From the Canyons to the Stars

Almost indecently open to the sky, a stark basin stretches out, dull orange articulated with red. Scrub crops up through the rocks: dusty sage with here and there a thin spray of sharply young green. Wind comes through the valley. Though it's not particularly strong, a mere breeze for out here, it's the wind more than anything that makes the desert the desert: The world breathes. Natives of geography like this who transplant to duller climates are often twitchy for months before they work out what's missing in a place where the air doesn't move freely.

The sky is a huge arena. At one end, the sun is going down at a horizon that's impossibly far away; at the other, the moon is well up in the pale twilight blue, and it's so enormous that someone might do a double-take and think for a moment they're not even on Earth. To human eyes—to most eyes—it seems to throw off the proportions of the whole scene, and the world goes surreal.

Leela takes a slow, cautious step out onto the alien soil.

She has never seen an environment like this, having never left the jungles and their close embrace on her own world. Xoanon's planet doesn't even have any deserts. So she is wary, all her instincts awake, because she doesn't know this habitat and can only speculate about the logic of the life cycles here.

The Doctor emerges from the TARDIS behind her, closing the door before a fragment of tumbleweed can drift in. Leela revolves, slowly, then looks back at him. "What is the name of this place?"

He rolls up his hat, slapping it once against his leg to beat out the dust. "Canyon country."

Leela purses her lips. The sun has slipped the rest of the way beneath the horizon; the sky is darkening, the moon is shrinking, and the stars are coming forward. Night comes on fast.

"What's the matter?"

Hand on her knife, she flexes her calves, alert without being tense. "I do not know that anything is the matter. I have never seen a place like this." She tilts her head, listening on the dry air for something he can't hear. "I need to… test it."

"By all means."

So Leela is off, running easily over the valley floor, mapping the terrain with her feet, learning the plant life and where the animals hide, exploring the vital energy of the place, burning off the discontent that has set her to pacing the console room lately. Like a dog, she needs to be let out once in a while.

That's all right. He's about the same.

The Doctor sets off toward the hills while Leela traces more or less the same path in large circles. Night is deepening without getting any darker: The colors shift from red toward blue, but the wash of moonlight has all the revealing power of high noon. It affords him a remarkably distinct view of the desert floor in all its layers (smooth dust, pebbles and smaller stones, yucca plants, little barrel cacti that are liable to get Leela's attention if she doesn't watch herself the way she unfailingly does, clumps of sage and creosote, little rocks, medium rocks, big rocks, and sprawling prickly pears). Several times he stoops and straightens, each time tucking a button of peyote into his hat.

Leela comes jogging up to him finally. She's not even winded. She looks better, more comfortable. She sniffs. "What is that smell, like the dreaming-place of our tribe?"

"I'll show you later. Does it pass muster?"

She's looking all around now as she trots beside him. "There are no inhabitants here, not for many miles at least." Certainly there's no light pollution. Even with the moon, the stars are so bright as to seem at once as mind-breakingly distant as they really are and yet to hang supernaturally low—almost in the air around them. "It is like… being offered up on a great sacrificial altar to the night sky, being in this place," says Leela. "And walking among these great towers of rock is like consorting with the gods."

"In this century, we had better hope not," says the Doctor. "The fashionable gods aren't very nice." But he can't help thinking that she has an uncanny way with words, for a savage. Probably because she is a savage.

They continue in a silence that grows increasingly companionable, toward the surreal contours of the buttes and the canyons beyond them. In a bit, when they're well up in the hills, they'll find a good, sheltered spot in the rock, where they can look out on the stars and the shadows the moon casts, and perhaps they'll share what's in the Doctor's hat to bring their disparate worlds twining together for a few hours. But for now, it's good to just walk. There is a particular feeling one has, traversing a plain like this with a friend. Not with a group, and not with a town behind you and another waiting in front of you; just… traversing.

Everybody's lost in the desert. It's just a question of how much you like being lost.