Billa Ali al-Qurein sweet-talked KhairAllah out of a fistful of Guineahāt one morning in Wadi al-Milk by claiming a finder’s fee for a lost camel that he himself had stolen from us the previous night just before we made camp at ‘Idd Ahmad wells. I could not find ‘Idd Ahmad on the 1934 Khartoum Survey Office map’s Jebel El-’Ein sheet, but I did find Billa Ali’s eponymous toponym, Umm Qurein, Mother of the Little Horned One. Maybe Ahmad was Billa Ali’s alias and where two No Tracks crossed, there lived his mother.
