The land above the rain shadow on the windward slope of the mountains, so fresh and green with the paint of rain, had assumed ten minutes after the storm subsided the look of faded stone, not unlike the pale, medieval gloom of Yale’s dominant architecture—and of so many exhausted New England schools badly in need of a restorative—but that wasn’t the connection. The towering trees with their intertwined limbs and their astounding motility creaked and groaned like the old wooden ships riding at anchor along the quays of the Connecticut tributaries; that wasn’t it either. The floor of the forest gave off the ammoniacal smell of vegetable matter, a gagging effluvium that scorched the nostrils, salted the eyes, and lodged achingly in the temples—and then I knew what crystallized the association: the gassy stench, there in this corner of a foreign field, was Armbruster’s office.

What dispelled the tedium in town were the surprising but inevitable clamors and crises and alarms that no day was without. Most of them—those which concerned us—involved the quasi-King who held a forthright and empirical attitude toward our gifts. He used the tennis racquet, it was whispered, to swat the blimplike bugs. The tennis net went to the royal bird catcher to snare the iridescent birds for the pot. The pit bull he ate in a puree of toothpaste, washing it down with the hair dye. One of his concubines tried to bathe a child in the washing machine, but no real harm came of it.

All this made for considerable excitement and gave us something to talk about. We Americans shook our heads with awe and wonder at the superb efficiency of Saeed al Sadr’s digestive tract while our hosts wistfully and endlessly discussed the prerogatives of royalty. They made up songs about it, their black eyes staring for inspiration into the desert. They were a weather-resistant people, tempered and toughened by the heat, wearing their robes to insulate themselves against it. In the ghostly pale of dawn and dusk they took on a phantasmic, deathlike insubstantiality.