Running is fatal, and life in the desert is a marathon, not a sprint.
-The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga, Mohamedou Ould Slahi
The Marathon de Sables is a seven day, 160 mile race in the Moroccan desert, its aim to finish faster, not fitter, than the others. The Way of the Forty, 1,000 miles from al-Nahud to Binban, is different- its aim to finish fattest, not fastest, for a fat camel fetches a better price than a lean. And all win the same prize…a one way ticket to the slaughter house.
In this part of the desert it is hard to find a sip without some clean sand in it.
-The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga, Mohamedou Ould Slahi
The drovers had a neat trick for keeping their sips sand-free, by covering the tea glass with the flat of their hand and lifting it hinge-like whenever they took a drink. But that couldn’t be done over the asīda bowl, so every bite of millet we took into the wind, its flour already plenty rough from its country milling, was even grittier than when we’d eat to leeward
Although stories of whole caravans being swallowed up and buried in sandstorms belong to the realm of fable, it is true that one such storm did destroy 1,500 goats and 2,000 sheep in 1947.
-Lloyd Cabot Briggs, Tribes of the Sahara, 1960
Cambysean myths about lost armies and lost caravans die hard in the Sahara. When it blew fiercely one day on us, Mas’ūd pointed into the wind and said what I heard as Um Duhayr, which the dictionary I was carrying had as, Mother of the Little Eternity, from the word Dahr in the Diminutive form, and I thought to myself, Poetic. But later I asked a Sudanese folklorist if the Kababish always called a headwind by such a name and he said No, so I checked Lane for other variants of the component letter D, and found this for Dthahīr, A Complaint of the Body, or in plain English, Mother of Pains in the Ass, and I thought, Mas’ūd was right.
A camel doesn’t have four feet, as most lay people think; it has more than a hundred, and the more, the better.
-The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga, Mohamedou Ould Slahi
It seems paradoxical that this most potent symbol of the desert should be a herd animal, if not exactly gregarious when in a group, at least more willing to join than to be left alone. Several times we passed a single grazer and a drover would then have to whip it back from the Dabouka. Otherwise it would have fallen in with our forty day death march to the Cairo slaughter houses or, if ill-suited to a fast pace, perhaps to an even earlier demise on the trail.
If a lone vehicle breaks or bogs down in the desert, the crew must stay with it. A vehicle is easier to find than a lone man.
-Desert Operations, Field Manual 90-3, Department of the Army, August 1993
And a man is easier to find than a bottle, which is why that person riding atop the Bedford shouted for the driver to stop and ran back to pick up the empty fifth that had just been thrown out along the sand track to El Obeid in 1962. My cousin told his bottle story to Hajj Bashir’s son-in-law, who had been born there. Surprised by having almost crossed paths fifty years earlier in Kordofan, they looked from where they sat on the terrace towards the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, and I said, Muqran al-Nilayn, Meeting of the Two Niles.
The following anecdote from the thirteenth century has the value of a parable: “My uncle,” a merchant says, “undertook a voyage to the south to trade gold. He bought a camel to get there. While traveling, he found himself in the company of a city-dweller…Both of them took the caravan back home. My uncle felt comfortable and free from worry: if the caravan left, he mounted his camel; if the caravan halted, he rested. But our city-dweller was exhausted and overwhelmed with worries.”
-The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages, François-Xavier Fauvelle
Mustapha was a tight planner and he assumed the Way of the Forty would get him to Egypt in forty days, not forty-one or forty-five, in time for his trip to the French Alps. It wasn’t likely KhairAllah would have understood if I’d asked him to drive the herd faster on sand so Mustapha could ski on snow, so I said nothing about it.
The key to success in desert operations is mobility.
-Desert Operations, Field Manual 90-3, Department of the Army, August 1993
Speaking of Mobility, a large dune belt in Egypt’s Western Desert is Abu Muharrik, Father of the Mover, but Lane has an odd meaning for the causative Form II verb Harraka, He Urged him [a Camel] to Go, But He Went Not.
I was lifted up and placed on a camel where I sat and though dreadfully shaken I was too glad to be relieved of the labour of walking to complain of my beast.
-Travels through Central Africa to Timbuctoo and Across the Great Sahara, Performed in the Years 1824-1828, Vol.1, Réné Caillié, 1830 edition
Caillié was the first Westerner to reach Timbuktu and return alive to tell the tale, a big deal in British and French explorers’ societies at the time, which all had bets riding on who it would be and how well he would play the role. The English translation of his Memoir’s title put it best, “Performed”.
First of all, you will have to deal with the desert mafia. For if they are not your guides and your guards, they will rob you.
-The Golden Rhinoceros, from the chapter “The Customs of Mali”, François-Xavier Fauvelle
There were rumors of Harāmiyya, Thieves, lying in wait for us along the Way of the Forty. That’s why KhairAllah wanted Nedu to hoist the Aaton on his shoulder when an unknown rider approached, so it looked like a rocket launcher. On the previous trip we’d crossed paths only with Billa Ali, who carried an Enfield, and even though it looked like it hadn’t been fired since WW2, we didn’t want to test our luck.
How different in the Sahara!- no shops, scanty food, less water…
-Angus Buchanan, Sahara, 1926, Dedicated “To Feri N’Gashi, Only a Camel, but Steel-True and Great of Heart”
Buchanan bought a year’s supply of tinned food in London’s West End, having a taxi wait outside the provisioner’s shop for an hour while he made his purchases, before heading off to the Sahara. That’s the same absurdity as when Dan Rather showed up on some Third World assignment wearing a safari suit tailored on Savile Row. Mustapha had his ‘Arāgi and Sirwāl made at a street-side sewing stall in El Obeid. Better it be done that way, cheaper and more camouflage.
It is bad luck to speak about the exact number of your camels because evil eyes are everywhere and they are hungry.
-Mohamedou Ould Slahi, The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga
It was by good luck that KhairAllah had only an inexact idea of the number of camels in his Dabouka, but he knew each one by color and gait and breeding brand, and if someone had counted them off on his fingers as he remembered each one, his tally would have been exactly on the nose.
Like all true camel herders, he was smart, intuitive, lighthearted, and funny.
-Mohamedou Ould Slahi, The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga
Ould Slahi published this fantasy, a sort of 1002nd Night- about a camel lost, tracked, and finally found- after being imprisoned at Guantánamo for 14 years in a story of false arrest, black site rendition, extraordinary methods of interrogation, unlawful detention, delayed release, etc., etc., etc…and then as a Hollywood movie and best-selling memoir. Much of The Actual True Story… Ould Slahi must have written in his head as a mental escape while being tortured, and if so…lucky that memories of his camel herding days saved his life.
But the camel, as they say, rests in two steps. Legend has it that an urban dweller rode a camel with a Bedouin. The Bedouin sat in front of the hump, and the urban dweller behind it so he could steady himself by grabbing the Bedouin. When they arrived home, the camel bent his front legs to come to rest, and the Bedouin, caught off guard, lost his equilibrium and fell to the ground. The urban dweller couldn’t help laughing at the Bedouin. The Bedouin looked at his friend and said, “Too soon to be happy: the camel rests in two steps.” And indeed, as soon as the camel bent his rear legs to come to his final rest, the urban dweller fell on his face.
-Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Guantánamo Diary
KhairAllah and I never rode double, but if we had, he would not have been caught off guard by a couching camel, which under him never knelt until he himself spoke the three magic words Ikhh! Ikhh! Ikhh! that to me meant nothing.
It is easier to cross the desert from north to south.
-The Conquest of the Sahara, Douglas Porch
Not true. Heading up the Darb you’re always facing a fierce headwind. If you want the wind at your back, you’d have to wait until the Khamāsīn (pl., from Khamsīn, Fifty, meaning, the sporadic south-to-north winds that blow in the fifty days following Coptic Easter Monday, in Egypt celebrated as the pre-Islamic holiday Shamm al-Nasīm, Sniff the Breeze!) blows.
The normal age of a camel is reckoned to be…the period, as the Arab counts, between the marriage of two generations of the same family- a camel, which comes in its youth to a man as his wife’s dowry, being expected to be yet “under him” on the occasion of his son’s marriage.
-The Heart of Arabia, St.John Philby, 1922
Human generations are widening everywhere and maybe too the lifespans of camels. KhairAllah’s first son Soliman is nearing forty and still unmarried. Much has stood between him and a future bride. University study, a shop-keeping start-up, the marriages of two older sisters, moving the family to safety in a time of civil war, and now building a new house for all. Try legalizing a land purchase without a functioning law, or making mud bricks without running water, or cutting a houseful of lumber with only a hand saw. Soliman may well be over forty before all that is finished and he marries, about the average lifespan of a camel.
…dust and sand which is tossed vp and downe the aire with easterne windes entring into their eies doth at last miserably weaken and spoile their eie-sight.
-Description of Africa, Leo Africanus, 1526, from the Hakluyt Society 1896 edition
At our departure from al-Nahud it was uncertain whether RahmatAllah could join KhairAllah as Hajj Bashir’s second Khabīr. RahmatAllah was nearly blind from trachoma, or so I imagined because it was a common affliction in those parts, but it may have been from sand blown into the eye. If that were the case, I’m now glad I wore glasses. It was Bilal who was ultimately chosen, perhaps because he could see well except when he got cross-eyed on Merissa.