text: "They say one drop of water is enough to burn away all civility in a person. As if it had never existed." "You old fool," grinned one of the men. His filthy face contorted and he coughed noisily. "What do you want to know about civility, huh?" The men around him grunted in agreement. The old man was silent. Nohim had once been his name, but what mattered a name if no one used it. And as the sandstorm abraded the plaster of the walls, so the years abraded his being. His memories faded, his mind became dull. Only his principles remained as clear and pure as polished quartz. The old man bent over the table and whispered, "Listen." The dozen men in front of him fell silent. There was something in his words that cast a spell over them. "Take someone and throw him in a hole. The first day, give him a bowl of water. On the second, half a bowl. On the third, a quarter. Then you let him thirst for two days. And then, on the third day, you drop a drop of water into the hole every hour." Something flashed in the eyes of the libertines. Cruelty was something they smelled from a hundred miles away like an animal smells a water hole. "Now it is yours. For that hourly drop of water he will give you anything, betray anything, do anything. He can't help it. No matter how strong his will; his drive, more deeply rooted than anything else, will betray him." The old man's knotty hands trembled. The spell broke. "Nice story," sneered one of the bandits. His defiant words could not hide the fact that his grip on the knife was tense. No doubt the old man's words had not left a mark on any of them. "Yes," said another. He licked his tongue over his parted lips. "Let's see if he'll still talk so nicely when we cut out his tongue." The old man slowly stood up. No one stopped him. "And, what if you contain something else to the people; something that is no less important than water?" He could almost feel the bandits' incomprehension at his back. Nothing was more important than water. "Love. Tenderness. Humanity. What do you think happens to people's desires if they are never satisfied? What kind of morbid, inhuman being do they produce then?" The libertines were so busy laughing and grumbling that none of them noticed the ancient revolver in the old man's right hand. Slowly he climbed over the corpses of the men. Their blood was already absorbed by the sand of the ground. No doubt it would soon cover their corpses as well; drying them out and preserving them for the millennia. But the old man was not interested in such things. He went outside to his horse. It whinnied softly and sniffed at the old man's hands. It wouldn't last much longer, he knew. But this was just the way of things. Thoughtfully, he mounted the back of his nag and turned toward the sun. "The water will meet the needs the people, animals and soil. The sand needs the blood.