A Trip to the Stars by Nicholas Christopher

and ridges of bare stone—like the Painted Desert.” He circled a point on the map with his index finger. “Here on the western edge of the hammada, fifty miles from the nearest village, in a small ruined temple dating to the time of Alexander the Great, there is an underground chamber containing a statuette of Meno, son of the god Ammon. The statuette is a foot high. It is carved from black marble and has inlaid eyes of gold with silver pupils. Except for one broken finger on the right hand, it is in perfect condition.” He paused for a long moment, until I looked up at him. He was smiling, but his eyes were gazing out the window, into the bright sunlight. “In two days,” he said, “I shall be holding it in my hand in Las Vegas. Calzas is on his way to obtain it as we speak.”
    I had listened to this speech with astonishment, though soon enough such speeches would not seem so out of the ordinary to me. Out of all the questions that popped into my head, I even asked one—one which Samax seemed to approve of.
    “How exactly will he get there?”
    He further opened the map so that several more panels appeared. “First he’ll land in Madrid,” he said, then ran his finger across the pale green of Spain, over the rich turquoise of the Mediterranean, into the yellow of North Africa, “and make a connecting flight to Algiers. From there he flies south to El Oued, an oil town with a small airport. Then he’ll set out overland by Land Rover with a guide and two bodyguards,first to Bir Beressof, a village, and then here, to a former oasis east of Bir Lahrache. That is where the erg ends and the hammada begins. Over the hammada he will have to travel on foot for several hours until he reaches the temple. Here.” Samax lifted his finger and placed my own on the spot. In doing so, he ran his thumb over my index finger, the one I had broken that never healed properly. And, peering closely at me, he said aloud what had already crossed my mind. “Yes, it is this same finger that is broken on the statuette of Meno.” Then, slowly, he folded up the map.
    By the time we were descending over the Mojave Desert into Las Vegas, dusk was falling. It seemed to me that I had traveled across, not just time zones, but whole worlds since Alma and I walked out of the house in Brooklyn and set out for the planetarium. My head was heavy, and had we remained in the air much longer I would surely have rested it against my seat and fallen into a deep sleep.
    Two blue sedans—identical to the one in which I had ridden earlier—awaited us on the apron at the private air terminal. My first gulps of desert air, taken on the tarmac with the wind whipping my hair, surprised me: for all its dryness, it felt as if I were swallowing, not air, but a cool dark liquid, and I was suddenly wide awake again. Samax and I got into the back of the first sedan, Desirée sat in the front with the driver, and we sped off. My first close impression of Desirée was the smell of her leather jacket mingled with a subtle jasmine scent emanating from her long hair, which was so lush and glossy, silver highlights twinkling in the black, that I wanted to lean over the seat and touch it. Instead, she turned around to me.
    “Enjoy the flight?” she said pleasantly. She had a low, musical voice.
    She smiled at me, and though her eyes, large and brown, were on my face, they seemed to be looking far away—so much so that she could have been smiling, too, at whatever she was seeing there.
    Through the car windows, the lights of the airport had no sooner faded behind us than the glow of the city proper, a great golden cloud of light beneath the royal blue sky, appeared through the windshield. From a distance the garish flashing neon of the Strip was like an electric rainbow that had shattered and was sputtering on the ground. But we left the interstate highway for a narrower, less traveled road and gradually veered left, away from the city, into a network of dark,