Sleep seized me, and I passed into a dream. I saw before me stretched a boundless plain of sandy wilderness…an uncouth shape appeared upon a dromedary, mounted high. He seemed an Arab of the Bedouin tribes…At the sight much I rejoiced, not doubting but a guide was present, one who with unerring skill would through the desert lead me…
-The Prelude, Book 5, Wordsworth
Wordsworth must have been eating opium when he wrote this, such was the dream that reading Cervantes had given him, in which Rocinante turned camel and Don Quixote an Arab. But KhairAllah had enough trouble in those forty days on the Darb, with a real thief and real giants, Billa Ali and Baobab trees, than to imagine us Khawajas as his squires.