VOICE OF THE SAND Mashak was a burning cry. Nothing more was left of him. His body had remained the same—same coarse chalk-white skin, same long meticulously depilated skull, same powerfully muscled limbs and jutting tendons—but the very idea that some intelligence still resided within this physical envelope had become inadmissible. Mashak was but a cry, a scream that never ceased. The walls of Manoâr echoed it to perfection; during the brief seconds when Mashak reinflated his lungs, the echoes of his cry filled the silence, and an instant later, Mashak’s voice rose again. For two days, the cry had gone on uninterrupted. Mervelld and I had climbed the steps of the watchtower, using our status as Watchers to try to escape from the cry, even partially. In vain: at the summit of the tower, the sound, scarcely muffled by distance, became even more terrible through the sympathetic vibrations it awoke within the metal walls. It was as if, Mervelld had whispered nervously not long after Mashak’s return, the city itself were screaming, using Mashak as a mouth.
