Months passed before he was reconciled with the desert but now he said, ‘The desert’s all right once you get to know it.’
-Olivia Manning, Fortunes of War: The Levant Trilogy
You cannot set foot in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and you are not the same person. But what of the Darb? Different dunes, different drovers, different dromedaries. Adam and Mas’ood made Aseeda and sang Dubayts one way, and four years later, Ibrahim and Idris, another. The same number of days, following the same route but different, for I was four years older.