A few moments later, she left the oasis. The trees gave way to spindly chenopods spaced at such even intervals it almost looked as if men had planted them. Beyond the low-lying bushes, the terrain became completely desolate. Without tree or chenopod roots to hold the soil in place, the wind shaped the sand into an endless sea of towering crescent dunes that stretched to the horizon and beyond.

Ruha knew that the sand sea spanned more than twenty-five thousand square miles. When the dunes finally waned, they abdicated only to a land of baked earth and wind-scoured bedrock, even more desolate and lifeless than the sands themselves. This bleak expanse stretched, as far as Ruha knew, to the ends of the world itself.

Of course, she had heard stories of a kingdom beyond the desert, but she had also heard tales of lands beneath the sands and beyond the clouds. To Ruha, who had met only three tribes in a year of riding across the most heavily populated part of Anauroch, tales of ten-thousand people living in a camp that never moved were unthinkable. She could not envision a pasture that would support all of their camels month after month.

As Ruha stalked toward the dunes, the biting odor of the chenopods stung her nose more sharply, drawing her thoughts back to the desert. She returned her attention to the sand sea.

The moon shone brightly on the gentle slopes of the dunes' convex sides, but the steep slip-faces on the concave sides were plunged into darkness as black as Ruha's robe. Between the crescent-shaped hills ran a gloomy labyrinth of barren and rocky troughs.