fire opal

"There will be some water just over there"! They hadn't spoken to each other for hours, tongue dried up somewhere behind clenched lips. With the outstretched arm that had peeled out of the shapeless silhouette of black cloth, the old man pointed far away towards the horizon. You couldn't see anything. Stones, only stones, dark and forbidding, they lay strewn side by side, in some places piled up in smaller heaps, round, endless crests that lay side by side like the backs of fallen enemies,...