He kept his eyes fixed on me and reached down to pull my map from his bag. Spreading it on the duvet he pointed to a deserted section of contours.
‘We are here,’ he said.
We had made good headway while I slept. They evidently knew enough. I tried to estimate how long I must have been unconscious for us to have covered so much ground. Their vehicles must travel fast. I saw small marks on the map at key junctures – questions, dilemmas, uncertainty that he had passed. Had he tried to wake me earlier?
We were approaching the mountains and the way ahead would become difficult. There was a town marked on the map. Who knew if it still existed? Once it had been an oil town. A prosperous place where people had flocked to make money, an oasis in the frozen north, where they had once sucked petroleum out of the ground. I had passed through it and it had unsettled me – the wealth and starkness.
We could go there or we could head deeper into the wilderness. There was a route that had once been navigable all the way to the northern fjords. We could take this and head deep into the unknown. I felt that was where we would find Abel. Somewhere in that incalculable wasteland. He was there, somewhere in that brown morass of contours on the map. I knew Abel would not be in Bonmont but it made sense to go there. We could be wandering for weeks if we set out straight. Without something more solid to go on we would never track him down.
‘Bonmont,’ I said pointing at the map.
He disappeared into the front of the vehicle.
I was left alone again.
His serious expression stayed with me. Seriousness had become a rare quality in the world. True seriousness, focus, that invisible property. It had disappeared from the world because nobody could bear it any more, nobody could bear to countenance it, replaced instead by dull determination.
People were serious about staying alive, it was true, but they protected themselves with fatalistic disinterest. There was an inevitability to everyone’s movements, a slack disinterest in their faces. They carried on due to some ancient instincts that had outlived the environment that birthed them.
To most people it no longer mattered who survived and who died. It was obvious that survival was mere luck. In the dust there was only chaos. Anyone who truly realised this could no longer stomach the idea of hope. They would rather not believe in anything than let the smallest glimmer of hope eat at them. Prayer was dead, blown away in the dust.
I wondered what Abel prayed to. Despite the dust and the chaos I had no doubt that Abel retained his seriousness. He would not be able to shake it. I had watched him, many times, sitting purposefully, motionless for hours.
It takes an immense amount of energy to do nothing, even to appear to do nothing. To appear to do nothing is, for most intents and purposes, identical to doing nothing. What sort of person can do this?
Who can bear to achieve nothing with their day, does not find it exceptionally burdensome to let their time evaporate, not to have a job, or even some simple task they are employed at that takes their mind off things. Who can bear just sitting, the clock ticking, doing nothing, watching one of the few days they have disappearing.
To do that, I felt sure, implied some instability, an hallucinatory life, a belief in invisible chords. There used to be people who called themselves Artists. None of them had fared so well recently.
To stare for hours, stare at a blank sheet or a twig, and then, after much painful deliberation, decide merely to make a black mark or a minor re-arrangement. What sort of sallow, cadaverous being can live like that? I thought again of Abel, staring out into the swirling curtains of dust. I thought I could shake him by thinking those thoughts in the hard open light but I knew I would never be able to shake him.
Sandstorms
The origin of recent meteorological phenomena is so unlike anything that existed on this planet before that our previous knowledge is almost certainly irrelevant. Yet, even so, it may be instructive to explain some of those old ideas to give some feeling for the things we once thought we understood.
The sandstorm or duststorm used to be a relatively common occurrence in certain regions of the globe, constrained mainly to certain arid regions. Deserts and drylands were the main sources of these events but they could often blow out over hundreds of miles. They would start with strong winds driven by atmospheric pressure zones. Regions around the Horse latitudes or subtropical high being notoriously prone.
These areas were associated with the subtropical anticyclone, where high-altitude currents moving toward the poles caused the large-scale descent of air creating a high pressure zone. The planet’s atmosphere was relatively stable then and three large convection cells provided the steady circulation of air from the equator to the poles.
At the equator the ground would heat the air causing it to rise and be forced outwards to the North and South. As this air travelled away from the Earth’s surface it cooled and would fall back under gravity at between 30 and 35 degrees North and 30 and 35 degrees South. These regions, on either side of the equator, created high pressure zones known for their hot, dry weather and referred to as the Horse latitudes.
The name was believed to derive from the "dead horse" ritual carried out by seamen of old, bound for the West across the Atlantic Now it is impossible to tell how much truth there is in it but it was once said that the sailors would throw a straw-stuffed effigy overboard as their ship passed this latitude.
In those times the crew received an advance on their wages from the ship’s paymaster when they boarded and it would take a month or more to work off this ‘dead horse’ debt. The sailing time to reach these tropics took a little over a month in those days and hence the ceremonial jettisoning of the “dead horse”. As the boats sailed through these latitudes the sailors knew they had worked off their debts and were nearing their destination.
In those days the oceans must have seemed an endless stretch of raw power, unforgiving, ceaselessly accepting of battered souls. Those sailors could hardly have imagined the sight of once mighty bays, choked with sand, dry as bone, absorbed out of existence.
Abiding names such as Sahara or Gobi, the world’s great deserts, had existed of course, sandstorms blew across their surface, but they must have seemed mere fantasies for those sailors. The wind they knew swept deep currents, adventure, salt and spray.
The dry, falling air in the horse latitudes had a quite different effect when it passed over sandy expanses. There it would lift the loosely held particles of sand, at first causing them to vibrate slightly, throwing them up into the air. A stronger bluster of wind might then cause some granules to saltate or leap up, causing skirls of sand close to the ground. The friction caused by the saltation of sand particles induces a weak static electric field, giving the dust a negative charge relative to the ground. This then loosens more sand particles which begin to be borne into the air.
If the wind is sustained, this process will cause the granules of sand to repeatedly strike the ground, loosening and breaking off smaller particles of dust. These dust particles then begin to travel in suspension as they are carried up and along by the wind.
Where the wind is stronger still the suspension will become thick in the air and a population of dust grains will travel by a mixture of different mechanisms, including suspension, saltation and creep. This often created massive walls of dust and sand, propelled along at great speed.
The exfoliating nature of this wind-driven sand is quite immense and combined with the heat and arid conditions already in place in a desert the results for humans were generally devastating. As cooler air passes over heated ground it becomes unstable and in desert areas, dust and sand storms commonly appeared in the wake of intense thunderstorms. The dust and sand thrown up by these winds could be lifted as high as 20,000 feet.