Have you seen a mountain amble like a camel?
-The Masnavi 3:16, Rumi
Mountains turning to dust, moving like shifting sand, ambling like camels…such are the Quranic metaphors for worldly impermanence. On Day 29 of the Darb when we passed Jabal Bint Um Bahr, Mountain of the Daughter of the Mother of the Sea, I thought I’d seen a mirage of water at our approach on the sand plain, that the mountain had become an island in a lake. But then my camel stumbled and what was real suddenly reappeared, or so it felt at the time.