The Heat

This is not a life giving heat; it does not grow wet moss, it does not breathe moistly on your neck. It dries and oppresses everything with its grand golden blessing, a tyrant throwing handfuls of clinking greedy coins like sowing seeds.

The land is only warm because of the sun, and when night descends, a heavy hand sits onto the earth, releasing the angry heat from the red city walls (hand of Fatimah?). In the hours after sunrise, the sun bakes onto earth again in order to warm up the dead hearth, but in the meantime the atmosphere is cool and cutting, like rough walls brushing against your every movement. In the midday scorch, an occasional shade is so cooling it might be sweet. The parched bush, or the dusty red walls have my thanks.

The landscape is abrupt. Lines between the sky and the earthern walls are clean and unimaginative, sharp-cornered, flat roofed. Whatever sparse vegetation grown are shockingly green and artificial, seeming to be planted just a day before, and replaced in the night when it has dried into shades of brown.