Free A Trip to the Stars by Nicholas Christopher Page B

examining much more closely after playing six games of solitaire in a row and winning every one of them. Samax had observed me doing so.
    “Have any luck?” he said, his pen never slowing on the paper.
    “Luck?”
    We were over the desert now, and pointing his free hand toward the window, he said, “Did you know that all of this was once the floor of an ocean?”
    I nodded, and at the same time craned my neck to see the map before him.
    “It’s a map of the desert,” he said. “Not this—another desert. Come, sit next to me.”
    I unbuckled my seat belt. Sitting that much closer to him, I studied his profile and inhaled the scent of his cologne, which was dry and pleasantly citric. Above the neat white moustache he had a large, straight nose, broad across the bridge. Closely shaven, his cheeks were remarkably clear and unblemished for a man his age. His brow was deeply but cleanly lined, as if he had spent much time alone, in contemplation. But considering that he lived in the desert, he had fewwrinkles around his eyes. Two simple reasons for this, I would learn, were that he seldom squinted—his eyesight was sharp and he regularly wore dark glasses—and that regardless of his changes of expression, from a smile to a grimace, his pale eyes remained open, level, and slightly inquisitive.
    He turned them on me fully now. “Do you like the plane?”
    I nodded.
    “Like to know the speed at which we’re traveling?”
    “About five hundred miles an hour.”
    “Oh, so you’re an old hand at this.”
    I shook my head. “I never flew on a plane before.”
    He looked surprised.
    “But I’ve read about them,” I went on.
    “What have you read?”
    “Oh, a book about the U-2 spy planes. They don’t fly so fast, but they can cruise fourteen miles up. And they weigh much less than other planes. Without the pilot, they’re not even one ton.”
    He nodded appreciatively, stroking his chin. “I didn’t know that.”
    “And I always liked to read
Aviation
magazine in the school library. Until they stopped getting it.”
    “I think we can arrange to get it for you now.”
    I shrugged.
    “Well,” he said, and I could see he was measuring his words, “I’m glad to be with you the first time you’re flying. How about if we go up to the cockpit in a while and the pilot can show you some things firsthand?”
    “Okay.”
    “First, though, look out my window.” He tilted his head back so I could gaze past him. “That’s the Painted Desert. Also known as the Colorado Plateau. There’s a point in its northeast corner, which we just passed, called Four Corners, where four states meet: you can walk in a little circle around that point and in about thirty seconds visit Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado. I did it once. Most of the Painted Desert is in Arizona. Calzas’s people, the Zuni Indian tribe, have their roots in the New Mexican part. It’s called ‘painted’ because of all the reds and oranges you see. Those ridges are sandstone, formed from massive sand dunes and clay hills that just baked in place 180 millionyears ago.” He pulled down the tray in front of my seat and laid the map on it. “Now,” he went on, warming to the subject, “this desert on the map is surprisingly similar to what you see below. It’s a small section of the Sahara that straddles the border between Algeria and Tunisia, called ‘The Hammada of Fiery Stone.’ ”
    I studied it. “The Sahara must be much bigger than this desert.”
    “The Sahara is the largest desert in the world. Over three million square miles. But did you know that one-fifth of the earth’s surface is desert?”
    I shook my head.
    “You see, a desert is simply anyplace that receives less than ten inches of rain a year. Of all the continents, only Europe has no deserts. Most of the Sahara is an ‘erg,’ which is a desert of flat sand and sandy dunes. Much rarer is a ‘hammada,’ ” Samax continued, “which in Arabic means a series of plateaus