Several hours later the dust cloud had disappeared over the horizon and we were back in the same featureless expanse I recalled from the day before, with a straight rail line running toward the descending sun. After our last encounter, the monotony was a relief. I was about to try to engage the Marshal in conversation once again when he suddenly told me to stop. I brought the car to a halt and gratefully collapsed for a rest. The Marshal exited the handcar, leaving his rifle behind but grabbing the last remaining full canteen as he left. He started to walk out into the desert south of the tracks. In the distance, just right at the limit of my vision, I could see a figure, wearing white robes and carrying a staff. Probably a man, but it was hard to tell at that far away.

After many long minutes, the Marshal reached the person in the emptiness and they stood together for a long time. At one point the Marshal handed the person something, presumably the canteen, and then a few minutes later the figure handed it back. The two began to walk together toward me.

As they approached I could confirm the other figure was indeed a man, dressed in white robes that blew about his skinny frame in the wind. He didn’t look Native American, but rather like a Black African. The skin on his face was wrinkled with age, and he was far shorter than the Marshal. The wizen reminded me of pictures I had seen in the papers when the troops had gone into Somalia a few years ago.

“A waterskin.” The Marshal commanded.

“You’re welcome.” I corrected him, handing over the bag.

Without acknowledging my passive aggression, the Marshal gave waterskin to the man, who uncorked it, took a sip, and then happily replaced the cork and slung it over his shoulder, flashing a smile of brilliantly white teeth as he did so. The man lifted his robes revealing an ornate dagger in a sheath that he handed to the Marshal.

“My name is Greg. It’s nice to meet you!” I said from the wooden platform.

The man looked at me with a stern countenance said a word or two in a language I could not understand, then turned and departed. Unphased, the Marshal reboarded the handcar and announced, “We should get going.”

“You speak his language?” I asked as I struggled to get the car going.

“No. But we both know the language of another people I have encountered.”

“But not the language we speak?”

“No, not English.”

Okay, so this world has an England. We got the car moving again. After a few minutes of silence the Marshal did something that left me absolutely flabbergasted. He asked me a question about myself.

“Are you a Musician?”

“No...well yes.” I was flustered. “I mean, I can play guitar and some other things. Sing a little too. But that’s not how I earn my living. I just play at bars on the weekend for fun.”

“How do you earn your living then?” Two questions from the man in gray, this was new.

“I’m in computers…” I trailed off. How could I translate what I did into cowboy? “Adding machines,” I said. “I work at a big company with a lot of adding machines they use to keep the books. I tell the bosses what adding machines to buy and I am in charge of the people that fix them when they break.”

“That is a lot of responsibility.” the Marshal said. His face was, as ever, unreadable, but I sensed he might actually be impressed.

“It pays pretty well too.” I continued. “I tried to do the music thing as a career when I was younger, but it never really took off. The wife lets me out on Saturday nights and there are some bars who pay me and a friend a few bucks so they can advertise that they have live music.”

“So you play in bars. Do you know any drinking songs?”

I felt a wide smile cover my face. “Yes, yes I do.”

“That may be very useful to us soon,” the Marshal said.

“You bet your tanned leather ass I know drinking songs!”

There was a twitch on his face. I realized my idiom might have brought to his mind the poor mule he had left at the depot. Silence again descended on the car.

When I could no longer stand it, I spoke. “I’m very sorry about your mule.”

“He was a hinney.” the man in gray said quietly.

“What?”

“The animal was a hinney, the opposite of a mule.”

He was making small talk, this was amazing. “How so?”

“A mule is the offspring of a stallion and a female donkey, a jenny. A hinney is the result of a mare and a particularly ambitious jack donkey.”

Had he just made a joke? I laughed, maybe a little too loud. I wanted to encourage this behavior. We were talking like regular people.

“Tell me something.” I continued, feeling more comfortable “How did you get inside the hut back at the depot, or were you hiding there the whole time?”

He raised an eyebrow.

“At the train depot, where we met,” I clarified.

“Through the back door.”

I had been in that place two full days and I had not found any other entrance to the hut. “There was a back door?”

“There is a root cellar below the hut with an entrance behind the back wall and a door leading up from the cellar in the floor of the main room.”

That cellar would probably have been cool and might even have had something to eat inside. I didn’t know what —roots I guess. Somehow, this man, approaching from the desert, was able to size-up the situation instantly and find his way to a hiding spot I had two days to find but could not.

“See, I thought you were magic.” I said.

“I have no magic”

I had no response to that and for a while we rode without talking.

Around noon we approached the most curious sight I had yet seen on our journey. It was a great chasm, at least twenty feet across and appearing to be at least fifty feet deep. It snaked its way along the landscape to both the north and south. This was no impediment to our progress as a steel rail bridge crossed the gap, but on the opposite side alongside the tracks stood a lighthouse. The archetypal white lighthouse you are picturing in your head? That’s exactly what it looked like, except in the middle of the desert rather than on the coast. It rose at least as high as the chasm was deep.

We had to stop. The steel bridge was just as wide as the tracks, no wider. The Marshal walked each horse across the narrow rail bridge individually, calmly preventing the beasts from looking down and panicking. I then brought the handcar across. Unable to control myself as well as my travel partner controlled the horses, I looked over the edge of the car. At the bottom of the gap was a pile of either white rocks or bones. We stopped the handcar beside the lighthouse and tied the horses back up to the platform again.

My companion drew his revolver and announced he was going to explore the lighthouse. I watched him enter the building with his pistol at the ready just above his waist. With the sun directly above there was very little shade, but the overhang of the gallery around the lamp provided about a twelve inch ring of shade around the base of the tower, so I walked over to the structure and sat down leaning against the exterior wall.

I must have fallen asleep, as the next thing I remember was the Marshal kicking my sneakers with his big boots. I then recall thinking I had just been having a nice dream. The sad boy from last night was happy now, having fun with new friends. Again those thoughts fled from my head moments after waking life intruded, if this was waking life. My days had seemed pretty surreal recently.

I was about to argue, but obviously I should have been watching out while he was inside the building. I had no explanation beyond sloth. I apologized and stood up. I figured whatever respect and goodwill I had earned at the black pillars was now gone. We reboarded our little handcar and continued on.

After another hour on the rails, the Marshal again called a halt. I looked around to find the reason for this pause and could spy nothing, just empty desert in every direction. It was only when I hopped off the cart that I saw the sign that must have prompted our stop. About forty yards behind where I brought the handcar to rest and a few feet south of the railroad tracks were three small stones stacked one on another.

“Now we need the horses.” the Marshal announced.

Following his instructions, I left one empty canteen on the handcar, along with a pistol from which he had removed the bullets. He drained the last waterskin giving the two remaining horses a drink, and then tossed the empty container onto the railcar as well. I was a little confused by this, but I decided it wasn’t worth questioning. He brought his saddlebags, which I now noted had had a scabbard for his rifle on the side. Mounting it on the larger horse, he slid the rifle into place. Despite the punishing heat he was still wearing his hat and coat. Dexterously he swung leg over the mount and took the reins.

Any enthusiasm I had held for the horses back at the depot had now deserted me. I had not ridden a horse since summer camp as a child, and I struggled my way into the saddle. He insisted I bring my guitar, but there was no good way to hold the case and stay upright in the saddle. I therefore left the case on the handcar, and used the shoulder strap to sling the guitar across my back. The Marshal noted my difficulty without judgement and then took the reins of his horse and was off.

We rode south for about an hour before anything appeared on the horizon. Then I started to see unusual rock formations. Tall skinny ridges of pointed stone reaching like fingers up from the desert. They looked like cave stalagmites only rising from the ground. The rocks grew taller for a while and then I saw a few small leafless trees join them in the distance.

“There’ll be water soon,” said the Marshal, “but don’t drink it until I say it’s safe.”

The rock spires were tall, at least as high as a two-story house. We navigated between them and saw the landscape beyond. It was a dry lake bed with dozens more of the rock formations and several large flat plateaus scattered about. The largest plateau off in the distance looked to be about the size of a football field and had several buildings atop it. In the lake bed were small spots of greenery and even some animals. There were a few hairy boars with intimidating tusks and even something that looked like a small camel wandering between the tiny oases.

The Marshal dismounted as we approached the nearest island of green. Following behind him I quickly understood his warning not to drink the water. There was a small spout of water bubbling up from the earth, but it was boiling hot. Steam was visible in the air above. Someone had dug a shallow trench from the spring that led away across the dry lake bed . Along the path of the trench a thin strip of greenery rose up on either side.

Also scattered about the empty basin were small chips of shiny black stone, ranging in size from the diameter of a quarter to the rough approximation of the size and shape of the brick. After awkwardly descending my own horse, I knelt to pick up one of the smaller pieces. I held it in my hand for a bit, rubbing my thumb over the surface.

“It’s obsidian,” said the Marshal. I had a sudden vision of the towers and creatures from earlier that day and hastily dropped the rock, as if that would shoo away the disturbing thoughts.

“Those stones and these hot springs tell me we are getting closer to the mountains I seek.” the Marshal said.

“The mountains you’re headed to are volcanic?” I asked.

He nodded, and seemed surprised by my use of the word. “The mountains I’m looking for are not like any I’ve visited before. The mountains I know are old, older than bones. Quiet mountains, formed before any creature or even plant appeared on Earth. The mountains ahead are not like the mountains I know. Though older than any man, or even the idea of man, they are still young as mountains are measured. They still retain the fires that formed them deep inside. The fires make them unpredictable, and spawn springs like this.”

The sun was growing red as it approached the horizon in the west. Following the trench away from the spring we found a point where the water was cool enough we could dip the canteens in by the straps even if it was still too hot to put our hands in. We filled both and set them aside to cool. Our activity had begun to draw attention. Across the valley, two dozen figures dressed in white robes began to walk towards us. At first they were so fair off the visual distortion of heat rising off the desert made them seem dreamlike and incorporeal, like ghosts. As they drew closer I could see they were indeed people, looking and dressing much like the man we had encountered earlier. The men and women did appear younger, and where he had worn an ornate, seemingly ceremonial dagger on his belt, these people mostly had large, sharp, multi-bladed black knives hanging from their waists.

The Marshal held up the knife he had received from the man in the desert, still in its sheath.

“Is your guitar in working order?” the Marshal asked me in a low voice.

I nodded.

“Good. We will soon need your drinking songs.”