Nalanda

Bastante Solipsis Marquez met with the chieftans of the tribes of the West, but could not linger.  He sped eastward, over the mountain pass and across the Great Desert which stretched endlessly across the horizon.  In ancient days it would take weeks, even months to cross the apocalyptic ocean of sand and salt.  Bastante rode a steel horse - a white beast named Nanda.  He had a mattress in the back and a 35 gallon biodiesel tank.  Without needing to stop, he could climb to the divide of the Great Western Mountains and descend hurtling into the endless desert, crossing all the way to the hidden and haunted Vale of Darkness, home to the City of the Temple.

     The City of the Temple had banned many Rainbow Warriors, and enslaved many more, and this forbidding and beautiful place had also banned Bastante Solipsis Marquez.  He had no business there.  Here lived the Ice Queen, who had banished him.  He rested in secret, hiding in a cemetery with wolves who howled him to sleep.  His psychedelic tentacles reached out into the night, probing the City, looking for a sign of relent, a glimmer of compassion from the Queen.  And he found it, and clung to it, hoping against hope for a truce, yet as before, the Queen resented his approach and tormented his dreams.  He awoke desperate to leave.  Making a quick offering and singing his heartsong, again he boarded Nanda and hurtled eastwards and south, bewildered by fate and subdued by karma.

Bastante drove out of the Vale of Darkness and entered the Great Mountain Kingdom.  The sands and the browns and the yellows and the reds gave way to higher and higher vistas, snowy mountain passes and evergreen forests which dropped away to rivers far below.  His spirits rose.  He felt at home here in the Mountain Kingdom.

The Great Continental Divide still lay far ahead of him when he detoured south.  Briefly, mountain and desert merged and morphed, one changing into the other.  Skirting the border between them, Bastante followed a river southwards, as it wrapped its way around and through great peaks.  Here, at the southwestern edge of the Mountain Kingdom, another council was held with the peace chiefs of the Western Slope.  Again Bastante was asked to stay, and again he declined.  He would return, he promised.  Time was short, and the demonic forces who sought to destroy the balance in the universe grew more daring by the day.  These asuras - the Lords of Materialism, they were called. The servants of Mammon, others called them.  They were the sorcerers of the Black Nobility, driven by desire to expand without ever contracting, to forever feed Yang while forever depleting Yin.  With tremendous will they had grasped the reins of power, and would never let them go of their own accord. They behaved precisely like an ego does in moments of meditation, refusing to let go.   It was a precarious situation.

Bastante leapt aboard his great steed yet again, and endlessly pressed his way eastward.  He passed over the Continental Divide, and gravity herself pulled him towards his destination as he guided his rocketship ever so slightly to the north, narrowly avoiding the fuming and belching City of the West, gateway to the Plains of Mordor.  He followed a secret passage northwards, out of sight of the City and the Plains, and at last entered the great Elven sanctuary of the Front Range - Nalanda.

Nanda rested in a grove by a creek.  Bastante rested under a tree.  For the moment, he was home.