The Sand Tower
Overview
Overview
"I understand you to be the best pilot here and want you to run my flatboat for me."
"Mr. Short, you best come back up we have a problem out here."
He was coughing and choking when he saw Spinwall break the surface between him and the wreck and begin swimming towards him.
"There she lay, E.B.. Look!"
Sure enough, logs were floating downstream...
Then the entire mass of rock of the falls shuddered with a sickening thud.
"we're out here in the middle of the Himalayas to make the ultimate kayaking movie"
There, at the upstream end of the eddy, DuBois, still in his boat, clung to an outcropping of the rock.
Locking him in an iron grip, he flipped him over and held tightly to his neck.
But Howard knew that any kayaker could understand the chickadee.
They reached the top of the dune and walked across to the camp, a circular compound consisting of seven mobile office trailers.
They descended the dune to the floor, and found themselves staring at the walls of the bowl all around them and also down into the cave.
His light came nowhere close to illuminating the recesses that spread out in all directions below the ceiling.
He was suddenly startled. Someone was there, watching him. He pivoted around in his chair. He was alone in the trailer. There was only the hum of the computers, and the crystal kayak on the floor behind him.
Frank Zappa of the Sahara.
He dragged Salil from the cab and took a few steps back.
The men on horseback wheeled their Arabians around and started charging back towards him, firing as they came.
He was breaking. Into a billion pieces. Suddenly a giant flash went off from where he had fallen.
Looking up, she saw a man, covered with blood, lying crumpled in the drive behind the car, beside him, a kayak wrapped up in a sleeping bag.
Then after dinner out, usually fast food, he would head back to the shop and work until the early hours of the morning.
Panicking, he tried to raise the visor, but it was locked down.
"Blam!" The bullet smacked into the side of the Ryder, splinters catching Pete in the cheek.
The realization came as a shock. It was not a canoe. It was not paddle blades. It was the double bladed paddle of the strange boat. Piloted by the strange man.
Concentrating. Moving up through the eddies. Conserving strength for the next hard climb.
Monitoring subconsciously his breathing. Stroking efficiently. Thinking through each climb while moving toward it. Executing them and simultaneously analyzing how he'd done and clearing his mind for the next. The midstream current a constant fixture of his peripheral vision, the side cliffs always close beside him.
They came around the tail end of an island and immediately two long canoes with three braves each, came charging out from the eddy behind the island, whooping with lust for battle.
Xoc twisted Pete around by his hair and swung the club towards his face.
Pete spun and jumped off of the ledge that had been behind him.
He looked up and across the creek where an old man in an aged bearskin robe sat under a sandstone ledge.
"Do you not know that no man comes to this place?"
It was like some huge beast, and it was coming down the trail toward him.
Hanging from a window shade was a cut crystal disc. . . Simon was drawn to it.
There, shimmering in the sun, was Mihalis.
Soon they were out of sight of each other, and he was left alone in the deadly game.
There were no boulders, only the walls of the channels forcing maneuvers around hydraulics in the bedrock.
Rekh recovered enough to grab an ankle as Simon jumped to his feet.
Rekh tried to rip the paddle from his hands.
Simon focused on the river. He launched off of the lip and tried not to look down. . . The tower loomed. He couldn't see the top. It dominated the bowl.
"Dr. Calvert, my name is Amelia Ward."
She looked out at the river sweeping by. . . Then she saw a shimmering and her son. . . She dropped to her knees and cradled his head in her lap, and ran her hand through his wet curls.
Her tears fell to his face.
"Just think, Oma. This one book did so much."
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