“Mirza Cheshim,” Salamon said, “you were telling us of your next picture. Altogether fascinating.”

  “Ah, so I was, so I was,” Cheshim said. “Alas, I have had to leave it unfinished.

  “What came to me one night—how shall I put it?—yes, it was a kind of tale. A well-digger loved a princess but never dared to tell her, for he was too poor. Then he found a bottle belonging to a genie and wouldn’t return it until the genie granted him vast riches—the foolish well-digger thought wealth would win her heart. He disguised himself as a great prince and brought her chests of treasures.”

  Baksheesh gave me a look. “I’ve heard that tune before.”

  “But the princess refused him,” Cheshim went on, “because her heart was secretly given to a humble well-digger. So, he wished for all his fortune to vanish and went back to her as the poor well-digger that he was.”

  Cheshim paused. “Ah, forgive me. I have neglected your refreshments.”

  “I can hardly wait,” said Baksheesh.

  As the hermit-artist hurried away, I turned to Salamon. It surprised me, I told him, that Cheshim was willing to talk of his unfinished work to strangers.

  “On the contrary,” Salamon said. “These fellows are pathetically eager to tell anyone willing to listen. In fact, once they start, and have the bit in their teeth, it’s next to impossible to make them leave off.”

  “I’ll tell you something else,” Baksheesh retorted. “He claims he dreamed all that? No. He’s a faker. A liar. It’s the same tale that wretch of a storyteller was spouting in Marakand.”

  Baksheesh was right. I, too, recognized it. As for wishing away a fortune, I had practically offered to do likewise with Shira only minutes ago.

  “Yes, I recall it, too,” Salamon agreed. “I should guess it’s an old, familiar story. Cheshim no doubt heard it as a child. It stuck in his memory and his dreams.”

  “Well and good, as far as it goes,” Baksheesh said. “Except for the end. That pestilential ragbag stopped short. He didn’t tell the best part. I did. I made it up off the top of my head as we walked along.”

  Shira nodded. “True.”

  “So he’s not only a faker and a liar,” Baksheesh indignantly declared. “He’s a thief. I don’t know how, but he stole it from me. Paint-dauber? He’s a mind-robber.”

  Baksheesh scowled and snapped his mouth shut as Cheshim reappeared. The artist carried an armful of flat, polished stones that served as plates for whatever it was he had piled on them. He motioned for us to sit on the beaten earth of a kind of portico that shaded us from the sun. Not to insult him, I made a show of dipping into my portion, which turned out to be surprisingly tasty. In fact, I wolfed it down.

  “I must thank you for doing me a service.” Cheshim beamed at Shira, then at me. “My unfinished picture—the dream faded. The faces of the princess and the well-digger escaped me. I was unable to continue.

  “Now that I see you two young people, their features are clear to me again. They are yours. You have allowed me to finish my painting. I am ever grateful. You are welcome to stay and see my work completed. It should take no more than six or seven months.”

  Salamon, I was sure, would have been overjoyed to spend half a year in the cave; but I thanked Cheshim for his kind invitation. Time pressed, we had to be on our way.

  “Young men are always in a hurry,” Cheshim said. “Without prying into your business, may I ask what way that is? Perhaps I can help you.”

  He seemed eager to be useful, and so I explained how we had come from Marakand and now planned to retrace our steps there. We needed new gear; and, I mentioned in passing, I hoped to find a better map. Of the treasure, of course, I said nothing.

  “No need for many weeks of travel,” Cheshim said. “There is a town much closer. What’s it called? I misremember. Something like Shahryar—ah, yes, Shahryar-eh-Ghermezi. I passed through it on my way here. When? I don’t recall. It must have been a good while ago. You will surely find everything you require. Not a comfortable journey; but, in the long run, to your best advantage.”

  I certainly had no heart to turn back; nor did I relish spending several miserable weeks only to end where we started. I had no misgivings—until Cheshim went on.

  “It’s very simple,” he said. “Follow the desert straight ahead until you run out of food. Then, turn right. Keep on your way until you run out of water. The town will be practically in front of you. Really, you can’t miss it.”

  Easy enough directions. All we had to do was pay attention and notice when we were starving and dying of thirst, conditions hard to ignore.

  I glanced at Shira, who gave a brief nod. Salamon, I was sure, would have walked happily to the moon and found it extremely interesting. Baksheesh looked sour, but he would have looked sour in any case.

  I got to my feet and stared at the pink sand and the cantaloupe-colored hills with their jagged outcroppings. Yes, Salamon’s constant wonderment must have rubbed off a little on me, for I found them astonishingly beautiful.

  And I hated them. They could kill us all.

  What a real karwan-bushi, with all his wits about him, would have decided—I had no idea. I did the only sensible thing.

  “We’ll try it,” I said.

  Sharing some grand purpose can forge unbreakable bonds of comradeship. So can boredom.

  Of that, we had enough to go around, with plenty left over: the everyday messiness; yawning grumpiness in the morning; afternoon annoyances; weariness at nightfall; and the same to do all over again at daybreak.

  As for foul odors, they came in a variety I had never imagined. We surely smelled as bad as the camels. Maybe worse. Luckily, we got used to it and stopped noticing. Also, we kept busy hawking sand out of our lungs. Even Shira, to the extent that such a thing was possible, looked haggard and drawn.

  Salamon, of course, was good tempered as ever, always in the best of spirits—which vexed Baksheesh more than anything else.

  “Disgusting old codger,” he grumbled. “Why can’t he be miserable like the rest of us? I ask you, O Noblest Karwan-bushi, where’s justice in the world?”

  We had, by then, decided to walk our animals. It would have been too heartless to burden the camels by riding them. Shira and her mare plodded along through sand above our ankles. Baksheesh, bringing up the rear, turned into more of a camel-pusher than a camel-puller. I trudged beside Salamon and the donkey, who had grown all the more devoted to him.

  I remarked, a little sourly, that if he meant to reach the sea, he had chosen a dry way of finding it.

  “Not at all,” he said, with his smile of happy innocence. “I am completely confident I shall arrive sooner or later. It is a simple matter of pressing on.

  “So, by all logic, you are bound to end up wherever you wish. Though it may not always be where you think it is. In any case, getting there is as interesting as being there.”

  The sea, that day, was less on his mind than Cheshim’s pictures. They troubled me, as well; I would have been glad to forget them. Salamon must have been pondering them since leaving the artist’s cave.

  “My brain isn’t as nimble as it used to be,” he said. “Cheshim showed a scene from the old tale of Tarik Beg— but what was Charkosh doing there? He doesn’t belong in the picture, and yet Cheshim painted him.”

  I had my own questions. Since I found no answers, I had to set them aside. I told Salamon they were only fancies that meant nothing.

  “All dreams are true, if you know how to look at them,” Salamon said. “What they tell us we don’t always understand. We need to put the bits and pieces together. The ball of fire that Charkosh was holding—it made me think of the Kajiks and Karakits burning down the village. And what did the innkeeper say about it? Flames no one could put out?

  “It reminds me of something called ‘Greek Fire.’ Once lit, it was unquenchable,” he went on. “In ancient times, people in your part of the world used it against their enemies. Fortunately, they gave it up. They may have found it too horrible. Or, most likely, they forgot how to make it.

  “I had a classmate at the university, more years ago than I can count. He had the foolish notion of discovering the lost recipe and making his fortune from it. By then, no one was sure if it had really existed or was only old folklore. But he kept at it, cooking up every ingredient he could think of.

  “We urged him on—we were as foolish as he was—and so he boiled, and mashed, and simmered, toiling away over his beakers, distillation coils, and retorts. What he ended up with was a bucket of the most vile-smelling concoction that turned your stomach and brought tears to your eyes.

  “He gave up after that. But the question arose: What to do with the substance? We couldn’t keep it, but how to get rid of the mess?

  “I must confess, my boy,” Salamon added, “the dean of our faculty and I had always been at loggerheads. He considered me a natural-born troublemaker; and I considered him a great bag of wind. I suggested pouring the stuff down his chimney and into his bedchamber.

  “What pranksters we were in those days. In the middle of the night, we all climbed to the roof, found the flue that went to his fireplace, tipped up the bucket, and sent the awful mess flooding down.

  “Before we could clamber from the rooftop, the dean burst out of his chamber, still in his nightshirt, coughing, gasping, holding his nose, babbling that some evil fiend had tried to poison him in his sleep.

  “Nightcap askew, he bumbled into the street, gulping fresh air. Alas, he saw us on the rooftop and understood we were the evil fiends. He shook his fist, raved and ranted all the more since the vile odor had wafted through the lecture halls, refectories, and dormitories. The street was aboil with professors, tutors, and distinguished scholars scrambling to flee the stench.

  “He ordered the provost to give us a most magisterial thrashing. My fellow students were heavily fined. To me, he granted a special favor, for which I have been ever grateful.

  “He expelled me,” said Salamon. “I could not have been better pleased. It allowed me to attend the best of all schools.”

  “And that was . . . ?” I asked.

  “The world, my boy,” he said. “The most rigorous of academies, but the curriculum is excellent. For a time, I conducted classes free of charge, and taught in market squares, taverns, innyards—until I realized my students knew more than I did.

  “And so I set off on my own road wherever it led me.” Salamon blinked and shook his head. “But now, my lad, I fear I’ve lost my train of thought. It will come back to me. I shall puzzle it out. You can think your way through a brick wall if you keep at it.”

  Following Salamon’s mental processes was like strolling down a garden path with unexpected twists and turns and odd things popping out from the hedges. What he had in mind I could not imagine, let alone picture him as having been a troublemaker and prankster.

  He was still pondering when we halted for the last meal of the day—an occasion I had come to dread. Our food was so disheartening I looked forward to going hungry.

  Cheshim had given us all he could spare. Very good it was, for whatever it was; but not enough to last us any length of time. We had to fall back on the reserves of our own provisions.

  These had gained a life of their own in the form of weevils and other tiny creatures not even Salamon was able to identify. At first, we pried them loose at knifepoint, but they outnumbered their host; and, finally, we ate them as part of the menu.

  At least they were fresh. I preferred them to the scrapings from the bottom of our sacks: what looked like pieces of old rope dipped in tar. I suppose they nourished us; but they were an acquired taste, and one I never acquired. Given the opportunity, I would have been tempted to trade both camels and Baksheesh himself for a few links of good Magenta sausage. I envied Salamon’s lack of appetite.

  I expected us to be roasted by day and frozen when the sun went down. I had not reckoned on the wind. The bare crags on either side of us funneled unceasing currents that swirled and fishtailed around us and crept into our tents when we tried to sleep.

  Mostly it blew straight into our faces. As did the sand. Every grain stung like a hornet. The camels clamped their nostrils shut. We draped rags over the noses of the mare and donkey, and did likewise for ourselves. The sand still filtered through the fabric. It invaded our clothing, scraped and chafed, and it was no use trying to dust it off or shake it loose.

  Starvation can sour anyone’s disposition. Not that we were at one another’s throats, but certainly on one another’s nerves.

  And I had my own bedevilments. My decision had put us all at risk, but my thoughts above all were for Shira. I could blame only myself and my search for the treasure in the first place. When Shira had told me she was leaving—if I truly loved her, I should have let her go. Even insisted on it. Wherever else, at least she wouldn’t be in this nightmare of a desert.

  What had Salamon said when the bandits had been so brutally killed, and I had a hand in it? Only one thing you can’t do, nor can anyone. Undo what you’ve done. It hadn’t comforted me then. It didn’t comfort me now.

  Astonishingly, Cheshim’s reckoning proved exact. After our last breakfast, we saw a trail opening to our right. It was rock-strewn, more gravel than sand. We followed it. The wind didn’t pursue us.

  Salamon assured us we were well on our way to Shahryar-eh-Ghermezi. “Very simple and logical,” he said. “Cheshim told us to keep straight until we ran out of water. As we have very little of it left, logically we should be there reasonably soon. Perhaps within a few days. And just as well, since no one can go without water much longer than that.”

  “No one but you,” Baksheesh retorted. “You’re already dry as a stick of kindling. A parched pomegranate! A shriveled-up old fig! That paint-dauber claimed we’d be at Shahryar-eh-whatever when our water ran out? What if we poured it all into the ground right now? Then it would be right here in front of us. You want logic? There’s logic for you.”

  “Well reasoned, my camel-pulling friend,” said Salamon, taking this outburst in stride. “But logic often has nothing to do with reality.”

  Cheshim had, so far, been accurate. What if his calculations, this time, were off by only a couple of days? I judged it wiser not to take the risk. And so we hoarded every drop of water, giving more to our animals than to ourselves.

  I don’t know if it was hunger or thirst that turned me lightheaded. By the end of our second day, my lips had cracked open, my throat felt as if a salted codfish had been stuffed down it. I could not so much as spit; not that I had a mind to do so. Thirst, I saw, was taking its toll on Shira, but she made sure the mare drank her fill.

  Baksheesh suffered more than any of us. Instead of walking, he lurched. Instead of him pulling the camels, the camels were pulling him. The ground, at least, had grown softer, almost spongy. We were grateful for that. But if there was a stone anywhere along our path, Baksheesh was sure to trip over it.

  Next day, he vanished from the face of the earth.

  Among the odds and ends I learned from the raïs during that nightmare caravan, one was: Stragglers were doomed. Travelers at the rear of the column, without realizing it, tended to lag behind. Little by little, the gap between them and the main body widened. The camels, when roped head to tail, plodded steadily forward; but the journeyers on foot, or on horseback, had to move faster and faster. In no time, the caravan could outdistance them. By then, it was too late. There was no way they could catch up. Separated, isolated from the group, for all practical purposes they were lost.

  So I always kept an eye on Baksheesh. Salamon trudged as usual beside the donkey; Shira, with her mare. Baksheesh had stopped having anything to do with the pack animals. And I, as well as being the karwan-bushi, took up the profession of camel-puller.

  Last time I had glanced back at him, Baksheesh was managing well enough on his own, limping along the soft shoulder of the trail. Now I turned and saw him sitting on the ground. Or so it seemed. First, I thought he had stopped to console his bunions. I was about to tell him to get a move on. Until I realized the lower half of him had disappeared.

  At that moment, with Shira at his heels, Salamon went running past me. Baksheesh, meanwhile, was yelling at the top of his voice, waving his arms, and gradually sinking from view.

  By the time I reached him, his shoulders already had vanished; his arms waved frantically in the air but they, too, looked about to submerge.

  Salamon motioned me to keep away. He had taken the donkey’s rope halter and now trod cautiously, testing the ground at every step. Baksheesh puffed and snorted. Salamon tossed the rope at him.

  “Take hold,” he called. “Stop flapping about; it will only make matters worse. And keep your mouth shut,” he added, for Baksheesh was spitting out gobs of what seemed to be a syrupy mess of wet dirt.

  “Quicksand,” Shira said between her teeth. “Idiot. How did he get himself into it?”

  If quicksand could be found anywhere in Keshavar, Baksheesh would be sure to step in it. I had heard only vaguely of quicksand: a harmless-looking patch of earth that would swallow an unwary traveler in the blink of an eye.

  This is not altogether true. As I later learned from Salamon, drowning in quicksand takes a long time; in fact it’s close to impossible unless you set your mind on it.

  The real danger, in this case, was that Baksheesh, like all of us, was exhausted and not much able to follow Salamon’s instructions. On top of that, the two of them were at cross purposes.

  The more Salamon urged him to stay calm, the more the frantic Baksheesh flung himself about. He kept sinking deeper, then bobbing up again, snorting and choking. He did have enough of his wits left to seize the end of the rope and hang on to it.

  “Excellent,” Salamon reassured him. “Now, lie back as if you were floating in a bathtub.”

  “I should know bathtubs?” muttered Baksheesh between mouthfuls of sand.

  He did, at last, float to the surface. Shira and I helped Salamon haul on the rope and dragged him clear. By this time, Baksheesh was so thoroughly soaked and covered with brownish wet sand that he looked like a loaf of gingerbread. Once on solid ground, he dropped in a heap, head between his hands. As soon as he got his breath back and regained some of his strength, he wailed as much as he had done while we were heaving him out.