A Fool's Gold
Like me, sweat pours from the darker than black stallion, equine perspiration soaking the bottoms of my pants, chafing raw my thighs and buttocks as I ride him with no saddle. Tired shoulders ache as I try to hold tightly to the mane and neck of the rein free horse while hot wisps of air blows across my sunburnt hands painfully cracking them. Sparse low-lying vegetation, clinging below the crests on the flanks of desolate granitic mountains, withers and provides little shade from the blaze of a midday sun.
The steed seems to know the way very well and I allow him to take me to the guaranteed objective, having agreed to one restriction to reach my goal that I stay the entire way on his back. He follows a trail gone-bad that cuts through the accursed leaden range in valleys with streambeds many eons dried-up; distant air shimmers under a harsh light. My desiccated mouth aches, each intake of breath a torment filled with dust raised by his obsidian hooves, each gait a painful jolt as he meanders mile after scorching mile, seeing not a single soul.
I should have turned back days ago. A fever dazzles me, blinding and possessing me to continue struggling onward despite the brutality of the ride, searching constantly with sleep deprived reddened eyes the next valley or hillside for indications of color or for a gleam or glitter. More than once I was momentarily deceived by distant reflections from pyrite.
Rearing up, the lent diabolical beast unseats me and hoofs it out of the area leaving me alone to search thirstily the parched land for another kind of glint that momentarily slaked my gilded fever. I curse them, the one I rode and the one who’s bargain delivered me into this godforsaken spot.
Instead of moisture, I find a nearby pit with worked quartz veins containing the promised mother lode occurring in a jagged igneous intrusion that glows hotly, spewing thick acridly sulfurous fumes from associated sulfide ores. The deposit looks as if freshly spat up from the inferno depths of the Earth. A sun-bleached sign stands adjacent to the stygian abyss with “Welcome to El Diablo’s Mine, your final prospect” fiendishly written on it.
Fluttering in the searing breeze, I spot my crimson signature on a document nailed to the post of the sign, bitterly recognizing it as the deceitful agreement that brought me here. I now see a subsection I did not notice before below the one that states the gold will be mine if I stay on horse back the entire route to the deposit. It further states I must ride the horse into the mine or my soul is his to keep.
With a fast sinking heart I realize what a fool I have been. At that moment I began to perceive the tormented moans, curses, and screams of dispirited men in between loud metallic clangs of tools emanating from within the hellish mine. Recognizing that I have nowhere else to go and deliverance from my foolish contract with the Devil is unlikely, I let off a strangled scream of despair from an inflamed mouth. From the deepest depths of my doomed soul I wish now only for a drink of water.
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