After several uninterrupted days of walking, the desert had slowly changed its face. The overwhelming heat, that burning breath biting at our bones with every step, had lessened, as if the world itself had finally agreed to loosen its grip. The temperature, without fuss, had gently slid into an almost unusual mildness, a temperate, bearable climate, where the skin no longer seared at every moment, where breath no longer burned the lungs.
The air had changed.
It was no longer saturated with ashes or anger. It now flowed with a calmed slowness, a discreet caress gliding over the skin without violence. A light breeze would occasionally lift the edges of our clothes, as if apologizing for its former excesses. There was something washed out in the atmosphere, something purer, as if the days of effort, of blood and dust, were behind us — even if we knew, deep down, that they were never far away.
And the creatures too, as if by tacit agreement, had vanished.
