The Borders We Share: Narnia’s Wastes, Sudan’s Split (Post 40)

 

The Borders We Share: A New Way to Fix a Broken World

Section 7: Deserts and Plains (Posts 37–42)

Post 40: Narnia’s Wastes, Sudan’s Split: Kings of Nothing

Enigma of the Crowned Void

The sun is a cold white eye that stares without blinking.

Two desolate wastes lie almost within sight of one another beneath that unrelenting gaze.

One is the Great Desert of Narnia, the vast southern reach that lies beyond the Lantern Waste and south of the Great Woods—a place of endless dunes and salt-crusted flats where the White Witch once ruled eternal winter and where, even now, the sun seems to remember her name. The other is the real desert that splits Sudan in two: the arid expanse that stretches from Darfur in the west to the Red Sea hills in the east, a 2.5-million-square-kilometre fracture zone where the 1956 independence line became—after 2011—the international border between Sudan and South Sudan, and where oil fields, grazing corridors, and the waters of the Nile still lie contested between Khartoum and Juba.

Both wastes are silent.

Both are crowned by absent kings.

Both are places where sovereignty has become a title without a throne.

Both are claimed by powers that rarely walk the full distance.

I arrive with the companions who have crossed every fractured frontier of this series: Sherlock Holmes, deerstalker traded for a wide-brimmed hat against the blinding glare; Dr. John Watson, notebook curling at the edges from the dry heat; King Arthur, who has swapped mail for a plain wool cloak but still carries Excalibur at his side like a vow that no desert can erase.

With us walk the people who actually belong to these wastes.

From Narnia come the last free wanderers of the southern desert—descendants of the Talking Beasts who fled south when the Telmarines came north; a grizzled Centaur astronomer who still reads the stars for signs of Aslan’s return; a young Faun who says the sand has begun to sing in two voices since Laputa drifted closer; and a Talking Eagle who claims to have seen the floating island pass overhead and drop a single golden feather that vanished into the dunes.

From the Sudan–South Sudan border come a Dinka cattle herder whose family has followed the same migratory corridor since before the British drew the line; a Nuer elder from Upper Nile who remembers when the oil rigs were new and the fighting was old; a young Sudanese activist from Khartoum who has been documenting illegal land concessions to Gulf investors; and a South Sudanese refugee woman from the Bentiu camps who carries a photograph of a house in Malakal she has never been able to return to.

This is Post 40, the fourth stride in Section 7: Deserts and Plains. We have left the shifting sands of Laputa and the Sahara, the bleeding grasslands of Cimmeria and the steppe. Now the series steps deeper into the arid nowhere, where sovereignty is measured not in hectares or hooves but in the barrels of oil beneath the sand and the number of cattle that can still cross the line before the bullets fly.

The Two Wastes, One Crowned Void

Narnia’s Great Desert is the southern reach Lewis sketched in passing—a vast expanse of dunes and salt-crusted flats that lies beyond the Lantern Waste and south of the Great Woods. In recent decades Laputa’s magnetic drift has begun to tug at the desert, stretching its dunes unnaturally far—almost as though the island above is trying to anchor itself by pulling the earth upward. Every year approximately 12,000 hectares of sand are lost to wind erosion accelerated by the island’s low-level downdraughts; the dunes migrate northward, burying ancient trails and clogging the few remaining oases. The Talking Beasts who still live here have no voice in the decisions made above them. They are not subjects; they are scenery.

The Sudan–South Sudan border is brutally real. Since the Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005 and the independence referendum of 2011, the two Sudans have shared a 2,000-kilometre frontier that cuts through oil fields, grazing corridors, and the White Nile basin. The Abyei region remains a flashpoint; the Heglig oil fields have changed hands by force more than once; the border has been militarized on both sides. Water is the true currency: the Nile waters are shared under the 1959 Nile Waters Agreement, but upstream dams and climate change have reduced flows. Both wastes are places where “kings of nothing” still wear crowns; both are claimed by capitals that rarely walk the full distance.

Sovereignty Conflicts frames both as classic triadic disputes: two privileged claimants exercising sovereignty over a populated third territory whose constitutive population is treated as peripheral to the claim yet suffers the direct environmental and economic cost.

Territorial Disputes adds the sociological fracture: in Narnia the Talking Beasts versus the absent human rulers; in Sudan–South Sudan the northern elites versus the southern pastoralists.

Cosmopolitanism and State Sovereignty asks the moral question: can a claim to land be legitimate if it systematically excludes or exploits the majority who actually inhabit and sustain it?

Territorial Disputes in the Americas provides the practical precedent: guarantor-led shared-resource zones that have achieved high durability in Latin American cases—models now urgently needed here.

The Evidence Gathered in Sand and Silence

Holmes refuses to stay in the shade. He spends four days walking Narnia’s southern desert with the Talking Beasts, measuring wind speed, dune migration rates, and the interval between Laputa’s magnetic pulses and the sudden gusts that strip topsoil. He spends the next four days walking the Sudan–South Sudan border with herders and activists, timing the movement of military patrols and the arrival of oil-company convoys. The data he returns with are starkly symmetrical.

In Narnia 12,000 hectares of sand are lost annually to wind erosion accelerated by Laputa’s downdraughts; 1,400 Talking Beast families displaced in the last decade. In Sudan–South Sudan 11,800 hectares of grazing land have been lost to oil concessions and border militarization since 2011; 1,700 pastoral households affected. In Narnia no Talking Beast has been invited to speak in the Cair Paravel court in living memory. In Sudan–South Sudan no high-level Khartoum or Juba official has spent a full day in a cattle camp without a security detail.

Watson’s notebook grows heavy: “Both wastes are being claimed by powers that never walk them. The difference is only in the signature—royal decree or oil contract.”

Arthur stands on a Narnian dune watching Laputa drift overhead, then stands in a Sudanese wadi watching a distant convoy of oil trucks move north to south like steel vultures. He says only: “A desert does not care who claims it. It only remembers who rested their flocks upon it.”

A Conclave in the Sands

We meet where the two wastes almost touch: a neutral point on Narnia’s lowest dune, lowered to within 150 metres of the Sudanese surface for the first time in history, with Sudanese, South Sudanese, and Narnian representatives brought by helicopter and Talking Beasts arriving on foot and hoof.

Present:

King Laputian, seated on a portable throne of adamant, visibly uncomfortable at being so close to sand; the Centaur astronomer, mane braided with eagle feathers; Bêlit’s daughter, sword at her hip, eyes fierce; a Dinka cattle herder; a Nuer elder from Upper Nile; a young Sudanese activist from Khartoum; Hamed al-Ghabri, the Omani elder whose water-bag has become a symbol of cross-border memory.

The Centaur astronomer speaks first, voice like distant thunder: “The dunes are moving. They do not ask permission. They only ask to be shared.”

The Dinka herder answers: “Our dunes have been moving under foreign oil rigs for fifteen years. We ask only for the right to follow our cattle freely.”

The Nuer elder, voice low: “We have lost sons to the border and daughters to the camps. The sand remembers their names even if the maps do not.”

Arthur lays Excalibur flat across a low dune crest. Every hand—royal, centaur, herder, elder—rests on the scabbard at once.

I open Sovereignty Conflicts:

“Egalitarian shared sovereignty does not ask who owns the sand. It asks how we keep the desert from swallowing the people who live on it.”

The young Sudanese activist, voice sharp: “The oil belongs to the people who walk the land, not to the capitals that sign the papers.”

Bêlit’s daughter, hand on her sword: “And the dunes belong to those who remember their songs, not to those who only measure their height.”

King Laputian, voice cracking from the unaccustomed dryness: “Our crystals keep us aloft, but we have forgotten how to land. Perhaps the sand will teach us.”

The Dinka herder, after a long silence: “If we share the water, the grass, the dunes—perhaps the cattle will come back and the children will stop running.”

Arthur’s voice, quiet as a vow: “A sword laid flat is not surrender. It is invitation. Let every hand rest here, and let the desert judge.”

The “Wastes Accord” is drafted in sand and ink:

Joint Narnia–Sudan–South Sudan Desert Commission with binding water-extraction and grazing caps; surplus funds a cross-border aquifer recharge programme.

Narnia’s southern desert declared a shared ecological zone; 30 % of any future crystal revenue funds permanent descent corridors and mobile schools for Talking Beasts.

“Sand-to-Sky Residency Pathway”: ten continuous years of contribution (herding, scholarship, land restoration) = permanent residency in Sudan or South Sudan or citizenship on Narnia’s grounded ring.

Higher Court seated alternately in Juba and on Narnia’s lowest terrace, with judges from Sudanese, South Sudanese, Narnian, and nomadic communities; veto power on any project that depletes aquifers or increases dune migration.

Every new oil or mining operation must display, in Arabic, Dinka, Nuer, English, and Narnian dialect, the source of the water and the names of the herders and workers who sustain it.

King Laputian signs first, his hand steady because it rests on real sand. The Dinka herder signs second. The Nuer elder signs third. The young Sudanese activist signs fourth. Bêlit’s daughter signs last—her sword resting beside Excalibur like an equal.

Murmurs of the Desert Wind

The wind still carries warnings: aquifers will fall, dunes will migrate, people will thirst. Yet it also carries new notes: the soft hiss of a recharge well pumping water back into the ground, the laughter of Dinka and Narnian children learning dune navigation together on a neutral rise, the quiet thud of a Laputan astronomer choosing to walk rather than float, the rustle of a water-bag being refilled from a tap that no longer runs dry.

Peace along this vertical-and-horizontal frontier is not a treaty signed in air-conditioned halls. It is a handful of sand left undisturbed so a palm grove may breathe again, a path reopened so a herder may walk it freely, a desert whose horizon is wide enough for every nomad and every Talking Beast to stand beneath the same sky.

Why This Resonates in You

You have stood in a desert so quiet you could hear your own heartbeat.

You have looked at a map and wondered why one side of a line is marked in green and the other in brown.

You have, perhaps, never met the herder whose cattle path was closed so a border could stay open, the scholar who learned that the stars are beautiful but the sand is home, or the elder who discovered that even a king can learn to walk.

The Borders We Share asks only one thing: the next time you look at a desert, remember there is always a ground—and that the ground remembers every footprint, every promise kept or broken.

Next Tuesday we move deeper into the wastes—new kings, new nothings.

I remain, as always,

Dr. Jorge

Trails to Wander:

• Sovereignty Conflicts (2017).

• Territorial Disputes (2020).

• Cosmopolitanism and State Sovereignty (2023). 

• Territorial Disputes in the Americas (2025).

NOTE:

New posts every Tuesday.

PREVIOUS POSTS:

Post 39: Erewhon’s Sands, Sinai’s Edge: Nowhere to Share

NEXT POSTS:

Section 7: Deserts and Plains (Posts 37–42)

41, Oz’s Plains, Outback’s Reach: Emerald to Dust

42, Laputa’s Dunes, Part II: Quantum Sands

AUTHOR’S SAMPLE PEER-REVIEWED ACADEMIC RESEARCH (FREE OPEN ACCESS):

State Sovereignty: Concept and Conceptions (OPEN ACCESS) (IJSL 2024)

AUTHOR’S PUBLISHED WORK AVAILABLE TO PURCHASE VIA:

AMAZON

ROUTLEDGE, TAYLOR & FRANCIS

Tuesday 3rd February 2026

Dr Jorge Emilio Núñez

X (formerly, Twitter): https://x.com/DrJorge_World

https://drjorge.world

The Borders We Share: Erewhon’s Sands, Sinai’s Edge (Post 39)

 

The Borders We Share: A New Way to Fix a Broken World

Section 7: Deserts and Plains (Posts 37–42)

Post 39: Erewhon’s Sands, Sinai’s Edge: Nowhere to Share

Enigma of the Unclaimed Horizon

The desert is so still it feels like the world is holding its breath.Two arid stretches lie almost within sight of one another beneath the same merciless sun.

One is the Sinai Peninsula, a triangular wedge of rock and sand thrust between Africa and Asia—60,000 square kilometres of jagged wadis, granite mountains, and shifting dunes that have borne witness to every empire from the Pharaohs to the Ottomans to the present day. The other is the great sandy waste of Erewhon, Samuel Butler’s satirical nowhere-land, a desert plateau so remote and featureless that its inhabitants once outlawed machines, then forgot why, then remembered again—only to discover the machines had already won. In recent decades Laputa’s magnetic drift has begun to tug at Erewhon’s sands, stretching the desert unnaturally far until its dunes almost brush the real Sinai, as though the island above is trying to anchor itself by pulling the earth upward. The wind moves in slow, sighing waves across both; the sand whispers secrets it has kept for millennia; the line between myth and map becomes difficult to see through the heat haze.

Both deserts are silent.

Both are contested.

Both are places where “nowhere” has become somebody’s home.

Both are claimed by powers that rarely walk their full length.

I arrive with the companions who have crossed every fractured frontier of this series: Sherlock Holmes, deerstalker traded for a wide-brimmed hat against the blinding glare; Dr. John Watson, notebook curling at the edges from the dry heat; King Arthur, who has swapped mail for a plain Bedouin cloak but still carries Excalibur at his side like a vow that no desert can erase.

With us walk the people who actually belong to these sands.

From Erewhon come the last free citizens of the high plateau—descendants of the people who once banned machines, then unbanned them, then banned them again; a stern magistrate who still believes illness is a crime; a young herder who has never seen a machine but knows the wind patterns better than any map; and an old woman who remembers when the statues of the gods were toppled because they were “too mechanical.”

From the Sinai come a Bedouin elder from the Jebeliya tribe whose family has herded goats among the granite peaks since before the Exodus; an Egyptian administrator from Suez who oversees the peacekeepers and the tourism; an Israeli security liaison who patrols the international border; and a young Palestinian guide from Rafah who says the desert has no memory of borders, only of water.

This is Post 39, the third stride in Section 7: Deserts and Plains. We have left the bleeding grasslands of Cimmeria and the Eurasian steppe. Now the series steps deeper into the arid nowhere, where sovereignty is measured not in hectares or hooves but in the handfuls of water that can still be carried before the dunes swallow everything.

The Two Deserts, One Vanishing Horizon

Erewhon’s sands are the high plateau Butler imagined as a mirror held up to Victorian England—flat, featureless, and mercilessly logical. In recent decades Laputa’s magnetic drift has begun to tug at the desert, stretching its dunes unnaturally far—almost as if the island above is trying to anchor itself by pulling the earth upward. Every year approximately 11,000 hectares of sand are lost to wind erosion accelerated by the island’s low-level downdraughts; the dunes migrate northward, burying ancient trails and clogging the few remaining oases. The citizens who still live here have no voice in the decisions made above them. They are not subjects; they are scenery.

The Sinai Peninsula is brutally real. Since the 1979 Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty, the peninsula has been demilitarized under international supervision, yet it remains a contested space: Egyptian sovereignty is recognized, but Israeli security concerns persist; multinational peacekeepers patrol the border; Bedouin tribes hold traditional grazing rights that are increasingly restricted by military zones and tourism developments. Water is the true currency: the peninsula sits atop fragile aquifers that are being depleted by agriculture in the north and desalination plants in the south. Both deserts are places where “nowhere” has become somebody’s home; both are claimed by distant capitals that rarely walk their full length.

Sovereignty Conflicts frames both as classic triadic disputes: two privileged claimants exercising sovereignty over a populated third territory whose constitutive population is treated as peripheral to the claim yet suffers the direct environmental and economic cost.

Territorial Disputes adds the sociological fracture: in Erewhon the high-plateau citizens versus the machine-fearing traditionalists; in Sinai the state authorities versus the Bedouin who actually inhabit the land.

Cosmopolitanism and State Sovereignty asks the moral question: can a claim to land be legitimate if it systematically excludes or exploits the majority who actually inhabit and sustain it?

Territorial Disputes in the Americas provides the practical precedent: guarantor-led shared-land-use zones that have achieved high durability in Latin American cases—models now urgently needed here.

The Evidence Gathered in Sand and Silence

Holmes refuses to stay in the shade. He spends four days walking Erewhon’s high plateau with the citizens, measuring wind speed, dune migration rates, and the interval between Laputa’s magnetic pulses and the sudden gusts that strip topsoil. He spends the next four days walking the Sinai wadis with Bedouin guides and peacekeepers, timing the movement of military patrols and the arrival of tourist convoys. The data he returns with are starkly symmetrical.

In Erewhon 11,000 hectares of sand are lost annually to wind erosion accelerated by Laputa’s downdraughts; 1,200 plateau families displaced in the last decade. In Sinai 10,800 hectares of grazing land have been lost to military zones and tourism infrastructure since 2000; 1,900 Bedouin households affected. In Erewhon no magistrate has visited the outer dunes in living memory. In Sinai no high-level Egyptian or Israeli official has spent a full day in a Bedouin camp without a security detail.

Watson’s notebook grows heavy: “Both deserts are being claimed by powers that never walk them. The difference is only in the signature—royal decree or peace treaty.”

Arthur stands on an Erewhon dune watching Laputa drift overhead, then stands in a Sinai wadi watching a distant convoy of white UN vehicles move north to south like ghosts. He says only: “A desert does not care who claims it. It only remembers who rested their flocks upon it.”

A Conclave in the Sands

We meet where the two deserts almost touch: a neutral point on Erewhon’s lowest dune, lowered to within 150 metres of the Sinai surface for the first time in history, with Egyptian, Israeli, and Bedouin representatives brought by helicopter and Erewhon citizens climbing rope ladders from below.

Present: King Laputian, seated on a portable throne of adamant, visibly uncomfortable at being so close to sand; the Erewhon magistrate, stern and mechanical in his bearing; Bêlit’s daughter, sword at her hip, eyes fierce; an Egyptian administrator from Suez; a Bedouin elder from the Jebeliya tribe; a young Palestinian guide from Rafah; Hamed al-Ghabri, the Omani elder whose water-bag has become a symbol of cross-border memory.

The Bedouin elder speaks first, voice carrying the slow cadence of the wadis: “The sand is moving. It does not ask permission. It only asks to be shared.”

The Palestinian guide answers, eyes on the horizon: “Our sand has been moving under foreign boots for decades. We ask only for the right to walk it freely.”

The Egyptian administrator, voice calm but edged: “We have brought roads, wells, tourism. The desert is more alive now than it has ever been.”Arthur lays Excalibur flat across a low dune crest. Every hand—royal, magistrate, herder, administrator—rests on the scabbard at once.I open Sovereignty Conflicts:

“Egalitarian shared sovereignty does not ask who owns the sand. It asks how we keep the desert from swallowing the people who live on it.”The magistrate, stiff as a statue: “Our laws are perfect. Illness is a crime; machines are banned; order is maintained.”

Bêlit’s daughter cuts in, blade half-drawn: “Your perfection leaves children hungry and old women wandering. Order without mercy is just another chain.”

The Bedouin elder nods slowly: “We have no machines, yet we are chained by borders drawn by men who never knew thirst. Let the sand decide who walks it.

”The Egyptian administrator, after a long silence: “If we share the water, the roads, the dunes—perhaps the tourists will come to see peace instead of ruins.”

The young Palestinian guide, voice low: “Peace is not a postcard. It is a path wide enough for my grandmother’s goats and your soldiers’ boots.”

King Laputian, voice cracking from the unaccustomed dryness: “Our crystals keep us aloft, but we have forgotten how to land. Perhaps the sand will teach us.”Arthur’s voice, quiet as a vow: “A sword laid flat is not surrender. It is invitation. Let every hand rest here, and let the desert judge.”

The “Sand Accord” is drafted in sand and ink:

• Joint Erewhon–Egypt–Israel–Sinai Desert Commission with binding water-extraction and grazing caps; surplus funds a cross-desert aquifer recharge programme.
• Erewhon’s outer dunes declared a shared ecological zone; 30 % of any future crystal revenue funds permanent descent corridors and mobile schools for nomads.
• “Sand-to-Sky Residency Pathway”: ten continuous years of contribution (herding, guiding, scholarship) = permanent residency in Egypt or citizenship on Erewhon’s grounded ring.
• Higher Court seated alternately in Suez and on Erewhon’s lowest terrace, with judges from Egyptian, Israeli, Bedouin, Palestinian, and Erewhonian communities; veto power on any project that depletes aquifers or increases dune migration.
• Every new tourism or mining operation must display, in Arabic, Hebrew, English, and Erewhonian dialect, the source of the water and the names of the guides and workers who sustain it.

King Laputian signs first, his hand steady because it rests on real sand. The Bedouin elder signs second, pressing the goatskin water-bag into the table as seal. The Egyptian administrator signs third. The Palestinian guide signs fourth. Bêlit’s daughter signs last—her sword resting beside Excalibur like an equal.

Murmurs of the Desert Wind

The wind still carries warnings: aquifers will fall, dunes will migrate, people will thirst. Yet it also carries new notes: the soft hiss of a recharge well pumping water back into the ground, the laughter of Bedouin and Erewhonian children learning dune navigation together on a neutral rise, the quiet thud of a Laputan astronomer choosing to walk rather than float, the rustle of a water-bag being refilled from a tap that no longer runs dry.

Peace along this vertical-and-horizontal frontier is not a treaty signed in air-conditioned halls. It is a handful of sand left undisturbed so a palm grove may breathe again, a path reopened so a herder may walk it freely, a desert whose horizon is wide enough for every nomad and every scholar to stand beneath the same sky.

Why This Resonates in You

You have stood in a desert so quiet you could hear your own heartbeat.

You have looked at a map and wondered why one side of a line is marked in green and the other in brown.

You have, perhaps, never met the guide whose path was closed so a border could stay open, the scholar who learned that the stars are beautiful but the sand is home, or the elder who discovered that even a king can learn to walk.

The Borders We Share asks only one thing: the next time you look at a desert, remember there is always a ground—and that the ground remembers every footprint, every promise kept or broken.

Next Tuesday we move deeper into the sands—new nowhere, new edges.

I remain, as always,

Dr. Jorge

Trails to Wander:

• Sovereignty Conflicts (2017).

• Territorial Disputes (2020).

• Cosmopolitanism and State Sovereignty (2023). 

• Territorial Disputes in the Americas (2025).

NOTE:

New posts every Tuesday.

PREVIOUS POSTS:

Post 38: Cimmeria’s Flats, Steppes’ Stretch: Dust Meets Grass

NEXT POSTS:

Section 7: Deserts and Plains (Posts 37–42)

40, Narnia’s Wastes, Sudan’s Split: Kings of Nothing

41, Oz’s Plains, Outback’s Reach: Emerald to Dust

42, Laputa’s Dunes, Part II: Quantum Sands

AUTHOR’S SAMPLE PEER-REVIEWED ACADEMIC RESEARCH (FREE OPEN ACCESS):

State Sovereignty: Concept and Conceptions (OPEN ACCESS) (IJSL 2024)

AUTHOR’S PUBLISHED WORK AVAILABLE TO PURCHASE VIA:

AMAZON

ROUTLEDGE, TAYLOR & FRANCIS

Tuesday 27th January 2026

Dr Jorge Emilio Núñez

X (formerly, Twitter): https://x.com/DrJorge_World

https://drjorge.world

The Borders We Share: Cimmeria’s Flats, Steppes’ Stretch (Post 38)

 

The Borders We Share: A New Way to Fix a Broken World

Section 7: Deserts and Plains (Posts 37–42)

Post 38: Cimmeria’s Flats, Steppes’ Stretch: Dust Meets Grass

Enigma of the Endless Horizon

The sky is so wide it feels like the earth has forgotten how to curve.

Two immense grasslands lie almost within sight of one another beneath the same pale winter sun.

One is the Eurasian steppe that rolls unbroken from the northern shore of the Caspian to the Altai foothills—Kazakhstan’s sea of feather grass and wormwood, where the wind never rests and the horizon is a promise that tomorrow will look exactly like today. The other is the great brooding plain of Cimmeria, Robert E. Howard’s shadowed land of wind-scoured flats and low hills that lies somewhere north-east of Conan’s Aquilonia and south-west of the drifting shadow Laputa now casts across northern Hyboria. In the last century the island’s magnetic field has begun to tug at the plain below, stretching Cimmeria’s grasslands unnaturally far—almost as though the steppe itself is reaching upward, yearning to touch the floating disc that darkens its sun. Dust swirls upward in slow spirals; grass bends sideways in long, sighing waves; the line between myth and steppe becomes difficult to see from horseback.

Both plains are endless.

Both are sparsely peopled.

Both are bleeding topsoil into the wind.

Both are claimed by distant powers that rarely smell the dust they own.

I arrive with the companions who have walked every fractured frontier of this series: Sherlock Holmes, deerstalker traded for a wide-brimmed hat against the steppe glare; Dr. John Watson, notebook already filling with wind-speed readings and grass-species counts; King Arthur, who has swapped mail for a plain wool cloak but still carries Excalibur at his side like a vow that cannot be broken.

With us walk the people who actually belong to these grasslands.

From Cimmeria come the last free clans—descendants of the horsemen who once raided south into Stygia and north into Hyperborea; Conan himself, now middle-aged, scarred, unexpectedly reflective, leaning on his great sword as though it were a walking stick; Bêlit’s daughter, who has taken her mother’s name and her father’s blade; and a young shaman whose braids are threaded with eagle feathers and who says the wind has begun to speak in two languages since Laputa drifted closer.

From the Eurasian steppe come a Kazakh herder whose family has grazed the same valley since the time of Ablai Khan; a Russian environmental scientist who monitors the slow southward creep of the desert from Kalmykia; a young Kazakh activist who has been documenting illegal land leases to Chinese and Gulf agribusiness firms; and an elderly Cossack woman whose great-grandfather fought with the White Army and whose granddaughter now herds on the same land under a lease agreement she cannot read.

This is Post 38, the second stride in Section 7: Deserts and Plains. We have left the shifting sands of Laputa and the Sahara. Now the series steps onto the open grasslands, where sovereignty is measured not in vertical metres or mineral tonnes but in the number of hooves that can still graze before the topsoil blows away.

The Two Plains, One Slow Erosion

Cimmeria’s flats are the brooding expanse Howard described as “a land of brooding hills and wind-scoured flats.” In the last century Laputa has begun to exert its magnetic influence downward, so that the plain now stretches unnaturally far—almost as if the steppe itself is trying to reach up and touch the floating disc. Every year approximately 14,000 hectares of grassland are lost to wind erosion accelerated by the island’s low-level downdraughts; the topsoil blows southward into the Hyborian kingdoms, silting rivers and burying pastures. The clans who still live here have no voice in the decisions made above them. They are not subjects; they are scenery.

The Eurasian steppe is brutally real. The Russia–Kazakhstan border runs 7,598 kilometres, the longest continuous land border on earth. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, large tracts of Kazakh grazing land have been leased—often for 25–49 years—to Russian, Chinese, Gulf, and Western agribusiness firms for wheat, barley, and fodder production. In the last decade alone, Kazakhstan has lost an estimated 1.8 million hectares of pasture to desertification and conversion. The herders whose families have used these lands for generations are rarely consulted. The leases are signed in Astana and Moscow; the grass disappears under tractors. Both plains are bleeding topsoil into the wind; both are claimed by distant capitals that rarely smell the dust.

Sovereignty Conflicts (2017) frames both as classic triadic disputes: two privileged claimants exercising sovereignty over a populated third territory whose constitutive population is treated as peripheral to the claim yet suffers the direct environmental and economic cost.

Territorial Disputes (2020) adds the sociological fracture: in Cimmeria the upper-island scholars versus the underside clans; on the steppe the urban lease-holders versus the rural pastoralists.

Cosmopolitanism and State Sovereignty (2023) asks the moral question: can a claim to land be legitimate if it systematically excludes or exploits the majority who actually inhabit and sustain it?

Territorial Disputes in the Americas (2025) provides the practical precedent: guarantor-led shared-land-use zones that have achieved high durability in Latin American cases—models now urgently needed here.

The Evidence Gathered in Grass and Dust

Holmes refuses to stay on horseback. He spends four days walking Cimmeria’s flats with the clans, measuring wind speed, grass height, and the interval between Laputa’s magnetic pulses and the sudden gusts that strip topsoil. He spends the next four days walking the Kazakh steppe with herders and scientists, timing the arrival of leaseholders’ tractors and the departure of saiga herds. The data he returns with are grimly symmetrical.

In Cimmeria 14,000 hectares of grassland vanish each year to wind erosion accelerated by Laputa’s downdraughts; 1,800 herding families have been displaced in the last decade. On the Eurasian steppe 1.8 million hectares of pasture have been converted or degraded since 2015; 47,000 Kazakh herding households have been affected. In Cimmeria no scholar has visited the flats in living memory. In Kazakhstan no senior leaseholder has spent a night in a yurt on land they now control.

Watson’s notebook grows heavy: “Both plains are being grazed to death by powers that never smell the grass. The difference is only in the signature—royal decree or lease contract.”

Arthur stands on a Cimmerian hill watching Laputa drift overhead, then stands on a Kazakh rise watching a distant line of combine harvesters move north to south like steel locusts. He says only: “A plain does not care who rides across it. It only remembers who rested their herds upon it.”

A Conclave on the Grass

We meet where the two plains almost touch: a neutral stretch of shortgrass prairie on Laputa’s lowest dune, lowered to within 150 metres of the Kazakh steppe for the first time in history, with Russian and Kazakh officials brought by helicopter and Cimmerian riders arriving on horseback.

Present: King Laputian, seated on a portable throne of adamant, visibly uncomfortable at being so close to grass; Conan, middle-aged, scarred, unexpectedly reflective, leaning on his great sword; Bêlit’s daughter, sword at her hip, eyes fierce; a Kazakh herder whose family has grazed the same valley since the time of Ablai Khan; a Russian agribusiness representative carrying a briefcase of lease documents; a young Kazakh activist holding a drone-captured map of converted pastures; Hamed al-Ghabri, the Omani elder whose water-bag has become a symbol of cross-border memory.

Conan speaks first, voice like gravel under hooves: “The grass is moving. It does not ask permission. It only asks to be shared.”

The Kazakh herder answers: “Our grass has been moving under foreign tractors for twenty years. We ask only for the right to follow our herds freely.”

The Russian representative, voice calm: “We have brought investment, jobs, grain exports. The steppe is more productive now than it has ever been.”

Arthur lays Excalibur flat across a low rise. Every hand—royal, warrior, herder, executive—rests on the scabbard at once.

I open:

“Egalitarian shared sovereignty does not ask who owns the grass. It asks how we keep the steppe from turning to dust beneath the hooves and wheels that feed us all.”

The “Steppe Accord” is drafted in dust and ink:

• Joint Laputa–Russia–Kazakhstan Grassland Commission with binding stocking-rate and conversion caps; surplus funds a cross-border soil regeneration programme.
• Cimmeria’s flats declared a shared ecological corridor; 30 % of any future crystal revenue funds permanent descent corridors and mobile schools for nomads.
• “Grass-to-Sky Residency Pathway”: ten continuous years of contribution (herding, scholarship, land restoration) = permanent residency in Kazakhstan or citizenship on Laputa’s grounded ring.
• Higher Court seated alternately in Astana and on Laputa’s lowest terrace, with judges from Kazakh, Russian, Cimmerian, and nomadic communities; veto power on any lease or extraction that increases erosion or reduces migratory corridors.
• Every new large-scale lease or crystal operation must display, in Kazakh, Russian, Cimmerian dialect, and Arabic, the source of the water and the names of the herders and workers who sustain it.

King Laputian signs first, his hand steady because it rests on real grass. Conan signs second. The Kazakh herder signs third. The Russian representative signs fourth. Bêlit’s daughter signs last—her sword resting beside Excalibur like an equal.

Murmurs of the Steppe Wind

The wind still carries warnings: topsoil will blow away, aquifers will fall, herds will thin. Yet it also carries new notes: the soft thud of hooves following a restored migratory corridor, the laughter of Kazakh and Cimmerian children learning rotational grazing together on a neutral rise, the quiet rustle of a Laputan scholar choosing to walk rather than float, the sound of a water-bag being refilled from a well that no longer runs dry.

Peace along this horizontal frontier is not a treaty signed in glass towers. It is a blade of grass left standing so a herd may graze again, a lease rewritten so a herder may stay, a plain whose horizon is wide enough for every horseman and every scholar to ride beneath the same sky.

Why This Resonates in You

You have stood on a plain so flat you could see tomorrow coming.

You have watched grass bend under wind and hooves and wondered who decides which herds may follow the old paths.

You have, perhaps, never met the herder whose grazing rights were signed away in a distant capital, the scholar who learned that the stars are beautiful but the grass is home, or the warrior who discovered that even a king can learn to walk.

The Borders We Share asks only one thing: the next time you look across a plain, remember there is always a ground—and that the ground remembers every hoofprint, every footprint, every promise kept or broken.

Next Tuesday we move deeper into the steppes—new dust, new horizons.

I remain, as always, Dr. Jorge (https://x.com/DrJorge_World) and at https://drjorge.world

Trails to Wander:

• Sovereignty Conflicts (2017).

• Territorial Disputes (2020).

• Cosmopolitanism and State Sovereignty (2023). 

• Territorial Disputes in the Americas (2025).

NOTE:

New posts every Tuesday.

PREVIOUS POSTS:

Post 37: Laputa’s Dunes, Sahara’s Split: Sand for All

NEXT POSTS:

Section 7: Deserts and Plains (Posts 37–42)

39, Erewhon’s Sands, Sinai’s Edge: Nowhere to Share

40, Narnia’s Wastes, Sudan’s Split: Kings of Nothing

41, Oz’s Plains, Outback’s Reach: Emerald to Dust

42, Laputa’s Dunes, Part II: Quantum Sands

AUTHOR’S SAMPLE PEER-REVIEWED ACADEMIC RESEARCH (FREE OPEN ACCESS):

State Sovereignty: Concept and Conceptions (OPEN ACCESS) (IJSL 2024)

AUTHOR’S PUBLISHED WORK AVAILABLE TO PURCHASE VIA:

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ROUTLEDGE, TAYLOR & FRANCIS

Tuesday 20th January 2026

Dr Jorge Emilio Núñez

X (formerly, Twitter): https://x.com/DrJorge_World

https://drjorge.world