Page 112 - November 2020

112
Litterateur
November 2020

Poems on Kings Highway Jordan under the

nocturnal desert sky

Eduard Schmidt-Zorner

Eduard Schmidt-Zorner is a translator
and writer of poetry, haibun, haiku and
short stories.He writes in four
languages: English, French, Spanish and
German.He lives in County Kerry,
Ireland, and is a Irish citizen, born in
Germany.

Here is his story written twenty years
ago.

What I had always longed for: to sleep in the desert, in the open air, under the stars.

I only knew the desert from visits to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Oman, I had never
spent more than one hour in this environment and only in air-conditioned cars with
the prospect of a cool drink at the hotel in Riyadh or Jeddah.

I was ordered to do the inventory of a spare parts store in a phosphate mine in
Jordan where five of the biggest excavators were in operation and the contract
agreement provided for spare parts storage and supply of parts for the service
technicians on site.

Flight to Amman. I was picked up the next morning with a heavy four-wheeler,
driven by a Scottish engineer, who looked rather as if he was an actor in a pirate
movie. He stopped in a suburb and bought provisions: Several six-packs of beer,
canned sausage, baked beans, toilet paper, and cigarettes.

Then he showed me how to drive in Jordan. I used often to drive through the
Balkans, spent many hours on the Autoput Zagreb to Belgrade and crossed
Hungary and Poland, but this experience surpassed all my experienced adventures.