The Alik ' r Content . I might never have gone to the Alik ' r Desert had I not met Weltan in a little tavern in Sentinel . Weltan is a Redguard poet whose verse I had read , but only in translation . He chooses to write in the old language of the Redguards , not in Tamrielic . I once asked him why . " The Tamrielic word for the divinely rich child of rot , silky , pressed sour milk is . . . cheese , " said Weltan , a huge smile spreading like a tide over his lampblack face . " The Old Redguard word for it is mluo . Tell me , if you were a poet fluent in both languages , which word would you use ? " I am a child of the cities , and I would tell him tales of the noise and corruption , wild nights and energy , culture and decadence . He listened with awed appreciation of the city of my birth : white - marbled Imperial City where all the citizenry are convinced of their importance because of the proximity of the Emperor and the lustration of the streets . They say that a beggar on the boulevards of the Imperial City is a man living in a palace . Over spiced ale , I regaled Weltan with descriptions of the swarming marketplace of Riverhold ; of dark , brooding Mournhold ; of the mold - encrusted villas of Lilmoth ; the wonderful , dangerous alleys of Helstrom ; the stately avenues of grand old Solitude . For all this , he marvelled , inquired , and commented . " I feel as if I know your home , the Alik ' r Desert , from your poems even though I ' ve never been there . " I told him . " Oh , but you don ' t . No poem can express the Alik ' r . It may prepare you for a visit far better than the best guide book can . But if you want to know Tamriel and be a true citizen of the planet , you must go and feel the desert yourself . " It took me a little over a year to break off engagements , save money ( my greatest challenge ) , and leave the urban life for the Alik ' r Desert . I brought several books of Weltan ' s poems as my travel guide . " A sacred flame rises above the fire , The ghosts of great men and women without names , Cities long dead rise and fall in the flame , The Dioscori Song of Revelation , Bursting walls and deathless rock , Fiery sand that heals and destroys . " These first six lines from my friend ' s " On the Immortality of Dust " prepared me for my first image of the Alik ' r Desert , though they hardly do it justice . My poor pen cannot duplicate the severity , grandeur , ephemera and permanence of the Alik ' r . All the principalities and boundaries the nations have placed on the land dissolve under the moving sand in the desert . I could never tell if I was in Antiphyllos or Bergama , and few of the inhabitants could tell me . For them , and so it came to me , we were simply in the Alik ' r . No . We are part of the Alik ' r . That is closer to the philosophy of the desert people . I saw the sacred flame of which Weltan wrote on my first morning in the desert : a vast , red mist that seemed to come from the deep mystery of Tamriel . Long before the noon sun , the mist had disappeared . Then I saw the cities of Weltan . The ruins of the Alik ' r rise from the sand by one blast of the unbounded wind and are covered by the next . Nothing in the desert lasts , but nothing dies forever . At daylight , I hid myself in tents , and thought about the central character of the Redguards that would cause them to adopt this savage , eternal land . They are warriors by nature . As a group , there are none better . Nothing for them has worth unless they have struggled for it . No one fought them for the desert , but the Alik ' r is a great foe . The battle goes on . It is a war without rancor , a holy war in the sense the phrase should always imply . By night , I could contemplate the land itself in its relative serenity . But the serenity was superficial . The stones themselves burned with a heat and a light that comes not from the sun , nor the moons Jone and Jode . The power of the stones comes from the beat of the heart of Tamriel itself . Two years I spent in the Alik ' r . As write this , I am back in Sentinel . We are at war with the kingdom of Daggerfall for the possession of a grass - covered rock that belongs to the water of the Iliac Bay . All my fellow poets , writers , and artists are despondent for the greed and pride that brought these people into battle . It is a low point , a tragedy . In the words of Old Redguard , an ajcea , a spiral down . Yet , I cannot be sorrowful . In the years I spent in the glories of the Alik ' r , I have seen the eternal stones that live on while men go dead . I have found my inner eye in the tractless , formless , changeless and changeable land . Inspiration and hope , like the stones of the desert , are eternal though men be not .