A fancy seized me which I had not known since childhood days…to carve my name…one more thrust against time…
-Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Youcenar
And Memnon, trembling at the power of Hadrian, suddenly spoke.
-from an epigram by court poet Julia Balbilla, a member of Hadrian’s royal entourage on his visit to Thebes in 130 CE, carved on the legs of the Colossus of Memnon
I had never kept a diary before my first trip in the Darb al-Arba’een in 1984. It opens on Day 3, pre-dawn, with 100 camels kneeling and rechewing their cuds, the previous day having driven them hard, eaten their trail dust and smelt their tail wind. I wrote in pencil in a lined notebook and on its last page working forward I kept lists- vocabulary words (rasad, rein; hizaam, girth; sanaam, hump; zurr, chest callous), geneologies of the drovers (Adam, Son of Hamid, Son of Adam, Son of Hamid), and foodstuffs from home that I missed most, bacon and baguettes the topmost. I doubt this is what Youcenar meant by Hadrian’s thrust against time carved in stone, but it helped pass those forty days, which in fact came to forty three. We were slow. I needed more pages.