Four camels twisted their legs and folded them into seats on which they sat.  He did the same and sat on his own feet.  Perhaps the caravan was to settle in for the night at this watering hole.  The herders though made no moves to unload the giant baskets their camels bore; they were crawling instead on knees to water’s edge, to drink, it seemed, as must the wildlife around.  They stretched out over the water and peered in.  Ah, inspecting the water, he thought.  Each lowered his nose to almost touch the water’s surface: smelling the water, he thought.  With their knees buried in sand, hands clasped behind their backs, they took on the look of cranes taking inventory.  They were as still.  They peered in, to penetrate water, when one hand suddenly unclasped, and it pointed.  The other herders crawled to — not quick and hurried but so as not to disturb — a vantage point from which they could lean out to the spot to which the finger still pointed.  He took a series of camera shots just as their arms flung all at once up to the heavens, reaching for something, and then back down to cover their faces, to take in, it seemed, the impact of the moment.  He cautiously crawled through the deep sand to a point close enough to barely make out four small translucent fish pooled in a corner of the watering hole and hear low muffled chants of, It gives us hope to see you here, vibrate out to him.  He set his camera aside and let himself fall into the moment the moment his hands covered his own face.  He felt memories being emptied out and with each instant feeling cherished for it.  The herders, perhaps sensing it, opened up:  the four fish to now be enshrined in his memory were the only of their kind on Earth, were to be found in that watering hole alone, were, like the herders themselves, of this specific place and no other.  He heard in their telling an ancient voice speak through of place not as the spot on which one stands as much as a specific locale from which one emerges, on which one grows, and into which one bends back.  Such a place was home to these herders.  He was of no such place, so why then was he, too, feeling so at home?  The herders had by then casually fallen back and molded themselves comfortable seats in the sand and taken to regaling in traditional lore he could grasp only through the measured cadence and tenor of their speech.  It wasn’t this place making him feel so at home, it came to him, as it was the four herders themselves — for, in them, all who had passed through this place had a home.