We now brought out all our baggage which was to be carried by the camels and began to load them. We had hitherto had no practice in the manner of doing this, neither did we understand the habits, words, or signs of the camel drivers, nor did they understand ours; wherefore for some days we loaded our beasts with many quarrels and much trouble.
-The Book of Wanderings of Brother Felix Fabri (1441-1502) Through the Holy Land, Arabia, and Egypt
The Arabic words for garbage and baggage are identical, ‘afsh, beginning with the hard-to-pronounce ‘ayn consonant. Mistaking the two can get you into a bit of trouble. I was never able to load my camel securely even after forty days. I carried the film rolls, Steve carried the sound gear, and Ned handled the camera and lens cases. We’d have hated to lose any of that, regardless of what we called it.
So we had to wait each morning for one of the drovers to finish their own chores to come over to help us with our “garbage”, as we usually correctly pronounced the right word’s wrong meaning. It always went smoothly unless that day’s drover was in a foul mood or preoccupied, in which case he would do a bad job and the girth or lashing would get loose almost immediately. They were both made of cheap plastic rope and would stretch out. Our gear was always getting loose. But we never lost any, or had any fall off our camels.
The drovers were as eager as we were to arrive safely so the film would get made. They wanted to be in it, to be up on screen, maybe to see it at El Obeid’s outdoor cinema ‘Arous al Rimal, the Bride of the Sands. We wanted to make it. Leaving behind for them the occasional polaroid picture was not enough. They wanted to be bigger than that, they wanted to be in the pictures. So we put them all in it. And as I told KhairAllah at the film screening, Everybody knows you now, from New York and London, from Paris to Moscow. He had heard of those places, just as everybody in Mileet and Kutum knew of him, “a famous khabir” as he says in the film.