Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel? Polonius: …’tis like a camel, indeed. Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel. Polonius: It is backed like a weasel. Hamlet: Or like a whale? Polonius: Very like a whale.
-from Act III, Scene ii
Nearing Day 40 you begin to see camels everywhere because you have been chasing after them for so long and each one is too precious to lose. On the flat, over a dune, behind an acacia, in your dream. Sometimes in the clouds.
There were not many clouds in February. That was dry season and the sky was blue, much bluer than the azraq, blue, color that the drovers called some of their darker-hued camels. So what you saw overhead was as empty and monochrome as all that sand you saw before you. Blue and yellow. Only when we butchered a camel once, already couched and then cutting along the spine and spreading its skin on each side to lay down like two halves of a picnic cloth did we see red. So then we had a tricolor- blue, yellow, red. Guess whose flag I saw flapping in the wind, up where the clouds should be.
