Dear Annalis,

Such lovely visions you have of my world.  The heat, dust and poncho are accurate, but sadly the clouds and breeze are absent over the last weeks.  I would welcome even a whisper of cloud cover during my frequent traverses through the desert; daily excursions in search of the elusive alternative materials to add to the constituents I imported from Earth.  I am now down to only two essential materials in my search for replacements, but the shale stone and clove oil will be the hardest to source locally.  I have searched all the reference material I have access to and completed a local search of the desert for alternatives, but there seems to be no native choices here.  Since the clove oil was one of the essential cross functional sense materials, I will need to use the imported stock I brought with me.  It may end up as one of the ten percent non-native material I will have to incorporate into the piece.  The Shale will be easier.  I am already working on some ideas.

Thank you for the information you shared about the ten year minimum exposure.  It was something I already suspected, but it confirms my decision to limit the additions of my Earth imports and use as much native material as possible.  It would have been nice to know this information when we were making the preparation on Earth, but that cannot be helped.  This information was probably only known to the researchers in the vicinity of the Equine.  It is such a new area of study.  I wish again that the secrecy that surrounds the Equine exploration was not so well kept.  Competition and security risks lead to all types of roadblocks in discovery when information is not shared freely.  How many people have spent years scrutinizing something that has already been discovered, but kept secret for financial gain?  How many people have died due to this subterfuge? I guess the nature of humanity will never change. 

On the subject of subterfuge, I do remember our codex carved within the secret tree of knowledge.  I brought a facsimile with me that I had long ago engraved myself as a memento of that summer we spent in the black forest with our family.  I had forgotten all about it.  Let us try and revitalize our secret language and see how it goes.  Then you can explain the cryptic three months of your journey.

I know you are not sure what was real or what was induced by your illness from the stasis, but just describe your experience.  I discern from your letters that a whole different chain of events occurred during those lost months.  Sometimes events during an illness can be enlightening.  Remember my Equine journal during my bout with desert fever.  Without these written mementos I could never have discovered the true origin of our anomaly.  I believe what happened to you actually occurred, but maybe they haven’t transpired yet.  See, I can also be cryptic and mysterious with my messages. After you send me an overview of your adventures, I will explain this comment and my theory about out of time experiences and their relationship to the Equine.

I hope you can decipher the last paragraph.  It is my first attempt to write in our archaic language after twenty years.

Love Always,

Victoria