Somewhere in the Nafusa Mountains, at the foot of an uncharted trail, the Libu people have been trading pickles with ghosts for generations.
They put the pickles out at night. In the morning, the pickles are gone. In their place: raw, uncut gold, far in excess of the market rate for pickled vegetables. They’ve worked out the quantity — too much and some gets left behind, too little and the gold decreases — so now it’s calibrated. A set amount of pickles. A set amount of gold. Nobody has ever seen who takes the pickles. Every attempt to watch has been defeated by what Ismael describes, diplomatically, as “incidents.”
“It’s all about the pickles,” Hasan says.
The pickle economy of Baboob — which is absolutely real within this universe and which has a specific cultural weight that carries all the way through into *The Nuns of Baboob* — is not accidental. The pickled vegetable as a symbol of transformation (the fresh thing preserved, changed, made into something else that lasts far longer than it would have) runs through both books. If you’ve been waiting to understand why the Sultanate of Baboob has pickles woven into its entire culture, this chapter is part of that answer.
The other part is Chapter 22. But that’s a different post.
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This recording is me reading this chapter. The author. I think there’s something about hearing the person who wrote a thing read it back to you that makes the text do something slightly different than it does on the page. Like getting a letter read aloud by the person who sent it.
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