Sands of Time

When the time comes for the official request to marry, the boy’s family visits the tent of the girl’s family. Cardamom-spiced Bedouin coffee is poured and set in front of the prospective groom, but he doesn’t touch it. If the bride’s father accepts the union he will invite the groom to drink the coffee, thus sealing the bargain. If he does not accept the union the groom’s family will be asked to leave without drinking the coffee. In this way no one is slighted and honor is preserved.

Raad stares at that photo day after day and in the evenings he climbs rock formations in the vain hope that his cell phone will somehow pull her signal from the ether. He is desperately smitten.

Our camels are smitten too, but only intermittently. On the same day that Raad tells me the story of the man being killed by his camel, Azaran slows his pace to a crawl and looks around with sudden interest. It’s the first time that he pays attention to anything more distant than the clover at his feet. I site camels across the wadi as he begins to burble from the side of his mouth. Up ahead Sainan does the same—inflating his mouth bladder so that it slops out to hang from the side of his lip like a displaced intestine. He burbles with the sound of a long drawn out fart, then slurps it back in, somehow managing to look stately and proud in the process.

“You gotta try a new line with the ladies, Sainan,” I say. “That can’t possibly work.”

Azaran sets out toward the other camels with stubborn determination. I yank on the rope, and he pulls back strongly enough to nearly tear it from my hands. I turn him in a complete circle, shouting “Yalla! Yalla!” and whipping his hindquarters with the end of the lead, but it’s too thick to be persuasive. He keeps edging away from our caravan, swinging his head and showing me his teeth.

We fight like this until Raad tosses me his camel stick.

“Catch to the camel,” he says. I detect a hint of urgency in his voice.

I belt Azaran in the side of the neck, forcing him to turn back, and then whip his hindquarters until he’s trotting in our original direction. For the camel the tape-wrapped stick gives a sting akin to being hit with a ruler. It’s unpleasant, but there’s no permanent damage. They understand the carrot and the stick, but mostly the stick.

Camels are clever creatures. They’re always pushing you, testing to see how much they can get away with. From the start of the trip I had trouble convincing Azaran to couch so that I could saddle or ride him. Following Raad’s example, I pull down on the lead rope, pat him near the top of his front leg and make a vocal command that sounds like clearing one’s throat. The camel yanks back firmly and turns to shove me with his shoulder, stepping on my foot in the process. For a moment I lose my balance and he nearly pushes me over. Such behavior doesn’t go over well with me. I yank his head sideways with the rope and punch him solidly in the ribs. He grunts, stumbles back a step and sits down, looking as surprised as I’ve ever seen a camel look.

The next morning I cut a camel stick from a juniper tree and wrap it in electrical tape, as I’d seen Raad do. Within two days I establish that I’m not some timid tourist and Azaran and I get along very well. I’m able to couch him by voice command alone, to saddle and unsaddle him, to climb dunes and get him to gallop. It’s my first big step towards mastering the beast.

The next day we ride to our farthest point outside of the Wadi Rum Protected Area, southeast of Burdah to a region that Raad refers to as Wadi Amsaham. From there it’s only a short ride to the Saudi border.

Gone are the monolithic peaks and fantastic shapes that dwarf the traveler in Wadi Rum, replaced by a Field of Mars landscape of reddish stony mountains and coarse sandy flats. The small bushes that dot the area are burned up, desiccated and brittle brown. Dried up watercourses channel only dust.

Riding through such a place is the nearest that most people will ever come to the feeling of exploring another planet, or a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Your mind drifts in the heat and it concocts elaborate hallucinations: it’s the aftermath of Judgment Day and we are the souls who have been overlooked, condemned to wander for the rest of eternity and to suffer great thirst. Then the camel stumbles and the illusion is broken.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 24th, 2007 at 2:32 pm and is filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site. Add to del.icio.us.