Until the Desert knows/That Water grows/His Sands suffice/But let him once suspect/That Caspian Fact/Sahara dies//Utmost is relative-/Have not or Have/Adjacent sums/Enough- the first Abode/On the familiar Road/Galloped in Dreams
-Emily Dickinson, Poem 1262
Indeed, to God we belong and Indeed, to Him we return
-Quran, 2:156
For the drovers, What lay at the end of the Darb, the Familiar Road, the Way of the Forty? Were they only dreaming those 40 days, or riding back to their First Abode- to Egypt, Um al-Dunya, Mother of the World- or perhaps returning to Him, not at a gallop but a camel’s trot.