Su Yao's Dazzling Counterattack Chapter 21
The Sahara sun blazed like a molten coin as Su Yao's jeep bounced over dunes, following a trail of camel hoof prints. Up ahead, a cluster of black tents materialized—a Bedouin camp, their goat-hair shelters rippling in the wind like living things. A man in a white *thobe* emerged, his face weathered by sand and sun, and lifted a hand in greeting. "I am Adil," he said, his Arabic laced with the lilt of desert dialect. "You come for the *hashimi* wool."
Their mission: collaborate with the Bedouin to create a desert-resistant textile, merging their prized *hashimi* goat wool—thick enough to block sandstorms, soft enough to sleep on—with the seaweed-metal blend. But the first morning revealed a clash of worlds. Adil's wife, Leila, watched with amusement as Elena set up a portable sewing machine. "We don't use machines," she said, her gold earrings jangling as she shook her head. "Hands remember. Machines forget."
The Bedouin wove in nomadic rhythm, moving their looms from oasis to oasis with the seasons. Su Yao's team, accustomed to fixed workshops in Marrakech or Shanghai, struggled to keep up. When they suggested building a permanent structure to protect the wool from sand, Adil laughed. "The desert is our workshop. If the wind wants to shape the wool, let it." His words proved prophetic when a sandstorm hit that night, scouring their metal threads and tangling the *hashimi* fibers into unworkable knots.
Cultural friction deepened over design. The Bedouin favored geometric patterns—triangles for dunes, circles for water holes—woven in earth tones that camouflaged with the desert. But Lin, eager to showcase the metal's shimmer, added streaks of silver and blue. "It looks like a tourist blanket," Leila said, pushing the swatch away. "Our wool doesn't need to shout. It whispers."
A more urgent crisis emerged when the *hashimi* goats fell ill, their wool growing sparse and brittle. The village healer blamed it on "foreign spirits" in the seaweed-metal fabric, which they'd stored near the goats' pen. "You bring metal from the sea to poison our animals," a elder muttered, his staff thudding angrily against the sand. The team was ordered to leave, their equipment packed into jeeps by sunset.
Su Yao lingered by the campfire, watching Leila hand-spin wool by starlight. "What if we follow your ways?" she asked, her voice soft. "No machines. No fixed looms. Just your patterns, your wool, and our metal—if the goats recover." Leila studied her for a long moment, then nodded. "We'll try. But the desert decides."
They moved with the Bedouin for a week, their tents dismantled and rebuilt at dawn, looms lashed to camel saddles. Su Yao learned to spin wool while walking, her fingers raw but steady, as Adil taught her to read the wind by the way sand danced. Elena, forced to abandon her sewing machine, discovered that hand-stitching the metal threads into the wool created a flexible weave—perfect for withstanding sandstorms. "It's like stitching with lightning," she said, grinning as the fabric caught the sun.
To save the goats, they turned to Bedouin remedies: feeding them *sidr* leaves, hanging amulets woven from date palm fronds near the pen. Lin, researching desert botany, realized the seaweed-metal storage containers were leaching trace chemicals; they switched to clay pots lined with goat fat, as the Bedouin had done for centuries. Within days, the goats' coats grew thick again. "The desert forgives," Adil said, passing Su Yao a cup of bitter coffee.
The breakthrough came during a moonlit weaving session. Leila, inspired by the way the metal threads glinted like stars, added tiny silver stitches to the dune patterns—"for the travelers who get lost," she said. Su Yao responded by weaving seaweed fibers into the water hole circles, making them swell slightly when damp. "Now it drinks like the desert," she explained, and Leila laughed, a sound like wind chimes.
On their last day, the Bedouin held a *suhur* feast before dawn, serving dates and spiced tea. Adil draped a completed cloak over Su Yao's shoulders: *hashimi* wool thick as armor, metal threads winking like constellations, patterns that shifted from dunes to stars depending on how you turned it. "It will keep you safe," he said. "In the desert, we protect our own."
As they drove away, Su Yao looked back to see the camp disappearing into the dunes, the cloaks fluttering from tent poles like flags. She thought of Leila's words: "The desert doesn't care about borders. It cares about those who respect its rules."
Her phone buzzed with a message from the Vatican—photos of the Pope wearing their liturgical vestments, a crowd of faithful cheering. Then another from the Navajo reservation: a video of children wearing their drought-resistant uniforms, splashing in rainwater.
Su Yao smiled, clutching the cloak tighter. The desert, the sea, the mountains—all threads in the same tapestry. And the work, as always, was just beginning.