The Walking Dead

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It was as if he had been brought to a camel market. All of his life since he had gained the first clouded images of memory, he had stood and watched such markets. And now they were thirteen hundred kilometres behind him, separated from him by the wilderness of the Kingdom's deserts and by the knife-edge crests of the Asir mountains. There, between the mountains and the shining sea, was the village that was his home.

The beasts of burden — camels, hobbled at the ankle, and mules lined up, standing listlessly, tethered to a rope running between two posts — were well respected by the travelling Bedouin and the itinerant merchants who came to buy. In the extremities of the desert's temperatures, brutal heat by day and chill air at night, or on the passes through the mountains that led to the Yemen border, a tribesman or trader would suffer death by dehydration or exposure if he had bought unwisely at the market. It was the skill of those men that their experience guided them towards paying only for animals in which they could place total trust. The new wealth of the Kingdom, in the cities beyond the mountains where there were wide highways and the oil wells with their networks of pipes, had not penetrated the Asir mountains. He came from the part of the Kingdom that had not shared the affluence of the petroleum deposits, and where old ways still continued. Where he had lived, there remained a use for animals that could be trained to fulfil a given purpose, and such animals were chosen and haggled over in the markets.

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