Immediately when you arrive in the Sahara, for the first time or the tenth time, you notice the stillness. An incredible, absolute silence prevails…Then there is the sky…
-Paul Bowles, Baptism of Solitude, from Their Heads are Green and Their Hands are Blue
At hobbling time after dark and in a hurry, there was always a lot of chattering to others and muttering to oneself, sometimes sing song and sometimes guttural, making either perfect sense or none at all. The camels never listened and the other drovers often neither. It was not easy to bed down an entire dabouka without making noise to calm them. Sh-Sh-Sh. Kh-Kh-Kh. Pluf-pluf-pluf, blowing out with loose lips. Just that, and clinking together of the hobbles’ wooden plugs with their palm rope loops draped on one arm and with the other you tied up 150 forelegs one by one, bending each back at the knee. Only then was the night’s stillness absolute and you looked up.