Skippy Peanut Butter

The grandfather of Husham was a complacent and bewhiskered old bat, who had begotten of a son and three daughters to a single wife. There was a time before he was an old bat, and in this time he had managed a score of camels and attracted many tents about his camps. Despite, perhaps, the will of his god, he had not taken another wife. There were few that questioned his practice in the matter, and those few men only passed leers at him or denounced him as a fool alone in the broad daylight atop a sandy mound.

The orange and yellow expanse likely lay out in every direction, rippling and churning with heat. Yonder a whip of wind would beat across the loose dunes and fling spume into the air, like a great and invisible finger tracing along in the sand. The sight would make them wince as they scanned the dusty world which drank the rays of the sun and turned them to fire and distant seas. Amid a fine cloth of beige or yellow, the viewer's eyes would be dark and squinted and deeply set in a face covered above and below from the reign of the sun: taking in the true width of endless desert.

He would spit and mutter and kick sand about himself before settling, perhaps adjusting his cloth and drinking in one more blinding observation of the desert and its staggering expanse. He could be sure then that his outburst had not been observed, and the cold bath of fear his rage had taken soothed him as he stared out across the burnt world. Distantly, likely,  in the south west was a reddish peak like the rounded tip of a gigantic and withered stone set before time commenced in earnest: the foremost mountains of Edom. From this land came this man and every man of every subordinate family of the great nomadic clan.

The men atop the mounds were heads of households and fathers and husbands themselves. Many had camels of their own, which they led to water and feed by themselves or with their often many sons. He would have been still and maybe content, knowing exactly where the parcels of his household lie. He could spy upon his camels in the distance, and even count their brown forms along the strip of whatever pale yellow or dusty brown strip they were eating at. His daughters were perhaps with their mothers, his wives, gathering water or preparing meals. His sons were among him, managing their father's beasts or milling about simply trying to defy the heat. If his wives were not all occupied at home, they could be among the household of another man, under the roof of a different tent with other womenfolk. The husband would be off doing a similar job as the sand-kicker, perhaps cursing the same name or their own luck or the sheer amount of spawn they had to feed and tend and bury and mourn while watching their camels graze.

All those gathered in inner turmoil to wander some and stand upon the dunes would have beards and crooked noses and dark complexions from years of sun with deep lines along the brow and cheeks topped with hundreds of little tributary lines to the side of each eye. These men glared from draping head dresses of perhaps the faintest green or what could have once been red. Their camels would have been grazing land that was often only fit for goats, chewing on brambles of brown twig to suck what nutrition could be had there. Sometimes the dromedaries keeled over and let out tremendous, heaving sighs, and the owner would scramble to the body and lament. The late stud perhaps sired only a couple of children and one was sold to a Moabite at a fine price. Her brother could have been a swarthy beast but untested, having probably not served in one of the great cross-dessert and mountain treks, burdened with goods for market in the great dwelling of Petra.

No, this creature was born shortly after the beginning of their journey in Teman far to the south, and the Moabite merchant was encountered closer to sandy Moab than mountainous Edom, where the stone fought the whips of wind and sun and spilled down sparse and wonderful brooks and streams. Here camels were joyous in dining on the brush and bred well, and horses could even be maintained among the infrequent and guarded plains and hillsides. Many clans and tribes dwelt here and vied for land and feuded for generations. But this very clan, whose head was a lean, severe figure with heavy brows and grey mustaches, was one of the few that braved a portion of the great and endless desert of the east. Many simply followed the leader to promising encampments, in which his keen eyes would spy brown or green. But rarely, if all had pleased the god Kaus with fine sacrifices, he would descry the faint shimmer that brought his tongue to his lips. He would stare and his hardened eyes would widen and become lively.

 In these places men of other households, who followed the slender chief with their wives and camels and sheep and tents, would work quickly to find a spot to survive. They would scan within a growing radius of a pool of water and stand upon their claims, sometimes dragging a camel or two to further mark the point. It was finally the chief's discretion to whom plots were allocated and always his most loyal of retainers grazed nearer and more successfully.

Often tents were set fairly near each other, as it was the women's doing while the men scrambled to find strips of heavenly green or squabble over grazing rights to a patch of ancient weeds. The chief of these Temanites had claim to the finest parcel of vegetation, with his most esteemed relatives grazing nearby. These men could rest some and watch their wives and children lounge by the clear and shallow pool, having finished their water-gathering quickly. They could jeer and praise their siblings or cousins riding healthy camels with ease and prowess.

One such of these riders, but not the foremost of that lot, was the father of Husham, who was a comely and rather slight individual as his mother, with the dark, squinting eyes and dense brow of his father. He was agile and fearless atop a dromedary, learning to master and care for the animals at a young age. His affection for the beasts of burden was perhaps misplaced later in life, as many speculated he was far too conservative with his sale of camels; it was claimed he had turned down the foremost Ammonite merchant in trade, at a simply incredible price. Like his father, he need not be made to hock off his workforce and could instead drive a great and seasonal march from Edom into the far north of Moab and Ammon and back again, loaded with the wealth of far kingdoms to sell in the great Edomite capital and seat of power: Petra.

With enough tents to follow and the menfolk therein, brigands became almost a nonissue. Every grown man of every family carried a blade, and an attack upon the camp was a crisis concerning the wellbeing and fortunes of all. The brandished, curved blades were like strips of sun in the daylight, wielding a tremendous and fiery power. Some tried to put swords in the hands of the young, that their shimmer in the night might be enough to scare thieves away. But when mettle was tested the boys were scarred or disemboweled and their fathers lamented.

Four of such trips did these Temanites make by Husham's grandfather's lead, while subordinate families came and went and broke from the heat and thirst and drifted to burn in the waste or made their fortunes and resettled their homeland to give birth to the vast tribal armies that came from Teman in some generations.
Many became integral pieces in the great camel trade, with perhaps two score dromedaries left to the possession of a few worthy and mighty sons. Beginning enterprises of the nature was straightforward for clan men, who had only to pull sturdy camels from the south across the desert to be sold at market in Dibon, where the nomads of the eastern desert would gather great trains of the beasts and drive them away, into the vast, sandy expanse. What lay at the end of the sands, if such a thing there was, perhaps only some of the few and desolate tribes of the Arameans knew.

In this world the Temanites made fortunes or lost everything in the unrelenting heat. None matched the wealth attained by the grandfather of Husham, who drove a mighty gang of beasts with a tiny but sturdy family from Petra to Dibon twice, and twice further from Dibon to Rabbath-Ammon. For his enterprise the men of his clan eternally respected and needed him, but for this they also cursed his name and kicked sand about in the huge, orange world of dust and shifting dunes. They perhaps felt puny, weak, or foolish against the oppressive glare and expanse, the biting wind and grand, near unearthly movements of dust. But their senses were not yet lost to heat or resentment and they still carefully eyed their brown spots in the distance, just over some impermanent, sandy slope.

Toward the end of each and every journey (which only the patriarch described and maybe three loyal cousins and an uncle endured to see entirely) the sand would turn imperceptibly to a firm and grey substance not unlike dirt. It became rocky just below the ground and soon they were treading on pebbles and stones within the earth and there perhaps was even a hardy tree amid the hillside boulders. Altogether view had been lost of any of those sliding yellow waves except to the south, which seemed a distant world now. The sun held less power here, for no conspiracy lay in biting and blinding sand along the stony slopes, which raised and leveled giving respite under narrow and crooked little trees. Every inclination would gain and settle until the grey wall of stones became so sheer that it could not conceivably be surmounted. And so the band would veer west and to the left, where the stones were pressed into the earth by camels and horses and chariots and wagon trains, and to the left their elevation could be seen off sheer drops into the jagged abyss below.

There were perhaps lulls in the movement along the wall, when dromedaries wailed their scream-like chortle and begged to feast off rocky weeds in the seems. Like this the great party would wind and wind along the ancient gangway. They would march a great while in a column perhaps two days, making what camp they could in the face of death. Camels or poorly bound wares went tumbling and many lamented, feeling robbed and ruined. Down would spill the gangly, crumpled body of the wailing camel and down would crumble and wail the sobbing nomad.

It could have been the keen, familiar set of eyes near the head of the train that squinted narrowly and discerned the first tidings. North, around  a bend walled by the great, sheer stone on the right and a rocky, ruinous fall to the left, he may have spotted a single, shabby camel chewing and staring mindlessly. Past the camel there was a man, or perhaps a young boy, who stared south as the camel did but with more interest. He would have seen the chief many yards away, rounding the bend atop a dromedary with a long face fully exposed below a wrap with the creases and weather-beaten lines and the deep-set, wanderer's eyes glaring. His brow was high and black and his skin very light sienna. The head dress would have contrasted his relatively simple garb of cream and yellow tones, being as red as the failing sun in the west in reign of all its tumultuous wake of sky, with rosy pinks and furious purples and any multitude of colors about the fringe of its influence.

The boy might stare agape first at the sheer redness of the man's cloth, then at the redness of those of his counterparts just behind, then mostly and finally at the number of beasts and owners and children and wives that marched all behind him in a fine line around the narrow bend. The boy might try to count the figures or shake his head to dispel whatever mirage had befallen him. But there, before him and his father's lowly camel, was a long and narrow caravan of desert-dwellers with tents and provisions in tow. They were somber and uniform in their walk and now they saw him and the unfortunate camel. He may have waved or stood speechless as the chief lead his people on and past the great slide of rocks the boy stood on, which rose steadily up to a crest that could not be made out from down there.

Past a boy and a camel and many stones the band would march where the land widened and the great gaps below and west seemed shallower now, but still ruinous. They carried on until they met the break in the hill of piled stones which was a narrow path that could fit three abreast and rose between two sides of densely piled rocks and boulders. Into this they turned, and immediately one could tell that the great mound of rocks leading up was made by men, who tumbled or placed the stones in a great abundance everywhere but that path, both left and right. As they climbed and looked around, they might soon be unable to see past the boulders the area from whence they had ascended, for the trail bent subtly east, and the astute could have spotted patches in the great crunch of stones where nothing but tough grey earth lay, and as up and up they climbed, more of these patches became apparent for the err of men and wear of wind and time had rendered the fortification incomplete.

The incline was none too steep, but long, and rutted with wheel-tracks and a fine dust kicked up from hooves and feet. By now they may have crested the hill and met the sentries between the sides of rocky tumult, which looked now more like a great assemblage of pebbles below and with only small stones at hand, far different from the heaps of boulders below. These men would hail and ask from whence the clan had departed. They would have fine caps of bronze and peach or orange tunics that concealed fabulous curved blades and copper-tipped spears slung across their backs. These bearded guards would know full well the name Teman and the fine quality of the dromedaries in train. At the deep red of the cloths among the patriarch's foremost retainers or the beauty of their wives they would have gawked. Entry they granted but just past this crest there was no town or tower or treasure-trove guarded, but a wide and relatively flat ground (in any direction save south) of that same greyish earth that remitted to scrub and brush only rarely with many less stones.

Yonder, however, there lie the blocky, brownish forms of domiciles way ahead and north, where many dwelt and traded and crafted and many more tarried only briefly, a stop in some great migratory pursuit. There were no walls or defenses save the battered and ancient ruin of some decrepit tower to the west. Beyond this place and especially close in the north and west was a vastness that could have been desert or plains or shimmering sea, as the sun made it seem in the fleeting hours of daylight. No drop nor any walls of rock nor trees could be seen out there, and the puny buildings seemed to be slowly worn away by the unremitting waste that did not end to any rocky enclave, but simply faltered and continued around and lapped hungrily at the edges of the vista.

Clearly now could be seen the waning eminence of the desert with its orange, colossal body looming east like a massive, swaying  army brooding at camp in a great terrestrial siege. There could have been no doubt now, and all newcomers would lament for in their ears was the howl of the wind and to their lips floated the hot breath of the desert. It was thus: Dibon was not a bastion from the great sand sea or its terminus, but its very western gateway.