When Gwen was awakened by the chill of the desert night, she found herself in an empty house, dead quiet except for the eerie clinking of the bead curtains.
The quiet of the desert reaches beyond silence; it preempts the emergence of sounds, like an anechoic chamber.
In the desert, one only hears two things: the wind and total silence.
She tried to go back to sleep, but her three nights in the desert had conditioned her to a different sleeping schedule. The empty house felt creepy at night, with no light and no sound, almost like a tomb.