After some travel until the middle of the day, we arrived at a new landscape. Here was a brackish tarn, or moor, or heath- a desolate land, most resembling a desert, yet not sandy and dry, but damp and soggy…The Northmen call this place the desert of dread.
-Eaters of the Dead: The Manuscript of Ibn Fadlan, Relating His Experiences with the Northmen in A.D. 922 , Michael Crichton
Crichton’s fiction mashes up Ibn Fadlan’s travelogue to the Russian North and the horror of Beowulf, with a bit of Borgesian metacommentary. I on the other hand couldn’t keep echoes of the Chisholm Trail’s cowpuncher diaries, Howard Hawks’ Red River, and the tall trans-Saharan tales of Leo Africanus from creeping into Voice of the Whip.