My happiest days have been in deserts with a couple of Arabs, our camels, and no footsteps but our own.
-E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Some Recollections on Fieldwork in the Twenties, 1973
Evans-Pritchard spent much of Twenties, when he was in his twenties, in the Sudd and grasslands of the Upper White Nile and its western tributaries among the Azande and Nuer, where he did his most acclaimed work, but seems to have had his life’s fondest memories of the deserts of Cyrenaica, in the Forties when he too was in his forties. So which was it E.E., Sand or Swamp? Camels or Zebu Cattle? He died the same year he wrote this, so maybe an old man should be allowed a change of mind.