Cambyses, being greatly enraged, marched against the Aethiopians without making any provision for the subsistence of his army or once considering that he was going to the remotest part of the world…before the army had passed a fifth part of the way, all the provisions were exhausted and the beasts of burden were eaten and likewise failed…The soldiers supported life by eating herbs, but when they reached the sands some of them had recourse to a horrid expedient…
-Herodotus, Book III
If you guess that the “horrid expedient” was to resort to eating millet paste for forty days, you would not be too far off. At our starting point near Nahud, Hajj Bashir’s agent Abd al-Wahab gave us a good supply of flour and sugar and tea and cooking oil. The sugar didn’t go as far as the other staples so after just a few days everybody was in a bitter mood but at least we didn’t kill and eat one another. And KhairAllah carried extra cash so once when our spirits were low he bought a goat from a passing herdsman and we had some meat. We only ate the camel much later because it was badly lame and couldn’t keep up, and we had to slaughter it anyway so it wouldn’t suffer a slow death out there.