The boy understood intuitively what he meant, even without ever having set foot in the desert before. Whenever he saw the sea, or a fire, he fell silent, impressed by their elemental force. I've learned things from the sheep, and I've learned things from crystal, he thought. I can learn something from the desert, too. It seems old and wise.
The wind never stopped, and the boy remembered the day he had sat at the fort in Tarifa with this same wind blowing in his face. It reminded him of the wool from his sheep… his sheep who were now seeking food and water in the fields of Andalusia, as they always had.
"They're not my sheep anymore," he said to himself, without . "They must be used to their new shepherd, and have probably already forgotten me. That's good. Creatures like the sheep, that are used to traveling, know about moving on."
He thought of the merchant's daughter, and was sure that she had probably married. Perhaps to a , or to another shepherd who could read and could tell her exciting stories—after all, he probably wasn't the only one. But he was excited at his intuitive understanding of the camel driver's comment: maybe he was also learning the universal language that deals with the past and the present of all people. "Hunches," his mother used to call them. The boy was beginning to understand that intuition is really a sudden of the soul into the universal current of life, where the histories of all people are connected, and we are able to know everything, because it's all written there.
"Maktub," the boy said, remembering the crystal merchant.
The desert was all sand in some stretches, and rocky in others. When the ............