Land of Unreason by L. Sprague de Camp, Fletcher Pratt Page B

to use them would grow too, or whether he would
have to be pushed off a high place to learn how, like an eaglet from its nest.
Who would catch him if he fell?
     
                Consideration of the
question diverted him till he noticed that his shadow had lengthened across the
featureless plain and the sun was setting. Evidently he was to be caught out
there for the night. Malacea had said it was only a walk of an hour or
two—something wrong somewhere. He hoped it was only that she was a tree sprite
and could not know this desert, but all the same the fear of this eternal
emptiness came back and sat at the edge of his mind, waiting to be invited into
the center.
     
                There was no help for it at
this moment. For better or worse he was stuck for the night. He sat down where
he was, waited till the red ball of fire dipped under the horizon and then
fished in the foodbag. Unlike the forest night, this one was brilliant with
stars, though Barber, looking aloft, could recognize none of the
constellations.
     
                Stars. He and Kaja had
picnicked under stars like that once. In sentimental memory, and to have
something to do, he imagined her sharing the meal with him, and set aside the
better half for her. But she was not really there, his conversational sallies
remained unanswered, so Barber ended by eating both halves of the meal himself.
Since there was nothing else to do, he scratched hip and shoulder holes in the
sand and went to sleep.
     
                The sun woke him by hitting
him squarely in the eye. He stood up, stiff from his comfortless bed, and
looked around. There was a line of hills, rimming the distance in plain sight,
and they could only be the Kobold Hills, his goal at last. He emitted a shout
of delight which was lost in the immense silence, and requisitioning a flask of
water from the bag, started briskly toward the hills.
     
                But after an hour's walk
they were dismayingly smaller and more distant than before. It might, of
course, be optical illusion. He had heard of such things in desert countries,
though his personal experience extended no farther than the plateau of central
Spain, where there was always a church or a house or a sleepy muleteer to serve
as a point of reference. But it might equally be something connected with the
peculiar physics or geography of this realm. He looked near and then far beside
him, searching for some feature by which he could orient himself.
     
                The result was disconcerting.
The desert close by his side moved back as he strode along, as any well-behaved
desert should. But that in the distance crawled slowly forward past him, faster
than he. It was as though the narrow strip on which he walked were an endless belt
conveyor, moving back faster than he went forward. The optical effect was the
familiar one he had experienced as a boy, when he had looked for a long time
from a train window. When the train stopped at a station the whole landscape
would seem to crawl for a moment in a direction opposite to its previous
motion. Only this time it really was moving.
     
                He sat down discouragedly
and flapped his wing-stubs in annoyance. No result. He tried thinking his way
through the problem, but that did not get him any forwarder.
     
                As he did so, a movement
caught his eye in the direction of the hills. A little accumulation of
blue-black clouds was piling and tossing over there, their summits glorious
where the sunlight turned them golden. There would be wind from the front of
that storm, thought Barber, and looked down toward the desert in front of him.
Sure enough four—a dozen-twenty—any number of little dust clouds were figging
and whirling across the desert toward him, and his eye gladly followed this
movement in the waste.
     
    -
     
    "It's
up and over the Tongue of Jagai, as blown
        
dust devils go,
    The
dun he