Dunes Whisper

  The valley where Umm Theeban dreamed. Photograph by Saleh Suliman.  Umm Theeban came out of the cave before the light did. She stood on the ledge where the mountain shoulders down into the wadi, and she waited until she heard the others stirring behind her. That was half the trick. Say a thing to sleeping animals and it stays in the cave. Say it to waking ones and it walks. "Last night I saw a great thing," she said. "Something is coming to this valley that has never come to it before." Nobody asked her what. That was the other half. She had been thin for three summers. In a pack, a thin hyena eats last and speaks never, and she had learned both. Then one morning she said she had dreamed, and for the length of that morning the young ones stopped shoving each other and looked at her, and she found that being looked at fed her in a way that meat did not. Theeban, her eldest, took it down the slope at first light and told it at the water hole, which was not a water h...