If a lone vehicle breaks or bogs down in the desert, the crew must stay with it. A vehicle is easier to find than a lone man.
-Desert Operations, Field Manual 90-3, Department of the Army, August 1993
And a man is easier to find than a bottle, which is why that person riding atop the Bedford shouted for the driver to stop and ran back to pick up the empty fifth that had just been thrown out along the sand track to El Obeid in 1962. My cousin told his bottle story to Hajj Bashir’s son-in-law, who had been born there. Surprised by having almost crossed paths fifty years earlier in Kordofan, they looked from where they sat on the terrace towards the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, and I said, Muqran al-Nilayn, Meeting of the Two Niles.