The Dabouka Stops for No One

Each year these caravans in Egypt carried three or four hundred camel loads of elephant tusks, 2,000 rhinoceros horns, 20 or 30 kantars of ostrich feathers, 2,000 kantars of arabic gum, 1,000 of tamarind and as much natron as was gathered along the way, as well as food suppplies that are eaten...Every year, two caravans travel to Darfur, each comprised of four to five thousand camels; the trip to Assiut takes 40 days.

It is above all essential in such a journey to be sufficiently well mounted to keep up with the caravan, as this stops for no one, and he who goes slower than the rest is necessarily left behind.

-Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt, During the Campaigns of General Bonaparte in that Country, Vivant Denon, 1803

A kantar is an Egyptian unit for weighing cotton, about 100 pounds, and a camel in a desert caravan would be packed at about 500 pounds of load at the upper limit, thus there might have been six to ten camels carrying feathers along the Way of the Forty at the time of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. I cannot imagine having to slow down for or catch up with or hang on to a camel carrying feathers.

On my first trip on the Way of the Forty I was fascinated with the many large pieces of petrified wood lying about. We often used them in threes in our camp fires for setting the cook pots above the flame. Sometimes I packed them up in my duffle. When KhairAllah saw this he thought I was crazy.

Why make a camel carry rocks to Egypt? he asked. There are plenty rocks there too, he said. But I want to take them back home with me, I said. Are there no rocks in America? he asked. These were once trees, I said. Then why don’t they burn like acacia wood? For that I would have had no answer, unless I went back to the jinns and Iblis and the shaytan, Satan, for which I saw no need, so instead I threw most of them away.

Jewels Fit for an Ass

“Perhaps there’s a woman in the case,” suggested someone. Fairclough, who was a lifelong bachelor, snorted and peered into his tumbler. “Unlikely,” said someone else. “The only female he lets get anywhere near him is that damned donkey of his.”

-The Mamur Zapt and the Men Behind, A Suspense Tale of Old Cairo, Michael Pearce

We learned in our Arabic class about the Islamic marriage law concept of mahr, a sum paid by the groom to the bride at the time of their wedding or at a future fixed date, either in cash or in kind, in which case as something easily monetized like jewelry. Jewelry was preferred because it could be personalized as belonging to the bride and to the bride alone, not something that could be mixed up as common household property and then stolen by the husband later, and its value would be obvious for all to see all the while the bride, even when eventually she became upstaged as surely she would be, could show it off as her fine every day adornment.

When times were tough for the whole family, or if she were to be left penniless in a divorce, she could sell it off piece by piece.

And I began to think how mahr might work for donkeys. Cairo’s working donkeys were often gaudily tacked with polished brass fittings, rings and chains and hooks and grommets and even a hamsa, or Hand of Fatima, dangling from the bridle’s browband or cheek pieces. I wondered if when times were tough for the donkey, it might pawn or sell a bit of brass to help make ends meet.

I saw plenty of donkeys pulled up in front of public bread bakeries where prices were so heavily subsidized that a loaf of ‘aysh baladi, literally meaning “village life”, because Egyptians use the same word, ‘aysh, for “bread” as they do for “life”- in Egypt both often being very coarse and containing more chaff than grain, cost less than a penny.

The donkey driver would buy ten or twenty loaves and throw them to the donkey to eat right there on the street. And I wondered if the donkey ever tired of ‘aysh baladi and wished instead to eat ‘aysh shami, a finer and more expensive bleached flour variety. And if his owner would not pay, if the donkey then wished he could just tear off a brass ring or chain from his bridle and pay for it with that. He was after all a city donkey, not a village donkey

Ezbekiyya Garden and Me

In Paris the khedive met Barrilet-Deschamps, who created the Bois de Boulogne and would design the Ezbekiyya Garden [on the model of the Parc Monceau, with small lakes, grottoes,and bridges]…Transforming the old city was out of the question…A European-style facade would instead be tacked on.

-Cairo, by Andre Raymond

The Ezbekiyya contained a number of houses of ill repute and was much frequented by British soldiers. Opposite the balconies from which scantily dressed ladies suggested their all were some very low class cafes in which yet insufficiently aroused clients could sit and gaze.

-The Mingrelian Conspiracy, A Mamur Zapt Mystery, Michael Pearce

I remember a strange thing happening to me early in my time in Cairo. I was sitting on a bench in Ezbekiyya Garden, I struck up a conversation with a man in a suit and tie. He was curious about me, my broken Arabic and my day of apparent leisure just like his. He said he lived nearby and I did something impulsive. I was in the dorm for the summer and wanted to break out of that bubble, so I asked him if I could live with him for a month or two, to practice my Arabic and learn Cairene customs. He looked at me as if I were crazy and quickly excused himself.

Later I told a fellow student what I had done, and he said that the man should not have been surprised. Foreigners had been coming to Egypt for thousands of years and settling down, often squatting in and often just plain stealing Egyptian real estate. I was like all of them. And there would be many more to follow after me.

A Donkey and Me

Arabeah, the city’s universal horse-drawn cab? Five miles? In this heat? The Effendi must be mocking. That left Cairo’s normal mode of transport, the donkey. Owen was not enthusiastic.

-The Fig Tree Murder, A Mamur Zapt Mystery, Michael Pearce

Downtown Cairo forty years ago was still full of donkey carts. They hauled trash and delivered milk. From their beds they sold watermelons piled into high pyramids and called out for glass bottles and metal refuse to be recycled. Some were driven by wild-eyed boys beating their galloping animals with sticks, others by patient old men with all day to get across town at a walk.

The fact that their donkeys were clogging the narrow roads and backing up motor traffic was only part of the reason it would take a donkey man all day to deliver greens from the Rawd al Faraj wholesale vegetable market, leaving Bulaq and passing Bab al-Hadid and Ezbekiyya and ‘Ataba, jamming way through the Muski’s retail shoppers and around al-Azhar’s milling prayerful up to the foot of the Muqattam Hills, and back again. What an urban planning lesson they could teach along that route.

Once late at night I was returning from Gamaliyya. Don’t ask why I was there past twelve. The streets were quiet and empty, strangely so, until I heard the clip clop of a donkey cart atrot coming from behind. I waved down the driver. To Garden City? Irkab, he said, Mount up- an imperative form of the verb I would learn very well later on the Way of the Forty. He took me home in silence. I always wondered what he must have thought, to have come across an Effendi at that hour, there.

Enter Ghadames, Not Far from Dorothea

There are two ways of describing the city of Dorothea: you can say that four aluminum towers rise from its walls flanking seven gates with spring operated drawbridges that span the moat whose water feeds four green canals that cross the city, dividing it into nine quarters, each with three hundred houses…Or else you can say, like the camel driver who took me there: “I arrived here in my first youth, one morning, many people were hurrying toward the market, the women had fine teeth and looked you straight in the eye, three soldiers on a platform played the trumpet, and all around wheels turned and colored banners fluttered in the wind. Before then I had known only the desert…

-Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino, Cities and Desires I

Ghadames is one of those cities that should not exist, excepting in the mind or on a map. It is in Libya yet touches on Tunisia and Algeria, with sand all round. Its people are not of the desert and not of the coast. They speak their own language uncorrupted by those spoken nearby. The women are said to live in the open air on the terrace tops, and the men live apart and below them but also above ground, on the second stories over the bottom floor store rooms. No one’s feet ever touches terra firma.

I spent the night there with a Libyan driver and guide assigned to me on a visit just as Qaddafi was opening himself to the West, just after 9/11 when he feared he’d be next on Cheney’s list. We toured the old city, through its outer gate and winding through its seven family quarters and their small date orchards owned by each household and watered by green canals according to an ancient irrigation time keeper.

One house was open for visits. The others were mostly locked. Qaddafi had been trying to modernize his country into something new, therefore its old cities had to go. They had to be made invisible, except for an old house here and there made for newly arrived tourists. It was empty but richly furnished with pillows and bolsters and painted on its walls and ceiling with arabesque abstractions.

Ghadames was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site but is now threatened with delisting. The listing document is full of facts and figures- how many homes, how many miles of irrigation canals, how many square feet of habitable upper terraces, etc. Its delisting determination will be made because of war and mayhem, unrepaired rain damage and neglect. Would that Ghadames were immeasurable and invisible.

Iskandariyya Why?

No, first of all let him say hello, with a new and unexpected appreciation, to Alexandria. “Mahatta Ramleh”, he directed the driver.

As for beggars and bashas, they were like wallpaper in a house. One soon ceased to notice them, and one rarely asked what degree of moral or aesthetic hardening that obliviousness implied.

-Academic Year, D.J. Enright, a novel about an English teacher in Alexandria

Alexandria, I am here. On the fourth floor I ring the bell of the flat. The little judas opens, showing Mariana’s face. Much changed, my dear! It’s dark on the landing; she does not recognize me. Her white face and golden hair gleam in the light from the window open somewhere behind her. “Pension Miramar?” “Yes, monsieur?” “Do you have any vacant rooms?” The door opens.

-Miramar, Naguib Mahfouz

I spent an academic year in Cairo, and Egypt was getting me down. Since the word for Cairo used by most Cairenes is the same word they use for Egypt, from time to time I had to get out of Masr and go away to Iskandariyya. For that you had to go “down”, I mean “north”… let’s just say I had to go bahri, seaward. My cousin was visiting so we went seaward together.

We checked into a pension on the corniche that could have been in a Naguib Mahfouz novel. In fact he wrote one about this place. Miramar, with old timer pensioners sitting around the common room, its windows thrown open to the Mediterranean breeze, all complaining about their aches and pains and Nasser and his revolution. They preferred the king and wanted him and his days to return. The place certainly had not been cleaned since Farouk left, or even since Nasser died. That was eight years ago

I liked getting off the train in Alex, it was as if Cairo had never existed or was in another country. There were horse drawn carriages waiting at the curb, caleches you called them there, since Alex was much more francophone than Cairo. And also Hellenophilic. I was amazed to see three Greek papers for sale in the news kiosk in Mahatta Ramleh, just outside a taverna serving ouzo not zabeeb, with white table cloths and waiters in bow ties and whole fish in ice trays at the front door. It could have been Athens.

And just as in the Mahfouz novel, the pension’s desk clerk was a real misanthrope. A grouch and a complainer. And even worse, totally unimpressed that I spoke to him in what I thought was my pretty good Arabic. He must not have believed that I understood what he said to me, because he would turn to the old timers in the common room’s lounge chairs and make jokes about the dumb khawaja. Especially that I didn’t like.

So I did something I had never done before and never will again. I left without paying. On our third or fourth day, when it was time to check out, my cousin waited downstairs on the sidewalk while I went up to the room. The desk clerk scowled and didn’t answer my greeting. I threw our bags out the window to my waiting cousin and left the room again. Back soon, I told the clerk. Back to Masr. And as in that great Youssef Chahine film, Iskandariyya…leh? Alexandria…Why?

Qu’est-ce qu’il y a?

1. The Desert. Only mountains, rocks, sand. 2. A small village. Muck-colored houses. Figures go by, women with pots on their heads, children, camels, dust, men in long white robes, others in blue robes, other in black. And some soldiers. Everyday life. 3. A small street. A light wind blows curls of sand into the air…Nearby there is an old, rather battered car. Inside it there is a man, David Locke. Thirty three years old. Unshaven. There is a tape recorder on the seat beside him, and a case for a 16mm camera on the seat behind.

Locke: Je peux vous parler un moment?

Man: Qu’est-ce qu’il y a?

Locke doesn’t answer directly.

Locke: Vous êtes Musulman, n’est-ce pas?

Man: Oui

-The Passenger, Michelangelo Antonioni, opening scene

We all ate out of the same bowl and drank from the same water skin for thirty nine days. Maseehi and Muslim. Kababeesh and Cape Codder- David was from Barnstable. A man from Bara and a Brincetonian- Arabs can’t pronounce their “p”s. Even Adam Hamid of the Hamari tribe, the youngest drover in our group, fell in with our common eating, drinking, snoring, and shitting. Until Day 39.

We were close to Aswan by then. In Adam’s mind, whatever centripetal force brought us together out there suddenly turned centrifugal. He said he’d no longer eat with a Maseehi, a Christian. (Lucky for him he didn’t say with a Brincetonian.)

So he ostentatiously cut out a piece of aseeda and put it in a small bowl of his own and ate apart. It looked a bit silly.

And KhairAllah didn’t like it at all. His job was to keep up the esprit de corps at all times. So he got out his hippo hide whip and gave Adam a few lashes. He told him he was a young stupid idiot, that David and I had ridden and eaten and drank and snored next to him for the whole trip. And now this? So he whipped him some more. Adam came back to the common food pot, acted sullen for a few more minutes, then joined in the conversation as if nothing had happened.

I never held it against Adam, maybe because I didn’t really understand what was happening and why. Muslim? Aywa. Maseehi? Yes. Al-’itnayn ma’a ba’d. The two together, said KhairAllah.

Bint UmBahr was No Zabriskie Point

What are you waiting for to leave that crowded madhouse city? Move here today, for a new life in the healthy climate of the desert.

-Zabriskie Point, film by Michelangelo Antonioni

Early film industry publicity reports claimed Antonioni would gather 10,000 extras in the desert for the filming of the lovemaking scene but this never happened. The scene was filmed with dust-covered and highly choreographed actors from The Open Theatre. The United States Department of Justice investigated whether this violated the Mann Act – which forbade the taking of women across state lines for sexual purposes – however, no sex was filmed and no state lines were crossed, given that Death Valley is in California.

What we would have done to see 10,000 naked women at Bint UmBahr. We were almost too tired at that point to care, much less to see straight ahead or to focus our eyes on anything but a half-full water skin. Zabriskie Point was Antonioni’s answer to American capitalism, in the guise of desert real estate development run amuk.

Getting our dabouka of 150 camels up the trail to Egypt was Hajj Bashir’s Sudanese answer. He provided the capital and ran the risk. He hired the drovers and bought their supplies. He paid the permit fees and the bribes. In Sudan, his discerning eye chose those camels he thought would survive the trip. In Egypt, his bluff and bluster sold those camels for the highest price.

No naked women, no Mann Act to consider, no lovemaking en route except for one or two misguided bull camels who amazingly still had juice after walking 40 miles a day. I know I didn’t- even if our camp at Bint UmBahr, Daughter of the Mother of the Sea, had somehow been shape-shifted to Death Valley, and we had found ourselves suddenly surrounded by 10,000 dust-covered vestal virgins. Blow-up!

Zabriskie Point, Death Valley

To Sing to a Camel

On the road they are not driven with sticks and scourges, but the camel drivers walk after them, singing thus: Han na yo yo an ho ho oyo o ho, and so on.

-The Wanderings of Brother Felix Fabri Through the Holy Land, Arabia, and Egypt, 1483

Its function is to express a surge of passion on the spur of the moment. This may be a sudden recall of a past encounter, or an expression of joy or bewilderment at a given moment…or commendation of the rider’s mount, boasting, and love.

-Yousif Babiker, University of Edinburgh, on the dubayt poetical form of rural Sudan

Brother Felix should have had a better translator. That was not wordless scat singing he heard but rather finely rhymed and metered poetry, quite possibly a classical dubayt intoned as song. On the other hand, we had the best Sudanese man at the BBC who knew all the western dialects, including Kabbashi, so his understanding of the dubayt form from Dar al Kababish was excellent, and he translated this poem, sung by our drover Idris while on Day 25 of the Way of the Forty he was driving camels on foot at that day’s Mile 20, to a high level of fidelity.

Rocket, My camel of the Soviet Union,

Have you yet passed Addika?

Have you found her wadi and entered?

Have not I said to tell her that

Your rider is raving for her love?

Rocket, My camel of Sudan,

Have you yet passed Addika?

Have you found her smoky scent?

Have you told her that I am sick in love?

You deny every lad living between Kojam and this place,

Leave the water, you have slain the best of us.

Your strap is thin, your girth hangs loose.

Your rein is like an arrow aimed for gazelles.

Astride you I leave this world and all its fleeting comfort.

Beneath your rein your head glistens,

Blood boils through your neck.

Rocks strew the way to Majozer

And the morning will find you

Beyond the sands that none dare cross.

Ride 'em or Rid 'em

Either ride them or leave them alone.

-a hadith, or saying of the Prophet, as recorded by Ibn Hanbal, referring to the camels when he saw men sitting on them idly

To saddle a camel is no small task; it is rather like building a house.

-The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years, by Chingiz Aitamov

On our midday breaks, KhairAllah insisted on unsaddling our camels so they could rest or roll or graze without a weight on their backs. I thought this was not necessary, since once we’d dismounted, most of the weight they carried was gone, and they didn’t roll anyway. Other camels were always taking a dust and sand bath, but not ours.

But KhairAllah was a trail boss, khabir, a word that means expert or informed one, and he knew best how to get his men and more importantly his camels up the trail to Egypt in one piece. So we did as he said, even if we had to rebuild our house after every siesta, when all we wanted to do was to go in and close the door and take a longer rest. That’s how hot and tired we were on the trail. You can imagine how the camels felt.

Garbage or Baggage?

We now brought out all our baggage which was to be carried by the camels and began to load them. We had hitherto had no practice in the manner of doing this, neither did we understand the habits, words, or signs of the camel drivers, nor did they understand ours; wherefore for some days we loaded our beasts with many quarrels and much trouble.

-The Book of Wanderings of Brother Felix Fabri (1441-1502) Through the Holy Land, Arabia, and Egypt

The Arabic words for garbage and baggage are identical, ‘afsh, beginning with the hard-to-pronounce ‘ayn consonant. Mistaking the two can get you into a bit of trouble. I was never able to load my camel securely even after forty days. I carried the film rolls, Steve carried the sound gear, and Ned handled the camera and lens cases. We’d have hated to lose any of that, regardless of what we called it.

So we had to wait each morning for one of the drovers to finish their own chores to come over to help us with our “garbage”, as we usually correctly pronounced the right word’s wrong meaning. It always went smoothly unless that day’s drover was in a foul mood or preoccupied, in which case he would do a bad job and the girth or lashing would get loose almost immediately. They were both made of cheap plastic rope and would stretch out. Our gear was always getting loose. But we never lost any, or had any fall off our camels.

The drovers were as eager as we were to arrive safely so the film would get made. They wanted to be in it, to be up on screen, maybe to see it at El Obeid’s outdoor cinema ‘Arous al Rimal, the Bride of the Sands. We wanted to make it. Leaving behind for them the occasional polaroid picture was not enough. They wanted to be bigger than that, they wanted to be in the pictures. So we put them all in it. And as I told KhairAllah at the film screening, Everybody knows you now, from New York and London, from Paris to Moscow. He had heard of those places, just as everybody in Mileet and Kutum knew of him, “a famous khabir” as he says in the film.

A Beast Gentle and Tractable

A beast gentle and tractable, but in the time of Venery; then, as if remembering his former hard usage, he will bite his Keeper, throw him down, and kick him: forty days continuing in that fury, and then returning to his former meekness.

-A Relation of a Journey Begun An. Dom. 1610, Containing a Description of the Turkish Empire, of Aegypt, of the Holy Land…. by George Sandys

Forty days of Venery! That’s a long time with something you can’t get off your mind. I know that forty is a significant number in Near Eastern religions and folklore. Forty days of fasting in the desert or forty years of wandering in the desert. We were not wandering, rather going in a straight line, as straight as the grazing permitted, but still trying to arrive within forty days.

Both times I rode the Way of the Forty, it took a bit more than that. But luckier for us, our camels were never in their time of venery. For them, it didn’t matter whether it was four, or forty, or four times forty days on the trail. No need to return to meekness when entering the abattoir. No reprieve for a camel at the end of the Darb al-Arba’een. The knife and then the fork awaited. Khilis al-jins [see April 29], then ‘itfaddal. The sex is finished, then bon appetite.

The Camel Inside and Out

The camel - a most difficult animal to draw because although pronounced in its articulations, yet in its movements most loose and undecided.

-Journal of the Society of Arts, Vol 13, April 21 1865, a review of Walton’s The Camel

Among the numerous friends who have aided me during the progress of the Work, I am happy to record my special obligations to John Patterson, Esq., MD, of Cairo…for the loan of his instruments of dissection and other valuable services.

-The Camel: Its Anatomy, Proportions, and Paces, London 1865, by Elijah Walton, watercolorist and draftsman of illustrated books offering instruction on how to paint objects of natural history such as camels, mountain geology, clouds, and other atmospheric effects

Walton spent the years 1860-62 in Egypt and the Middle East painting and dissecting camels. The 94 plates in his anatomical atlas of the camel show a close attention to the muscles, veins, and bone structure of the head, the hoof, and other body parts. He describes the anatomy unique to the camel- its nostril flap, its flexible neck, its prehensile lip- and the footprints left by its walk, run, and gallop.

I only saw one camel being butchered for meat, this one midway on the trail as it was dying of exhaustion in a couched position. Its throat was cut and its head and neck pulled taut with a halter so it would fully bleed out. We made a deep cut along its back bone, diverting the incision around the hump, from shoulder to tail, then pulled the skin free on both sides to lay it out like a picnic cloth on the ground. With that, the butchers got busy and very bloody.

I imagine what Walton’s job was like. Just as our drovers cut the meat into cook pot-size pieces and pulled the skin from the head and hoofs after we had buried them in a sand-covered fire pit over night then dug them up in the morning, so he must have done a lot of pulling and cutting. The drovers carried daggers honed sharp on both sides of the blade. Thanks to his friend Dr. Patterson, he used an autopsist’s bone saws and scalpels. Both they and he did the job of loosening the camel’s articulations and deciding where next to dissect. One did it for art’s sake, the others for dinner.

A Film About Camels and Their Men

Those dromedaries and camels which are constantly ridden and carry heavy burdens are less vicious and will sometimes even place their lips against your cheek. It is the custom of the kind master occasonally to put his face against that of his own dromedary while speaking gently to it. Moreover the Bedouin seldom or never beats his dromedary, but treats him with as much kindness as his own children. If one runs away which it sometimes does for many miles in search of food or water, he will follow it and by using soothing sounds invariably induce it to be retaken.

-The Camel: Its Anatomy, Proportions, and Paces, 1865 London, By Elijah Walton

Ned and I had a pitch meeting with Robert Gardner, hoping he would support our plan to make a movie about camelmen from Sudan driving their herd to Egypt, of how they ride for 40 days then return to Sudan by ferry and lorry to ride with another herd, doing this sometimes five times a year. I told him I knew the trail boss from a previous trip and what we expected to film of their chores and life on the trail.

The pitch failed. He said that the film should be about the camels, not the men, and the extreme injustice with which they are treated after finishing the trail- with the slaughter house as their reward, or the lucky ones with a plow harness- and not like the men with a paycheck. At the least, he told us, we should focus on how the men and camels bond on the trail.

Gardner had a point. The camels and the men did not travel separately and apart, but rather together and as one. That is why camelmen are sometimes called camel ticks, rukaab, literally meaning “riders”. I cannot say how the camels felt about their riders, and I never saw their riders express anything like love and affection for their camels, but I did see what the camels, whether they were riding camels or herd camels, gave of themselves to the men. Their freedom. And patience. And direction.

We ended up making a film that I call an anthropology film, about men, but it is really a film about their camels. And that last scene, when they are being loaded onto rail cars for shipment to Cairo slaughterhouses, all those not sold in Upper Egypt for farm work, while the drovers observe silently from a distance and Egyptians load the train with clubs and shouts and whips, is a sad one. I think Gardner was right after all.

Don't Waste Our Water

He urinates and uses his tail to swish his piss about. All this spitting, drooling, and urinating- wastage of water- can be seen as a form of conspicuous display intended to impress the female- the male camel’s equivalent of the peacock’s tail.

-Camel, by Robert Irwin

When I would leave the campsite to walk a bit into the desert to urinate, I always got a question from the drovers when I returned. Luwees, why do you stand like a camel when you piss? Camelmen wore sirwaal pants without zippers, so they would have had to drop their drawers in order to pull it out and answer nature’s first call. So they squatted instead.

The male camel’s throat bladder, a part of the soft palate called the “dul’a”, or the palatine diverticulum- which he expells with a deep gurgle when aroused, looks like he is blowing a pink chewing gum bubble. The English call it “a flaming grimace”, pronounced with a long “a”, which gives what is merely a rank sexual display a bit of upper class dignity, like a peacock’s tail.

Ah! Aseeda

In the meantime having pitched the tent under a great tree where we were sheltered from the rays of the sun and in tolerable security, I fed on polenta (aseeda) and water with the camel drovers…

At length a bowl of polenta and another of dried meat was set before us. My illness deprived me of all inclination to eat; and observing the company not much inclined to invite me to join them, and yet embarrassed on how to avoid the ceremony, I relieved them by declining it and desiring them to begin. When they were satiated, and they lost no time in eating…

-Travels in Africa, Egypt, and Syria in the Years 1792 to 1798, William George Browne

My first taste of aseeda was not the same aseeda I would eat for the next forty days. That first day I ate with some elderly camel merchants with delicate stomachs, which required them to eat wheat flour aseeda with milk, which had a disgusting gelatinous look and taste. One of them said to me, Luwees, you will eat this for the next forty days, and I was worried because I really hated it.

Lucky for me, on the trail the drovers eat a millet flour aseeda with sauce made from vegetable oil, onions, hot red pepper, and dried okra and tomato powders. Millet is used as animal feed in America because it is highly nutritious despite its rough taste. On the desert trail, good nutrition makes all the difference between life and death.

I learned to like millet aseeda mostly because I liked to burn my lips on the red pepper. And everyone in the dry desert likes to lubricate themselves inside and out with seed oils. The meat was another story. Once we bought and slaughtered a goat but it did not go very far between 10 men shared by two campfires. Another time we slaughtered a camel that was near death from exhaustion, and if an Islamic slaughter can be performed before death, the meat is okay to eat. So we hurried up and cut its throat.

We ate fresh camel meat that day and the next, and after we tried to dry the meat without salt, by cutting it into thin strips and hanging it on a rope line during the night, hoping that the wind would do the job of the sun. It did not, and it began to spoil. We ate it anyway for a few days before we all began to gag on it. Dried meat is called sharmout, and a prostitute is called a sharmouta. I never asked what the etymological connection might be.

At the aseeda bowl when many men crowd around, you have to squat not side by side but rather front to back, with the right hand pointing inward to make the food grab. It was always fun to watch a late arriving straggler join the bowl when it had already been served; he had to squeeze himself between two others, a bit like the runt of the litter fighting his way to the hind teat.

I don’t think I ever missed a nighttime meal even when I was feeling sick, for I knew that riding on an empty stomach all the next day would make me feel much worse than however bad my upset stomach was making me feel that night. And you have to eat fast if you wanted sauce on your millet, because the boy cook always shorted us on the sauce, making it so a large cold unappetizing lump of aseeda was always left over, that even the yearlings were reluctant to eat the next morning.