an Internet café, I could sense him firing on the cylinders of each new day. I recognized the feeling. He sounded exuberant, untethered, even while complaining that he was ground down by the long bus rides and the flies that crawled up his nose and the unending barrage of begging children. When we met up, we feasted on meals of chopped collard greens and dollops of mashed chickpeas spread over pancakey injera bread. We tossed our backpacks into the corners of grotty guesthouse rooms and threw ourselves into bed. He was strong and capable, and I loved the golden hair on his arms.
I did my best not to worry about the girlfriend named Jane. When Nigel talked about her, he grew flustered. Sometimes when telling me a story about his past, I could tell he was editing her out of it. But mostly he didn’t talk about Jane. He talked about me.
He was soon to return to London. Before he did, we made one long excursion together, into the brown desert of northwestern Ethiopia, across a legendary swatch of land called the Danakil Depression. I’d read about it during my pretravel reading binge at home, in a National Geographic story titled “The Cruelest Place on Earth.” The Danakil was far from anywhere and scorchingly hot. My Lonely Planet carried a brief mention of the area but didn’t provide instructions or encouragement to go. Which somehow made it perfect.
We took buses until we reached a market village on the outskirts of the desert. The town was populated by a tribe called the Afar—Muslim nomads who made their living pickaxing salt from the flats on a distant edge of the Danakil, then loading it onto camels and trekking it many miles through the some of the hottest weather in the world to sell to traders. The Afar women wore loose head scarves, and many had henna tattoos on their faces, three thin lines or a series of droplets on their cheeks. The Afar men were famous, apparently, for castrating their enemies.
We wanted to see the salt mines. Nigel thought maybe he could sell some photographs of the miners to a magazine. I thought I’d try my hand at writing about the experience, possibly for a travel website or my hometown newspaper. After asking around, Nigel and I found a guide—a short, rotund Afar man with a face that was wrinkled like a walnut shell and a long gray beard into which he’d rubbed a rust-colored henna dye. Hereafter known to us as Red Beard, he spoke no English but, in an agreement brokered by a local guy who did, Red Beard said he’d take us out to the salt flats and back, a trek of about ten days. We were joined by a solemn younger man—the Camel Whisperer, we called him—who said nothing in any language but had beautiful bladelike cheekbones and a shy smile and walked devotedly next to the four camels in our little caravan: one for each foreigner, one for Red Beard, and one for the luggage. Each animal also hauled two yellow plastic jerry cans, sloshing with water.
We rode behind Red Beard on a path that took us first across low hills of hard-packed sand and shrub and eventually out onto the flaking gray expanse of the sodium flats. From atop our camels, Nigel andI sang songs, played Twenty Questions, and shouting over our shoulders at each other, told silly stories from childhood. He had spent his school years at a boarding school for rural kids, where he hated all the rules. He’d been angry at his parents for years afterward, he said, for sending him there. He tutored me on all things Aussie—why they loved Vegemite; how to shout “Why the fuck not, mate?” as a kind of battle cry for life.
We slugged water out of our bottles, let the sun broil our shoulders, behaved like high-schoolers on a rambunctious first date, only our date was taking place in an Ethiopian desert, with Red Beard and the baby-faced Camel Whisperer quietly and inscrutably observing our every move. The unspoken assumption was that Nigel and I were married. Which was why it was okay for me to rest a hand on his
I did my best not to worry about the girlfriend named Jane. When Nigel talked about her, he grew flustered. Sometimes when telling me a story about his past, I could tell he was editing her out of it. But mostly he didn’t talk about Jane. He talked about me.
He was soon to return to London. Before he did, we made one long excursion together, into the brown desert of northwestern Ethiopia, across a legendary swatch of land called the Danakil Depression. I’d read about it during my pretravel reading binge at home, in a National Geographic story titled “The Cruelest Place on Earth.” The Danakil was far from anywhere and scorchingly hot. My Lonely Planet carried a brief mention of the area but didn’t provide instructions or encouragement to go. Which somehow made it perfect.
We took buses until we reached a market village on the outskirts of the desert. The town was populated by a tribe called the Afar—Muslim nomads who made their living pickaxing salt from the flats on a distant edge of the Danakil, then loading it onto camels and trekking it many miles through the some of the hottest weather in the world to sell to traders. The Afar women wore loose head scarves, and many had henna tattoos on their faces, three thin lines or a series of droplets on their cheeks. The Afar men were famous, apparently, for castrating their enemies.
We wanted to see the salt mines. Nigel thought maybe he could sell some photographs of the miners to a magazine. I thought I’d try my hand at writing about the experience, possibly for a travel website or my hometown newspaper. After asking around, Nigel and I found a guide—a short, rotund Afar man with a face that was wrinkled like a walnut shell and a long gray beard into which he’d rubbed a rust-colored henna dye. Hereafter known to us as Red Beard, he spoke no English but, in an agreement brokered by a local guy who did, Red Beard said he’d take us out to the salt flats and back, a trek of about ten days. We were joined by a solemn younger man—the Camel Whisperer, we called him—who said nothing in any language but had beautiful bladelike cheekbones and a shy smile and walked devotedly next to the four camels in our little caravan: one for each foreigner, one for Red Beard, and one for the luggage. Each animal also hauled two yellow plastic jerry cans, sloshing with water.
We rode behind Red Beard on a path that took us first across low hills of hard-packed sand and shrub and eventually out onto the flaking gray expanse of the sodium flats. From atop our camels, Nigel andI sang songs, played Twenty Questions, and shouting over our shoulders at each other, told silly stories from childhood. He had spent his school years at a boarding school for rural kids, where he hated all the rules. He’d been angry at his parents for years afterward, he said, for sending him there. He tutored me on all things Aussie—why they loved Vegemite; how to shout “Why the fuck not, mate?” as a kind of battle cry for life.
We slugged water out of our bottles, let the sun broil our shoulders, behaved like high-schoolers on a rambunctious first date, only our date was taking place in an Ethiopian desert, with Red Beard and the baby-faced Camel Whisperer quietly and inscrutably observing our every move. The unspoken assumption was that Nigel and I were married. Which was why it was okay for me to rest a hand on his
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