287. Colours of earth, 1
I wake up with vanishing shades of my dream scattering.
I almost raised a hand to try and catch a familiar face of my youth.
The large eyes of Bleue meet mine. I recognise her and remember who, and where, we are.
My hand brushes her warm cheek, making her smile.
B - Rise and shine Rose.
R - Good morning Bleue. How do you feel?
She’s very well, and so am I.
It’s freezing cold outside. We dress while inside the tent that barely holds any the warmth.
When we’re finally ready, we open and enter the wider world, with blinding clear sky.
Next to our tent, our flying tree stands, like a balloon. It’s covered with a blanket so it looks more like a ghost.
The earth is covered with a thin shimmering layer of crystals of fog. The moisture of the night froze, and will soon melt or sublimate.
We pack up and begin walking across the empty field, next to the ruins of a city with similar ochre colours. Antikiyan colours. There’s only but our footsteps to hear. Or Bleue’s humming sometimes.
We see a shooting star in plain morning sky. It falls to the Earth far away. I share my second-hand knowledge further with Bleue.
B - We sent machines in space and they just stay there... Like the moon?
R - Yes. Now sometimes they fall. If they’re too close or too slow, Earth catches them back. The moon stays.
B - I wonder if we could go to see the moon one day... And to see the morning Earth rise from there.
R - Hm... We probably won’t. But please make up a story about it. I’d like to hear it.
We talk of the moon we can still see in the sky. It may be slightly smaller than in my memory, but it’s still the same moon.
We reach a road. One of these endless roads occasionally destroyed or cluttered with vehicles wrecks. This one looks clean and empty though. Just dusty. It slithers slightly between one dusty set of ruins and another further away.
There’s a heavy dust that sticks like soot, but more brown, not black. It’s covering everything in the landscape I now realise.
A little further ahead is a crossroad. We can go back, keep going ahead, or west, in these arid lands, or east toward the city.
Something is making us avoid this city. A form of unease or instinct. We want to avoid that one.
Therefore we chose the road heading further north.
~
It took us a few days to realise what was really bugging me in the landscape we’re traveling through. There are no trees. Nowhere. Grass, bushes, stumps even, but no woods, no orchard and fruit tree, nothing.
Only traces that not so long ago, trees did used to grow here.
B - Maybe they flew away?
R - I like the idea but it seems unlikely. They left their roots. Maybe they were all cut, or burnt?
I can’t think of any sensible explanation. This shan’t slow us down though.
We find luckily a few more lizards who died outside, because of the cold probably. We eat them. They’re salamanders I think, more than lizards. The land is not as arid as it looks.
Soon we leave the unknown city behind us, and our road joins with others. The earth around us spreads across the land and up to the mountainous horizon as dull rainbows.
The colours of earth, rather than just dark and dull everywhere, are in a huge variety like rainbows. But earthly rainbows. Old rainbows maybe.
In England, and most of Europe, if you asked me what colour earth is, my answer was obvious and simple. Here, it’s not.
And I like it.
We slowly melt in there. The light morning glazing is long gone, and instead the land sticks onto our clothes and onto our skin. Soot I tell you.
These earth colours slowly crawl onto us, making everything alike them.
It reaches a point where unless we’re moving, or there’s a sharp shadow, we can’t see each other anymore. We’ve melted into this landscape, blending in completely.
It’s funny.
And as I see some sorts of waves in the distant land, I realise that this movement over the land probably means that we’re not the only animals to have been coloured here.
The optical illusions, since we’re now aware of their existence, are easier to spot.
The grainy desert of coloured umbras and iron oxides looks so even to the eye, though multi-coloured, that it tricks us into believing it is a desert. Not at all.
We ended up walking on grass with the same patterns of colours, and even walking around bushes and various ruins. Including fossils of various vehicles. Skeletons rather, but it’s as if the earth elements had replaced their original nature here too.
Bleue and I keep trying pointlessly to keep at least our faces clean. It’s hopeless.
We’re covered, hair to toes, in a thin layer of dry mud.
As we look closely at each other’s face another morning, we an amazing make-up, as we are covered with scaly flakes of dry earth. It fissures as our skin moves, showing artificial wrinkles, and scaly fissures.
We look like old shamans of the land.
Since our health doesn’t seem to be at risk, we just laugh it off and move on.
Only our flying tree stays clean, as it’s not touching the ground probably. There’s only the thread we use as a leach to pull it behind and along us.
Another morning, we saw a family of rabbits, going their way around this land.
Some of the grass and herbs that we step on without really seeing them, are edible to them.
We found a pond in a wreck of a truck, half buried alongside a hill. A rabbit drinking its dark water fled as we approached.
We drank some of it as well.
In the distance, we now are able to see a forest, by the shapes only. Same colours.
We spotted movements inside, as we waited for the stars to appear above the green horizon.
B - This land is not as empty as it first seemed.
R - Appearances are even harder to rely upon nowadays...
B - That’s true. Look at ourselves.
We look like smiling golems. The smiles are really alive though.
~
