Exhausted with fatigue, half starved, unkempt, with ragged clothes and boots worn into holes, we were regular tatterdemalions! So completely had we lost the European aspect that when we arrived the natives remarked that we were the very image of their own people!
-Mongolia, the Tangut Country, and the Solitudes of Northern Tibet (1876), Count Nikolai Przhevalsky
Mustapha, Nedu, and I pulled into Wadi Halfa from the cataract known as Batn al-Hajar, Belly of Stone, with a day to spare before the ferry departed for Aswan. I didn’t want to risk an illegal land crossing with the Egyptian border police. We hadn’t had time to clean up after leaving the herd on Day 34 and the ferry hostel bathroom it turned out was no place for a scrub. A Chinese road building crew was playing cards in the hostel courtyard and Mustapha asked if they’d deal him in. They looked at him as if he’d just fallen out of the sky. One of us? Mongol? Uyghur? Kazakh? No, Měiguó Rén, American, he said. Aces High, One Eyed Jacks, Suicide Kings, that’s us, he told them.