Item: Earth 11a
June 14, 2025
Tlokli Expedition
Journal of Robert Wilkington, ASMU
The heat was terrible today and the fleas, blinded by thirst, bounced like tiny erratically fired cannon balls across the dusty caravansary main tent – pinging, zinging and ricocheting from various parts of our bodies, the canvas walls, the dogs, even the very page these words are written upon! Maddening, and needless to say, I am bitten and itching from head to toe.
One redeeming hour in the suffocating heat of mid-afternoon brought us into contact with a passing group of the rarely seen Nhit people. They are a nomadic tribe said to wander the vast and terrible desolation of the great Xeng-Ten valley rift in a perennial migration to and from certain sites where the strange black stones of the rift valley are laid upon the dusty ground in patterns of peculiar geometry.
This group consisted of two men and a woman of middle age, a girl child, and one small, indeterminate figure hunched inside a hood and cloak of some dark and rather pungent leathery material – what we later learned was said to be the hide of the fearsome Xeng-Ten Wild Man. We spoke to them for several minutes, mainly through a shared smattering of the nomad lingo known among the windy crags and bleak desert stretches of this region as “Tribe Talk”.
We queried them regarding their destination and they replied, as best we could make out, that they were going where the day would take them. They seemed friendly enough. But I was not the only one to be disturbed by the furtive gleam deep within the dark caves of their eyes, hidden beneath the heavy, sloping brow ridge present in all of the group with faces visible; most horribly perhaps in the child standing slump shouldered and still in the shadow of her mother. Likewise, each of them moved with a grotesque shuffle that can be described only as simian, long arms swinging from the shoulders as they hunched forward into their path.
Our brief exchange raised many questions, for us at least, and offered intriguing clues about the Nhit culture, not the least of which is the fact that, as we learned with amusement and amazement, they have no word for thwock.
Tlokli Expedition
Journal of Robert Wilkington, ASMU
The heat was terrible today and the fleas, blinded by thirst, bounced like tiny erratically fired cannon balls across the dusty caravansary main tent – pinging, zinging and ricocheting from various parts of our bodies, the canvas walls, the dogs, even the very page these words are written upon! Maddening, and needless to say, I am bitten and itching from head to toe.
One redeeming hour in the suffocating heat of mid-afternoon brought us into contact with a passing group of the rarely seen Nhit people. They are a nomadic tribe said to wander the vast and terrible desolation of the great Xeng-Ten valley rift in a perennial migration to and from certain sites where the strange black stones of the rift valley are laid upon the dusty ground in patterns of peculiar geometry.
This group consisted of two men and a woman of middle age, a girl child, and one small, indeterminate figure hunched inside a hood and cloak of some dark and rather pungent leathery material – what we later learned was said to be the hide of the fearsome Xeng-Ten Wild Man. We spoke to them for several minutes, mainly through a shared smattering of the nomad lingo known among the windy crags and bleak desert stretches of this region as “Tribe Talk”.
We queried them regarding their destination and they replied, as best we could make out, that they were going where the day would take them. They seemed friendly enough. But I was not the only one to be disturbed by the furtive gleam deep within the dark caves of their eyes, hidden beneath the heavy, sloping brow ridge present in all of the group with faces visible; most horribly perhaps in the child standing slump shouldered and still in the shadow of her mother. Likewise, each of them moved with a grotesque shuffle that can be described only as simian, long arms swinging from the shoulders as they hunched forward into their path.
Our brief exchange raised many questions, for us at least, and offered intriguing clues about the Nhit culture, not the least of which is the fact that, as we learned with amusement and amazement, they have no word for thwock.
Transcribed by Richard Cody, 2005
posted by Richard Cody @ 9:36 PM
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