How do you say no?

Like all men of the Library, I have travelled in my youth…For a long time it was believed that these impenetrable books belonged to past or remote languages…

-The Library of Babel, Borges

I have spent more time lately in the Library than travelling, so I can say that it is easier to read Lane’s Lexicon from a chair than it would ever have been in a saddle, searching for a word like Whoa! But seeking Kabbāshi equivalents of his Classical vocabulary was fruitless.

I’d say, O KhairAllah, Let us alight from these our dung makers to rest under this Father of Sweetness tree, a lone respite on the Darb of the Forty to the Mother of Cities, Qāhira, She the Victorious. And KhairAllah would say with a shake of his head, No.

PERCHANCE TO…

Welcome to the desert of the real.

-Morpheus

In KhairAllah’s herd there was a Hashi, a Yearling, and to her we fed extra millet from a canvas sack we kept at the fireside. One late moonless night I was awakened with a start, the Hashi’s mouth had taken hold of me through the sleeping bag, mistaking my gluteus for her grain, ending my dream and rousing me to the reality of the desert, its stars so bright I could thread a needle.

Trees as rooms

You long for trees in the desert, not just for the shade they provide, but also because they stretch up toward space...Trees create room.

-Exterminate All the Brutes, Sven Lindqvist

William Shatner often plays the fool but he said something almost profound when he returned from the edge of space on the Bezos rocket. Up there where it turns cold and black, he said, you realize just how thin is the baby blue blanket that covers us and keeps us warm. When I was on the Darb the midday sky was mostly heavy, thick and oppressive, and the few trees that we found for rest breaks gave us shade, but they also seemed like tent poles, lifting that blanket above our heads so that we could move, so that we would not suffocate in bed and had room to breathe.

My dār, my home, my grave

…the bedouin who lived along the Nile in the north of the Sudan and came down from the lands of the Kababeesh and the Dar al-Hamar…

-The Wedding of Zein, Tayeb Salih

KhairAllah was a Kabbāshi from Dār al-Kabābīsh and Adam was a Hamari from Dār al-Hamar. They did not get along well because KhairAllah was an experienced Khabīr, Trail Boss, and Adam was an inexperienced Tabbākh, Cook, not because they came each from a different Dār. Lane gives Dār as House, Abode, or A Place Where One Alights and Takes Up Dwelling. Thus, Tanzania’s Dār al-Salām, The Abode of Peace, and Morocco’s Dār Baydā’, White House, or Casablanca. Lane also gives Dār the less common meaning of Burial Ground, but there is no telling where KhairAllah and Adam will alight for that last and final time.

blue, as in bird shit

We will gather the sinners on that blue day

-Quran 20:102

KhairAllah had camels of six hues in his herd, many Ahmar (Red), Ashqar (Rufous), and Asfar (Yellow), fewer Abyad (White) and Adbas (Bay), and even fewer Azraq (Blue), but these last went unridden, maybe because their color’s triliteral root, Z-R-Q, has the seconday meaning of Bird Shit, although Lane shows it as a corruption of the closely pronounced root Dh-R-Q, meaning Bird Shit more properly.

Fewer Ancient ways

Guided by stars and some instinct less defined…whose romance on a route that ends, for the camels at least, on the butcher’s slab…animals, some hobbled, others too benign to seek escape from a harsh destiny, are paraded and sold in a market that seems to prosper in its melee of whip-cracking merchants and groaning, grumpy, growling beasts. Ancient ways endure.

-Imbaba Journal, New York Times, December 18, 1989

This was written ten years after I first visited the market as an observer and five years after I joined the melee as a participant. I know now that ancient ways do not endure, for the camels these days come to market not guided by stars in the desert but rather driven by lorries on asphalt roads. But the Cairene butcher still beckons the Kordofani camel. The laws of supply and demand still pertain, even if the Egyptian and Sudanese pound are wildly out of sync, no longer 1 for 2 as in my day on the trail. Now it is more like 1 for 25.

Panic and joy at the karāma

And once out in the desert there is no return. One has to go on, whatever happens. It is now, at this moment and only now, that I have a chance to get off. Always the same alloy of panic and joy at the moment of departure. It is like losing one’s footing at the beginning of a great love affair.

-Exterminate All the Brutes, Sven Lindqvist

I wonder how many of the first time drovers felt like quitting just before their time to saddle up. I guess it was too late to change one’s mind once having eaten roast lamb at the Karāma, the goodbye and good luck ritual meal, like backing out of a parachute jump when standing at the plane’s open door. It was different for me, I was heading home from there, those forty days were my first steps getting back. But a young drover like Ibrahim, on his first trip to Cairo, Africa’s largest city, must have felt like Columbus’ cabin boy, afraid of sailing toward the edge of the world and falling into the unknown.

Mas'ūd

Khawāja nimra wāhid, Kuwayyis, Kuwayyis, Kuwayyis. Khawāja nimra itnayn, Kuwayyis, Kuwayyis, Kuwayyis.

-Mas’ūd Abu Dūd, on the Darb, February 1984

Poor Mas’ūd, for he never got our names straight in all those forty days. I was always Foreigner Number One and David was always Foreigner Number Two, and we were both Kuwayyis, Good, Good, Good. But then again, I didn’t get his name right either, thinking that Dūd meant what was given in my Modern Standard Arabic dictionary, Worm, and I told this to David and we laughed unkindly at Mas’ūd, but in Sudanese Arabic, Dūd means Lion, and they have given it this meaning because the Boll Weevil destroys their cotton crop as if it were a Lion destroying their lives.

©David Melody

Butts, grub, and god

Cuando salimos para Kiansis con una grande partida, ¡Ay! Qué camino tan largo, No contaba con la vida…Unos pedían un cigatto, Otros pedían que comer, Y el caporal nos decía, Sea por Díos, qué hemos de hacer?…When we left for Kansas with a great herd, Ay! What a long trail it was, I wasn’t sure I’d survive….Some [drovers] asked for a cig, Others for some eats, And the trail boss would say, It’s up to God, what can we do?

-Corrido de Kiansis, a Mexican drover’s ballad about a cattle drive from the Río Grande to Kansas, circa 1860

Cattle on the Chisholm Trail and camels on the Forty Day Trail shared more than their south-to-north direction. And when Mexican cowboys did the driving, their laments and longings sounded not unlike a Kabbashi’s frequent Shakāwi, Complaints. Wanting a smoke, needing some grub, relying only on God, they all drove the same trail…Mā Shā’a Allah, What Allah has Willed, an invocation in the past tense, because getting to Kiansis or Qāhira, or not, was foreordained by Díos.

Who is a man in sudan

Campy fun!…suggests a story conference debauch…Miss Montez saunters with the regality of an usherette…Turhan Bey gives a boyish imitation of Rudolph Valentino…If there's a scene that explains why the film is called SUDAN, a locale that never figures in the plot, it wasn't included in the print I saw…I was born in Sudan. If I showed this film to my Mum it would only confirm to her that I’m a pot head.

-Reviews of the film Sudan (1945), starring Spanish-accented Maria Montez, aka the Queen of Technicolor, and German-accented Turhan Bey, aka the Turkish Delight

I haven’t seen this film, so I missed the slave trader’s villainously comic henchman played by Philip Van Zandt, who also appeared in the other Orientalist B-gems Yankee Pasha, Arabian Nuts, Thief of Damascus (as Ali Baba), and Son of Ali Baba (in an uncredited role- so low his star had fallen by the end of his career). He killed himself after his last silly part in a Three Stooges short.

Van Zandt’s most dignified role was in Citizen Kane as the newsreel editor Mr. Rawlston, whose line “It isn’t enough to tell us what a man did. You’ve got to tell us who he was” frames the greatest film ever made. I wonder if Voice of the Whip tells us who KhairAllah is, or is there still more to learn?

Glasses and cups

…as clearly as sand/pouring through glass in the winter desert./He was the metal of his crown at last.

-Augustus, Frank O’ Hara

At first the drovers drank their tea only from a glass, their chalice for this almost religious ritual after and between meals, before their sleep and through their night vigil, so they stowed them in rags nested inside tin cans so as not to break when loaded onto their camels. Inevitably they did, and so the drovers counted down…four, three, two, one…the glasses that remained unbroken. Except me, for I had bought a metal cup before setting out. And thus it was my cup, increasingly bent, blackened, and dinged as it became the farther into the Darb we rode, from which the drovers drank one after the other in turn after me.

Asses in the falāta

Falāta, A desert in which there is an interval of two days with a portion of the day preceding them and a portion of the day following them between the watering of camels and one day between the watering of asses…

-Lane’s Lexicon

Only KhairAllah can say whether the desert of the Darb should be called Falāta, because we Khawajas never went a day between being watered. The camels, yes, they went many days between watering, but no, not the asses.

Questions from kordofan

Everyone had put questions to me and I to them. They had asked me about Europe. Were the people there like us or were they different? Was life expensive or cheap? What did people do in winter?

-Season of Migration to the North, Tayeb Salih, a novel set in a Sudanese village

They also asked me, If you put camels in zoos, why not dogs and cats? Why in Amrīkā does a kilo of lamb or goat cost more than a kilo of beef or chicken? And I asked them, If Egypt is the Gift of the Nile, what is its gift to Sudan? Why do you say, The Sahara will eat you, but not, The Nile will drink you? Yes, in Kordofan each Su’āl, Question, had a Jawāb, Answer, from a Jawwāb, One Who Traverses a Foreign Country.

Khairallah reading cervantes

Sleep seized me, and I passed into a dream. I saw before me stretched a boundless plain of sandy wilderness…an uncouth shape appeared upon a dromedary, mounted high. He seemed an Arab of the Bedouin tribes…At the sight much I rejoiced, not doubting but a guide was present, one who with unerring skill would through the desert lead me…

-The Prelude, Book 5, Wordsworth

Wordsworth must have been eating opium when he wrote this, such was the dream that reading Cervantes had given him, in which Rocinante turned camel and Don Quixote an Arab. But KhairAllah had enough trouble in those forty days on the Darb, with a real thief and real giants, Billa Ali and Baobab trees, than to imagine us Khawajas as his squires.

Last before the nile, the island of the blest

This place is called in the Greek language the Island of the Blest.

-Herodotus, Book 3, Chapter 26

I may have been bitten by the idea of riding the Darb in 1979 when I first went to the Western Desert, driving south from Assuit in a shared peugeot taxi, a so-called “Flying Coffin”, and descending the plateau in switchbacks through a break in its sheer wall that later I learned was a caravan route up from Kordofan. Kharga Oasis (Outer, that is, as seen from the inner-most desert), what would have been a north-bound caravan’s last stop before reaching the Nile after travelling forty days, came first. So maybe I just wanted to know how that would feel.

My Vast useless map

Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied…that vast Map was Useless…In the deserts of the West, still today, are the Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals…

-Suarez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes (Del rigor en la ciencia, Borges)

It need not take a prudent man- nor an imprudent Khawaja- to know that maps of the desert are essentially useless, even a child’s map decorated with fanciful drawings of camel caravans and palm trees. I left my own map somewhere behind, just past Abu Simbel, its dry tattered paper used as fire starter on green acacia branches when no other wood could be found and we were eager to boil tea.