Dunes Whisper

Dusk falls over the open desert, the hour old Bedouin legends say the jinn are closest Out in the old Bedouin desert, there are countless stories about the jinn, the unseen beings that old Arabian folklore says walk this world alongside us, out of sight most of the time. Some of those stories are told strictly as warnings. This one gets told because it proves something else entirely: a steady mind beats panic, every time, even against something that isn't human. A Bedouin was riding alone one night, cut off from everyone, deep in open desert. Nothing around him but the sound of his camel's steps on the sand. The desert stretched out flat and endless in every direction, and the silence out there was the kind that lets a man hear his own heartbeat. While he rode, he heard a sheep bleating somewhere among the low valleys nearby. He pulled up short, surprised. Nobody camped anywhere near this stretch of desert. No Bedouin family for miles. So where had a sheep come from? He thought...

Dusk settles over the hills near Bir Jabal Dharie, deep in the sands of Najd.   In the Bijadiyah - Saudi Arabia , where the sands of Najd run up against bare rock hills, there's an old well that everyone who's ever crossed that stretch of desert knows by name. Bir Jabal Dharie. Its water never runs dry, no matter how brutal the heat gets or how long the drought drags on, and that alone would make it worth remembering. But the people of that land know this well for something more than its location and its sweet water. They know it has guardians unlike anything else out there. A line of snakes has lived inside that well for longer than anyone can trace back. They don't look like ordinary desert snakes, not in shape, not in size, not in the color of their skin. They keep to the deep cracks between the rocks, and sometimes show themselves near the mouth of the well around sunset, but they don't attack anyone, and they don't come looking for trouble. The Bedouin call the...