①sahl easy②ashal easier③al-ashal easiest④ishaal diarrhea
-Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic
We were approaching Wadi al-Kalabsha at night, not far from Aswan whose glowing lights we could see. We were low on water, dead out in fact, and tired, angry, and thirsty. Too far a ride for lake water, we’d have to draw from these putrid wells if we wanted to drink tea and boil millet. How putrid was it? We gagged on sulfur from a distance.
Government schemes had over fertilized the ground. Land reclamation in Egypt is a science of “more is more”- more irrigation, more nitrates, more urea. So the ground and its water smells as you might guess.
Before the lake rose and it was moved, Kalabsha’s wadi had been the site of ancient Nubia’s largest temple, a Roman era grand construction begun by Augustus and completed under Vespasian. One archaeologist called it “a common holy place for the Roman military and the nomads they were stationed there to control.”
Fast forward 2,000 years and, mutatis mutandis, I know for a fact that KhairAllah and Masood had nothing in common with Egyptian border guards stationed there to control them. Control? More like shake down. Not even worth going over to their post and asking for fresh water. So we drew from the well holding our noses and with it brewed rancid tea and boiled gaseous aseeda.
At midnight it all blew up, inside each of us one by one, getting up from our bedrolls, threading carefully but quickly through the maze of couched camels to the outer ring of light thrown off by our dying fire, and there in the sand dropping our drawers. Ishaal.
We thought it would be so easy, for sure easier than what we’d already been through, in fact the easiest part of the whole Way of the Forty, to finish this last bit of trail to Binban. But it was hard. And soft at the same time.
