Jafar al-Sharif would sit cross-legged with the journal of Ali Maimun open on his lap piecing out unusual words. He’d make the sound of each letter in turn, then try to integrate them into one continuous sound. By the second or third try he could usually guess what the word was, and Cari would tell him whether he was right or wrong. After a while he caught onto the fact that certain letters frequently appeared in given combinations, and that those combinations often formed words embedded in other words. If the need and the conditions had not been so desperate, Jafar would have been utterly elated at the thrill of these new discoveries in his life.
The travelers skirted the eastern shore of the Bitter Sea, through that narrow tract of fertile land between the inland ocean and the Gobrani D
