Excerpt...
His people came from the desert. They came from the same sort of desert where, thousands of years before, the Lord helped Moses get water from a rock. It took them many years to leave. But at least by then they had learned there could be no water from rocks.
Between here and the desert, before the moment when Gabriel stood as he did, gazing out at the ocean, five generations of his family had turned to dust, among them his grandfather and even, now, his father, who would never know or see that he had made it right to the edge of the earth, where the earth gave way to water only, water spreading out beyond his capacity to see. Before he could come to this place, all the generations who knew only desert had to die.