"Fancy me at it again." How many times did I think that as the Sudanese sun slowly ticked across the white hot sky. Less than halfway through a forty day journey, and already I'd come down with saddle sores- camel saddle sores, the deep, hide-in-the-dark kind that never seem to heal.
I suppose I should have considered myself lucky. I had been given a white camel to ride, a sign of authority and dignity I was oft told- the breed that the Prophet Muhammad rode, but I was going out of my mind with open oozings on my tendermost.
All for a good cause. But I was not reassured. Shooting a documentary film about the camel trade from Kordofan to Cairo can't really be done from the back of a jeep, especially when everyone else- including my soundman- was in the saddle.
I had made this 800 mile trip along the darb al-arba'in, or the Way of the Forty (named for the route's average number of days) once before, as a younger man with a tougher tail. The trail boss on the second trip was the same as the first- KhairAllah, a respected elder of the Kababish tribe. But all he could recommend at the moment was another smear of vaseline from the fast failing pot I'd bought in our trail head village.
"Nothing doing," I shouted to him in my broken Arabic over the ceaseless north wind. "I'll wait for Ma'toul and there, if God wills, we'll take our rest."
Ah, Ma'toul, what a sweet sounding place. Nothing- I knew from my last trip- but a desert well serving a brackish beverage, hidden in a nearly shade-less stand of stunted siyaal trees. But still, rest and refreshment.
"How far did you say it was to Ma'toul?"
"Four days, three days or four," answered KhairAllah with a merry flick of his whip hand.
A few things I had yet to learn about desert travel. You don't measure distance by miles or days or dots on a map come and gone. You scan the front horizon for a landmark, a barely visible mountain, say, and then you wait you wait you wait and you wait to pass beside it, and then you wait you wait you wait and you wait for it to disappear behind you. You know thus how you stand in comparison to what you can see, but you have no idea where things are that you cannot.
Something else about the Sahara- saddle sores get worse before they get better. Shifting my seat only made them worse, widening the separate wounds until they linked up into one big raw spot. Pus made it tacky. The dry heat made it scab over. As Van Morrison might have sung, "When you got a stomach ache, a little rubbin' will see you through. When you got a buttock ache, there ain't nothin' you can do."
Next day, KhairAllah proved himself a man of false promise. I'd kept my tongue out of sight til late afternoon, singing only an occasional chorus of "My bonnie lies over the ocean", when I again popped the question. "How long to Ma'toul?" "One more day, one more day if God wills." Thank you KhairAllah, thank you.
I was not the first green horn to run the risk of saddle galls on the darb al arba'in and I have not been the last. The ancient Egyptian Harkouf rode this way during the Old Kingdom in the service of his boy Pharoah Pepi II, returning from a reconnaissance of tropical Africa with ostriches, gold, and, much to the delight of his master, a dancing pygmy.
The Englishman William G. Browne rode round trip on camel back along this route at the end of the 18th C. His stiff upper lip account- with nary a word of backside emollients!- makes an engaging read in this age of manned flight. If only dromedaries had wings... and first class seating.
In the meantime, a couple of masochistic honeymooners and a pair of perilous Paulines have humped up the trail- each leaving behind their own versions ( Impossible Journey: Two Against the Sahara, by Michael Asher and Mariantonietta Peru, and Shadows in the Sand by Lorraine Chittock) of fighting blisters, sand storms, and fifteen hour stirrup-less days astride.
"O KhairAllah, I do not yet see Ma'toul." Today we came upon and passed mountain landmarks whose names I had learned before- Abu Fas, Father of the Axe, and Bint Um Bahr, Mother of the Daughter of the Sea. From dawn the sun had spun its color wheel from yellow to white to yellow to gold to finally... burnt umber. Dark falls and Ma'toul must be near, but still no sign. What is that, two more days? Cutting it close to the bone, say I.
Nights on the drive were every drover's pleasure. Even if only a few hours sleep were its end, camp making was always a joyfully anticipated task. Half reclining, lying back, rolling over- a saddle could accommodate none of this. Spread a camel blanket upon the ground and I will show you a royal's bed. The bedouin have a saying I'll never tire of- Al-na'im huwa al-sultan, He who sleeps is king.
At daybreak I thought I sniffed Ma'toul. Camels coming in off a drive can smell Nile water from miles out, so why not I? God knows they were no thirstier. The north star was right- on my left cheek. The wind was right- in my face. The sun was right- rising in my eyes. Even KhairAllah's gait seemed right- urging his mount with more spur than his norm. He too yearned for a fresh drink.
Breaking a camel camp requires more effort than it deserves. Clint Eastwood simply stands up from his slumber, rearranges his poncho, and sets to. For the bedouin, each camel had to be unhobbled, checked for lameness, and gathered for the morning count. It never ceased to amaze how three illiterate drovers always agreed on the same total. One hundred and eighty head are a lot to sum on fingers alone.
The following day our ride was tough. Water was so low that at the noontime stop only one teapot made the rounds. The drovers grumbled among themselves about the trail boss and the couched\camels extended their necks like exhausted hounds. Our sunshade made from a strung tarp was too flimsy to give us the spell we needed. When and if we did make Ma'toul, we all knew it would be by the skin of our teeth.
"Morning of Cream, 0 Professor!" was KhairAllah's idea of a jibe in my direction at the breakfast bowl. Professors, as far as he knew, did not ride camels. "Morning of Milk, O Son of a Bookkeeper!”, came back my answer, noting his unfailing accuracy with the head count. ”Today we reach Ma'toul ?” "In three days, God willing." “Smile when you say that," I spit through gritted teeth, reading another page from Clint Eastwood's book.
The Arabic for trail boss is khabir, literally meaning expert, a rank not given lightly by the export traders who employ the men to whom they entrust a movable Fort Knox. A trail herd is worth upwards of $400,000 US, and during the forty day desert crossing they seem to move quite literally off the face of the earth. No one alive can track a hijacked herd through the eastern Sahara.
KhairAllah had made the Cairo run as a drover some twenty five times before earning his khabir's stripe. He could navigate the wastes by night as well as by day. He knew when to push his herd and when to lay off. He kept the peace among his fractious men and knew when to tell a bawdy joke. And he hated to lose a camel either to the vultures (I loved their name, Abu Jumjuma , Father of the Skull) or a thief.
But more he hated to lose a herd as he did that day. Blame it on the flaming grimace. When a male camel entered his rut, he let us know by prolapsing a bright pink throat sac out his mouth and inflating it to the size of a child's birthday balloon. The play became infectious and, boys being boys, soon the camels were scattered for miles about, fighting and dueling across open sands.
It took a long while to pick up the strays, recount, and again get underway, and with such delay I was not surprised by the revised estimate of reaching our watering hole. Four days to Ma'toul. KhairAllah, are we going nowhere? Time moves forward and we go back. How can this be?
The head does strange things when the bottom gives out. It begins to mime every downstairs jolt and jar. I took personally the indignities of being rubbed the wrong way by a dumb animal. I could not exactly fight fire with fire but I did want my mount to know where it hurt. But humps are not rumps, and he took no notice of my misery. We rode on late in the night, no one but I knowing the depth of my pain.
What I thought to be our final campfire before Ma'toul was a miserable affair. I had stanched the bleeding but I continued to lose fluids. Our water ration was a cup apiece. I fell asleep with a new appreciation for the taste of trail dust-blackened saliva. Tomorrow I would wash it down with clear well water.
"0 Son of a Bookkeeper, Morning of Jasmine. Today by God we will settle our accounts. Ma'toul before lunch?” My smile was not returned and my heart began to sink. "Ma'toul you ask? By God, you are as poor at riding a camel as you are at seeing what lies before your eyes. Did you not see Ma'toul pass on our right hand as we rode. It is five hours behind us and we'll have no turning.”
I left it like that. Ma'toul no longer mattered. concern, and licking yesterday's wounds was not a way to seek solace in a raw world. If I wanted to take a stool at the Lucky Strike, my favorite watering hole back home, I should have stayed at home. Rest now was of no cure for what ailed me most. The desert held no drink for me that day, where tomorrow never comes.