I must without further delay withdraw as vociferously as possible the objection I made to your word vagabond as applied to the Nile: "Que le Nil vagabond roule sur ses rivages”. There is no designation more just, more precise, and at the same time more all embracing. It is a crazy, magnificent river, more like an ocean than anything else.
-Gustave Flaubert, March 13, 1850, Aswan, Egypt, letter to Louis —
I thought we were the only vagabonds when we finally arrived at the Nile after 20 days in the desert, sometimes wandering and sometimes circling in search of pasture, then later always moving straight and fast to our mid-point rendezvous with its Nubian rivage. Camel drovers from Kordofan are bedu, the ones who wander. Nile riversiders are farmers and traders, filling and emptying their sedentary lives from sacks of peanut and millet scoop by scoop.
When we arrived in Dongola, I tailed KhairAllah walking through the souq and felt all eyes there falling upon him, for the first time not upon me. He was the curiosity, not me, dressed as a desert man washed up in a river city. The whip dangling from his hand gave him away. I never did ask why in town he’d need a sout, a whip- a punning counterfoil to its Arabic homophone sawt, a voice. Sawt al-Sout.
No Donglawi would call the Nile a vagabond. And neither would a Kabbashi, or a Kawahli, or a Hamari. They were the only wanderers I knew in Sudan. Maybe not true bedu, true nomads- see Omar Sharif’s meme from Lawrence of Arabia when, both of them very parched, Peter O’Toole offers him a sip of water and he declines with the words, “I am bedu” (Steve and I always had a big laugh about that, especially when we were three days past the last well and feeling dry)- but certainly more rootless than those Nubian farmers and stallkeepers watching as daboukas from Dar al Kababish passed by.