And man is ever hasty.
-Surah 17, Verse 11
Be patient, for you have no patience but from Allah.
-Surah 16, Verse 127
Bi Raah, Easy does it, Hold your horses. KhairAllah could say that without opening his mouth, merely by dropping his nearside hand from high to low. That’s when and where we would make camp that night. Our own schedules? Maalish, What’s it to me?, he seemed to say with that lazy whip hand.
Mustapha had a ski house in France he was trying to get to. I was due home- I’d promised to be gone only forty days. Nedu wanted to get the film rolls in a refrigerator before they cooked out there. When Yusuf went ahead of us in the last ten days, KhairAllah was angrier than I’d ever seen him. Not because he saw it as a violation of trail etiquette. Rather because the camels were happier, Hajj Bashir was happier, and the buyers were happier if you took it easy. With patience, they’d arrive in Egypt fat and sound and rested, as they were in Sudan when he set out with them.