From the Second Book of WistThistle, still underway, in which Mano warns that to drink the water of the Hoko, found only in the Dunes of Pen, is to journey into the cactus’s dreams.
“Félan painted it. I’ll tell you the story. He went where you mean to go, but not out of necessity. He was young, wanting to stretch his legs, and the Dune’s of Pen seemed to him a vast mystery. It’s in the blood and bone of the young to go into the world. They hear the stories, but that’s seldom enough. They want to see the world themselves and I don’t disparage them for that. How else should we learn, grow, fall in love, but by going out into the world. Félan wanted to know the mysteries of the Dunes and most of all, wanted to see Yað’Olgum, the lake in the southern most reaches of the Dunes. There is said to be a temple on its southern shores—abandoned long, long ago.
“The Dunes of Pen are a dangerous desert, even for those of us who live at its shores. No man can carry the water needed to traverse those sands, but must find his water in the desert. It can be done. The hoko is a cactus that grows among the isles of rock in the midst of the sands. From their roots, one finds water. Scrape the skin, squeeze the root upon the tongue, and one may drink..
“And if that were all to be said, then any soul might journey safely through the Dunes, but the hoko’s water is a strange poison. The water makes thin the veil between the waking world and the world of the spirit. There is a deep dreaming in the hoko’s water that is like the depthless sea. The spirit that wanders too deeply there will lose her way. The mind wanders without the body and the body without the mind. So was it with Félan, never truly in himself after returning from the Dunes. Strange visions had he, and dreams that drove him mad—so deeply had he drunk from the hoko. He could never truly waken from them. Such things as he described. If you were but to stay another night, I would give you a taste of that water, for the tasting of it might be forewarning. For our ceremonies do we drink it, and only then, so that we might commune with those who have gone into the spirit realm. Do not deplete the water you bring, but drink from that and from the hoko together, so that the hoko’s waters may be diluted. Then will your spirit not wander too deeply into the hoko’s dreams.”
“Mistress,” said Éhto, “what dreams are they?”
“You see this,” said Mano, holding up the burning stitch to the mural, “madness such as this. Dunes that are neither sand nor water, yet both—that move like the waves of Eyling. He told of hourglass creatures that might dissolve in the winds and be themselves again come the wind twice round. He told of the crescent moon that sailed like a ship, inwardly aglow upon the sand’s tides. He told of birds with feathers of flint, that sparked the dry air as they flew. He told of spiders, with many-gemed eyes, spinning webs of jade. He told of fish, with scales of chrysoprase and gold, that leapt from the burnish of the sanddrifts, to disappear again as easily as fall into the ocean; of stars that chimed over the taut drum of the Erþe. All these and it drove him mad. He died of a fever that I could not cure him of. The madness of the hoko’s dreaming put the desert into him. His spirit was afire, Mistress Ohéto, and not enough water in the world was there to put it out.”
PoemShape 