The Man is on the Camel
Blogging 101,etc.
I cannot find a memory story of how we got there, but pretty sure it was because Walt insisted on holding out for a house stay instead of going on to yet another camp
Don’t accurately recall the sequence of events, but these things did happen to us.
During our North African trip, we’d been robbed (Man on Camel Part three), we’d been mobbed (a future blog), we’d been kidnapped (a future blog), and we’d had an encounter with a Scorpion. It was enough to smarten you up…
Let’s say it was after the scorpion that brought us to the camel ride.
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Once again, we were late bedding down for the night. Once again, out in the open, with only a bare minimum of scrub brush for shelter, we threw our mattresses down on the hard-packed sand, and began the ritual of trying to relax.
We arranged ourselves in a sort of half-star pattern, Paula and Walt forming a vee with their thin mattresses and mine heading west, perpendicular with Walt’s facing south at the head. A movement caught my eye. I looked down quickly and spotted a little black object scuttling under the head of my mattress.
“Did you see what I thought I saw?” Walt asked.
“I most certainly did,” I said in my best imitation of Stanley Oliver of the old comedy team Oliver and Hardy.
It was a scorpion. Black, small, and deadly.
Walt drew out his jack knife and opened the blade.
“Lift the mattress,” he said, “and I’ll stab it.”
I got ready. I looked at Walt. He nodded.
I gripped the corner of the mattress, took a breath, and jerked it up. Walt, poised with his blade, took a stab. The scorpion scrambled away, diving for more cover. I lifted the mattress higher. Walt stabbed, stabbed again. And again.
“Got it!” he declared in triumph.
He held his knife up with the scorpion skewered on it, still wiggling.
“Well, put it out of its misery,” Paula said. “Poor little thing.”
The poor little thing died, right there on the blade.
“I’m keeping this for a souvenir,” Walt declared.
©rohanrb.deviantart.com, from www.freetattoodesigns.com
Scorpion – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorpion
Scorpions are predatory arthropod animals of the order Scorpiones within the class Arachnida. They have eight legs and are easily recognised by the pair of grasping pedipalps and the narrow, segmented tail, often carried in a characteristic forward curve over the back, ending with a venomous stinger.
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This might have been Walt’s motivation, for while we were in the next town on our way South to see the Aswan Dam and the new home of the relocated Valley of the Tombs, he decided that we didn’t want to sleep out again that night.
For some reason that escapes my memory (future blogs) we wound up at the local police station. I suspect it was something about the having been mobbed and robbed and being “attacked” by a killer arthropod. I remember waiting it out. The police put us in the upstairs of a vacant house while Walt negotiated. When he joined us, he said he was holding out for indoor accommodations.
In the end, he got them. The upstairs room we were waiting in. No furniture. So we spread our mattresses on the bare wooden floor, harder than most of the shiftable sand we had bee sleeping on.
Well, next morning the police got us up early. They gave us breakfast, and piled us into their jeeps and we drove down to the Nile river. There, they got us into boats and took us for a ride on that famous water course.
I can’t say that I was very much at ease during that ride. My mind insisted on filling my vision with marauding crocodiles and killer worms if we spilled overboard. Our hosts insisted that we scoop some water up and drink it. Courtesy dictated that we do. We did. I developed a “sympathetic” stomach ache. I couldn’t wait for the ride to end.
Once we landed on shore, I surreptitiously checked my limbs for leeches, trying hard not to be spotted for a sissy. I wondered if years in the big city had softened me that much. After all, as a child, my brother and I couldn’t wait to get into the river for a swim, and that river was host to many and many a leech (blood suckers to us), and, under the bridge, a favourite swimming hole with us, surrounded by bats hanging upside down on the abandoned end of a barbed wire fence.
Still, the stories…about the Nile…about its dangers (in the water) and the perils (upon the water)…they live in the head.
At any rate, our eager hosts were more than anxious to make up for any bad experiences we had had in their beloved Egypt. They took us for a camel ride.
So there I am, on my camel, a peace offering well received. The camel was a friendly one and jogged rhythmically along the sand and the dunes, rocking me gently forward and back with each loping step. It was bliss.
Perhaps this is not as dreamatic (well, it is dreamatic, a la the typo, but I meant to say dramatic, of course) as expected, but it is indeed one of my favourite memories on my travels, and I do treasure it. As they say, it may not necessarily be the destination but the journey. And I grew greatly in my mental journey for it.
So I have chosen my Man on Camel for my gravatar, indicating the journey I’ve been on, and the journey I am on, and the journey to come. In many ways, it indicates me coming out of hiding and taking on the world. About facing imagined dangers head on. May my camel give me a smooth ride. With adventures on the side, of course.
Me climbing up the shifting sand of the Sahara dune, with a pocket full of Sahara sand, me metaphorically coming out of hiding behind life, happy to be in the background, happy to be the support person, not the leader.
And I still don’t wish to swim in the Nile. Nor do I wish to drink it. Not without boiling the hell out of it first.
Paula riding camel; Walt climbing aboard, with our “cameleer.” Note: Long since we have all lost contact. These are my memories; theirs will obviously be different, as demonstrated in a number of famous films where the story is told over and over, each telling by a different member of the communal experience. So Walt and Paula, thanks for the memories, and if you should ever stumble onto this, please forgive the use of your images, and get in touch, willya?
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