Tengra Ngiam

By Heiko Rudolph

Stories of other-wordly longing, shimmering with memories of long lost love.

Tengra Ngiam is a child of the desert, who walks the silent paths, far from the cities and crowds of the modern world.

Her visions are sketched in these vignettes.

Eighteen short stories, that speak of a painful burning beauty inside the heart.
They unearth feelings and memories of other times and place that each of us carries inside.

---(O)---

• Language: English
• Publisher: Heiko Rudolph
• Release date: Jun 21, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458141910

Heiko Rudolph

Made in Germany, exported to Australia, working in Asia. Engineer, writer, Chi Gong practitioner. Lover of tea, good Cafes & good friends. Haiko Writing of numinous beauty that sends a shiver down your spine... Following my heros and masters of the craft: Lafacadio Hearn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lafcadio_Hearn George MacDonald http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_MacDonald

Book preview

Tengra Ngiam

Child of the desert.

Stories of other times

By Heiko Rudolph

Copyright 2011 Heiko Rudolph

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may be given away free of charge as a 'friendship present' to up to 2 of your close personal friends. If you would like to share this book with more persons, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it and it was not given to you as a 'friendship present', then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author :-)

Dedicated to my masters: George MacDonald 1824 - 1905; Lafacadio Hearn 1850-1904, WB Yeats 1865 - 1939.

Table of contents

Ngagimi

Wyndrider

Wind calls

Night

Eyes of the deep

The bargain

The girl

The Man

Lighthouse

El-na-Rubena

Knights of the heart.

A face

Bus Stop

UR

Candle

Chains

Make Amends

Come walk the stars with me.

Ngagimi

...'tis not the darkness thou fear'st my friend

but the blinding light of day,

should'st thine fears be taken away

revealing life without end....

- Ngagimi, Voices of Xylantheum

---o(O)o---

A deep red sunset.

Dusk.

The warm desert wind carried the smell of smoke, fire and food. It came from the group of three crumbling stone houses.

Each house had three palm trees their leaves sharp as scalpel blades.

A man with scars on his face, sat in his comfortable reclining chair in the shadows of the verandah looking out over the sea of sand. In all directions a vast expanse of sand. Just sand and a few sparse tufts of grass here and there sheltered by odd sharp twisted rocks. Directly in front of him was a faint glow of lights on the horizon. It grew a little brighter and was easier to see as the darkness gathered. The wind was nostalgic and warm. Stars stood out as sharply defined pinpricks. The unshuttered window from the house behind him glowed a warm orange.

His clothes were old, good quality, well made long ago. He leaned back in his chair and let his mind sweep out over the sand in all directions, the radar of his awareness describing a huge spiral around his house, including the sky above and the subterranean caves. Ever since the attack, he did this at least once an hour. At least.

No danger, no change, just the solitary figure of Ngagimi, still walking towards his place. He sensed that she was tired, but she would reach him. Not everyone made it. But she was strong enough.

The slow dignified chime of an old-fashioned grandfather clock reached him from inside the house. He had set it up as his official reminder to scan the area. For the last two years he had played an odd game with himself: he would ask his body clock to remind him to scan just before the chime. I wanted to finish exactly when the clock started its tune. After years of playing the game, his body’s innate sense of timekeeping was virtually perfect, he knew exactly when it was time.

His radar was tracking someone.

He had seen her walking all day, he knew she was coming. He had seen her coming closer in his mind’s eye before he ever saw the faint dot moving in the shimmering heat of the day. Daytime was no time to walk in this desert. That was the best time to put up your tent and sleep. But of course Ngagimi would not listen to such wisdom, ‘that was her’ he thought with a grim smile, ‘she always chose the hard way’.

It would take her another five hours to reach him.

Last time he saw her was over twenty years ago. They had not parted as friends. What brought her out here now, at a time like this, walking on her own ? And to see him of all people ?

He wondered why.

‘Stop!’ He pulled his thoughts back to the present. He could not afford to let himself think about that time again, he would loose himself and it would take a whole day to fight his way back. He would never lose his way in the desert sand, but in his mind, he had lost himself for years. It was like resisting the itch to scratch an insect bite, hard not to kid himself that he would scratch it just that one tiny little bit, just once.

He loved the scent of the desert, the astringent dry desiccated sand. It was clean. Pure.

The wind picked up the heat and wrapped it around him, but there were pockets of cool air in it already. In an hour it would be too cold to sit here without a jacket. He went inside to get it and checked on dinner cooking in the oven. It smelled nice.

When he sat down again, it was almost too dark to make out Ngagimi’s shape, she was barely visible, a tiny dot against the almost dark horizon. He turned around to make sure the window behind him was unshuttered, so she would see the light. As a rule he never let any light escape his house after dark, it had attracted too many strange refugees from the city and other places. It might look desolate and empty out there, but he had learned the hard way.

They said if you died out there in the sands, it took a day and only your bones were left. In the beginning he thought it was a superstition to keep people in awe, huddled in their towers and subterranean wells. But since he had come here he had seen it happen often enough to know that there was truth in it.

The city was a hard place. Every now and then, some raving, deranged soul would escape the city, out into the sands, scarcely knowing what they did and where they were going. They were always totally unprepared for the desert, never taking enough food and water. In the beginning he had gone to rescue some of them. He had taken them back to the safety of his house. Some he had reached in time. Others had died too fast in the heat of day, or frozen to death at night before he could reach them.

The desert is hungry, was an old saying. Often, by the time he arrived nothing of their bodies remained except a clean dry skeleton. In less than a day, sometimes after only a few hours nothing but the bones were left. There were never any footprints, nor had he ever seen birds or vultures. The desert was indeed hungry.

In the early days he had asked discreet questions in the city. He was told to mind his own business. It was just craziness that had driven people to desperation out into the harsh vastness, seeking relief in the vast open spaces. He doubted it was the real story.

---(O)---

He too had left long ago, but he had planned his exit carefully. His first clear memory after the turmoil of leaving the city was looking back at it from a long way out. It had been an evening like this.

The shining city stood tall and solitary in the sea of sand. Sand and low bristly bushes with hard sharp needles on small twisted branches. They stood their ground in the biting cold winds of the night and the hot blinding heat of the sun.

The city, was a beehive of human activity. It’s fragile butterfly beauty, humming and bustling with life and movement. In the city humans had huddled together as a defence against the sand and bristle bushes stretching for thousands of miles in all directions. But it was more than that, it was a defence against a nameless undefinable fear.

Did people know how precariously its life was balanced ? Founded as it was on nothing but sand and the huge caverns of water hidden underground.

He looked back, on the beehive, tall pyramid shaped buildings lit up from within. Between two large buildings at the city’s edge bright purple and red light came streaming from the ground and flooded the air docks above. Cargo Zeppelins were tied to them, like giant balloons in the breeze pointing out the direction of the wind. It looked beautiful from this distance.

Sand stretching as far as the eye could see in every direction. These specks of brightly shimmering light looked alive in the monotonous pastel colours of sand. The colours in the city drew the eye like a magnet, like jewels around a woman’s neck. Better not think of that.

He had felt hot desire to return to the city, like a magnet it drew him, pulled at him, gently but relentlessly. Just as relentlessly he had walked on and on until he arrived at this small cluster of houses half buried in the sand. He had retreated there before, when life in the city seemed ALL consuming and human problems swamped his mind. This place had nothing, except a tiny little well, in deep old caves, yet having that, it had the most important thing for life in this world. An old couple had lived there at the time.

But that last time he had come to stay for good. The first thing he did was to plant pine trees from the precious seeds he had brought with him. Three of them had survived. Their roots had found the water below and they thrived. He pruned them and kept them out of sight.

Some