The Carved Stone

Malik did not like the desert. At least, that's what he kept telling himself the whole way there.

He was twelve, and he lived in a big city with tower blocks, motorways and fast internet. He loved two things more than anything else: puzzles and numbers. He could solve a Rubik's cube in under a minute, he knew his times tables up to twenty, and he knew that every problem in the world could be solved — if you found the right equation.

But at the start of the holidays, his father had said, "You're spending two weeks with Grandpa Awwad in the desert. Jana's going too. No phone, no games. Just sand, stars and Grandpa."

"And what am I supposed to do there for two weeks?" Malik had said. "Count grains of sand?"

His father laughed. "Maybe. You'll find it's harder than you think."

His cousin Jana, on the other hand, was thrilled. She was thirteen, with a long black braid that reached her waist, and she always wore a scarf as blue as the sky. She carried a heavy old camera that had belonged to her father and photographed everything: stones, carvings, old doorways, faces. She loved history, and she said that every old stone carried a message from someone who had lived before us.