Desert life today is much the same as it was ten centuries ago, the same as it will ever be. Free and charming in its simplicity, yet with certain terrors ever present…
-Zoraida: A Romance of the Harem and the Great Sahara, William Le Queux, 1894
Plus ça change…KhairAllah said, interviewed standing in a usually reliable pasture in the Wadi al-Milk, When I arrived here, Astaghribt…, I Was Dumbfounded [not, in that verb’s secondary meaning, I Was Westernized]…To see how little grass was left since I last passed by. So no, desert life is not much the same as before, not with a changed climate and deeper droughts, not ten centuries ago and not even ten weeks.