Indie Herb asks
Who is this man on a camel?
Long story. It starts in Toronto. Young man, working at The Globe and Mail newspaper of record. It was a case of use it or lose it. “You didn’t use your holiday last year,” they said. “If you don’t use it, you lose it.”
“Can I,” I asked, “put it back-to-back with this year’s holiday?”
“As long as you don’t want it in the middle of the summer.”
I took the month in March. It was during one of Europe’s coldest winters.
My aim was to “do” the festivals of Spain and Portugal. I got as far as Madrid. I fell in love. I decided to stay. And I was fortunate enough to find work at the Mangold Institute, teaching English as a Second Language, as it is now called.
However, come late spring and, to me, we were in the midst of a severe heat wave. I would walk from the hacienda room through the shaded streets and lanes, until I hit a broad street of heat waves shimmering up off the pavement. I had to cross. I steeled myself, held my breath, and paced across. Still, when I stepped onto the sidewalk, a wall of extreme heat hit me hard as it bounced off the whitish wall.
Well, that was just about too much. So, when I was lined up at the American Express to collect my mail, the notice on the bulletin board was irresistible. It read something like this:
Group traveling south across the Sahara.
Call Steve at 000-000
How could I resist?
A large contingent of us took the train to Gibralter, where the group broke up into two, and I was asked to join the group planning to travel across North Africa. The other group actually took off south. They suffered dysentery en route, break downs – both vehicular and personal from what I heard later – and wound up in Chad, where at least one member was hospitalized. Eventually they found their way back home to California by pack boat.
As for the rest of us, we had our adventures, and wound up in Egypt, heading for the Aswan Dam and the Valley of the Kings.
But en route, were running out of daylight as we sought a place to camp for the night. We came to a spot where we could cross a canal. We found a spot right there, beside the road and on the canal bank.
We fed ourselves and took to our beds, settling in to do a little lett
*er writing and reading.
Along came a energetic bunch of young men, who stopped to “converse” with us. After some success, the guys rattled on across the canal.
We settled down and went to sleep.
Sometime in the middle of the darkness, something woke us up. I rolled over and reached for the knife I had stashed under the mattress. But a very strong hand grabbed and held my wrist. I looked up and out, right into the eyes of an old man staring down at me.
To be continued–
