The Crack in the Desert

Polly came in high over a desert of rounded pink and gold mountains, bare stone domes rolling away to the horizon. Beneath her, a single dark line snaked through the rock, as if some giant wall had cracked from top to bottom. Polly, a small green parrot with a red-orange head, blue wing feathers, yellow feet and little round glasses on her beak, had crossed half a continent for this particular crack.

She set down at its mouth. For centuries, camel caravans filed into this opening and vanished between the walls, swallowed whole by the mountain. Word travelled with them of a hidden city waiting at the far end. Its name is Petra.

The walls towered above her, higher than any tower human hands ever raised. Flying over the top would have cost her a minute at most. That was precisely why she refused to do it.

She intended to arrive the old way, along the canyon floor, in the footsteps of the caravans. The walk takes some twenty minutes at a merchant's pace. Polly granted herself seven days.