…life hangs on the contingency of a skin of water, more or less.
-Emerson
It happened in the first days of the trip when we were still passing scattered villages in the grasslands. KhairAllah had left us for the night to visit a friend and told us to carry on. We ran out of water, the goatskins were dry when we camped, the drovers were grumpy. No tea water, but plenty of tea, plenty of sugar. Adam Hamid was sent out in the dark to fill them at some well and I waited until I finally went to bed. He was a Hamari far out of his tribe’s range so he might not have known where to find it. About midnight I guess he returned with the skins full amid a lot of chatter and the tea fire was stoked. The drovers drank while I slept. If it had been a cold beer I might have roused myself, but it was only tea. Plenty more where that came from in the next forty days.