The inhabitants of these villages are almost wholly uneducated and have very primitive ideas. One boy asked me how many days there were in one hour.
-Notes on a Journey to Kordofan, Arthur Holroyd, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, 1839
Like that boy, the drovers tried to measure all unfathomable spans of time- if you’ve never seen a clock, an hour is as unknown as a millennium, and if you’ve never been in an airplane, a trip to New York is as unimaginably long as a trip to the moon- in terms of what they did know, days and lunar months, rainy seasons followed by dry seasons, and Ramadan followed by Eid al-Fitr. One asked me how many days was my flight home, for he had a point of comparison right at hand, forty days to Egypt.