Arthur Rimbaud lived seven years in Harar, dividing his final years between trading in the city and expeditions across the deserts of Ogaden and Danakil and the Somali plains to the Red Sea; it was from Harar that he left, exhausted, to seek treatment in France and die in Marseille. In Harar today there is little or nothing to recall him, no objects, a fake house, not a single book in the city library, his name uttered only by the handful of young guides who pester the rare tourists.