Free Golden Blood by Jack Williamson

often at the girl, clinging to her hejin wearily but with invincible determination.
    The oval face beneath her white kafiyeh was blistered, the full lips cracked and bleeding from sun and alkali dust, the tired violet eyes inflamed by the pressure of glaring light. But still Aysa was beautiful, and she smiled at him with courage on her weary face.
    Cruel, those three days had been. Yet Price regretted them only for the hardship the girl had so stoically suffered. An odd contentment filled him; his old, bitter ennui was dead. Aysa’s companionship had become a precious thing, worth the living of a life.
    She was the guide, finding the way by obscure landmarks that she knew by tradition alone. At sunset she turned to him, troubled.
    “Anz should be before us,” she whispered, husky with thirst. “We should have seen it from the last ridge.”
    “Don’t worry, little one!” He had tried to speak cheerfully, but his voice croaked false and hollow. “We’ll find it.”
    “Anz should be right here,” she insisted. “My father taught me the signs, before he died, as his father taught him. It should be here.”
    Perhaps, Price thought, the lost city was here. According to Aysa’s story, none of her people had seen it for a thousand years. It might be beneath them, completely buried! But he kept the thought to himself.
    “Let’s ride on,” he said. And he pretended to discover with surprise the few drops of water in the goatskin—his own share, which he had saved when they last drank. After a single sparing sip, she suspected the heroic subterfuge, and would take no more.
    They goaded the weary camels on, as the inflamed, sullen eye of the sun went out. And still they went on, in an eldritch world of pallid moonlight, sometimes walking and driving the exhausted animals, until they collapsed of thirst and fatigue and despair, to sleep fitfully. Dawn came and they saw Anz.
     
    The black walls, of Cyclopean basalt blocks, stood half a mile away. Driven sands of ages had scored in them deep furrows. Here and there they had tumbled into colossal ruin, like a breakwater broken by the yellow sea of sand. Tawny, billowing dunes were piled against them in crested waves, sometimes completely covering them. Shattered ruins rose within the walls, crumbling, half buried, darkly mysterious in the dawn, emerging grim and desolate from night’s shadows as if from the mists of centuries immemorial.
    Price roused Aysa to point it out. But his hopes sank swiftly after the first thrill of discovery. Anz was truly a city of death, sand-shrouded, forgotten. Little chance he thought, of finding in this dark necropolis the water for which every tissue of their bodies screamed.
    Aysa was filled with new eagerness.
    “Then I was not lost,” she cried. “Let us enter the walls!”
    They urged the unwilling camels to their feet, and toiled toward Anz.
    Black walls breasted the conquering sand, massive, forbidding. The gates, mighty panels of patina-darkened bronze, were closed between their guarding towers, red sand banked so high against them that a thousand men could not have pushed them open.
    Driving the staggering camels to the crest of a dune that had overflowed the wall, they saw the city within. A city strange as a dream. A dead city, buried in sand.
    A ruined and leaning tower rose here above the red dust, like the end of a rotting bone. A shattered dome of white marble, there, like an age-bleached skull. Or a cupola of corroded metal, monument above some buried building.
    Over the silent mounds of the sand-beleaguered city Price sensed a brooding spirit of slumberous antiquity, a clinging ghost of the forgotten past. One instant, in imagination, he saw the ruined buildings whole again, saw the broad streets cleared of sand, magnificent thoroughfares thronged with eon-dead multitudes. He saw Anz as it once had been, before dead Petra was carved from the rocks of Edom, before Babylon rose upon the Euphrates, before the first pharaohs