Khairallah Crosses the Desert and Enters Binban

On a February day in the year A.D. 638 the Caliph Omar entered Jerusalem, riding upon a white camel. He was dressed in worn, filthy robes, and the army that followed him was rough and unkempt.

-A History of the Crusades, Vol. 1, Chapter 1, The Abomination of Desolation, Steven Runciman

In his fifteen hundred page opus, Runciman only once wrote about a white camel, the kind KhairAllah rode into Binban on a February day of the year 1984 wearing a clean ‘aragi over a dirty sirwal and followed by his rough and unkempt men, except for the youngest drover Adam who had shaved his face clean the night before. For our ragtag group of Muslims and Christians, entering Binban was not quite like making pilgrimage to Mecca or conquering Jerusalem, but it did promise us a drink from the Nile which the Holy Cities could not.

Runciman shows great sympathy for Muslims and Byzantine Christians whom he considered victims of the Catholic Crusaders. His depiction of the Caliph Omar entering Jerusalem peacefully he contrasts with Count Raymond of Toulouse’s butchery and blood letting there five hundred years later. Unlike Raymond, we entered Binban not on a crusade but after crossing the Sahara.

Our word “crusade” comes from the stem word cross, as in crucifix and cruciform, which you also see in the French, Croisade, from croix, but even more clearly in Arabic.

Salib in classical Arabic means cross, from the verbal form salaba which Wehr gives as “to crucify someone, to make the sign of the cross, or to cross one’s arms over one’s chest”. He gives an adjectival form as huroub salibiyya, Crusades, literally “crosswise wars”- note that there is no capitalization of letters in Arabic orthography so thus it has less the religious connotation than George Bush gave it after 9/11.

I learned the Arabic verb for “to cross (a physical space)”, such as a desert or a river, as ‘abara, which also gives the word mi’bar, ferryboat, on which we and the camels crossed the Nile from Binban to the Daraw quarantine station. That was not a crusade either, just a short crossing, twenty minutes rather than forty days. By then Egyptians had taken charge of the camels, loading them onto rail cars to ship to Cairo, so we all stood by watching, crossing our arms over our chests and waiting for our next desert crossings. I waited four years for mine, KhairAllah less than four weeks for his.

The Village Dogs Bark and the Caravan moves past

Camel-drivers squat beside iron kettles over heaps of embers, sorcerers from the Sahara offer their amulets.

-In Morocco, Edith Wharton, who visited during World War One just as she was beginning to write The Age of Innocence

…in private broughams, in the spacious family landau, or in the humbler but more convenient Brown coupe…It was one of the great livery-stableman’s most masterly intuitions to have discovered that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.

-The Age of Innocence, describing how hack coachmen and their cab-like Brown coupes provided quick get-aways, get-tos, and discreet trysting places for New York’s upper crust

Edith Wharton was as unfamiliar with camel drivers in Marrakesh as she was with Brown coupe coachmen in New York. From inside the carriage, she could pull the string to the outside bell telling the coachman at whose door she wished to be dropped, without saying a word to him. But for caravaneers she was at a complete loss, for neither could she speak their language nor read their amulets. And the cross-Saharan trail from Gao to Ghadames via Ghat and Germa was much trickier than simply going up Fifth to Sixty Third and over to Park.

KhairAllah often asked me if they needed camel drivers in New York. No, I said to him, in New York we have subway trains that run underground like worms. And zookeepers who look after camels also have to look after giraffes and elephants. Then what can I do to work in America? he asked. You could be a farmer, I said. Farmer! he snorted, I am not a peasant. Then what are you? I asked. A khabeer, he said. A man of experience and expertise, who knows the trail from Sudan to Egypt. Then stay in the desert, we both agreed, and let the New York dogs bark at your moving shadow.

Wa man laa shaikhu lahu, shaikhuhu al-shaytan. He who has no shaikh, the devil is his shaikh

Landing on an empty beach by small boat, just before being captured by mounted Arab tribesmen…PETERSON (played by Robert Morley, aka Fat Gut): Where do you suppose we are? DANNREUTHER (played by Humphrey Bogart): Africa. PETERSON: What part of Africa? O’HARA (played by Peter Lorre): Yes, that’s important. What part? DANNREUTHER: Not a bad place to land. No customs. No forms to fill out.

In jail…AHMED aka The Arab Inquisitor (speaking to Dannreuther): I believe you must have Arab blood. Westerners are not usually so subtle.

AHMED: Our country is in a state of unrest. PETERSON: Oh, I am sorry. AHMED: Agents of certain foreign governments sometimes try to enter it by stealth. PETERSON: Tsk, tsk. But surely Your Excellency, in our case one look is sufficient to convince you of our innocence. AHMED: No, one look is not enough…Would you instruct that one (pointing to Bogart’s wife, played by Gina Lollobrigida), that in my country, a female’s lips may move but her words are not heard…Tell me more about Rita Hayworth.

-Beat the Devil, a comedy about a gang of crooks going to Africa to get rich quick

Beat the Devil’s last twenty minutes bring to life so many things that happened to me in Sudan and elsewhere in Africa that it’s almost as if I had been unconsciously acting out Truman Capote’s screenplay. Here are some of them…

An empty beach with Arab tribesmen…The Mauritanian coast along the Banc d’Arguin, where Moorish looters lurked for ships to run aground on the unseen mud shallows far offshore and then send in rowboats to unload their Africa-bound European passengers with many jewels and much cash. Kevin and I walked on that beach but the only Arab tribesman we saw was our jeep driver.

No customs, no forms to fill out…We crossed the Sudan-Egypt border on camels in the dark of night and later had to go into Aswan for a passport stamp. The customs post at the ferry station wanted no part of us, so we were sent to headquarters where we explained how we had skipped past the check points a week earlier. Not possible, not permitted, the officer in charge said. But he gave us our stamp as if we’d arrived by ferry that same day. He didn’t want any part of us either.

Westerners are not so subtle…This is true. In Umbadr I lost my temper when I was pulled out of a film screening midway through and brought before the army officer who told me to wait until a soccer match he was watching on TV had ended. Here, Sit in the chair, said the soldier who brought out a rickety seat with broken legs and patchy nylon webbing, We are hospitable to guests here. I kicked over the chair and raised my voice, You call this no-good chair hospitality! Ana za’laan jiddan, I’m really pissed off.

Foreign agents enter by stealth…I have no idea why the drovers thought we khawajas wanted to ride with them forty days to Egypt. Fusha. Fun, we said. No one rides a camel for fun, they answered. Maybe you are a jaasuus, pl. jawaasees, a spy. But they still treated us like brothers.

Tell me about Rita Hayworth…My introduction to the world of camels was because of John Wayne, when Hajj Bashir, dressed in the immaculate white jallabiyya of a wealthy Sudanese trader, called me to his side when I was wandering alone through Cairo’s Imbaba camel market with no idea who to interview for my oral anthropology class. Tell me about John Wayne, he said, They say he wants to die. It was true, I too had heard that John Wayne was on his death bed back in LA, a long way from Imbaba but close enough to hear the news if you were a daily VOA listener as was Hajj Bashir, as I later found out and came to admire most about him.

His Shaikh is the Devil…KhairAllah was not my shaikh but he was everyone’s khabeer. Without his khabar, knowledge, and khibra, experience on the Way of the Forty, none of us would have made it to Day 2.

In Morocco

At the suggestion of the municipal officials we mounted the stairs and looked down on the packed square. There can be no more Oriental sight this side of the Atlas and the Sahara…In the middle of the square sit the story-tellers’ turbaned audiences. Beyond these are the humbler crowds about the wild-ringletted snake-charmers with their epileptic gestures and hissing incantations, and farther off, in the densest circle of all, we could just discern the shaved heads and waving surpliced arms of the dancing-boys.

-In Morocco, Edith Wharton, from her visit to Marrakesh in 1917

David and I were preparing for a long day and night in the Djemaa al-Fna, reconnoitering its four corners from the Cafe de France’s roof terrace. What the hell, we said, let’s just go down and jump right in. So we wandered through and around the circles that form and widen around the performers, then shrink and misshape until they are no more when they’ve cashed in and gone home, their audience lost to another’s circle. So many tourists wander by that David with a big camera on his neck fit right in. But my notebook seemed ridiculous.

We couldn’t decide which Oriental sight- amulet writers or boy boxers? snail soup sellers or acrobats? monkeys or pythons?- would beguile us first. That’s why each act had their own tout, to bark in four languages, to the French and Germans, the Americans and the Italians. That’s where she came in.

We should have pegged her as a ringer straight off. No woman wears both a niqab and a miniskirt in the square. Uncovered hair and designer eyeglasses were a dead give-away. Still, we bit. Hi guys, where are you from? she asked in a whiskey voice with a rasp somewhere between a pack-a-day habit of Camels and Salems. But catch that accent, we thought. Brooklyn or the Bronx?

So we had to ask her, Hi yourself, where are you from? All over, she said. Anyplace you want. Follow me if you want more. No thanks, we answered, we have to interview a snake-charmer. Oh, she said, I can help you do that too.

You say afalfa, I say Alfalfa, KhairAllah says Birsim

alfaç (catalan), alfaz (aragones), alfalce (navarro), alfalfa (castellano, gallego, portugues), afalfa (murciano), falfa (leones): en algun momento hemos creido, como Machado, que esta voz derivaba mas probablemente de arabe halfaa’ que del classico fisfisah, ya que la evolucion fonetica resulta mucho mas sencilla y la dificultad semantica podria esquivarse suponiendo que en algun momento alhalfa designara en al-Andalus alfalfa. Pero, habiendo leido buen numero de obras de botanica de autores andalucies que no dejan de consignar los distintos nombres de las plantas en varias lenguas y dialectos, hay que devolver la razon a Coromines y a su hipotesis mas complicada, Derivado intrarromance castellano alfalfal, catalan alfalsar, portugues alfafal

-Diccionario de Arabismos y Voces Afines en Iberorromance, Federico Corrientes

birsim, clover, specifically Egyptian clover (Trifolium alexandrinum L.)

-Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, Hans Wehr

There is nothing like reading a dictionary to kill time if you have all the time in the world. The Arabismo Dictionary’s entry for alfalfa goes on and on and on, from Aragonese to Portuguese, and then on to Subarabigo, Tunecino, and Ugaritico if you could be so lucky. Corrientes doesn’t mention the history of alfalfa’s English language written usage, which according to the OED began with W.Harte in his Essential Husbandry of 1764, “Alfalfa, whose luxuriant herbage feeds the lab'ring ox, mild sheep, and fiery steeds.” Darwin in the Voyage of the Beagle spelled it a bit differently, “The beds of alfarfa, a kind of clover” and an 1891 entry in The Judge’s Library- A Monthly Magazine of Fun has this to say, “He'd done fenced in his claim an' cut two craps of alfalfy afore that feller ever seed the steerage.” So let’s cut the crap, so to speak, and add them to the list of variant spellings.

But KhairAllah, like Shakespeare having small Latin and less Greek, wouldn’t know his Medicago sativa from his Trifolium alexandrinum, only that birsim gives a camel the runs and fattens the cow, while thistles and thorns fatten a camel and kill the cow. Alfalfa? Never heard of it in any language, certainly not in the supposed but lost Classical Arabic source word fisfisah (with the “s” a velarized fricative), as opposed to fasfasah (with a non-velarized “s”), meaning bedbugs- which KhairAllah might call rukaab, riders, of which he too is one, on camel back.

A khawaja's ass-load

Idhaa inkasar al-jamal hammal hamal himaar. If thy camel breaks down, put on an ass-load.

-Burckhardt’s Arabic Proverbs

I rode a white camel for the first 20 days, then I left the dabouka for a day and a night to enter Dongola to get my passport exit stamp. When I met up again with the herd I was told my white camel had broken down and died, and from then onwards I would ride a chestnut gelding, the cameloid eqivalent of an ox, a strong, slow, and lumbering beast. So what therefore does Burckhardt’s proverb say about me? My khasi certainly did not haul his ass for the next twenty days to Egypt, but he sure did mine, a khawaja-load.

O my camel! (translation. Woe is Me!)

gamal /n pl gimaal/ camel ma shuftish il gamal wala l-gammaal [proverb] (I have seen neither the camel nor the cameleer) I have no idea who was responsible. ma gaash fi-l-gamal (He did not come by camel) He hasn’t asked for too much. il-gamal bima hamal (The camel with what it carried) The whole caboodle. is-sikka tfawwit ig-gamal (The way permits the passage of the camel) No one is forcing you to stay. ya gamal-i (O my camel!) expression of mourning by a woman lamenting her dead husband.

gamali /adj invar/ 1. of or pertaining to camels 2. requiring long cooking. shay gamali [jocular] tea very late in coming.

-A Dictionary of Egyptian Arabic

I regret never asking the drovers for idioms and proverbs in their Kabbashi dialect that mentioned camels. These Egyptian proverbs originate from the language of settled peasants who rarely see camels in their daily life. Donkeys and sheep maybe yes. Camels probably never. But I still wonder how many camel proverbs there might be in the drovers’ language.

They have no aphorism like “it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven” because there are no rich men in Dar al-Kababish, and the original verse probably contains a misprint of the Greek word kamelos (camel) for kamilos (anchor chain), of which there are none in North Kordofan because there is no water on which to sail a boat.

But KhairAllah definitely might say something like, is-sikka tfawwit ig-gamal, The way permits the passage of the camel, because we were riding camels on the Darb al-Arba’een, The Way of the Forty, otherwise known as a sikka sahraawi, A Saharan Way, and no, we were not Arab Seamen aboard Ships of the Desert, just woeful cameleers, or as Egyptians would say, gammaaleen.

If The Nile Doesn’t eat me, Something else will

Lepidus- What manner o’ thing is your crocodile? Antony- It is shaped, sir, like itself; and it is as broad as it hath breadth; it is just so high as it is, and moves with its own organs; it lives by that which nourisheth it; and, the elements once out of it, it transmigrates. Pompey- What colour is it of? Antony- Of its own colour too. Pompey- ‘Tis a strange serpent. Antony- ‘Tis so. And the tears of it are wet.

-Antony and Cleopatra, 2.7

After 21 days we finally reached the Nile. Everyone drank and washed. David and I went swimming, to the drovers’ great consternation. The Nile will eat you, they said. Al Neel biyakulkum. We laughed and swam deeper and farther into the current. I wondered how it would feel to leave the camels there and then and just keep swimming to Egypt. No more waterless nights to pass around the campfire, no more empty goatskins at our midday stop. But then I thought, what about all the tamaaseeh? and swam back to shore. Better to be picked at by vultures than swallowed by crocodiles. I had heard there were still many living in the Nubian Reach of the Nile. So it wouldn’t be the Neel that ate me, it would be the Neel’s strange serpent, a timsaah.

A Kabbashi’s Camel Chorale

The nomad’s camels are strong and frolic in these fat weeks of the spring pasture.  Now it is they lay up flesh, and grease in their humps, for the languor of the desert summer and the long year. Driven home full-bellied at sunset, they come hugely bouncing in before their herdsmen: the householders, going forth from the booths, lure to them as they run lurching by, with loud Wolloo-wolloo-wolloo, and to stay them Wòh-ho, wòh-ho, wòh-ho! They chide any that strikes a tent-cord with Hutch!

He sang in their braying-wise [which one of their ancient poets, Antara, compared to the hum of flies!] as we passed over the the desert at a trot, and quavering his voice (î-î-î-î) to the wooden jolting of the saddle.

-Travels in Arabia Deserta, Charles Doughty

At a fast pace the air was filled with the drovers' cries of Hut, Onk, Heh and Biraah (Easy does it)- the four notes of the Kabbashi chorale.

-Smithsonian Magazine, March 1987

There were many strange noises made by the men when driving and riding camels, noises made to calm them and others made to excite them, like lullabies and drum beats. There was a lot of onomatopoeia on the trail, as if they should speak to them in camel talk when their own Arabic failed. Slower, Faster, Easy, Ouch. The drovers would say Ouch! when they could see it hurt the camels more than it hurt themselves, trotting across stony ground or the girth rubbing a saddle sore. If I closed my eyes and just listened I could imagine myself overhearing a conversation between babies, or extraterrestrials. Wolloo-wolloo. î-î-î-î. Hutch. Onk. Biraah. Hey, take it easy up there, I’m walking to Cairo as fast as I can.

Water of the fountain of Paradise (tasneem), stored in the hump (sanaam)

How can you say, “I am not defiled, I have not gone after the Baals?” Look at your way in the valley; know what you have done- a restive young she-camel running hither and yon, rushing into the wilderness, in her heat sniffing the wind! Who can restrain her lust?

-Jeremiah 2:23

The hump should not be very big. A very large hump is a sign that the male is a poor breeder and that a female is sterile.

-A Field Manual of Camel Diseases

It was true, our camels were very lustful. Like Jeremiah’s haashi with interlaced tracks, they were always veering this way and that with sexual intent. Putting their nose into another’s backward-aimed urine stream and then sniffing the breeze- as Egyptians do in shamm al-naseem, a pre-Islamic holiday celebrating the spring fling the day after Coptic Easter- really turned them on.

So it is odd that an overly big hump is a veterinary symptom of sterility and impotence. After weeks of only aseeda we lustily ate roasted camel hump, the sanaam, after we butchered one who fell lame in our herd, but we didn’t drink maa al-tasneem, the Water of the Fountain of Paradise promised in the Quran to those who are saved. I doubt if it is the water stored in the fat of the sanaam, a word from the same s-n-m triliteral root as tasneem, and the sanaam we ate did not really taste heavenly, just chewy. Our water came from goatskins and I preferred the liver.

a sport and a pastime

Innamaa al-hayaat al-dunya la’ibun wa lahwun

-Surah 47, Verse 36

Amusement and Diversion. Idle Sport and Play. Play and Passing Delight. Sport and Frivolity. Childish Games. These are what translators of the Quran have called al-hayaat al-dunya, the life of this world. Hans Wehr has the two Arabic nouns that tell us what is the life of this world coming from the verbs la’iba and luhiy, with their various meanings given as “to slaver, slobber, drool (baby)” and “to turn one’s attention from, to try to forget”.

James Salter’s novel, which opens with that verse from Surah 47, is considered one of the most explicit literary treatments of sex ever written by a non-pornographer or not Henry Miller. Could he have guessed fifty five years ago that sex might best today be called a sport and a pastime. Did Muhammad know fifteen hundred years ago that the two words in a verse he transcribed direct from the Angel Gabriel’s mouth Salter would use for his title. Drooling and Forgetting. Al-maktoub maktoub, What is written has been written. Innamaa, indeed.

Cairo's unwashable taste

Can you rinse away this city that lasts/like blood on the bitten tongue?

-Chandni Chowk, Delhi, Agha Shahid Ali

Maybe everyone has a city in their lives like Cairo is in mine. The city where I first drew blood and saw blood, where you can never wash away the taste on your tongue. Cairo is still on my tongue, I have two small scars to prove it where the cuts were made, the holes where the tubes were inserted letting me breathe again.

But I still like Cairo, admire it even, and I hope for the best despite all the stupid things Cairenes have done to themselves since their Arab Spring. The lines from Julius Caesar come to mind, as I remember them- in fact I misremembered them and just now had to look them up again- when Marullus scolds his fellow Romans for being so easily swayed by Caesar’s oratory following his defeat of Pompey- “you blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things”, he says- just as I wanted to scold Cairenes for going gaga over Sisi after he toppled Mursi. Do they really not regret cutting their own democracy’s infant throat?

The people I knew there forty years ago are either dead or their whereabouts are unknown. Ahmad my building’s bawaab, Mahdi Bashir the camel trader’s son, my first Arabic teacher Ahmad Taher who no longer answers email, and the makwagi who worked in the stall next door. But still I would not mind going back again and wandering around Talat Harb Square. Groppi is gone but Cafe Riche is open. Maybe you can still buy books at Madbouly. I hear it’s easier to cross the street without getting killed by wild traffic, and that a dollar still goes a long way in kebab restaurants.

What blood sticks to a Cairo-bitten tongue does not have to be bitter. Wash it down with ahwa saada, and swallow again.

Postcards from the Periphery

Kashmir shrinks into my mailbox,/my home a neat four by six inches.//I’ve always loved neatness. Now I hold/the half-inch Himalayas in my hand.//This is home, and this the closest/I've ever been to home…

-Postcard from Kashmir, Agha Shahid Ali

I’ve always been sent and have sent postcards to distant places from other distant places. Sometimes a bit bigger than four by six inches, but not by much. I’ve liked buying postcards as much as stamps for postcards wherever I’ve gone. I try to convince the postmaster that postcard stamps should cost less than letter stamps, usually to no avail. It’s the same effort, he says, to deliver an envelope as it is a card, the same hand to hand, hand over hand, hand after hand effort required for both.

That’s why I like sending a postcard, the fact that when it is mailed in a place like Sudan, say, or Nepal or Argentina, many people’s hands, starting with mine, touch it (and get a chance to read it and look at the picture) before it arrives finally in the recipient’s hand So many different people in that chain of events, I bet they would be surprised if they were ever to be in the same room and were told, You all helped deliver the same postcard.

Finding the right words for a postcard is an art, for me mostly a jokey form of art. From Cuzco, Peru I once mailed a card to Mel Gerling, a farmer friend in Missouri who drove combines and tractors and used electric augurs to lift grain into bins and bailing machines to pack straw. The postcard showed a family of Inca farmers wearing ponchos and chullos and standing barefoot in their field with a ox-drawn plow. I had written on the back, Greetings from Peru, this is how all the farmers work here. It was a joke, but when I got home and saw Mel, he pulled out the card and asked me if it was really true. I had to admit, No, that photo was taken a hundred years ago.

I used to write cards to a man in Upper Egypt from whatever other country I was in. Once I sent one from Havana and when I saw him later he pulled out a high stack of the cards he’d received from me over the years and we went through them one by one, him asking me about each country’s stamp. I remember he really treasured the Cuba stamp.

Maybe it all started with postcards I’d been sent when small by my great Aunt Ahwee, who got her name when my toddler sister could not pronounce her name, Marie, properly and could only say Ahwee. Aunt Ahwee would send me in St.Louis postcards from Disneyland that always signed off Love and Kisses, Ahwee. That’s how I really feel like ending every postcard I still write. Ahwee…

Money, Count it Twice

Word passes in whispers [among the Egyptian traders] that we’ve arrived from Nahud…Muhammad truly needs help in this camel trading business. Making a profit from a simple sale is a new concept for him, a man used only to working hard for honest pay. The EXIM game confounds him, where two Sudanese pounds equal one Egyptian pound, where prices can double in a single sentence [are you speaking Sudanese or Egyptian Arabic?], where two thousand miles of trail in forty days multiplies what a camel is worth, where, as here in Binban, neither a man’s word nor handshake is held true. Money…count it twice.

-Day 42, Trail Diary, Kordofan to Cairo, February 1984, on the day we arrived in Egypt’s Nile Valley camel-trading town of Binban, 30 kms north of Aswan on the western bank

Muhammad was the most naive, honest, kindly drover in our group. Adam was the designated camp cook but Muhammad did most of the aseeda making, despite already having done most of the other camp chores. Once Adam asked for a rag to clean a pot and Muhammad tore him off a piece of his own riding tunic. He was too poor, too miskeen (unlike in classical Arabic where the word means miserly, in Sudanese colloquial it is miserable) to have any turban cloth left at all. We joked that he was too miskeen even to be buried properly, turbans being a man’s ever-present shroud.

So when Muhammad tried to sell his camel to the shrewd Egyptian traders, KhairAllah stepped in to help him negotiate. There was some shouting, dowsha, but that is normal in Egypt, and in the end Muhammad seemed satisfied with the price. KhairAllah himself was not well versed in trading- he was the khabeer, trail boss, expert of the route not the market- but he proved again and again that he could do most things and many things well

I was not happy that day in Binban. The trail camaraderie had ended too abruptly. Egyptians can do that to you, in a minute break a magic desert spell that has lasted for forty two days. Just look at the last scene in Voice of the Whip, when the narrator says, “But this is the end of their journey, Egyptian workers load the train”, and the film goes to slow motion as fat peasants with sticks beat the camels and the drovers look on impassively from the side.

Robert Gardner had a point when he objected to our funding pitch. No, he said, it does not sound like an ethnography about men. What I hear is a tragedy about camels, they walk across the Sudanese desert only to be sold and slaughtered by Egyptian butchers. In Egypt, money…count it twice.

a naaqa's appointed Time and ours

They said, Thou art only one of those bewitched. Thou art no more than a mortal like us: then bring us a sign, if thou tellest the truth. He said, Here is a she-camel [naaqa]. She has a right of watering and ye have a right of watering, both on a day appointed.

-Sura 26 The Poets, Verse 153-155

‘Idd Ahmad. Two wells and two mud-made troughs after our long morning’s march on the wadi’s edge and a dry breakfast. Last night a scrap broke over low water, it touching on other complaints they have with me and David, about our constant queries- especially the names of landmarks they don’t know, only KhairAllah does- and that we write their answers in our books [to the illiterate a kind of bewitching].

But scarce water at bottom is the matter even though we’re never more than two days from a well. Yes we each have a priority for it- Muhammad his ablutions, Adam his washing of pots, Masood his sweet tea, in fact David and I want no sugar at all. Last night Masood said, Water finished, sugar finished, Khilis al mayya, khilis al sukr. I said, Ma’aleesh, mabahibbish sukr, So what, I don’t like sugar. This got his goat. Even the camels fight about water. Over my shoulder they growl at the trough. The wells are always poor…

-Day 14, Trail Diary on the Darb al-Arba’een from Kordofan to Cairo, February 1984

Thus the Prophet Salih was interrogated by the Thamudites, a tribe that later disappeared, perhaps swept away by flowing lava. And so too our ibl, camels in their collective plural, which in our dabouka included a naaqa, a she-camel or two, watered on their appointed day, before the drovers allowed themselves their appointed glass of tea. But everyone was grouchy because those wells were poor, their water muddy and sandy, some said even bitter. Sugar helped, but David and I preferred our tea unsweetened. They must be witches to dislike sugar, they said of us.

Camels in the sky

Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel? Polonius: …’tis like a camel, indeed. Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel. Polonius: It is backed like a weasel. Hamlet: Or like a whale? Polonius: Very like a whale.

-from Act III, Scene ii

Nearing Day 40 you begin to see camels everywhere because you have been chasing after them for so long and each one is too precious to lose. On the flat, over a dune, behind an acacia, in your dream. Sometimes in the clouds.

There were not many clouds in February. That was dry season and the sky was blue, much bluer than the azraq, blue, color that the drovers called some of their darker-hued camels. So what you saw overhead was as empty and monochrome as all that sand you saw before you. Blue and yellow. Only when we butchered a camel once, already couched and then cutting along the spine and spreading its skin on each side to lay down like two halves of a picnic cloth did we see red. So then we had a tricolor- blue, yellow, red. Guess whose flag I saw flapping in the wind, up where the clouds should be.