Early the next morning, Armen caught breakfast and made a small fire for cooking. He was hungry, and the small fish seemed to take more trouble than it had meat on its bones. After daybreak, he loaded up his bike, and walked it northward above the shore of the reservoir.
Dust castles on Owens Lake (Great Basin Unified Air Pollution Control District)
After he ran out of reservoir, again he followed the aqueduct, only now it turned northwest. It seemed to be heading into the Great Wall. After a mile or so, the aqueduct passed under the highway. Armen stood under the late morning sun by the pavement and felt the traffic race by. After some unmetered span of time he was freed by his trance by a breeze. He crossed the highway and resumed following the water.
Several miles past the highway, the aqueduct crossed Olancha Creek. Unlike the aqueduct and its reservoirs, this creek fed the land along its banks as it flowed downward to the white, dry bone of Owens Lake. The shore of the old lake bed was green, though, with the runoff of the creek. Armen spotted the tiny, distant shapes of horses feeding on the grasses there.
Out beyond the horses, something like a fog rose from the lakebed.
The breeze grew to a strong but shifting wind.
The white mass above the lakebed continued to grow, but unevenly. It grew to points in places, with jagged steps climbing upward to the towers; like a phantom castle.
The wind strengthened more, and as Armen stood transfixed, staring at the ghostly castle, the wind took hold of it and began to whip it around, and the castle deformed until it took the shape of a white whirlwind.
The whirlwind began to spin randomly about the lakebed, and spun off toward Olancha, and it soon blanketed Armen. He closed his eyes and hit the ground to shelter himself from the saline dust storm. Armen couldn’t feel the sun anymore, and soon the air began cool, and cool more until Armen felts as though he were in a blizzard. He opened his eyes as he lay face down to the ground and saw: the salt-sand had transformed into snow.
Armen stood up and looked out into whiteout, binding himself against the cold. He saw sihouettes of exotic creatures through the blasting snow. A mammoth, several camels, and a big cat with what seemed to be fangs—all shadows in the whiteout. He began to follow the shapes, but he kept stumbling in the wind. Under the screaming and howling of the wind, he thought that he heard the cries of the shadow beasts, but then they were gone, and wind was all that he could hear. He fell to the ground and braced himself against the cold.
The whiteout seemed to darken slowly through a mayriad shades of grey.
Armen would waken from time to time, each time just realizing that he had lost consciousness again. Then he woke to find everything had become black, and it occurred to him that that everything was the snow that before been white. He folded into himself and hoped for sleep.