Ukhayyad liked to brag about the thoroughbred camel to the other young men of the tribe…he would raise his voice, singing one of those bewitching songs, like charms against loneliness that riders take refuge in whenever they cross waterless deserts…
That was not the first time. The camel had entangled Ukhayyad in far worse humiliations many times before.
-Gold Dust, Ibrahim al-Koni
Al-Koni didn’t learn Arabic until he was twelve. He is Tuareg and spoke Tamashek when he was growing up in the Libyan desert, in the Fezzan region. Now he writes in Arabic, novels and epics as he calls them, always with the desert as his theme, “a shadow of the place without water” he calls it. But when you drive south from al-Koni’s birthplace in Ghadamis towards the Fezzan oasis, you see plenty of water sluicing north through huge steel pipes and sucking the aquifer dry. The Great Man-made River Project they call it, making even an oasis the size of Fezzan into a desert. Too much water, flash floods, can kill you. As can too little. So to survive you may need both meanings of the word markab, boat and beast [on which one rides].