Chapter 27 chapter Five

Paul struggled to control the orthopter, feeling more and more that they were rushing out of the force of the intertwined storm.His more than Mentat consciousness worked on piecemeal details.He felt the dust blowing towards his face, like billowing waves, mixed with the eddy current, forming huge eddies one by one. The cabin is an angry box filled with green-lit dashboards, and the stream of tawny dust outside is featureless.He began to look through the thin screen. I have to find the right vortex, he thought. For a moment he felt the storm abating, but still shaking them, and he waited for another vortex to break out.

The vortex was at first like a sudden wave, shaking the plane.Regardless of his fear, Paul banked the plane to the left. Jessica watched the flight control the movement of the ball. "Paul!" she screamed. The vortex makes them swirl, twist, and flip.It tossed the planes upward like a splinter on a fountain, and spit them out above the vortex—like a winged mote in a cloud of moonlit, spiraling dust. Paul looked down and saw the hot, dusty column that had so reluctantly abandoned them.The storm dwindled, drained like a dry river into the desert, and disappeared—the silver-gray column of wind getting smaller and smaller as they flew on the updraft.

"We flew out of the vortex." Jessica whispered. Paul scanned the night sky, turning the plane to avoid the sudden falling dust. "We've escaped them," he said. Jessica's heart was pounding, and she forced herself to calm down, watching the disappearing storm.Her sense of time told her that they had been raging for almost four hours under the cooperation of various natural forces.But in a part of her mind that saw the time of this experience as a lifetime, she was born again. Like a prayer, she thought, we face it but cannot resist it.The storm passes us, surrounds us, it disappears, we remain.

"I don't like the sound of the wings," Paul said. "There's some damage there." He felt the plane rattle through the controls in his hand.They flew out of the storm, but not yet into the place he had foreseen in his dream, yet they escaped.Paul felt trembling. He trembled. It feels like a magnet and can be scary.He found himself with a problem, something that made him shudder.He felt it was partly because Arrakis was full of decaying spiced food, and perhaps also because of prayer, as if words had a power of their own. "I shall not be afraid..." Cause and effect; despite the evil, he is still alive.He felt that without the magic of prayer it was impossible to have that little sense of self and keep himself from falling.

The words of the ancient European Christian Bible echoed in his memory: "What sense do we lack that keep us from seeing and hearing the other world around us?" "There are still rocks around," Jessica said. Paul concentrated on the activator of the orthopter, shaking his head to get that feeling out of him.He looked where his mother was pointing and saw a dark patch of rock rising up in various shapes on the desert ahead to the right.He felt the wind around his ankles, kicking up a cloud of dust in the cabin.There's a hole somewhere, probably the work of the storm.

"Better if we land on the sand," Jessica said. "The wings probably don't need to be fully braked." He looked at a place ahead and nodded.There, a ridge of sandblast bulges into the moonlight above the dunes.We can live a long time in the desert.The Fremen live here, and if they can do it, so can we. "As soon as we stopped, we ran towards those rocks," Paul said, "I'll get the backpack." "Run..." She fell silent and nodded, "Sand Lizard!" "Our friends, sand lizards," he corrected her, "they'll eat the orthopter and there'll be no evidence of where we landed."

How thoughtful he was, she thought. He glides lower and lower, and as he lands there is a sense of rapid movement—the shadows of the dunes are vague, the rocks rise like islands.The orthopter lurched on top of one dune, jumped over a valley, and crashed into another dune. He uses sand to slow down, Jessica thought, and I should give him credit for his talent. "Fasten your seat belt," he warned. He pulled back on the orptopter's brakes, lightly at first, then harder and harder.He felt the air swirl, and the wings descended faster and faster.The wind shrieked through overlapping shields and layers of wing blades.

Suddenly, the plane tilted slightly, and the left wing of the plane became fragile due to the blowing of the storm, curled upwards and inwards, fell to the side of the plane with a bang, and broke.The plane skidded over the dunes, twisted to the right, did a somersault, and turned upside down, with the nose buried in the first dune in a sandstorm.They fell on that side of the wing, right wing up, pointing at the stars. Paul unbuckled his seat belt, jumped up, past his mother, and unscrewed the door.The sand around them swarmed into the cabin, smelling dry like flint.He dragged the backpack out of the back seat and saw his mother unbuckle her seat belt herself, stand up, walk over to the edge of the seat on the left, get out, and climb onto the metal surface of the plane.Paul followed, grabbing the pack straps and tugging at it.

"Run!" he ordered. He pointed to the other side of the dune, and they could see a stone tower carved by the wind and sand. Jessica jumped out of the plane, ran, and scrambled up the dune.She heard Paul panting after him.They climbed a sandy ridge that zigzagged toward the rocks. "Run along this ridge," Paul said, "it's faster this way." They ran desperately toward the rock, the sand catching their feet. A new sound began to make sense to them: a wordless murmur, a hissing sound as it slid and rubbed on the ground. "Sand lizard!" said Paul.

The sound is getting louder. "Hurry up!" Paul gasped. The first rock lay like a sandy beach less than ten meters in front of them.At this time, they heard the sound of metal crunching and crunching behind them. Paul shifted the pack to his right arm and grabbed the pack straps.As he ran, the backpack slapped the side of his body.They scrambled up rock outcroppings, through a winding gully carved by wind and sand, and up a gravel-strewn face.Breathing becomes dry and there is a gasping sound in the throat. "I can't run anymore." Jessica gasped. Paul stopped, pushed her into a rocky cleft, turned, and looked down at the desert.A moving mound of sand moved forward, parallel to the rocky islet on which they rested—the moonlit, rippling sand, the crest of sand about a kilometer away, almost as level as Paul's eyes.The sweeping dunes meandered in its path—a short curve across the desert where their abandoned, gnawed plane was.

Where the sand lizard was, there was no trace of the plane. The mound of sandbags moved toward the desert again, quickly retreating from the path it had traveled. "It's bigger than Gilder's spaceship," Paul whispered. "I was told that sand lizards grow up deep in the desert. But I didn't expect...how big!" "Neither did I," gasped Jessica. The thing went out again, away from the rock, and ran quickly towards the horizon with a curved trajectory.They listened until the sound of it receding was lost to the slight movement of the sand around them. Paul took a deep breath, looked up at the steep slopes reflected in the frosty moonlight, and quoted a line from the Katab a Iba: "'Travel by night, rest by day in dark shadows .'" He looked at his mother. "We still have a few hours of night, can you keep going?" "rest for a bit." Paul walked up the rock face, strapping his backpack on his shoulders.He stood for a moment with a compass in his hand. "Just let me know when you're ready," he said. She rose from the rock, feeling her strength return. "Which way?" "Where this ridge leads," he pointed. "Into the depths of the desert," she said. "The desert of the Fremen," Paul whispered. He paused, shuddering at the memory of the vision in Kaladan's precognitive dream. He had seen this desert, but it was somewhat different in shape from the desert he had seen in his dream, like a visual phantom that had disappeared from memory.Now when this optical illusion is projected into the real environment, it doesn't seem to be fully remembered.The optical illusion seemed to move, approaching him from different angles, yet he remained motionless. In the dream, Idaho was with us, he remembered, but now Idaho was dead. "Have you found your way yet?" Jessica asked, mistaking him for being undecided. "No," he said, "but we're going anyway." He put his backpack tightly on his back and climbed firmly along the "canal" carved by wind and sand on the rock. This "canal" was dug on the rock face illuminated by the moon, and the stepped ridge extended southward. Paul climbed up the first ridge, with Jessica right behind him. After a while, she noticed that the path they traveled was a particular problem that required immediate solutions—the bunkers between the rocks slowed them down, the ridges carved by wind and sand cut their hands, and the obstacles forced them to choose: from Go over it, or go around it?Rock formations have their own style.They speak only when needed, and in hoarse voices. "Be careful here—this ridge is sandy and slippery." "Be careful not to bump your heads on this rock." "Stay down here on this ridge, with the moon behind us, and the moonlight will reveal our movements to anyone over there." Paul stopped on a bright spot of rock, his pack leaning against a narrow ridge. Jessica leaned against him, grateful for a moment of rest.She heard Paul tugging on the hose of the filtration suit, sucking a little of the water she recovered, which was a little salty.She remembered the waters of Caladan—tall fountains around the curved vault of the sky.Such abundant water has never been valued by herself... When she stood beside it, she only noticed its shape, the light it reflected, or the sound it made. Pause, she wants to rest...really rest. She thought that pity would stop them, if only for a moment.There is no mercy without stopping. Paul lifted himself off the back of the rock, turned and climbed a slope.Jessica sighed and followed. They slid down the slope and landed on a wide sandbar leading to steep rocks on the other side of the bumpy land.They are caught in a choppy rhythm of movement. Jessica felt that for the night they were dominated by the matter beneath their hands and feet—cobblestones, pea-sized gravel, stones, pea-sized sand, sand itself, coarse sand, fine sand, or powdery sand. Powders got into nasal filters and had to be blown out; bean-like sand and gravel rolled on the hard rock surface, and accidents were likely to happen due to carelessness; the sharp corners of the stones were easy to scratch. The waves of sand that existed everywhere dragged their feet forward. Paul stopped suddenly on a rock, and his mother fell into his arms, and he caught her, holding her on her feet. He pointed to the left, and she looked along his arm, and saw that they were standing on a cliff, and two hundred meters below the cliff was a desert, stretching like a still ocean.There it lay, undulating in moon-white waves—horned shadows lost in curvilinear waves of sand.In the distance, a cloud of dust rises, covering the gray and hazy steep slopes. "A vast desert," she said. "To walk across such a wide desert," Paul said, his voice muffled by the filter covering his face. Jessica looked left and right - there was only sand below. Paul stared straight ahead, at the bare desert beyond, watched the shadows move as the moon passed. "About three or four kilometers across," he said. "Sand lizard," she said. "Definitely is." She only noticed that she was tired, and the pain in all her muscles dulled her perception: "Can we take a break and eat something?" Paul put down his backpack and sat down, leaning on it.Jessica put a hand on his shoulder and braced herself, falling on the rock beside him.As she sat down, she felt Paul turn and heard him rummaging in the backpack. "Here," he said. When he stuffed two energy capsules into her hands, she felt his hands dry. She took a sip of water from the tubing of the filtration suit and swallowed two energy capsules. "Drink your water," Paul said. "As the saying goes, the best place to keep water is your body. It keeps you energized and you'll be stronger. Trust your filtration suit!" She obeyed, drank all the water in the water storage bag, and felt that she had regained some strength.Then she thought how quiet it was here when she was tired!She recalled hearing the poet knight Gurney Halleck say, "Better a dry mouthful of food and silence than a house full of sacrifice and battle." Jessica told Paul these words. "That's what Gurney said," he said. She recognized the tone and the way he spoke, as if speaking to some dead person.Poor Gurney might be dead, she thought.Atrez's army was either dead or captured, or lost like them in this waterless desert. "Gurney has quotes all the time," Paul said, "and I hear his voice now: 'I will dry up the rivers and sell the land to evil; I will lay waste the homeland and give everything to strangers.'" Jessica closed her eyes, moved to tears by her son's passionate words. After a while, Paul said, "How are you...feeling?" She understood that he was asking about her pregnancy, so she said, "Your sister won't be born for several months, and I still feel . . . have enough energy." She thought: How formally I am speaking to my son!Since answers to such delicate questions were Bee Geist's way, she looked for and found the reason for her formality: I was afraid of my son, terrified of his strange behavior.I was afraid of what he saw in front of me and what he said to me. Paul pulled down the hood to cover his eyes, listening to the chaotic calls of insects in the dark, his heart was filled with silence.He felt itchy nostrils, he scratched the itch, removed the filter, and smelled a strong smell of cinnamon. "There's a spice mix around here," he said. A soft wind brushed Paul's cheeks, ruffling his coat.But the wind had no threat of a storm, and he felt the difference. "It will be daylight soon," he said. Jessica nodded. "There's a way to get through that desert safely," Paul said, "the way the Fremen get through the desert." "Where's the sand lizard?" "If we get behind the rocks here and make a metallic thud with the small drum sticks that the Fremen use," Paul said, "it'll keep the sand lizards busy for a while." She glanced at the moonlit desert between them and another steep slope. "It's going to take four kilometers to walk." "Maybe. If we just made natural noises as we walked across the desert, those noises wouldn't attract sand lizards." Paul surveyed the vast desert, searching in his precognitive dreams for the mysterious revelation: the clanging of metal, the artifice of artificially manipulated Fremen drumsticks.This little drumstick was packed in their fleeing backpack.He found it strange that what he felt at the thought of the sand lizard was something utterly terrible.He knew that it seemed to be on the fringes of consciousness, that the sand lizard should be respected, not feared... if... if... He shook his head. "There has to be a rhythmless sound," Jessica said. "What? Ah, yes. If we disturb our steps . . . the sand itself moves from time to time, and it is impossible for the sand lizard to investigate every little sound. Before we experiment, however, we should rest well." He looked over, looked at the rock wall, and noticed the passing time of the vertical moon shadow. "In an hour, it will be daylight." "Where do we spend the day?" she asked. Paul pointed to the left and said, "There, behind the bend in the north cliff, you can see by the way the wind-hewn face, and there are some deep crevasses there." "We better get started now?" she asked. He stood up and helped her up. "Have you rested enough? Can you climb down? I want to get as close to the desert as possible before we camp." "It's absolutely fine." She nodded and let him lead the way. He hesitated for a while, picked up his backpack, put it on his shoulder, turned around and walked down the cliff. If only we had sling weights, Jessica thought.It's easy enough to jump down there, but sling weights are another thing to avoid in the open desert, maybe they attract sand lizards as well as shields. They came to the edge of the overhanging ledges and saw a crack behind them, its jut outlined by moon shadows down to its entrance. Paul led the way, moving forward cautiously, but quickly, for the moonlight did not last long.They spiraled downward into darker and darker shadows, upward rocks looming mingled with the stars.At the edge of a hazy dark gray sand slope, the crack narrowed, about ten meters wide, and the sand slope sloped down into the darkness. "Can we go down here?" Jessica asked softly. "I think so." He tried the sloped surface with one foot. "We can slide down," he said, "until you hear me stop." "Be careful," she said. He climbed the slope, slid down, and slid along the soft surface to an almost sand-filled flat, deep in the middle of the rock face. There was the sound of sand sliding behind him, and in the dark, he struggled to look up the slope, almost knocked down by the sandstorm, and then everything gradually fell silent again. "Mother?" he called. no answer. "Mother?" He dropped his backpack and climbed up the slope, crawling, digging, and throwing sand, like a madman. "Mother!" He gasped, "Mother, where are you?" Another sandstorm poured down and fell on him, burying him.The sand piled up to his waist, and he struggled to get out. She met the sandboard and was buried, he thought.I have to stay calm and work this out carefully.She wouldn't suffocate right away, she'd stiffen herself up, reduce her need for oxygen, and she knew I'd dig her out. Using the Bee Geist method she taught, his crazy heartbeat calmed down, his mind went blank, and there were not many memories of the past.In his memory, every movement, every slide, reappears in his mind, moving with inner peace.This calm is in stark contrast to the moment of actual need for comprehensive recall. For a moment Paul scrambled up the slope, probing cautiously until he found the crack wall, where a rock bent outward.He began to dig, removing the sand with extreme care so as not to cause another sand slide.A piece of fabric was exposed under his hand, and he followed the fabric until he found an arm, along which he dug out her face. "Hear me?" he asked quietly. no answer. He dug faster and dug out her shoulders.She was soft, and he felt the slow beating of her heart. The self-help method of stiff body, he said to himself. He cleaned the sand off her waist, put her arms around his shoulders, and pulled her down the slope.Slowly at first, then pull as fast as you can, feeling the sand on top of it about to collapse.He pulled faster and faster, panting, trying to keep his balance.He pulled her out, onto the rock-strewn ground where there were hard objects.He took her on his shoulders and started to run, rocking, as the whole sand slope collapsed and a great hiss echoed from the rock walls, growing louder. He stopped at one end of the fissure, which faced the dune-matched desert some thirty meters below.He gently put her in the sand and talked, bringing her back from her rigidity. She woke up slowly, breathing deeply and long. "I knew you'd find me," she whispered. He looked back at the crack: "Maybe it would have been better if I hadn't found you." "Paul!" "I lost my backpack," he said, "and it's buried under a hundred tons of sand...at least..." "Is everything lost?" "Excess water, filtration tent—all important things are missing." He touched his pocket, "The positioning compass is still there." He touched his belt: "Knife, binoculars are still there. We can take good care of them." Look at this place where we're going to die." At that moment, to the left of the rift, the sun was rising from the horizon, and the colors shone across the vast desert, and the birds sang in the rocks. But all Jessica saw on Paul's face was the look of desperation, and she said to him contemptuously, "Is that what you were taught?" "Don't you understand?" he said, "everything you need to survive in this place is under the sand." "You found me," she said.Now her voice is soft and rational. Paul crouched down. Soon he was looking up at the crack, looking at the new slope, sizing it up, remembering the softness. "If we could hold down a little bit of that slope and the surface of the hole in the sand, we might be able to stick a stick into the pack. Water would do it, but we don't have enough water..." He stopped short, and then Say, "Bubble." Jessica didn't move so as not to interrupt his thoughts. Paul looked at the bare dunes, searching with nose and eyes, then focused on a patch of blackened sand below them. "Spice of Decay," he said, "it's aroma--it's very alkaline. I have the Compass, and it's kinetic pack is acidic." Jessica leaned upright against the rock. Paul ignored her, jumped up, and ran along the wind, down the slope at the end of the chasm, into the desert. Jessica watched the way he walked, stopping every now and then—one step, stop, two steps, slide, stop... There was no rhythm in the forward pace, which told the predatory desert monitor lizard that something belonging to the desert was moving. Paul went to the decayed spices, scooped up a pile of decayed spices, wrapped them in his robe, and returned to the crack.He put the Spice of Decay in front of Jessica, squatted down, and used the tip of a knife to disassemble the positioning compass, and the surface of the compass was removed.He removed the belt, dumped the compass parts on top, removed the kinetic pack, and removed the dial mechanism, leaving the empty compass chassis. "You need water," Jessica said. Paul removed the water hose from his neck, took a long gulp, and spat the water into the chassis. If it fails, the water is wasted, Jessica thought, but anyway, that's all right. Paul cut open the power pack with a knife and poured its crystals into the water, where they frothed a little. Jessica saw something move above them and looked up to see a flock of hawks perched along the edge of the crack, staring at the uncovered water below. Great Mother!From that distance, she thought, they could smell the water. Paul put the cover on the compass, removing the cover button to leave a small hole through which the fluid could escape.Holding the compass in one hand and a handful of decaying spices in the other, he returned to the crack and surveyed the terrain of the slope.His robe fluttered softly because it was not tied by a belt. He lumbered to the middle of the slope, kicking off the little strips of sand and stirring up clouds of dust. After a while, he stopped, stuffed a pinch of Decay Spice into the compass, and shook it. Green foam is coming out of the tiny hole that used to be the lid button.Paul aimed it at the slope, where he built a low embankment.He started kicking off the sand beneath it, using more foam to secure the surface of the dug hole. Jessica stepped under him and called, "Can I help?" "Come up and dig," he said, "we've got about three meters to go, and we're getting close to that thing." No more foam came out of the compass box as he spoke. "Come on," said Paul, "I don't know how long the foam will hold the sand." Jessica crawled up to Paul, and he stuffed another pinch of Decay Spice into the compass box, shook it, and the foam came out again. While Paul built the foam embankment, Jessica dug the sand by hand and threw it down the slope. "How deep?" she asked breathlessly. "About three meters," he said, "I can tell the approximate location, we had to make the hole wider." He moved a step sideways and slipped in the loose sand. "Dig back at an angle, not straight down." Jessica did as he was told. The hole slowly descended until it was parallel to the surface of the basin, but still no backpack in sight. "Maybe I miscalculated?" Paul asked himself. "I started to panic and made a mistake." He looked at the less than two ounces of acid left in the compass. Stretching up in the hole, Jessica wiped her cheek with her foam-tainted hand, her eyes meeting Paul's. "Upper level," Paul said, "lighter, okay." He stuffed another pinch of Decay Spice into the compass case, letting the foam bubble up and drip onto Jessica's hand.She began to cut a vertical plane on the slope of the upper layer of the hole, and the second time her hand cut through the vertical plane, it hit something hard. She dug slowly along the straps that had plastic buttons on them. "Don't touch it," Paul whispered. "We're out of foam." Jessica grabbed the straps with one hand and looked up at him. Paul threw the compass into the basin and said, "Give me your other hand and listen carefully. I'll pull you over the side and up, but hold on to the strap. We're on top No more sand pouring down, this ramp is fixed. What I'm going to do is deflect your head off the sand. Once that hole is filled with sand, I can dig you out and pull the pack up .” "I see," she said. "Ready?" "Ready." Her fingers gripped the straps. With one jerk, Paul pulled her halfway out of the hole, and the foam bank gave way, sending sand pouring down but her head sticking out.When the sandstorm stopped, Jessica stood waist-deep in the sand, her left arm and shoulder still buried in the sand, her jaw protected by the folds of Paul's robe, and her shoulder aching from the tension. "I'm still holding on to the straps," she said. Slowly Paul reached into the sand beside her and found the straps. "Let's come together," He said, "Take it slow, don't break the strap." More sand poured down as they pulled the backpack straps up.When the straps came out of the sand, Paul stopped pulling.He pulled his mother out of the sand, and together they pulled up the slope and out of the bunker. Within minutes, they were standing in the crevasse with their backpacks between them. Paul looked at his mother, the foam staining her face and robes, the sand caked where the foam had dried, looking as if she was a wet, green maraca target. "You look like a mess," he said. "You're not that pretty yourself," she said. They started laughing and then cried. "That should never have happened," Paul said. "My carelessness." She shrugged, feeling chunks of sand fall from her robe. "I'm pitching the tent," he said, "you better take off your robe and shake the sand out." He picked up his knapsack and turned away. Jessica nodded in agreement, but was suddenly too tired to answer. "There's a hole in the rock," Paul said. "Somebody pitched a tent here before." why not?She thought as she brushed her robe.It was just the right spot—deep in the rock face, facing another cliff about four kilometers away—high enough to avoid sand lizard attacks, but close enough to easily reach the desert to cross. She turned to see Paul pitching the tent, the hemispherical surface of its crooked dome meeting the cracked rock wall.Paul walked past her, raised his binoculars, and twisted quickly to focus on the cliff over there.The cliff is in the morning light, and on the other side of the vast desert, a golden mist rises. Jessica watched Paul, who was surveying the natural landscape, his eyes exploring the desert. "There's something growing over there," he said. Jessica took another pair of binoculars from the backpack next to the tent and walked over to Paul. "Over there." He held the binoculars in one hand and pointed with the other. She looked where he pointed. "Sage," she said, "a scrawny thing." "There might be someone nearby," Paul said. "That could be the remains of a plant experiment station," she warned. "It's pretty far south in the desert," he said.He stroked the area under the nasal filter partition, feeling his lips were dry and rough, and his mouth smelled of thirsty dust. "There's a sense of a Fremen presence," he said. "Will the Fremen be friendly to us?" she asked. "Keynes promised to ask them to help us." But these people in the desert are deadly, she thought.I got a taste of it today.Reckless people may kill us for our water. She closed her eyes, and compared with this barren desert, she thought of the beauty of Kaladan.There was a holiday trip in Caladan—she and Duke Ledo, before Paul was born, had flown through the southern jungles, over weedy meadows and rice-laden deltas.In the green bushes, they saw the ant defense line-groups of people carrying heavy loads on suspended poles.There are white flowers blooming on the strange grasses and stones in the sea. Everything is gone. Jessica opened her eyes and looked out at the silent desert, the temperature of the day was rising, the unsettling heat was starting to steam the air over the bare sand, the rocks opposite them were like something seen through cheap glass . A cascade of sand spread its makeshift curtain, hissed across the crack's opening, and slanted down.She could still hear the hiss of the sandstorm when it was gone, growing louder, and once heard, never to be forgotten. "Sandlizard," Paul whispered. The Sand Lizard came running from their right, with incomparable majesty.A large twisting pile of sand across the dunes within their field of vision.The sand rose up ahead, kicking up dust like bow waves in the water, then sprinted to the left and went away. The sound died away, and there was silence again. "I've seen air cruisers smaller than this," Paul whispered. She nodded and continued to stare across the desert.Wherever the sand lizards passed, they left unforgettable deep grooves, which flowed endlessly before them, flowing towards the distance close to the sky. "During the break," said Jessica, "we should continue your studies." He suppressed the sudden anger and said, "Mother, don't you think we can't do no..." "You're panicking today," she said. "You probably know more about your brain and nerves than I do, but you still have a lot to learn about the capabilities of your body's muscles. What the body itself does sometimes, Paul, I know Can teach you. You must learn to control every muscle, control every tendon of the body. You need to practice your hands, you must be able to use the muscles of your fingers, the tendons of your palms, and your fingertips sensitively." She turned around: "Now Let's go into the tent." He crooked the fingers of his left hand, watched her crawl through the trapdoor, and knew he couldn't make her change her mind...he had to agree. No matter how I've been treated, I've become a part of her, he thought. Practice hands! He looked at the hand, how inadequate it seemed in judging a creature like the sand lizard!