This is how the discovery occurred…in one of the parchment books the lad was selling I saw characters I recognized as Arabic. But though I recognized them I could not read them and looked around to see if there was not some Spanish-speaking Moor about to read them to me; and it was not difficult to find an interpreter there. In short, chance offered me one to whom I explained what I wanted, placing the book in his hands. He opened it in the middle and after reading a little began to laugh.
-Don Quixote, Part I Chapter 9
We were in the middle of nowhere when a lone rider approached to palaver with KhairAllah. I could not follow the conversation in real time but finally KhairAllah turned to me and spoke in the pidgin Arabic that he thought I spoke and thus would understand better than his dialect. He said that this man had lost three four year old camels two days ago and wanted to write a letter for another man in another group to pass to a third man who was coming up behind. KhairAllah asked me to put all this down with pen and paper.
I didn’t know why just passing a verbal message from man to man would not suffice. After all, this was the land of oral transmission. But I wrote it as best I could, getting the salutations and invocations right at least. In the name of God, Praise be to God, Greeting Upon You, etc. etc. I probably scrambled the message itself.
That letter floating around the desert from the hand of one illiterate camel drover to another will be a collector’s item someday. Just like the postcards I liked to send back to the States from rural post offices in distant countries, some with good postal services like India, some with not such good services like Sudan. In fact most of those postcards would eventually arrive at their destination, to my kids back home, and I would marvel at the untold number of men, to me strangers all, who had to pass those cards from hand to hand in order for my children to get to read them at the far end. Like a game of telephone that works out to the very last syllable. Greetings from Sudan. Love, Daddy.