…the bright desert lay ahead.
-”A Distant Episode”, Paul Bowles
This story was published two years before The Sheltering Sky, with similar plots…a Westerner is captured by nomads at the desert’s edge and taken deeper and deeper into the Sahara, abused physically- rape, tongue cutting- and mentally along the way, and finally released. Said Bowles, “the desert is the protagonist”, a thing itself that never speaks, despite what the soon-to-be glossectomized Westerner is told, “Keep on going south…you’ll find some languages you never heard of before.”