Crescent moon

    By Karin Zeitvogel

 His name meant ‘moon’ in Arabic. Hilal. Crescent moon. He was a young Bedouin, a man-child with eyes of translucent amber and skin as smooth as the sandstone aqueducts leading to Petra, Jordan’s wonder of the world, that have been burnished by the ceaseless passage of water.

His eyes twinkled like stars in the night sky, borrowing light from the sun. When Hilal spoke, his words carried the wisdom of his people and a contentment that comes from living close to nature, in league with the sky and the open spaces of the desert; the wind that bounces off ragged hillsides painted in the bright oranges and reds of the Jordanian desert.

Hilal was 24 and had been working for 12 years. He started out leading tourists on donkey rides down sandy trails and into the history and the spectacular beauty of Petra. His schooling had been minimal, and yet his English was embellished with wit and colloquialisms most students who study in classrooms never pick up.

“You want to go for a camel ride?” Hilal asked me.

“I’ve been asked a dozen times and no, I don’t,” I replied.

“Why not? Live a little,” he insisted. His eyes flashed. He knew he’d impressed me with the deft turn of phrase.

Many years previous, I told the moon-boy with sparkling eyes, I accepted an offer to ride a camel. My steed was the youngest of the herd, and we were at the tail-end of a convoy of camels that was supposed to head out into the desert for a bonfire and festivities. A tourist thing.  Well, my camel must have been stung by something because before we had even done three camel-paces, it began bucking furiously, doing its best to throw me. I clung fast, suppressed a desire to shout out “Yee haaaaaaa” and managed to stay on.

It’s a long way down from a camel’s hump, I had thought, vowing to cut short my camel-riding and rodeo career.

“Where did that happen? Egypt?” Hilal asked in all earnestness, holding me tighter with his eyes than I had held that camel with every muscle in my thighs.

“Tunisia,” I said. “In the desert near Tozeur.”

North African camels were different to the ones in Jordan, Hilal said, still trying to convince me to live a little and ride a camel. But I still refused to clamber on board one of the ships of the desert, who to me had become shits of the desert after the episode in Tunisia.

I had met Hilal in one of the meeting rooms carved into the mountains at Petra. Not the Treasury, made famous by the Indiana Jones movie, but a smaller, less noticeable niche that was further down the main path, past a dozen camels waiting for a victim, then up some sandstone steps worn down by the passage of time and tourists.

“Before Indiana Jones, we had maybe 100 tourists here a year. Now we have thousands,” Hilal said.

His eyes twinkled a little too much and I sensed exaggeration.

Crescent Moon wandered over me with his eyes of amber. And then, as he had done with his offer of a camel ride, he awakened another bad memory by blurting out another question.

“How old are you?”

The question took me by surprise and, like the question about whether I wanted to ride a nice Jordanian camel, took me back to when another young man had asked me the same question, but without the sparkle that I saw in Hilal’s eyes.

“How old are you?” asked the captain, whose name meant nothing as poetic as crescent moon. His name meant ‘famed warrior.’

His deep dark eyes sometimes hid a world of agony that had stained his life since he had spent time as an anonymous warrior in Iraq.

 

See the rest here: http://www.womensvoicesforchange.org/2008/10/how-old-are-you-asked-the-boy-with-amber-eyes.html