As he talked of men and marches, half consciously he tricked out his memories with the words and phrases of the camelmen of our caravan days, and the winged words carried with them the pungency of camel dung smoke…
-High Tartary, Owen Lattimore, 1930
My memories of caravan days are pungent and so are KhairAllah’s of the two trips he took with me, but I think they overlap in his mind even being four years apart. That he forgets the names of the drovers I understand because he made the trip many times and the number of drovers who accompanied him is that many times four. But of the Khawajas, how could he mix up Nedu with the Aaton, Mustapha with the Sony, and Daoud with the Nikon? To the subject of a documentary, do all documentarians look alike?