The desert could not be claimed or owned- it was a piece of cloth carried in the wind, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names…It was a place of faith. We disappeared into landscape. Fire and sand. The places water came to and touched…Ain, Bir, Wadi, Foggara, Khottara, Shaduf. I didn’t want my name against such beautiful names.
-The English Patient, words spoken by Odaantje’s László Almásy
The desert’s hundred shifting names- Badw, Baadiya, Baydaa’, from just a single triliteral root- for sand, for rock, for dune fields and sheets and seas. I didn’t understand many of those words then and now it is too late because one has to be there to see and learn and remember. Back home the desert became a blur again. It’s true, you disappear into the desert when you ride through it for forty days. That’s why Almásy remembered words for water but not for sand. Ain, Bir. Spring, Well. No forgetting those when thirsty.