“If they want to ride lemons, let them drink lemonade”
-with apologies to Marie Antoinette
The amount of water a camel needs varies according to the conditions…When thirsty, they can drink 80-100 liters of water at a time.
-A Field Manual of Camel Diseases, Ilse Kohler-Rollefson, Paul Mundy, and Evelyn Mathias
It had been a long first day in the saddle. Glad finally to be on the trail, we all overdid the hooting and the hollering, the kicking and the whipping. We three foreigners were bone tired and parch-mouthed, Steve especially. Our camels were not the fastest mounts in Hajj Bashir’s herd.
KhairAllah said he would make lemonade, since the lemons were fresh now and would not last, and on this first day there was plenty of sugar to waste, a word the drovers had used, on a drink that was not their beloved tea.
The water poured from the skins was black and smelt like goat, but to KhairAllah that was nothing. When boiled, the smell lessened, and when brewed, the black tanning blended to almost normal looking tea color. But we were drinking the water fresh, not boiled, so the smell and the color remained. Lemonade the color of squid ink, with floating goat hair.
KhairAllah handed Steve the bowl first, the same bowl we would use over the next forty days for washing hands, soaking rawhide, and measuring out sorghum to feed the two yearlings. He took just one look and passed it to his left. No, I don’t drink lemonade that looks like that, he must have thought. You have some, he said. So I did.