Dear Dad

The day was bottheringly hot and I was not ready tof or Abdul and his camel. With the man himself there was no fault to find but his camel was the most unsympathetic brute I ever sat behind. He took a dislike to me the moment he saw me. He turned his head and looked me up and down with a cold glassy eye and then he looked across to anothe camel, a friend of his that was standing facing him. I knew what he said. He had an expressive head and made no attempt to disguise his thoughts. He said that there are funny things that one comes across in the heat of a summer day.

The camel again tured his head and looked. I have never known a camel that could twist himself as this camel did. I have seen circus animals do tricks with their necks that compells ones attention but this animal was more like rubber giraffe I has as young lad. If I had seen his eyes looking at me from between his hind legs, I doubt if I should have been suprissed. He still seemed more amused with me than anything else. He again tured to his friend and remarked how extrodinary and that it must be the season for growing pale people and thought the sun would have something to do with it and then commenced licking flies off his left shoulder. I began to wonder if he had lost his mother when he was young and been brought up by a cat.

Abdul called him to stop, but he took no notice. Abdul ran after overtaking us just passed the last houses in Umdefog. I did not catch what the man said to the camel but as he spoke quickly and excitedly I gathered a few phrases from the camel like "Who asked for your opinion?"

The camel cut the conversation short by stepping up the pace. I think the camel said that he should not talk so much and that his forever pleading was slowly starting to get on his nerves. This camel proceeded though the shrub and thorns, and nothing could persuade him from not to proceed through the shrub and thorns. His owner expostulated with him, but he continued to trot on. From the way the camel hitched his shoulders as he moved I felt somehow he was saying his owner just tires him with his talk and if he would shut up and get a move on and let us all get back for lunch.

Upon reflection, I am not sure that that wall eyed old brute had not sence on his side. A few miniutes that had felt like weeks Abdul cought up with us on the back of another of these beasts. It pained me to admit that somehow Abdul had the brute under control and I did not. I recon he gave me the untrained quadruped.

Wadi Halfa is the hottest place in the world. In summer it goes to 110 in the shade and it seems that the stomes start to melt. In winter it simmers at a few degrees below ninty and it is possible to fry an egg on the pavement without it getting burned. Shops do their business early and late in the day. Banks I thought would do likewise. But no. In Wadi Halfa as everywhere else in the world, bankers followed their own inscrutable whims. Opening time was nine thity.

The ferry is not one boat but two. Two small paddle steamers lashed together and run on one paddle. For three days and two nights I driffted down the nile along lake Nasser.The sunrises and sunsets are so extrodinary beautiful that my body turns insideout and empties my heart to the sky.The stars are close enough to grasp. Laying on the roof of the ferry at night, I begin to at las notice the new constalations of the nothern sky carry on my personal realtinship with these new clsters of jewels. When those stars are that close then you just have to take them seriosly.

I sleeped illegally on the roof of the first class boat, because the second class deck is indescribable. I would rather swim than sleep there. Hundreds of nubian camel drivers all dressed in grubby white lay side by side among their bundles across the deck. The crevaces between them are caulked with a mixtre of orange peel, cigarette ends and spit. The hauking and spitting which is a constant background mourmour to arab life here rise to become the dominet sound, louder than speech, louder thn the drone of the ferr’s engine, drowned oly occasionly by a particuarlly loud blast from the ships hooter. Lungs rasp and rip, you can har tissues tear into shreds, and the glutinous produckt flies in all directions. I am still after being so long on the road, not ready for that yet.

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