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The sun went down Various nocturnal prowlers wandered near to Dios, and by so to be worth all the trouble that would accrue froain Herons honked Mist unspooled between the pools, was burned up as the sky turned frolorious uneventfulness for Dios until an alien noise took the silence and did the equivalent of cutting it into small pieces with a rusty breadknife

It was a noise, in fact, like a donkey being chainsawed As sounds went, it was to h-performance motocross Nevertheless, as other voices joined it, similar but different, in a variety of fractured keys and broken tones, the overall effect was curiously attractive It had lure It had pull It had a strange suction

The noise reached a plateau, one pure note made of a succession of discordances, and then, for just the fraction of a second, the voices split away, each along a vector

There was a stirring of the air, a flickering of the sun

And a dozen camels appeared over the distant hills, skinny and dusty, running towards the water Birds erupted from the reeds Leftover saurians slid smoothly off the sandbanks Within a minute the shore was a mass of churned mud as the knobbly-kneed creatures jostled, nose deep in the water

Dios sat up, and saw his staff lying in the mud It was a little scorched, but still intact, and he noticed what somehow had never been apparent before Before? Had there been a before? There had certainly been a drea like a dream

Each snake had its tail in its ed fa a camel prod He looked hot and very bewildered

He looked, in fact, like souidance

Dios's eyes turned back to the staff Itvery ih All he could remember was that it was very heavy, yet at the same time hard to put down Very hard to put down Better not to pick it up, he thought

Perhaps just pick it up for a while, and go and explain about gods and why pyramids were so important And then he could put it down afterwards, certainly

Sighing, pulling the re the staff to steady himself, Dios went forth

The End