Sahara is too little price
To pay for thy Right hand.
-Emily Dickinson, I Did Not Reach Thee
Some see the Sahara as a metaphor, its burning sand, its miles between wells, its mirages that test man’s sanity, the place where Emily Dickinson sought God in its fiery furnace. But to the drovers, the desert was just a desert. I never met a drover named al-Yamīn, the Right Hand, or even Ibn al-Yamīn, but if I had, I wouldn’t have thought, like her, that he had been underpaid.