Psychotropia

Nietzche famously talked about an abyss that looks back into you when you look into it, and I've always taken this to be philosophical drivel. I guess he was trying to say that there are no actions without consequences, but the number of people who've since decided that this is somehow deep and relates to evil is ridiculous. Apart from that, I found that abyss when I was wandering in the desert, and it was far less worrisome than almost everything else I found while I was there.
Some way away from the abyss was a settlement; a collection of one-room huts built on boards that in turn rested on the sand. When the wind blew, the occupants lifted the hinged rooves of the huts like sails and the huts would skate across the sand, rattling and hissing like angry snakes. The occupants would tack into the wind or run with it, always staying within a mile or so of the abyss, circling round it like strange, land-bound birds.
There were about fifteen people living there, although their numbers changed from time to time as people went to the abyss and people-shaped things came back from the abyss. Their leader, at least while I was there, was a woman who called herself Oisha. She had waist-length black hair that she braided like a rope, brown eyes that watered constantly, and skin so brown and wrinkled that I first thought she was one of the people-shaped things that had come back from the desert. When she told me, trying to seduce me, that she was only twenty-two, I dug a bottle of SPF-60 sun-tan lotion from my rucksack and gave it to her, advising her to use it daily until it ran out, and then go and find more. If ever there was someone who needed to wear a burqa, it was her.
I asked her about the people who lived in the huts, and she said that they were travellers, people stopping off at a waystation before they went to the abyss to become consumed by what it showed. She stopped abruptly at that point, and nothing I could say or offer would induce her to talk more about it, and I wondered for days afterwards what she'd said that she thought she shouldn't have. It was clear enough that the people who came from the abyss weren't the same as the people who'd gone to it; many of them didn't appear to have ever had had human form before! But perhaps there was something else. She changed the subject eventually by showing me the fifteenth hut, where no-one lived.
This hut was a garden in the desert; beneath its roof was a verdant green expanse. All around the edges were thick-leaved, glossy shrubs with small green berries, and beyond them were a few fruit trees and then vegetable plants, only some of which I recognized. But there wasn't enough to feed even fifteen people for any great length of time, and I pointed this out.
"People who arrive bring food with them, water too," said Oisha playing with the end of her braid and fluttering her eyelashes at me like a moth trapped by a window-pane. "There are small animals in the desert that can be trapped for meat. Sometimes the abyss... sends meat as well."
I could see from the look on her face what she meant: sometimes what came from the abyss couldn't be allowed back into human society and had to be killed. I wondered then if eating such 'meat' was really the safe thing to do.
"And these shrubs," she caressed a leaf, "suppress the appetite and show you visions that tell you when you should go to the abyss."
"The leaves or the berries?" I asked.
"The berr--" she stopped, puzzled. "The berr--." She stopped again, and left me to talk to the others in the huts. When she returned she was disturbed.
"Some say the leaves, others say the berries," she said. "Some say that what you take influences what returns from the abyss."
I nodded and we moved on, and she never noticed that I'd plucked a branch from a bush to put in my rucksack, leaves, berries and all. Later that evening I slipped away as they all gathered at the fifteenth hut and left them to their dance with death.
Chemical analysis when I returned from the desert revealed that both the leaves and the berries contained psychoactive nerve toxins, and even one berry would be enough to kill a man, though only over a period of twelve hours. The bark, however, contained the psychoactive ingredient without the nerve toxins and could be relatively safely consumed.