Note- published in the St.Louis Post Dispatch, December 27, 1987
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VOICE SINGS in the desert, rising above the wind's steady rush over a campfire in the eastern Sahara. Singing for his fellow Kababish tribesmen assembled at the fire is Saeed abd al-Faraj, Servant of Joy.
Saeed is an illiterate camel drover from northwestern Sudan's Kordofan Province, an area ' devastated by drought and famine but still alive with the camel herding and poetic traditions stemming from the pre-history of the Arabian peninsula, from where the Kababish tribe is said to have come many centuries ago.
Saeed is entertaining his weary companions, who lightly interject their own oaths, praise and encouragement between the deep breaths the poet must take to reach the end of his long verses. The group has been driving a herd of camels from t eir home territory toward Cairo, about 1,000 miles to the north.'
As their guests, a friend and I recently had the first opportunity for outsiders to accompany the Kababish for the length of the Darb al-Arba'iin, or Trail of the Forty, so named for the journey's average number of days. The Sudan-to-Cairo camel trade is perhaps the last such instance anywhere in the world of men driving livestock to distant markets, with unrestricted movement across large empty spaces.
The rituals, rhythms and hardships of trail life for the camel drovers are much the same as t!tey were for the American cowboy driving longhorns up the Chisholm Trail after the Civil War. Clint Eastwood as Rowdy Yates, Montgomery Clift in Howard Hawks' film "Red River," and the real-life E.C. "Teddy Blue" Abbott, Bylis John Fletcher and Thomas "Andy" Adams would have felt right at home sharing grub and wrapping up in their blankets beside Saeed and his companions Masood, Muhammad and trail boss KhairAllah after a long, dusty day in the saddle.
Abbott's We Pointed Them North (University of Oklahoma Press, 1966), Fletcher's Up the Trail in '79 (University of Oklahoma Press 1968) and Adam's The Log of a Cowboy (University of Nebraska Press 1964), three rare and now classic memoirs of the Chisholm Trail, closely mirror the life of their contemporary Sudanese confreres.
But whereas the songs of the cowpunchers recounted their long suffering on the trail, a camel drover today is more likely to sing of the pleasures found at trail's end. While on night watch, Teddy Blue would have softly lamented:
I'm up in the morning afore daylight
And afore I sleep the moon shines bright.
- No chaps and no slicker, and it'S pouring down rain,
And I swear by God that I'll never night-herd again,
Somewhere in the Sahara, Saeed tonight is probably sitting comfortably at the fire's edge, his camels securely hobbled and in no danger of stampeding or wandering, singing:
Her waist isn't flabby but her hips are wide,
Yet still just a hand can gird the buttocks riding high.
By the life of the Prophet! On a feast day!
Her gown shines brighter than the dawn's glow.
His fellows break into laughter when later Saeed makes it clear that the "her" of the poem is a she camel and not the young maid of whom all had been dreaming.
Mostly what lured cowboys onto the trail was the boredom of staying alone on the ranch for too long, or the hope of passing through Ogalalla, the so-called Gomorrah of the cattle trail, and winding up the trip in the saloon-ridden railheads of Abilene and Dodge City with a pocket full or wages. Young drover Berry Robuck or Lockhart, Texas, was obviously keeping secrets from his mother when he told Joe McCoy, builder of Abilene's cow palace, that "stampedes, high water, hailstones, thunder and lightning which played on the horns of the cattle and my horse's ears compensated for the unpleasant things."
For the Kababish tribesman, the excitement of seeing the new and different is partly what makes them, especially the young, endure the rough life of the trail. Cairo is, after all, Africa's largest city, with more inhabitants than the entire Sudan, and one of the most important religious capitals of Islam.
Hardship at home, however, is even a stronger motive to put the Kababish on the trail. Many have lost their own herds to the drought, either through thirst and starvation or in distress sales to the big merchants with whom they now sign on as drovers. An·d all are increasingly in need of cash wages.
But in all other aspects - the drover's wise-to-the-world superiority over the sedentary townsman, the trail's dangers from weather, terrain and human foe, the stacked, bleached bones of their fallen charges now used as cairns, the bone numbing fatigue from days and nights in the saddle, and the throat parching dust thrown up by the herd but rarely washed down by water - the camel men and cowboys are brothers in both mind and body.
It's not for nothing that the pan-handle town of Sudan, Texas, not far from Muleshoe, is situated in the same part of the state that the Kordofani village of Donkey Ear is situated in the Sudan. To list all of Texas' cattle-named towns and the Sudan's camel-named villages would be too big a job.
Finding easy trails and watering the livestock at decent intervals was a major concern of both camel and cattle boss, even if a camel is much heartier than a longhorn. While the scent of a watering hole from miles away might stampede a herd of cattle going without water for only a couple of days, our camels had to be coaxed to drink after 12 dry days on the march. This was done by letting them graze amply beforehand to fill their bellies with roughage and waiting until the sun was well overhead. Even when near their death from thirst, camels can be very fickle drinkers.
A dominant animal - stronger, calmer and usually gelded - would quickly emerge in each herd and take the lead. Cattlemen depended on their lead animals more than camel men do theirs because the naturally skittish prairie cattle were always ready to stampede unless restrained from ahead. Old. Blue, a lead steer in a herd belong to Charles Goodnlght, became so indispensible on his first trail that he was led back to lead other drives, working eight seasons in all before being put out to pasture. His mounted adorned the Goodnight ranch office.
Because one rambunctious animal could set off the entire herd, various surgical procedures were performed on those misbehaving. Particularly wild steers would have their eyes sewn closed, and by the time that thread rotted, in about two weeks, they would have become considerably meeker.
In a camel herd, the malcreant was always the rutting male, whose obscene "flaming grimace," slmilar to a horse laugh but with a deep gurgle, rearing head, and partial expu!sion of an inflated throat bladder, sends females into a frenzy and riles every other male. The only solution is to pierce his nostril with string and hang a heavy object from this sensitive patch of skin, which stops short whenever he begins to cause trouble with a lusty toss of the head.
Rustlers were a common threat to both cttle and camel drovers. A routine modus operandi of the Old West’s “jayhawkers, red legs, and bushwackers" was to stampede the herd and then offer to round up strays for five dollars a head. The Kababish faced the same kind of problem from desert thieves such as Billa All al-Qurain (The Little Horned One), who cut single camels from the herd during fast-paced, moonless night rides and then would approach the trail boss the next day, demanding a bounty for the lost camel they claim to have found the night before.
Whlle camel drovers today and tomorrow will continue to share the same trail life that the cattle drovers lived about 100 years ago, they will undoubtedly also face the same future, as forces beyond their control draw their days of driving to a close.
Regardless of the camel trade's ability to rebound from the 1985 drought, it is clear that the camel drovers will soon find themselves out of the saddle so to speak. The laws of supply and demand - cheaper transportation costs of new roads and rail lines, changing consumer tastes, and the eventual exhaustion of surplus livestock - all contributed to the end of the cattle· drives on the Chisholm Trail, and will likewise hurry the demise of the Kababish camel drives on the Darb al-Arba'iin.
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