"See that fence." Sol points toward barbed wire strands and posts. "The white dust along here helps guard against the suicide bombers. The footprints show if someone comes across the fence. Sometimes the terrorists try to walk only on the rocks."
"Beyond this point it looks like there are only rocks," Rory says.
"But the Bedouin tracks even on the rocks. The Bedouin is the best tracker in the world."
After a moment, Megan says, "I thought deserts were sandy."
"A desert is a place with less than two hundred centimeters of rain a year. It don't matter about the land. Rock or no rock. To be without rain is what makes a desert."
"Oh."
Sol points to a jumbled draping of red and blue rugs interspersed with canvas and cotton sheeting in clashing prints. The bundling of cloth is supported by leaning stakes, and it's obviously a huge, make-shift tent. "Three, maybe five families live there."
"Is that a typical Bedouin encampment?" James aims his camera toward it.
Sol nods. "Sometimes the Bedouin builds walls. But he still covers the roof with the canvas like a tent. It is what he is used to. See the TV antenna."
"Is that for real?" Megan asks. "There's telly out here in the desert?"
"The head man has the TV. The women do the work while the men gather to watch the soap operas."
"Where do they get electricity?"
"Sometimes they use the car battery. Sometimes solar panels. They have nothing in the tents to eat, but every chief of the tribe, he has the TV to watch."
White dust envelopes the squalid settlement. The tents and antenna disappear.
Just then a girl walks by on the side of the road. Blond and thin, she's wearing khaki shorts and a white tank-top, and her swaying pony tail is shaded by a red ball cap.
"Stupid tourists," Sol says. "They don't know nothing. Last month, two women is killed in the desert for the money in their purses. This girl has the expensive camera."
I tap him on the shoulder. "Shouldn't we stop and warn her?"
"Girls that age. They know everything. What can you tell to warn them?"
The Bedouin child a few miles back leaves no doubt how his grown siblings or parents will react to a young foreign woman in shorts.
"I think we need to stop and tell her it's dangerous to be out here alone."
Before I finsh my sentence, the van reaches a rise and races downhill again, and Elizabeth indicates a tour bus parked beside a kiosk. "I imagine that's her group. She's probably only walking ahead a little to stretch her legs."
I glance back.
The girl's red hat has disappeared behind the dust and the dunes.
"I still think we need to say something to her," I say.
"What can you tell girls who thinks they know everything when they don't know nothing?" Sol repeats.
He doesn't stop.
