Afterwards I lay in the afternoon sun, occasionally opening my eyes to notice a soaring raptor, two mules carrying firewood up to a nearby village, a tribesman bringing his goats down from the high pasture.
Outside, two bull-necked Afrikaners sipped tea in the garden of the adjacent coffee shop, and a Himba man in a Cal State T-shirt and a two-panel skirt — short and gathered in the front, long and straight in back — distractedly herded goats down the main street while chatting on his cellphone.
Four large, dark, wild billy goats, sitting down in the shade of a solitary birch tree, all panting in the heat.
The jug rests on the backs of two goats lying down with an applied bee and flower decoration beneath the spout and a handle shaped like a twig.
He hung the goats upside down and cut them up.
Happily, for every real Mongolian goat laying down its life for high fashion, there are at least three knitted-on-a-loom "goats" that will serve equally well, especially given that neon orange is not a goat's colour of choice out on a Mongolian mountainside and bright reds and blues are very much les couleurs d'hiver this season.
Goat comes down and watches us over its shoulder, shits on the wall of the rainwater tank — our lifeline — and hobbles off to where it prays, where it makes art.
Philip Roth, who has been on a phosphorescent late-career run, issuing nearly a novel a year from 2000 through 2010, might have instead decided to decant all that strong sinister wine into a single 1,200-page 1,200-paget you would be tempted to title "Horny Goat Stares Down Death".
The result is an album of delightfully unusual sea songs, some with familiar features ("The Bridget Ann" is a set of words I've never heard before, set to the same tune as the Newfoundland song "Feller from Fortune,") and others completely new ("Donnelly and the Goat" and "Down in those Valleys" were new to me).
Or consider the designer Miguel Adrover, who in 2001 sent a "large hairy black goat" down a runway during a Middle-Eastern-themed défilé on the Lower East Side.
"Combing" is too gentle a word for the actual process, unless you imagine combing the tangled hair of a screaming five-year-old who has just discovered chewing gum: the goats are wrestled down, and the cashmere is tugged off them with a large, wide-toothed metal comb that looks like something left over from the Iron Age.
