It is the year 757, just after the An Lu Shan Rebellion shook the foundations of the mighty T'ang Empire in China. And it was one of those moments on the cusp of time when Tando Ghazi Khan, a simple trader of tea and spice, leads a caravan to the edge of the great desert and becomes embroiled in the struggle that will decide the fate of an empire and shake all under heaven and earth--

Join Tando and his cameleers as they set out on a last, fateful journey from the markets of Dun Huang China to Kashgar on the western rim of the great Taklamakan Desert. Hoping only to garner enough profit to end his days as a trader, Tando and his men are captivated by the mystery of a strange and confounding map, and a quest that will lead them to the ruins of ancient, lost cities that once thrived in the heart of the Taklamakan. Along the way they must struggle for survival when they are caught up in the clash of empires raging across the great stage of Western China and Central Asia. The armies of Tibet have come down from their high mountains to challenge the T'ang for dominance. Tando soon finds his simple caravan at the very heart of that struggle and is brought to a moment of fateful choice as he reaches the edge of the most forbidding desert on earth, a "Land of No Return."

· Jade Ring Green, a tea of great virtue, becomes a saving grace for Tando and his men.
· Forbidden rites of the old religion of Tibet ignite the passion and contention of rival clan leaders.
· A young Tibetan general struggles for survival when treachery and betrayal threaten his mission.
· A lost waif is led to the hidden shrines of a Buddhist sect, and the long guarded mysteries of the Tantra.
· A Tarim Scout pursues an emerging love and is driven to a fateful moment at a forsaken desert outpost.
· A trader’s map reveals a secret that leads to the heart of the mystery in the Taklamakan.
· The deepest truths of Buddhism are revealed in a moment of great awakening.

Taklamakan is an artful blending of James Clavell’s "Shogun" and Tolkien’s "Lord of the Rings." It has all the hallmarks of an epic quest that is driven by strong and compelling characters and the clash of cultures on the fabled "Silk Road." The book is richly fueled by the author’s detailed historical research into one of the most eventful moments in the history of Central Asia.

John Schettler has been writing and publishing professionally since 1980. A graduate of Loyola University where he majored in English and Writing, John makes his living as the owner of "The Writing Shop" in Ventura, CA, a business offering web design, writing and desktop publishing services. His professional credits include a number of non-fiction publications and articles on subjects related to military history in the 20^th century. He also spends much of his creative time writing essays, novels and short stories in areas related to history, science fiction and contemporary life. Taklamakan is John’s first attempt to merge his love of history and fiction writing in "a novel of epic proportions." To this end, he has blended elements of two of his favorite books, James Clavell’s "Shogun" and Tolkien’s "Lord of the Rings," to bring the story of the fabled Silk Road to life with a style that is uniquely his own in "Taklamakan."

When he reached the crest he was rewarded by the vision of an endless sea of sand, stretching away from him to the horizon and bathed in the most lovely shades of red and gold he had ever seen with the coming of the dawn. The ocher crests of sand were crowned in tawny swathes of glittering gold as the sunlight washed over the landscape. The dunes rose and fell in a series of undulating waves, deepening at the troughs to shades of amethyst purple before descending into shadow. They extended in all directions, for as far as his eye could see, and he gaped at the scene, enchanted with the majestic stillness and serene majesty of the desert.

All of the stories were wrong, he thought. All of the tales of horror and hungry ghosts and demons that would claw their way up from ancient lost cities hidden beneath the sands were wrong! As he looked at the land now, he sensed the tranquil silence of the place, the vast natural beauty that was as varied and random as the blue-white clouds above, yet possessed of an inner rhythm that shaped and contoured the sculpted dunes as though they had been fashioned by the hand of some unseen artist. The serenity of the desert seemed to reach into his very soul, quieting and comforting. These sands had all once been part of the massive ridges of mountain that surrounded the Tarim Basin. As millennia passed, the steady hand of wind and water had slowly eroded the rocks, breaking them into boulders and stones and piles of bare gravel that tumbled down from the heights above, carried by a thousand streams and rivers that found their way into the basin with the turning of each season. As the eons passed, the stones and gravel were ground and eroded to smaller and smaller particles, until they were light enough to be scooped up on the tireless winds and gathered here in this immense ocean of sand that formed the very heart of the Taklamakan.

Looking on the dunes, he was struck with a vital awareness of the endless connection of all things. Here were the sands that had once held forth on the high majestic peaks of the Tien Shan, the Celestial Mountains to the north, or the purple shrouded mystery of the Pamirs to the west, or again the ragged heights of the Kunlun Shan south, or the great Himalayas beyond. And look how the soul of the mountains remains in them, he thought! The sands had arrayed themselves once more in vast ridges, mirroring the stony ranges on every side, as though they yearned to recover the grandeur they once knew in the mountains. Here they slept, a silent echo of the ancestral stone they were born from, and Drekk found a resonance with them, reaching back through the ages to take the barest hold on something old, and ancient and holy that was the very source of his own being.

Here in this immeasurable, vacant expanse of rolling sands he seemed the only living thing on earth, a solitary, sentient being that had been brought here to bear witness to all of this, and know the subtle but sure connection that joined all things to a certainty. He breathed in deeply, smelling the tang of the desert sands and the barest tinge of salt in the air. At once he imagined the great oceans beyond the mountains south...measureless, swells of water that flowed in jade green waves with crests of foam and brine, the liquid, living counterpart to the silent waves of sand about him. The hand of the artist was seen in all things, he concluded, in the great oceans, and high mountains, and here in this boundless sea of sand that seemed to blend the essential qualities of each. The desert appeared as a silent shadow of the mountains, but yet it was alive with the same movement and life of the sea. To look upon it all was the most humbling experience of his life, for he seemed to know himself now on another level, and suddenly felt himself to be ancient beyond his ken, and connected as well to everything around him.

Then the wind swelled up in the distance and stirred the caps of the highest dunes, sending a stream of golden sand fleeing west before the rising sun. As he watched it he was struck with the realization that the scene around him, vast and still, was actually alive, a fluid and ever changing motion as the winds played over the dunes, shifting their course and scale and texture over time. In that moment he knew the ceaseless and eternal rhythm of his own life, blown this way and that on the winds of circumstance, re-shaped by his experience, and contoured by the hearts and minds of every other person he had ever known. He was so much more than he seemed, or ever thought himself to be! The sense of himself as a single entity, a lone man struggling through the desolation of an endless desert was suddenly gone. Now he seemed a gilded voyager, gazing with wonder and awe upon a newly discovered land, and seeing there the image of his own soul for the first time.

The sun blazoned up over the horizon, chasing the hues of amber and orange from the scene, and then a sudden rake of clouds sailed across the sky, driven by an unseen river of air and wind that he could not yet feel. They cast a veil across the sun and, in an instant, the rich shades of color faded to pale yellow and sallow gray. His hold on that tenuous cord that seemed to bind him to the land, and join the desert itself to the oceans and mountains of the earth, now slipped from his grasp, and fled from him. He was shaken from his reverie, a simple man again, alone in the desert and reaching south with searching eyes for any sign of life or movement. As the vision faded, he felt his own inner longing again, magnified now in the great emptiness about him, a hollowness of spirit and a loneliness that yearned for fulfillment. He cast about him, as though desperate to recapture the insight the vision of the desert had fired in his mind. It was gone. He was here again, human, tired and hungry...just a small and insignificant creature crawling on the back of an enormous dawan of sand. And he was lost.

How would he ever hope to find another living soul in all this bleak, vacant land about him? The winds were rising up now, and the eddies of blowing sand that had streamed like holy pennants a moment ago now seemed like portents of doom to him. The shifting sands would blot out every trace of the trail he had been following. The long, still reprieve the desert had given him thus far was coming to an end. He could sense the wind turning, swinging around to the north, and gathering strength. How would he follow her now? She could drop a thousand pearls behind her and the desert would swallow them in a single heartbeat. How would he find her now?

The futility of his situation suddenly fell upon him like a great weight. He cast himself down on the crest of the ridge, and wept. His body trembled as he struggled to hold back the emotion, unwilling to relinquish something so precious as the water of his teardrops to the dry hunger of the desert. But he could not restrain the immensity of the sorrow that welled in him now. He had not cried tears like this for many years. He now doubted everything in his life that had brought him to this forsaken place. What was he doing here? Why had he come? He felt empty, and lost and alone.

Then a strange voice came to him behind the quiet drone of the wind. The voice was calling him, thin and indistinct, as though the wind itself was struggling to fashion the words. He struggled up onto his hands and knees, instinctively looking for the sound. The voice wavered on the wind, formless but yet insistent. It was calling him, he was certain of that, and he looked about him to try and locate the source of the sound, his heart beating faster as he remembered the tales of naga spirits and windy ghouls who would call to a man in the desert. Tears streaked his cheeks and his vision suddenly cleared. There was something there, far below, a smear of color in the shadow of the high ridge of sand. It was moving, waving, calling to him. Then his sight resolved into focus and he saw Chen Hu. The spirits fled from his mind. The monk was beckoning to him from the base of the ridge, a hundred feet or more below him. In a moment of calm he heard the familiar voice calling up to him on the cool morning air.

"What you do there? Pray to Buddha? You pray too long! Time to walk now."

Drekk raised an arm, waving acknowledgement, and sighed heavily. Yes, he was tired, and hungry, and perhaps even lost now in the heart of the desert. But he was not alone, and it was time to walk.