He remembers that day and when I mentioned this to him, he said that he thought those stones were gold stones.
-email from Soliman KhairAllah, April 15, 2025
I asked Soliman to ask his father if he remembered the day I gathered chunks of petrified wood in the Wadi al-Milk and packed them onto my camel. At the time he said to me, Ma Yinfāsh, They are useless, and I told him they would be my souvenir of the trip. Forty years later, those stones lie in my drawer and KhairAllah now thinks they were valuable, that I had been ahead of my time, because Sudan exports so much gold mined along the same Wadi.