on-writing-well

A Writer's Decisions 281
nomad appeared from nowhere and stopped to ask if we had
any quinine. Another nomad appeared from nowhere and
stopped briefly to talk. Later we saw two men walking toward
us across the desert and beyond them... was it our first
mirage? It was another salt caravan, this one fifty camels long,
silhouetted against the sky. Spotting us from God knows how
far away, the two men had left the caravan to come over for a
visit. One of them was an old man, full of laughter. They sat
down with Mohammed Ali and got the latest news of
Timbuktu.
The hardest sentence there was the one about the drivers
tinkering with the Land Rover. I wanted it to be as simple as all
the other sentences and yet have a small surprise tucked into
it—a wry touch of humor. Otherwise my purpose at this point
was to tell the remainder of the story as simply as possible:
So the four hours passed before we knew they were gone,
as if we had slipped into a different time zone, Sahara time,
and in the late afternoon, when the sun's heat had begun to
ebb, we got back into our Land Rovers, which, to my surprise,
still worked, and set out across the Sahara for what
Mohammed Ali called our "encampment." I pictured, if not a
chieftains tent, at least a tent—something that announced
itself as an encampment. When we finally did stop, it was at a
spot that looked strikingly similar to what we had been driving
over all day. It did, however, have one small tree. Some
Bedouin women were crouched under it—black-garbed figures,
their faces veiled—and Mohammed Ali put us down on
the desert next to them.
The women shrank back at the sight of us—white aliens
dumped abruptly in their midst. They were huddled so close
together that they looked like a frieze. Obviously Mohammed
Ali had just stopped at the first sight of "local color" that he