Weaveworld

I

NO REST FOR THE WICKED

1

efore the explorers, the Rub al Khali had been a blank space on the map of the world. After them, it remained so.

Its very name, given to it by the Bedu, the desert nomads who’d lived for unnumbered centuries in the deserts of the Arab Peninsula, meant: The Empty Quarter. That they, familiar with wildernesses that would drive most men insane, should designate this place empty was the most profound testament to its nullity imaginable.

But amongst those Europeans for whom names were not proof enough, and who had, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, gone looking for places to test their mettle, the Rub al Khali rapidly acquired legendary status. It was perhaps the single greatest challenge the earth could offer to adventurers, its barrenness unrivalled by any wasteland, equatorial or arctic.

Nothing lived there, nor could. It was simply a vast nowhere, two hundred and fifty thousand square miles of desolation, its dunes rising in places to the height of small mountains, and elsewhere giving way to tracts of heat-shattered stone large enough to lose a people in. It was trackless, waterless and changeless. Most who dared its wastes were swallowed by it, its dust increased by the sum of their powdered bones.

But for that breed of man – as much ascetic as explorer – who was half in love with losing himself to such an end – the number of expeditions that had retreated in the face of the Quarter’s maddening absence, or disappeared into it, was simply a spur.

Some challenged the wasteland in the name of cartology, determined to map the place for those who might come after them, only to discover that there was nothing to map but the chastening of their spirit. Others went looking for lost tombs and cities, where fabled wealth awaited that man strong enough to reach into Hell and snatch it out. Still others, a patient, secretive few, went in the name of Academe, seeking verification of theories geological or historical. Still others looked for the Ark there; or Eden.

All had this in common: that if they returned from the Empty Quarter – even though their journey might have taken them only a day’s ride into that place – they came back changed men. Nobody could set his eyes on such a void and return to hearth and home without having lost a part of himself to the wilderness forever. Many, having endured the void once, went back, and back again, as if daring the desert to claim them; not content until it did. And those unhappy few who died at home, died with their eyes not on the loving faces at their bedside, nor on the cherry tree in blossom outside the window, but on that waste that called them as only the Abyss can call, promising the soul the balm of nothingness.