as be bent he caught sight of his own long, flowing beard. Odd, he had been clean shaven for as long as he could remember, and certainly was when he had boarded at this house as a callow undergrad. It struck him at that moment that what he was wearing was not really a bathrobe, more like a...now, he knew this; he had been to a lecture about it...yes, that was it, a thawb. Wasn't that supposed to go with a...a...something to do with coffee...a keffiyeh? He scratched his head, and was almost not surprised when his fingers encountered coarse cloth. Something blinking at the corner of the desk caught his eye. At the edge of the desk lay a GPS device, a small, persistent white light blinking in the top corner, the name of some middle-eastern sounding place in the center of the screen, and, yes, he became aware of it now, a soft, barely audible voice intoning over and over again a sentence in what sounded like some ancient language. A prayer? Some urgent coded message across the mists of time? Or just turn left at the next oasis?
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