The Dictator's Last Night

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When I was a boy, my uncle — my mother’s brother — sometimes took me with him into the desert. For him it was a journey that meant more than going back to his roots. It was a cleansing of his spirit.

I was too young to understand the things he was trying to instil in me, but I loved to listen to him.

My uncle was a poet, uncelebrated and unassuming, a touchingly humble Bedouin whose only wish was to pitch his tent in the shade of a rock and sit listening to the wind whistle across the sand, as stealthy as a shadow.

He owned a magnificent bay horse, two watchful greyhounds, and an old rifle he used to hunt mouflons, and he knew better than anyone how to trap jerboas (for their medicinal properties) as well as the spiny-tailed lizards that he stuffed and varnished and sold in the souk.

When night fell, he would light a campfire and, after a meagre meal and a cup of too-sweet tea, he would slip into a reverie. To see him commune with the silence and barrenness of the rock-littered plains was a moment of grace for me.

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