The land was the color of burnt caramel. It was flat and it was featureless: there was no tree in sight, no blade of grass, no ditch, no dune, no sand, no shrub, there were no ups, no downs. There was nothing, not even a boulder, to disturb the absolute flatness of the ground. The ground was hard, covered in gravel the color of burnished iron ore.

Light wisps of white cirrus lifted from this one-dimensional landscape and burnt up in the blazing sun. A wind whipped up a fine dust that blew around our ankles. To the untrained eye this was wasteland: barren, arid, infertile, hard, uncultivable.

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