The Well of Ishrahan

Chapter V:  Double Sunrise

Reported location: N29º 10.4' W008º 11.3' Activity level: 8. Ambient: 22.7 DegC. Days since reset: 64. Daily VMG: 7.8 km/h. Erratic and unexplained course changes.

The eagle owl was in no hurry. It could see that I was not flying at full speed and it had the legendary patience of its kind.[1] There was only one chance for me to escape but it was a desperate throw...

Away to my right, small whorls of blown sand were being picked up on a strengthening wind. They began to form a brown veil of airborne dust that grew more dense as I watched. If I could only reach it, my pursuing nemesis would be unable to attack - but if the dust storm subsided before I covered the distance, I would have no other options left.

Flying as hard as my damaged shoulder would allow, I angled down and into the curtain of sand. Grit clogged my nostrils and eyes and I could barely see. The wind increased again and with it the whole column of sand began to rotate: I was borne away on a scorching updraught, helpless and disoriented. Time and direction ceased to have any meaning. Of the predatory owl that had been chasing me there was no sign and I never saw it again.

I have no idea how long the sandstorm lasted, but it was a great while. The wind did not start to drop until long after darkness had fallen, by which time I had been carried far out into the desert. Eventually the air around me cleared, but there must have been a load of dust at higher altitude because I had no sight of stars or moon that night. And daybreak was to be even worse.

I awoke in a cold dawn to be greeted by a horrible image: the desert stretched away to the east in an empty vista of low dunes towards an indistinct horizon, and above that were two suns - one above and slightly offset from the other.[2] I just stared at them, my beak was hanging open for I had forgotten to close it, and I felt physically ill.

At this point I should perhaps mention a few things about how we do our long-distance navigation. Our direction of travel is given by the position of the sun where it rises and sets on each successive day. (We can use moon or prominent stars in the same way, but the sun works best.) The interval between sunrise and sunset is critically important: we have an internal sense of elapsed time that is very accurate, and the comparison of sunrise timing and its angle to the zenith gives us our position in the world.

(You may have heard stories that we have “magnetic beaks” or some other twaddle of the sort. This might be true of other birds, but all I can tell you is that my beak has never pointed in any direction other than straight ahead!)

Length-of-day is not just important for navigation - it governs many aspects of our existence: when to migrate, when to build a nest, the right time of year to mate and lay eggs, and can even tell us which fish might be available to catch. So you can see that having two suns in the sky was a dreadful conundrum: I didn't know which one was real, or even if they both were! Panic began to take over: I was alone in a featureless desert with no clue as to where I was or where to go next.[3] 

After calming down a bit I headed in the general direction of south-west, at low speed and with many rest stops. My shoulder was still painful through all of that day and most of the next. There were no landmarks that I could orient on – just the infernal desert, going on and on...

And even in such a seemingly empty place, there were unexpected dangers. That night I roosted on the desert floor, perched on a low pile of sand-worn stones. I had taken a good look round and there was not another living creature as far as the eye could see. Yet early in the morning, I heard a curious scraping sound from the very stone that my legs rested on. I stood up and from under the stone crept yet another animal that was new to me – but not to my ancestral instincts. Obeying them, I pulled my head right back and extended my wings away from it. In the pre-dawn light it looked light-brown, apart from its darker lower legs and small, inoffensive-looking pincer claws. But the feature that had triggered my defensive posture was the ghastly thing's segmented tail, recurved and engorged with venom. [4]

I wondered if it was blind as it cast about left and right, sensing my presence but unsure of what I was. The tail arced forward and then back, slow and menacing. There was only one thing to do...

I put my foot on it, driving it hard into the sand and held it there with my full weight for a good while. And the really horrible thing was: when I lifted my talon again, it just turned round and scuttled back under the stone. That was two more useful life lessons: (i) scorpions can be found anywhere in the desert, no matter how remote, and (ii) they are a lot tougher than they look.

Towards evening of the third day after this incident, I began to see higher ground on the horizon. Gradually it took form and I saw with growing excitement the unmistakeable shape of encircling hills that had been locked in my mind from birth.

Ishrahan was there!

The heat and pain had sapped almost all of my remaining reserves but I pressed on. Hunger and raging thirst meant nothing now: once I reached the groves and streams of Ishrahan, there would be plenty of water and fish, and my long journey would be at an end. The final miles took me over a series of rocky outcrops that formed the eastern border of a great low-lying basin. My shadow rose to meet me and I landed on a wide ledge, at the very end of my tether but still eager for the first sight of my new home.

How can I describe for you now the horror and dismay that I felt in that moment? I looked down and saw, not the lush wetlands and waterfalls of my imagination but a scene out of some demented nightmare...

Where the great river should have run, a wide angular canyon slashed across the landscape. In place of water-meadows there were harsh fingers of drifted sand. The fair woods of Ishrahan were nothing more than low bastions of shattered rock and stone – and between them, ravening monsters snarled and spat, hunting back and forward over the plain and bellowing to one another in the clouds of dust they kicked up.

I had made a terrible, fatal mistake. I had expended all my energy in coming to this dreadful place and now I would never leave it alive. Even if the monsters did not get me (and as I watched, two more went past, crackling and emitting blue fire) then I would quickly succumb to thirst, for there was nothing to eat or drink as far as the eye could see.

My talons tightened their grip as true fear started to get the better of me, and the ledge I was perched on crumbled beneath them. My last memory was of falling and then everything went black.

Final reported location: N20º 31.6' W012º 12.0'   Activity level: 0.   Ambient: 27.3 DegC.   Days since reset: 70.   Daily VMG: 0.0 km/h.   No activity.    Deceased or PTT fault.

[1] Carron may have been unlucky. Two species of large owl are recorded in the Draa: the Pharoah eagle owl Bubo ascalaphus and the much bigger and more formidable Eurasian eagle owl Bubo bubo hispanus which is very uncommon and only properly confirmed at the upper (eastern) end of the valley.

[2] The “twin suns” mirage is extremely rare, but several examples have been well documented – most recently one in China, in 2011. Like most mirages, it is caused by the refraction of light through air layers of differing density, usually due to an extensive temperature inversion.

[3] Carron's distress at the phenomenon is understandable, but his situation may not have been as bad as he seemed to think. The sun's disk subtends a visual angle of half a minute of arc (approx 0.0087 radians) At the latitude of the Sahara Desert, the vector location error caused by such a discrepancy in the sun's apparent position would be only about 12 kilometres at most.

[4] This description seems to match the Sahara scorpion Androctonus australis – an extremely dangerous species, about 8cm long, which deploys a fast acting 4C-C neurotoxin by stinging.