Even today caravans look like a river. Still, today it is water who is the stranger here. Water is the exile, carried back in cans and flasks, the ghost between your hands and your mouth.
-The English Patient
We drank not from cans or flasks but from Qirab, sing. Qirba, Goat Skins, and Edward Lane writes in such detail of how they were made- ”a goat about one year old”, “a patch of leather over the fundament”, “a seam from the throat to the belly”- that you wonder if he had sewn one himself, or only had dreamt that he drank from one, a dead animal held to his lips.