In the heart of the desert, amid a vast, desolate area, travelers might find traces of something quite different…Now and then one finds bones, bleached white by the relentless sun, a grisly reminder…transient cemeteries that bear witness to the past.
-Egypt: Civilization in the Sands, Pauline and Philippe de Flers
Camels like salt and they like calcium. Dead bones, their bones, have both. It was always strange whenever we passed through what looked like a desert boneyard, a place mid-trail where several camels had been butchered and their skeletons left to lie, scattered by vultures and jackals, and our own camels lowered their heads to the ground to pick up a half-buried bone in their flappy lips, maybe to suck, maybe to chew, maybe to imagine what awaited them in the abattoirs of Cairo.