How true again the proverb, ‘The camel has his schemes, and the camel driver has his schemes’, the interests of the driven and the driver being ordinarily very different…
-Proverb Lore: Many Sayings, Wise or Otherwise…, F. Edward Hulme
Hulme’s Arabic proverbs were pulled from Burckhardt’s collection, in which he notes he was “greatly assisted by native helpers” whose “quaint and delightful humor” leads to another, “When the monkey reigns, dance before him”. One wonders if the native helpers were making a monkey of him, Burckhardt having a poor grasp of colloquial Cairene Arabic from which he put the proverbs into a written form of Classical.
I once was very interested in the Sudanese grazing pattern called the Jizu in the country’s northwest corner. Mas’ood told me that herdsmen took camels there for months at a time and had no water to drink. “We drink camel urine,” he told me, “Wallahi al-’adtheem”, By God the Great. I believed him until KhairAllah told me, Nonsense, Mas’ood won’t even drink unsweetened tea.