Drought had hit hard throughout the Kingdom, and what had begun as a trickle of refugees had become a flood. We saw many families we knew along the way. Hope lay in the south and the largesse of the British. Some, like us, had contacts and relatives in Aden. We were lucky, for we never once fell into the path of either the Imam’s or the tribesmen’s armies, nor were we ever close to any of their skirmishes. Those first nights on the road I barely slept. I kept waking up and seeing a ghost—a girl with my face, squatting in the dust next to my pallet. She rocked back and forth on her heels and accused me with narrowed eyes. I didn’t know it then, but I was looking at a cast-off version of myself—the Adela I was leaving behind. Sometimes in my dreams, I still see her, this left-behind Adela. She cries out to me. She begs me not to leave. She tugs on my ears and tells me that the tragedy that later befell my family would not have happened if only I had stayed. But when I awake, I tell myself that this is foolish.
