Caravans transport the precious across the sand. They move at night, the only time when it’s not too hot, and even then the heat has soaked into the ground and comes at you from below rather than above, which is somehow even worse. Silk curtains are a silly way of keeping the dust out of the peopled carriages, but they’re mostly for the sun anyway. Centuries ago this was how you moved – at night, cloaked for protection, jostled and uncomfortably confined. Whoever thought this was romantic was senseless.
“What is the endgame of all these megaconstructions? Well, in ancient Egypt, the late 6th-dynasty state had not only become so large that it was nonfunctional (think of the giant cable company that never answers the phone), it had also become a mass of intercompeting elites who used the government to serve no one but themselves. (Think of today’s relentless multimillion-dollar bonuses, payoffs, bribes, insider trading, and fraud, all happening openly with no one going to prison.) As the competition ramped up, and as the Egyptian state became impoverished from mismanagement, the end result was nothing less than war.” – Kara Cooney
