The curve of the dune drew his eye and for a second he imagined a female hip. Walking behind their father’s camels, they wore not the twelve-yard thobe of the Ha’tari but a nine-yard abomination that wrapped so tight its folds barely concealed the woman beneath. Two more days to endure until the sheikh and his family would grate upon him no longer with their decadent and godless ways. Two more and he would deliver them to the city. These particular al’Effem had been in his care for twenty days now. He glanced back toward the curving shoulder of the next dune, behind which his charges laboured along the path he had set them. He shook his head, thoughts returning along his trail to the caravan. Reaching the top of the slope, Tahnoon gazed down into yet another empty sun-hammered valley. The wind picked up, hot and dry, making the sand hiss as it stripped it from the sculpted crest of the dune.
In addition, they scrimped on the second and fourth prayers of each day, denying Allah his full due. Another weakness of the tribes not born in the desert. The al’Effem sometimes named their beasts. Others might pass through and survive, but only Tahnoon’s people lived in the Sahar, never more than a dry well from death.
In the desert such rigid observance was all that kept a man alive. Only the Ha’tari kept to the commandments in spirit as well as word.
Around its length his fellow Ha’tari rode the slopes, their vigilance turned outward, guarding the soft al’Effem with their tarnished faith. Behind him, the caravan, snaking amid the depths of the dunes where the first shadows would gather come evening. So Tahnoon rode, and he watched, and he beheld the multitude of sand and the vast emptiness of it, mile upon baking mile. If Allah, thrice-blessed his name, would grant that he saw clearly then his purpose was served. The caravan behind him relied on Tahnoon’s eyes, only that. His spine, his thirst, the soreness of the saddle, none of it mattered.
He rode, hunched, swaying with the gait of his camel, eyes squinting against the glare even behind the thin material of his shesh. Tahnoon’s back ached, his tongue scraped dry across the roof of his mouth. The prophet said sand is neither kind nor cruel, but in the oven of the Sahar it is hard to think that it does not hate you. The sun burns there, the wind whispers, all is in motion, too slow for the eye but more certain than sight. In the deepness of the desert, amid dunes taller than any prayer tower, men are made tiny, less than ants.