Hourglassed grains of Gobi.

Blue skies, cloudy skies, red and pink and burgundy sunsetting skies. Vast golden steppes, motionless. Steep rocky protrusions from the earth, streaked with snow, projecting huge inescapable shadows in which every nose won't stop twitching. Wolves slaying camels beside campsites at night. Lone galloping horsemen bisecting the horizon. Zero showers, neglected hygiene, every presupposition shattered. Beside the fire, star-spangled sky, milky milky way, breath transmuted to frost along the inside edges of the tent. Tinned horse meat for dinner. Hitch a ride, the soulful jounce of the camel over the dunes, toward more dunes, the neverending dunes, I an inconsequential flea on its back, a small and unremarkable crease in the lifeline of the Gobi desert, she who once played colosseum to the dance of dinosaurs that long ago, so long it's absurd. One day warped into eight, slowly but noticably, our tea running dry as the sun rose from its slumber, having chivalrously spanned four of the emptiest aimags - provinces - in this entire world, up and down and side to side in the most robust of Russian military vans, a throwback to the Soviet's near-century of of Mongolian governance. All along with nothing - nothing! - but the pure and vital majesty of nature to amuse and accompany us.

I pray the pictures we captured will do my four cosmopolitan friends and I's trip deep into the furthest bowels of the Gobi some slight sort of justice. But it's so very difficult to relay-

Everyone should visit the Gobi desert at some stage, any stage, of their life.

She is close to incomprehensible.