He looked down at his students and kindly noticed that he had captivated the children's attention.

"Imagine a bubble. A bubble of air in clear water."

He looked around and his hands seemed to protect a small sphere.

"Thraen is like this little bubble and everything you know, everything you see - everything! - is inside this bubble."

He could see questions forming in the faces of the girls and boys, but none of the children dared to interrupt.

“Silly old Selutam, you will probably think, Thraen isn’t a bubble in the water!" He leaned forward.

"And you are right - and wrong at the same time."

He looked up into the night, where the world shone in the sky above them. High above the horizon to his right, the Sea of Silence arched, and even higher above it, the mighty ridge of the Salthras Mountains began to emerge from of the darkness.

“Thraen is a bubble, a large bubble full of wonders! But Thraen is not a bubble in water, of course.”

He gently placed his hand on the ground in front of him.

"What is this?" he asked his students.

The answers came as quickly as the arrows from a Teroekh longbow.

"Sand!" "Earth!"

He raised his hand again.

"That's all correct. But what is underneath the sand?”

"Stone!" and “Rock," were most of the answers.

"Very good. And what lies beneath the rock?”

Now the answers did not come so quickly.

"Water?" "Earth?" "More rock?"

He smiled his almost toothless smile at the girl who had given the correct answer. "Yes, Senaï, there's more rock.

And underneath that lies a lot more rock! So much rock that it never ends, no matter how deep you dig! What does that mean?”

The Selutam leaned back.

After a while, a little boy asked: "Thraen is a bubble in - the rock?"

The Selutam nodded in confirmation.

“Thraen is a bubble in the rock. In an all of rock!”

He took a handful of sand and picked out a grain of sand. He held it on his index finger and looked at it.

“Thraen is like this small grain of sand. And the whole desert itself is like the eternal rock around it.”

Amazement spread across the children's faces. None of the children and only a very few adults of the tribe had ever seen the end of the desert.

“As you all know, Perdisah made Thraen thousands of thousanddays ago. She prepared Thraen to set up her Jurtha and live here until one day she will move on to a new camp.”

The Selutam once again raised his arms and stretched them out towards the other world in the middle of Thraen. The dark silhouette floating in the centre of the rock bubble that was Thraen stood out sharply and clearly against the sky. The light behind it had already moved a little further.

"Perdisah has turned her benevolent eye upon us."