After breakfast the boys went off to tend the camels, while the girls stayed to clean up and work at household chores. The boys rode the camels, shouting to each other in loud voices that could be heard for miles in the clear air of the desert. But there was no roughhousing. For one Arab to grab or strike another was unthinkable.

Nick tried to mount a camel. Grabbing a tassel hanging from the saddle, he tried to pull himself up as he had seen the other boys do. Sweat blinded his eyes and he fell off. Everyone laughed. His face burned and he kept trying, but couldn’t do it till Youssef helped him. Youssef was his friend.

All that day, Youssef taught him how to speak Arabic. In the days that followed, everyone he spoke to corrected him and taught him. He learned at an astonishing rate, as though his mind had been a car idling along in first gear suddenly pushed into overdrive. Even Sheikh Zaid remarked at his ability.

Arabic was very different from English, Nick learned. The most important difference was that everything was either masculine or feminine. The way you said something depended on the gender of the person saying it, the gender of the person you were talking to and the gender of the thing itself. Any word associated with a thing, such as an adjective or a number, was also modified to reflect the gender and number. Usually, if a word ended with “a” it was feminine.

“Why is everything male and female?” Nick asked Youssef.

“Look at the world and show me what is not male or female,” Youssef said.

“What about things, like rocks or tents?”

“That’s the hard part,” Youssef said with a laugh.

That afternoon, Safooq began to teach Nick how to hold a rifle. The old British Enfield .303 was bigger than Nick and he could barely raise it. Safooq held it for him as Nick squeezed off his first shot at a nearby tamarisk tree. The recoil bumped his chin and he began to whimper.

“Crying is not the way of men. If you cry, you should not shoot,” Safooq said and Nick choked back the tears. That evening he asked Sheikh Zaid if he wasn’t too little to learn to shoot. He was afraid everyone would laugh at him because he couldn’t lift the rifle. To be laughed at was a dishonor.

“You are Bedu now. All Bedu can shoot,” Zaid said.

“But why is it so important?” Nick asked.

Zaid looked down at the boy with some surprise. “A man who is not a warrior might as well be a woman.”