Qaafile mein subah ke ik shor hai,/Yaani ghaafil hum chale, sota hai kya!
The shout of the morning caravan gives its call,/”Out of your bed, O Sleeper, we are off!”
-Mir Taqi Mir (1723-1810), Urdu Poet
22nd of Safa. Quitted the land at an early hour and proceeded up the river, in hourly expectation of coming into view of Dongola, which we had been given to understand was a considerable town.
-G. B. English
Urdu comes from the Turkish word, Ordu, for army, the language having been born as a synthetic lingua franca suited for the military life of the Mughal Empire’s multi-lingual soldiers speaking Persian, Hindi, Arabic, and many Central Asian others. And so the Mamluk-founded town of ‘Urdi, Military Camp, built by Turkish slave soldiers exiled from Egypt following Muhammad Ali Pasha’s usurpation of power there in 1811, which the drovers still called as such, a word also known to Bactrian camel drivers in the Gobi Desert. Not Dongola, in the Mahas dialect of Nubian, as the Nile-bound farmers of beans and peas there call it.
The Kababish knew nothing of this town’s history, nor of the American fortune seeker George Bethune English’s Narrative of an Expedition to Dongola… from 1822 telling of the punitive campaign led by Muhammad Ali’s son Ismail Pasha to attack these renegade Turks, only that ‘Urdi was the halfway point on their journey. Mir’s couplet would have fallen on their deaf ears, for in their dreams they had already awakened from their long trail’s short sleep and arrived in Egypt. No need to hurry them past Dongola, they could already taste Cairo’s sweet promises.