And on this day, he will tell me his story and I will tell him mine.
-Paulo Coelho, Forward to the 25th Anniversary edition of The Alchemist
Hajj Bashir was not an alchemist unless you think turning Sudanese camels into Egyptian guineas is a form of black magic. Perhaps it was so in the eyes of the drovers, whose employer got rich simply by sending them up the trail to the Cairo sale corrals where I had first met him. As for KhairAllah, he too was a kind of alchemist, turning camel stories into another sort of gold, the kind you want to hear him tell over and over again back in his Majlis in Omdurman.
©Paulo Coelho