Camel-drivers squat beside iron kettles over heaps of embers, sorcerers from the Sahara offer their amulets.
-In Morocco, Edith Wharton, who visited during World War One just as she was beginning to write The Age of Innocence
…in private broughams, in the spacious family landau, or in the humbler but more convenient Brown coupe…It was one of the great livery-stableman’s most masterly intuitions to have discovered that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.
-The Age of Innocence, describing how hack coachmen and their cab-like Brown coupes provided quick get-aways, get-tos, and discreet trysting places for New York’s upper crust
Edith Wharton was as unfamiliar with camel drivers in Marrakesh as she was with Brown coupe coachmen in New York. From inside the carriage, she could pull the string to the outside bell telling the coachman at whose door she wished to be dropped, without saying a word to him. But for caravaneers she was at a complete loss, for neither could she speak their language nor read their amulets. And the cross-Saharan trail from Gao to Ghadames via Ghat and Germa was much trickier than simply going up Fifth to Sixty Third and over to Park.
KhairAllah often asked me if they needed camel drivers in New York. No, I said to him, in New York we have subway trains that run underground like worms. And zookeepers who look after camels also have to look after giraffes and elephants. Then what can I do to work in America? he asked. You could be a farmer, I said. Farmer! he snorted, I am not a peasant. Then what are you? I asked. A khabeer, he said. A man of experience and expertise, who knows the trail from Sudan to Egypt. Then stay in the desert, we both agreed, and let the New York dogs bark at your moving shadow.