…;he is preoccupied,//looking for something, something, something./Poor bird, he is obsessed!/The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray/mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.
-from Sandpiper, Elizabeth Bishop
We never ran, always walked or even slower, and camels have only two toes so it got boring after a single day, watching them. Only 39 to go. But maybe we were all preoccupied on that trip, being that there was little to occupy ourselves with in the first place. A big desert does that to your head, empties it of the here and now.
So instead we looked down, maybe eight or nine feet down, trying to pick out from the blur of passing ground the Sahara’s bits and pieces. There were broken ostrich shells (or were they bleached ostraca?), hunks of petrified wood from when the paleomonsoon made forests grow here, more rarely three-stone clusters as the jury-rigged fire-dogs of old campsites, and what was most common, the sand. From perched on a camel’s back, all seeming a most monotonous color. But from closer, say when you’ve spread out a sleeping bag after a long day and you roll over to one side to sweep away loose acacia thorns that might poke you in the night, you see them, your face inches away. Each tiny and distinct. Black, white, tan, and gray. But few rose or amethyst as I remember.