The Fifth Element

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IT WAS 1913 AND “THE WAR TO END ALL WARS,” WORLD WAR I, had not yet begun.

Other wars were raging, though.

The War of the Desert Against the Nile was continuing its eons-old pitched battle here at the desert’s edge where the village fields met the dunes; the battle yielding up a little more sand one year, a little more cultivated ground the next.

The War of Animal Against Man was being fought out by a mule with a boy on its back, slowly plodding along a track leading into the desert, away from the village fields. The mule went slower and slower, until the boy hit him with a stick between the ears, gaining a temporary advantage in the war.

“Go,” said Omar in a native dialect as ancient as the tombs that dotted the landscape. “But not too fast,” he added.

The boy was fighting his own war―the eternal War of Youth Against Age. He had been sent to

fetch water, and he was in no hurry to get back so that the grown-ups could boss him around some more.

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