Transmitting from the Mojavee Wilderness in Joshua Tree, California, now is the time for Desert Oracle Radio, the voice of the desert.

Night has fallen on the desert.

You know, when you're reading a historical account,

and the writer says something like,

because they did not know any better,

the people believed in this or that horrible disaster was a sign.

And you think, well, of course it was a sign.

The greater meaning may or may not allude you, but of course it means something when one-third or one-half or more of the population is wiped out in a few years.

As with the black death of 13 and 46 to 13 and 53

the plague had been dormant in the goby desert probably for centuries

the desert wilds of today's mongolia the northern

parts look a lot like the great basin so maybe the plague first traveled east on the silk road

which runs through the middle of the goby.

Probably in the early 14th century, probably in the 1320s, something or someone kicked it up from the dry ground.

And it hitched a slow overland ride to China, where about half the population of

Kubla Khan's dynasty perished from that awful disease, but for anybody in Europe or

the Mediterranean got the bad news.

Maybe.

It's hard to say what took the Mongolian Empire's population from about 130 million to about 60 million over those handful of years.

As in Europe, a combination of climate disasters and famine malnutrition, livestock disease,

and it already weakened the populations.

Maybe it really was a Mongolian army, lobbying plague victim corpses by a catapult into the port city of Kaffa on the Black Sea in today's Ukraine. Maybe that's what did it back in 13 and 47.

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