The endless sands yield nothing but…sand, sand, sand, still sand, and only sand, and sand, and sand again.
-Alexander William Kinglake, Eothen, or Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East, 1844
Kinglake must have gone a little batty in his ten day desert crossing from Gaza to Cairo. Or he had a bad case of palilalia. Imagine if he’d been on the Darb, KhairAllah would have called him Abu al-Rimāl, Father of, you guessed it, the Sands, or maybe, Abu Kalām Fādi, Father of Nonsense.