The long step of the camel causes a very great motion in the riders, which for some is very disagreeable.
-Richard Pococke, Bishop in the Church of Ireland, Description of the East and Some Other Countries, 1743
Richard Pococke sent forty eight letters home to his mother while he was travelling for three years to Alexandria, Cairo, Aswan, and beyond. As he wrote as a kind of rationale for going after he had already left, “if seeing those places [in the East]…may touch my heart with a greater sense of duty and make greater impressions for what he did for us, I hope this journey on that account alone shall not be thought a fruitless one.”
I am not surprised that the “he” to whom Bishop Pococke referred in camel country was the Maseeh, the Messiah, and not the Taajir, the Trader, or the Khabeer, the Trail Boss, or one of the Raa’i’een, the Herdsmen, but only that the postal service from Upper Egypt in that era functioned so well. Two hundred and fifty years later I sent a telegram home from Dongola saying, Do not worry, Day 25 and I’m midway on the Forty Days Trail. That cable never arrived, and I’d paid a few piasters extra for it to be hand delivered. So in my case she had to wait until I got back in person to hear my greater impressions of Hajj Bashir, KhairAllah, Mas’ood, Rabih, and the others.