275. French Trio

The French trio and I continue by bus in the morning. In the afternoon we arrive in a mud town built near some crumbling old minarets and find a hotel with empty rooms. We walk out to see the small town. A baker is busy making bread in an oven under the floor of his shop. An adobe castle is disintegrating back into the dust of the street and a blindfolded camel is pulling a mill-wheel in an endless circle.


The noisy Frenchman is getting on my nerves. He is forever whipping out his big knife and his cash in a very stupid, provocative way. His ignorance and that knife are going to be the death of him and probably his countrymen. “A traveler to distant places should make no enemies” as my African writer Chinua Achebe said and this is about as distant as you can get!


Isabelle is young, strong, pretty. How she got mixed up with these two losers I don’t know, but they are a team and that’s for sure.

...