It was a desert peopled only with echoes- a place of death for what little there is to die in it- a wilderness where, to use my companion’s phrase, there is nothing but He.
-Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah, Richard Burton, 1855
For most of those forty days out there it really seemed like it was all or nothing, either everything I’d ever need…or nada. Not a world in a grain of sand, but a long laugh at a half understood camel joke. Sometimes it was a tasty bit of fried onion stuck on my aseeda finger, sometimes a sip of dark water from a newly tanned goatskin. It didn’t make me any more religious, I wasn’t looking for and I didn’t find He out there. Plenty of them though, drovers and camels. And they were enough for me. Yalla binaa, O Allah, Be with us!, they would say every morning before dawn.