“Abdel Rashid”

(Traduction by Cristina Figueras)

(Illustration by Fran Galán)

(Sculpture by Pedro Fernández Ramos)

The soft breeze of dawn ruffled the rebellious mane of hair, half

trapped under the folds of the turban, while his amber eyes allowed the horizon that was letting the first rays of sun break through, to bathe them. He was absorbed in the beauty of his land, the one that saw him grow up among dunes and high crags, like the one on which he now stood. He thought about his people, those people forged in the adversity of a difficult world, where famine and conflicts of interests went hand in hand. Hostility that, as the merchant of salt and guardian of his own people that he was, he found himself obliged to defend. Although more than an obligation, it was quite an honor, because he felt himself deeply rooted in his fellowmen and, in turn, amply valued by them.


Nature had played a strange role, because it had provided his race, a simple lineage of lions, with the unusual evolution to stand up on two legs and to reason through language. There was controversy about it within his own tribe, as there existed a series of old lionesses that coined the convinced notion that an ancestral curse had provoked this evolutionary aberration. Anyhow, that’s the way he was an, as everything else, it had its advantages and inconveniences. Physically he was superior to the majority of rivals who wanted to approach those he protected in the negotiating conclave, or he who dared to cross the minimal barrier against his people, as he would undoubtedly taste the ardor of the cutting edge of his dagger.
But they were also victims of the usual social rejection that entailed being a strange mixture between man and lion, a hybrid that provoked distrust in the human race.

Meditating about it, his extraordinary sense of smell detected remnants of the sweetish scent of blood. He focused his sight towards the semi-darkness of the valley where the sun had not yet flooded it with light, and he discerned a figure that was advancing, stumbling because he was probably wounded.

A far off splendor coming from the northern plains announced the sound of a shot. The salt merchant looked at the figure again, which fell slowly to the sands. With his customary agility, Abdel went down the cliff, jumping from rock to rock in order to look at the victim thoroughly. Once he was a little closer, his heart skipped a beat when he saw that it was his best friend, and a heartrending roar broke the calmness of the beautiful landscape that he had been contemplating only moments before.

Pepe Gallego


Abdel Rashid por Pepe Gallego se distribuye bajo una Licencia Creative Commons Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivar 4.0 Internacional.
Basada en una obra en http://www.origenart.es/index.php/tienda/miniaturas/abdel-rashid-detail.