I could taste camel urine in the water…it was the attraction of the unknown rather than any love of deserts which was luring me...
-Arabian Sands, Wilfred Thesiger
That was all in the mystery of drinking water from a goatskin filled from a well whose name I hadn’t heard when KhairAllah said it. Mahtūl? ‘Idd Ahmad? Kalābsha?…How sweet would it taste? How dirty would it look? How sick would I get? It did seem odd that the risk of desert travel would be in the drinking and not in the traveling.