This, too, I order from you: tread the way that wagons do not trample. Do not drive in the same tracks as others or on a wide road but on an untrodden path, even if yours is more narrow.
-from the Aetia, Callimachus of Alexandria (310-250 BCE), lines spoken to him by Apollo
One might say that the Darb today is quite well trampled, by asphalt and refugees from civil war, yet in those days there were no wagons, no lorries, not even army patrols. With KhairAllah in the lead, a Khawaja may be forgiven for assuming he was following the route home taken by Old Kingdom Pharaoh Pepi II’s trail boss Harkouf, that no one since the 3rd millennium BCE had seen these same stones, these mountains and dunes in the Wadi al-Milk.