Tuareg Wood Bowl

Hold it up to a window and the grain does the talking.

Tuareg, Mali, twentieth century. A wooden bowl, ten and a half inches across and five inches deep, in pale honey and smoke brown. The rim is a gentle oval. The inside shows the rings of the tree it came from, and the outside is worn and mottled where decades of hands have passed over it.

The Tuareg are people of the Sahara and its edges. A wooden bowl is a sensible thing to own there: light, and not given to breaking.

A bowl for dates, perhaps. Or for nothing, beautifully.