overseas briefing Arabian Nights

Author: Michael Nevadomski

ALEXANDRIA - I awoke to Hamada shaking my shoulders in the darkness.

"Sabahal-ful, ya bey. Yulla bina." Morning, boss. Time to go.

I stretched under the blankets and pulled on my boots, shivering in the cold. The blue light of morning was breaking to violet, and I could hear Hamada's brother Suleiman scurrying around outside, breaking twigs for the morning fire.

We had been traveling for four days together through the Western Desert - across the mammoth sword dunes of the Great Sand Sea to the scorched valleys of the Black Desert, past the Crystal Mountain to here, the White Desert - a pristine sea-turned-wasteland, its chalk cliffs and mushroom rocks ghostly and whistling with wind. This was our last morning together and the end of my hike - the first part of a three-week trip through "The Great Desert Circuit" linking the five major oases in Egypt: Siwa, Bahariyya, Farafra, Dakhla and Kharga.

The fire began to roar, and it pierced the gray mist around us with golden light. We squatted next to it, warming our hands, and Suleiman fussed over the tea things. The white rocks around us turned pink and coppery as the sun rose.

Shay, ya basha? Suleiman asked, tying a gray kuffiyah around his head. I nodded, sniffling. Tea would be perfect right now.

On our first afternoon together, after he had noticed me sniffling from the cold, Suleiman handed me half a small onion. "For your nose," he said, his mouth half-full. "Eat."

As I bit into my half, I began to tear up, and the taste sent me into a flurry of all the swears I could manage in Arabic and English. He and Hamada laughed. But my sniffling nose went away, and hours later, I would ask for another onion in between his eager questions about life in the city.

"Why did you come to the desert?"

You never hear the quiet in Alexandria.

"But Iskanderiyya is beautiful, no?"

Yes. But it is better here. It is not so busy.

Earlier yesterday, we had stopped along the dunes to get closer to the cliff escarpment that rose over us like an alabaster wave. Hamada napped as Suleiman and I clambered over stretches of pure white - smooth, pearly domes that rose out of the fine tawny sand like white whales in the sand sea, patches of chalk scattered on the ground like snow receding in the hard, sapphire noon, or the shattered porcelain of other chalk flakes. And, as we walked through the labyrinth of white archways and caves that the wind had carved with its fingers, Suleiman would stop and look around and whisper under his breath, Subhan Allah.

And now, seeing the deepening shades of pink on the chalk rocks that loomed around us, the fading mist and the tired, gentle faces of the two brothers in the firelight, I thought the same thing.

Yes, my friend. Subhan Allah.