East Delta Traveling

It wouldn't get light, and it still wouldn't...and then suddenly it did. First a flush of rose started at the lip of the sky where the teeth of the mountains bit sharply into it and crept slowly upward, like flames lapping inside the dark skull of the heavens. Then the acacia trees, tow-headed, twisted figures stooped in the lee of the mountains, bowed into focus one by one, flinging long shadows onto the shale. Creatures seemed to skitter among the tumble of boulders lining the road, and I wondered what sorts of animals lived out here--foxes? hyenas?--but in the trembling dawn light it was impossible to be sure. In all likelihood it was nothing more than my imagination that made me think I saw a flash of ears, a pair of beady eyes, a tail whisking behind a pedestal of broken rock.

And so our bus rocketed south down the highway, while the driver, a dimple-armed fatso crammed into a generic blue uniform too small for his generous body, smoked his thirtieth cigarette out the open window and drove carelessly, his free hand groping the clutch like it was some part of a woman. I met his eyes in the mirror and he smiled at me, a girl traveling alone in the Sinai in cutoff jeans and reddened by the sun, rims of salt crystalized around her toenails. He reached back to hand me a tea-stained leaf of a British tabloid discarded on the bus by a previous English-speaking traveler. Alf shokr, I told him, a thousand thanks. The lead story was about a man beaten to death for cutting in line at a supermarket in London. Shopper slain in tragic queue quarrel, read the headline.

I unearthed a half-eaten bag of crumbled chips from my backpack and ate them one by one as the road uncurled unhurriedly before us.