Where the Derb al-Arbain passes, a hundred tracks spread carelessly apart where thousands of padded feet have pushed the small stones aside…Time will not alter them; it only blows sand to fill them so they become like yellow ribbons…a series of wiggling, vacillating, haphazard, characterless lines, like a hank of hair from a poodle’s coat, illustrating the I’ll-go-as-I-damn-please-and-you-can’t-hurry-me nature of the camel.
-The Paradise of Fools: Being an Account of a 6,300 Mile Expedition Through the Libyan Desert by Motor Car, M.W. Mason, 1936
Mason didn’t mention that those sunken parallel trails collect more rain than the pebbled ridges separating them, so in springtime they sprout grass and desert flowers that look like the combed fur of a chia pet laid out as flat as the Sahara.