This desert is luminous, radiant, one’s chest is dilated, one is in good spirits…
-Travels, Book IV, Ibn Battuta
No thank you, I did not want my chest to dilate on the Darb. I told the drovers about my troubles five years earlier in Cairo, about my spontaneous pneumothorax and operation at Agouza Hospital, although at the time I did not know how to say Collapsed Lung, so instead I said Exploded, while I was sleeping. The drovers were relieved I think when each night I’d unroll my kit a bit apart from them.