Nature scalped, flayed, discovered all her skeleton to the gazers eye. The horizon was a sea of mirage…
-Richard Burton, 1855
Maybe it was like taking an x-ray of nature, those days mid-trail where we saw nothing at all but sand and rock. No soft tissue, nothing vascular or digestive or pulmonary. Nature thrown up on the autopsy table, what was once living tissue peeled away to camel bone and petrified wood, the air so dry no need of formaldehyde. What we were inside is what we saw outside, mirror and mirage sharing the same Latin root, To See.
Mirror in Arabic is Miraa’a from the same Semitic root (Ra’aa,To See with the Eye) as Muryin, “a she-camel whose udder shows her to be pregnant”, as per Lane, who gives two words for Mirage, one seen early morning when a man in the distance seems to quiver and one seen at midday which appears as water. Burton saw the latter, the sea. We saw the former, the quivering man, as in a Miraa’a held to our own faces.