He stopped. He turned suddenly looking back … nothing. He turned onwards, and saw nothing. Unbelievable! He thought. There was nothing ahead. Well, that was where he was heading to, as he restarted walking. Absolute North! Zero, zero, zero! He he he, he laughed! It looked as though some magnetic force was pulling him towards North.
He stopped and tried to see as further he could, protecting his eyes from the extreme bright light of a midday shining sun of the Sahara, using the palm of his right hand upon his eyebrows… Nope! Nothing he could see, apart from the sun and the clouds of sand, (for those were golden colored), that blinded him, nothing! Nonsense! He murmured. There is everything! His house, his family, his buddies, his… where he worked, yes, why? That’s right! But then, he could not understand, how come…?
He spat sand out of his dried lips… how come he sensed something? Right here, right now! He shouted silently. He meant… that is stupid! Yes! He agreed. Maybe he was just getting crazy. After all he had not eaten for ages and… forget it! His tongue felt like sandpaper in his mouth, and he tried to ignore it, but the horrible feeling would not leave him. He kept walking. But it was not walking any longer. It was more the walk of a Gentile, with nothingness in his mind; rather stumbling from left to right, up and down, from dune to dune.
He stopped abruptly, turning his entire body 180° in a screw move and felt his boots sinking in the hot sand underneath, as though he was going to surprise someone or something, right behind him… Nope! He thought disappointed – Nada, sifr, niente, rien du tout, gar Nichts, absolutely nothing! He would swear though… something or somebody… he paid better attention, sharpening his eye. He even stopped breathing for a minute or two, until he started hearing his own heart pounding, bu-bum, bu-bum, pumping blood in his thoughts, the pressure in his forehead tut, tut… hum, hum – apart from his own shadow and the footprints he left behind him making an almost perfect line in interrupted ups and downs upon the dunes, nothing.
What do you mean nothing? He asked himself almost offended. Alone for the dunes, and there are thousand if not millions of them, and do not they make a beautiful contrast with the clean blue sky… God! Wasn’t that Wonderful? Yes he was able to see that because the sun was behind him. Speak of the devil… he made a gesture to lose his shirt that was sticking to his back and cooking his dehydrated body, he felt he was becoming a mummy… He was so overwhelmed contemplating Nature… That, what he saw, was a Masterpiece! That must be what Art is all about. That was what all artists where after, after all… That was surely something! And each dune carrying billions if not trillions of sand grains… each grain a cosmos, beautiful for itself. Trillion? He could not figure the number, how many zeros it takes to make a trillion – 12? 18? 1012 or 1018? How come? – He never saw a trillion before… And surely not in a dune, but perhaps within a cubic meter… He would have to rely on the quondam teachers who came up with such figures, and maybe they knew how many grains a dune carried… Obama let us be acquainted with a similar number, the U.S. National Debt, he could not recall. And again was it billions or trillions? A big number with loads of numbers on the right side that were not necessarily zeros…
And he felt sad for his ignorance. He did not know how many zeros a trillion carried, and how many trillions a dune carried on its turn. So many things he did not know… Ha, ha, ha! He laughed. He would be twice or three times a trillionaire if he filled his pockets of sand and each grain a dollar or Euro worth – it did not matter much, after the first six zeros. Why? No! Not that he was economizing zeros. He just did not wanted to waste numbers in vain… Maybe he had just thought it would be enough for a simple man in a life time. And that made sense, or is it not what Economy was all about?…
To be continued…
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