A Camel for a School Bus

Sitting cross-legged on a camel’s hairy back, I take in an undulating panorama of the Wadi Rum desert from atop my plodding throne. The highway I transverse is a shifting sea of red sand, fine grains that I take home as an inadvertent souvenir in my shoes. The sky is blue like a pool on the first day of summer vacation, beckoning adventure. In between ground and sky lie grand rock formations which change with the sun: gray, purple, beige. Atop my camel I feel like a tribal princess, proceeding gloriously in a mysterious land.

But my coach suddenly halts to munch on the local delicacy: prickly shrubs. Feeling a jerk, I become aware of the young boy walking barefoot beside me. It is he who expertly yanks forward the camel and its naive city princess.

The boy is about ten years old. His eyes are like dark pieces of amber in firelight. Holding the camel’s reins, he shuffles through the sand methodically, concentrating as if he can read secrets in its wind-blown designs. He is a Bedouin, a desert-dweller, a student in the mornings and a tour guide in the afternoons. I look at his small frame and imagine what it would be like to grow up with these cliffs as a playground, a thousand crevices filled with beetles and old bones waiting to be discovered after school. Does he know that for me, riding this camel through his back yard is school, part of my university program? I wonder what he hopes to be someday, what future he reads for himself in the swirling red dust.

Sometimes, his father tells him bedtime stories of the olden days, when the desert did not reverberate with so many foreign words. But the boy likes listening to the tourists chatter, and shyly lifts his eyes from the sand to practice the English phrases he has learned. In his dark eyes I can see that he is proud of the desert, proud to share this serene place which is his home. And as my own eyes dilate to take in the expansive wilderness before me, I realize that if this were my home, I would be proud too.