The sand beneath his feet tastes like glass and bitterness; he knows because the wind rips through the undulating hills, sloughs off a layer of dune-skin and forces him to swallow every time. His eyes feel heavy, sight is blurred beneath the crust of sand in his eyelashes. He longs to rub it off, but knows that if he does the tiny grains will cling to his eye and pain will sit there for the rest of the day, tormenting him. So he leaves it, and pretends it doesn't matter.

     Instead he concentrates on the burn of unrelenting sun on his shoulders, his neck. Walking in this landscape he marvels at the bleak beauty; three colours - gold, azure blue and grey. Grey in the tired bushes that cling to the sand determined to survive. Azure blue above and around him, like a single eye pressed close to a tiny landscape to watch him breathe. Gold beneath his feet, around his home.

     He doesn't know why he lives here, where the thought of water is like a whisper on the wind - listen and it's gone. A single black mouth in the side of a dune and that's all the home he knows. Maybe one day he'll walk, walk away from the shallow cave, the baking rocks, the watching sky. Maybe. Here, though, he is a tiny being in a tiny world, watched by a blue sky empty of life or knowledge.