Everything we know about those years reached us as names and dates: he left, he travelled, he returned, he reclaimed. Four verbs standing in for eleven years. We think what fell between the verbs weighs more than they do — the road between Riyadh and Yabrin, the nights in Kuwait, and the long wait nobody writes about because nothing in it is a story.

We are a small Saudi group: someone who reads the sources, someone who draws, someone who writes, and someone who argues over the wording of a single line for a week. We have added nothing to what the historians established, and we claim nothing of the sort; all we did was take the known account apart and put it back together in another order — one station after another, the image before the text rather than after it, and a timeline that walks beside you instead of being read from above.

We work slowly because a correction is cheaper before publication than after it. Every figure here is traced to its source, and where the presentation is our own judgement we say so rather than mixing it with the record. The work is open: one chapter finished, two on the way, and whenever a more exact document reaches us we go back and change what we wrote.