Zarb is the dish that defines the Bedouin feast. Meat — usually lamb or chicken — is rubbed with spice, layered with onions and vegetables on a wide tray, and lowered into a pit dug in the sand. The pit holds a fire that has been burning down to coals for hours. The food is sealed under sand and left to cook for two or three hours, until the meat falls from the bone. When the tray comes out of the earth, the smell carries across the camp.
Galayah Bandura is the lunch we cook on the route — a fast tomato stew with onion, garlic, fresh tomato, sometimes peppers, eaten with Bedouin flatbread baked on the *saj*, a domed iron griddle over the fire.
Bedouin tea is shrub-strong, sweet, infused with *maramiyya* (a wild sage that grows around the dunes). It is served from a kettle that lives at the edge of the fire. Refills are not a question — they are the rhythm of an evening.
Cardamom coffee — bitter, light, served in small cups, poured three small times — is reserved for arrival, departure, and certain conversations.