But wasn't that progress too, that the elephants were killed off like the mastodon and giant rhino before them, like all other wildlife and wild places? 'We can't stop time,' MacAdam said. 'But you can change the way it goes,' Nehemiah insisted.

The breeze across the desert as the light died was so sweet she could almost drink it.

Long before the stars died the birds began to sing - cool rippling doves, loud cheery starlings, the long lilting trills of warblers and thrushes.

Faraway a leopard barked that high, dissatisfied deep roar it cuts off so sharply, as if its annoyance is too great to express, can only be appeased.

Water was how the desert would bring everyone together. The antelope's daily prayer, weighing the mortal need of water with the mortal danger of obtaining it.

I have spent hours and hours watching elephants, and to come to understand what emotional creatures they are...it's not just a species facing extinction, it's massive individual suffering.

...He sat back on his heels and watched the stars one by one cut their way through onrushing darkness, till all was reversed, day was night, and the blackness glittered with all the desert's sands, each a tiny flame beyond the bounds of time.

Already this sun was pouring its wrath into the blue Indian ocean where swordfish and marlin cruised like silver-blue attenuated warheads in their green-gold depths...

Inside her head or out in the desert was the same, and the air inside her throat was very dry to keep from crying and her neck sore from forcing herself not to look down, not to look back.