Monday, 5 September 2011
Desert Encounter!
I walked past a plastered wall and noticed that a piece of plaster had fallen away and revealed this eye. It reminded me of the veiled face of a bedouin woman. When I was a baby, my mother caught sight of a desert nomad heading in her direction. He galloped his stallion furiously towards her and she, evidently, held me up in front of her. He pulled his horse up at the last moment in a cloud of dust. With a hand resting on his Khanja (a large curved knife), he raised his ancient rifle above his head in salute and raced off back into the Cyrenaican desert! What do you see in this picture?
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A lizard - if I half-close one eye; scaly skin. Those huge komodo dragon ones.
ReplyDeleteStrange: When I was a child (5 maybe), I had a re-occuring dream of being in the desert and having the same experience (from your mothers perspective that is) I vividly remember the wind blowing the man's blue headscarf and that the horse was white. He chanted the same word over and over again, And it was quite frightening.
ReplyDeleteI never really made head or tail of it, and am just remembering it now, having read your post!!
Well now I see the face/eye too! Quite wonderful. An interesting concept that the women forced to wear those damnable veils would become so invisible as to be mistaken for stone.
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