And Scheherazade noticed that dawn was approaching and stopped telling her story. When the next night arrived, however, she received the King’s permission to continue her tale and said,
After I told them about my country, I asked them about theirs, and they said they were of various castes…some who are the noblest …others who abstain from wine…and live in delight and pleasure and own camels…
-from the First Voyage of Sinbad in the Arabian Nights
For me and the drovers, swapping camp fire tales of each other’s country did not go as smoothly as Sinbad said. They were more interested in my not abstaining from wine. Some thought I owned my own airplane the way that camel traders owned their own cars. I wanted to know who among them owned their own camels. Very few as it turned out. So yes, a 747 was their equivalent of a stout four year old bull.
I told them about elevators that ascend to the 100th floor and restaurants that have sold one billion hamburgers, sometimes right through the car window, the way in Khartoum street peddlers sold packs of face tissue and chewing gum to you in stalled traffic. I told them about 7-Eleven’s Big Gulps and Double Gulps and they told me about having to drink camel urine when their water ran out. I told them that in America only farm animals ate sorghum, and they told me to finish my boiled sorghum cake, which we ate every day on the trail for forty days straight. I told them that America had homeless people who were so poor they slept outside every night, and they said that in Sudan everyone slept outside when it was hot.
We swapped stories like this almost every night, but we did not stay up until dawn telling them. We were too tired for that, and by dawn we were already breaking camp. But one thing we could all agree on, the delight and pleasure of owning camels, or at least of driving them in a dabouka to Cairo, feeling that we were all of the noblest caste.