Iraqi Sandstorm

[paisley]

pics from the bbc

ominous

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Freaky. I remember Deb and I doing New Year's in the Sinai in 1990-91, as warships were building in the Gulf of Aqaba getting ready for Gulf War I. The hotel we were hanging out at had a big party set up for the tourists/travellers, who proceded to get completely wrecked; a band from Cairo had come in and were tearing into a smoking "Lay Down Sally" when the power suddenly went off across half of Egypt. That left the people there with nothing to do but drink more and fall over in the dark. As this whole scene was unfolding, the doses I'd taken kicked into high gear, and when I looked along the parapet of the hotel, where we'd been walking surveying everything going on down below, I saw that a vulture had settled on the wall and was watching it all with seemingly the same interest. Behind him was the emptiness of the desert mountains, with only the noise of the revellers echoing off them. The vulture stayed, and stayed still, for a very long time. Then you could look across the hotel compound, past the beach, and towards Saudi Arabia, to the dim outlines of all the instruments of war being slowly arrayed for the coming slaughter....

Everything got a little fuzzy after that. I'm just glad there wasn't one of those sandstorms, or that would have been a bit too much for me right then on a variety of levels.

On the upside, we met a very nice Egyptian deadhead that night who took us in for a few weeks while the war took off, and kept our minds off it as well as we all could.