…as clearly as sand/pouring through glass in the winter desert./He was the metal of his crown at last.
-Augustus, Frank O’ Hara
At first the drovers drank their tea only from a glass, their chalice for this almost religious ritual after and between meals, before their sleep and through their night vigil, so they stowed them in rags nested inside tin cans so as not to break when loaded onto their camels. Inevitably they did, and so the drovers counted down…four, three, two, one…the glasses that remained unbroken. Except me, for I had bought a metal cup before setting out. And thus it was my cup, increasingly bent, blackened, and dinged as it became the farther into the Darb we rode, from which the drovers drank one after the other in turn after me.