The three month-old summer wind blows from the south, whipping an entire desert’s worth of sand across Sufayri, the plain named after its copper coloured barren expanse, but our eyes are almost shut and the sand is in them and in our hair and in our mouth, and Said Nasser Walad Bareeka is trying to smile for a photograph but he’s really gritting his teeth and holding on to his headcloth, and there’s sand on the lens and we’re stumbling over tires and a stuffed toy horse. And the Plain of Copper is just an expanse of nothing, not even a village. Because the only things you can really get your hands on are the scraps of wood that once made his areesh, or shack, and the soft blob of the hill in the background, so scraped by sand it doesn’t have an edge left in it. And that’s Jebel Abu Raslah, where the raslah sprouts after the rains, and the goats like it. When that mattered Said used to move from one shack to another following the water with his goats, until five years ago when he built a concrete box of a house and bought a pickup and got municipal water delivered by tanker. The bedouin used to make mats out of the raslah, but they’re buying plastic carpets from the towns now.
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