Morning greetings

The “Habīr”, conductor of our little caravan, hailed me with the kindly greeting, “Blest be thy day and commended!”

-Wilhelm Junker, Travels in Africa in the Years 1875 to 1886

On my first day of Colloquial Egyptian Arabic class I learned the standard Daily Greeting, Sabāh al-Khair, Morning of Goodness, usually answered, Sabāh al-Nūr, Morning of Light, but with many variations, the wittier, the better. One could respond, Sabāh al-Zibda, Morning of Butter, or, Sabah al-Qishda, Morning of Cream, or, Sabāh al-Jubna, Morning of Cheese, etc., etc.

Five years later I took this with me on the Darb and answered KhairAllah’s morning greeting however I felt, Sabāh al-Bard, Morning of Cold, or, Sabāh al-’Asīda, Morning of Gruel, or, Sabāh al-Rukūba, Morning of Riding, and he would look at me as if I were Majnūn, Crazy.

From hameed to Zagazig

Nevertheless, my reception was far from courteous, the Minister constantly interrupting the proceedings and insisting that such demands [by a foreigner to travel in the Sudan for the purpose of exploration] were never made nor granted. Thereupon my friend interjected, “But your Excellency, the Doctor is not going to Zagazig!”

-Wilhelm Junker, Travels in Africa in the Years 1875 to 1886

I’d never been to the flyspeck Egyptian town of Zagazig and don’t want to go now. Nor do I want to go back to the even smaller flyspeck of Hameed, the last Sudanese border post, and have to talk again to the policeman Ahmad Diyāb. My travel permit didn’t help, nor my letter of introduction from Hajj Bashir, nor my bowing and scraping and calling him Ya Dābit!, O Officer! Maybe I should have told him I wasn’t going to Zagazig.

extravagant noise

I did not like this wild and noisy negotiation. I knew that I must make great allowance for the extravagant language of the Arabs; but there seemed to be an eagerness to get me among them which, in my eyes, was rather ominous of bad intentions.

-John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petræa, and the Holy Land, 1837

Stephens was right, the Egyptian merchants made a lot of noise when our herd arrived in Binban. They saw us Khawajas as easy pickings, riding camels into town as we did on Kordofani donkey pads that they coveted. Sudanese traders back in El Obeid were quite taciturn, and by comparison our Kababish drovers were downright silent, except when scolding with a few choice expletives a misbehaving animal.

On the darb to our first abode

Until the Desert knows/That Water grows/His Sands suffice/But let him once suspect/That Caspian Fact/Sahara dies//Utmost is relative-/Have not or Have/Adjacent sums/Enough- the first Abode/On the familiar Road/Galloped in Dreams

-Emily Dickinson, Poem 1262

Indeed, to God we belong and Indeed, to Him we return

-Quran, 2:156

For the drovers, What lay at the end of the Darb, the Familiar Road, the Way of the Forty? Were they only dreaming those 40 days, or riding back to their First Abode- to Egypt, Um al-Dunya, Mother of the World- or perhaps returning to Him, not at a gallop but a camel’s trot.

Dhim', or thirst

With thee in the Desert-/With thee in the thirst-/…

-Emily Dickinson, Poem 201

Lane has Dhim’ as Thirst, Desire, Longing, and in a secondary sense, Interval between the Watering of Camels, or, Interval during which Camels are Kept from Water, and in the metaphorical, Interval between Birth and Death, so she may be onto something in this poem…the Desert is Life, and the interval between drinks, Dying.

Solitude, wasteland, birriyya

Wasteland after wasteland. And when you multiply in your mind’s eye all the wastelands yet to come, a vague feeling of terror comes over you.

-Pierre Loti, February 1894, The Desert

Loti called it a “Solitude” while his translator used the word “Wasteland”, but KhairAllah might say Birriyya, which Lane has as, Ground without Herbage, or, Land Nearer to Desert than to Water, and gives as an example the verse, Birriyya Ba’dha Birriyya, […] After […], written by the Umayyad poet Ru’ūba ibn al-’Ajjāj (684-762), which quite possibly Loti’s Bedouin cameleers recited without Loti understanding a word they said.

Go Along, along, along

And then off you go, perched atop the ever-moving camel as it plods along. You go along, go along, go along…Solitude follows solitude. You stretch your ears into the silence and hear nothing, not a birdsong, not the buzz of a fly.

-Pierre Loti, February 1894, The Desert

Loti rode from Cairo to the east exactly ninety years before Daoud and I rode up from the north. Maybe the Sinai is quiet, but the Darb was not. When the air was still we heard, could almost feel, the sloshing of our camels’ feet in the soft sand. When the wind was cold and high we heard it blow loudly in our ears, so loud we could hear nothing else, not even the plaintive muttering of the drover we called Muhammad the Miskīn, the Miserable, because of his torn and thin clothing, riding abreast of us.

Avast in a vast country

The first and overwhelming impression of Sudan is its physical vastness…

-Sudan: A Country Study, Library of Congress, written for the Department of the Army

Soldier, better bring extra jerrycans of gas. Unless you decide to invade by camel, in which case you might talk KhairAllah out of retirement to be your Khabīr. You’ll have many miles to cover between Adhān al-Himār and Um Dubbān, Donkey Ear and Mother of Flies. It took us days, even without stopping between those two villages to graze our herd and make our tea.

Little to regret on the darb

But there is little time for regret in the desert…

-In Darfur: Travels of an Arab Merchant in Sudan, Muhammad ibn Umar al-Tunisi (1789-1857)

In the desert it was usually but not always more likely to feel Nadam, Regret, than it was to meet a Nadīm, Drinking Companion. On Day 1, Day 2, or Day 3 of the Darb al-’Arba’īn, Way of the Forty, it was only human to regret the decision to ride 40 days to Egypt. But Bilal in his cups felt no Nadam at all. A happy Merissa drunk, he fell off his camel and remounted with a smile.

A country of little water

The most healthy part is the Gouz, or Country of Sand. The Arabs who inhabit it and breathe its pure air are full of force and courage, but it unfortunately contains little water.

-In Darfur: Travels of an Arab Merchant in Sudan, Muhammad Ibn Umar al-Tunisi (1789-1857)

I wonder if Jizzu, the rare seasonal flourishing of rich pasture grass in the remotest part of Dar al-Kababish that is like catnip to their camels, is a cognate of Gouz, properly transliterated as Jauz, Center of a Desert. Mas’ūd told me that herdsmen in the Jizzu had to drink urine because there were no wells. I asked, Why don’t you take milk camels with you? He looked at me with a twinkle in his eye.

A khabīr on the ground

Many a pig sleeps on silken sheets/while the learned sleep on the ground.

-In Darfur: Travels of an Arab Merchant in Sudan, Muhammad Ibn Umar al-Tunisi (1789-1857)

Al-Tunisi’s prefatory poem captured my own thought one night when bedding down somewhere between the Matoul and Idd Ahmad wells. KhairAllah the Khabīr- Experienced, Expert, Specialist (see Wehr), and in its most unexpected seconday meaning, Foam or Froth of the Mouths of Camels (see Lane)- slept soundly at the fire. But NB cf. Al-Khabīr (a metonym for Allah, always with the Arabic definite article)- The All-Experienced, #31 of the 99 Beautiful Names of Allah- which makes KhairAllah the Khabīr more properly Abd al-Khabīr, Servant of The Khabīr.

Hard, difficult, not easy

The Sudan is a hard land. Its geography leaves relatively few choices…

-Kingdoms of the Sudan, O’Fahey and Spalding

Along the Nile there is water and soil. There is gold in the Red Sea Hills. In Kordofan there are grasslands and gum trees. Depending on the winter rain, the land there is more or less hard. Sa’b, Difficult, KhairAllah might say. Al-Mayya Sa’ba, Al-Qush Sa’b, Al-Ābār Sa’ba. Water, Grazing, Wells. Difficult. Hard.

A cameleer without camels

I seek God’s forgiveness if I have described a path I myself did not follow…

Like a cameleer who chants without driving camels, like a shepherd who has no flock, like someone offering coffee but his coffee is imaginary, like a host extending an invitation but having no food…

-Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti (1753-1825), Remarkable Remnants of Translations and Events, aka The History of Egypt

Al-Jabarti’s history of Ottoman Egypt and the French Conquest under Bonaparte begins just like Cervantes begins Don Quixote, with apologies for its shortcomings and excuses for its errors. He worries that he has described a way he himself has not travelled and he quotes a poem that mocks a man’s empty boasting. Never fear…KhairAllah, Khabīr of the Darb al-’Arba’īn, The Way of the Forty, will say nothing in contradiction.

Daoud and KhairAllah, 1984

On the dromos, on the darb

δρομάς, Running, Dromedary, an ellipsis of δρομάς κάμηλος, Running Camel, from δρόμος, Race, Running, Race Course, Track, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *drem-, To Run

-Oxford Dictionaries

What is with these Dromedaries all running and racing on a Dromos, a course or a track? To be sure, we rode them, Riding not Pack Camels to be technical, mostly of the white Kabbāshi breed, but they mostly walked over a trackless unmarked route, unless you call their occasional skeleton, dropped from exhaustion and cross-gorged by a drover’s dagger, a milestone on the Darb.

Mafēsh mazāg

Abdou would have called this a real Mazāg, accompanying the word as all Egyptians do, with a gesture of the hand- a flattened palm brought to the side of the head- signifying blissful plenitude and the prolonged, cultivated consumption of everyday pleasures.

-Out of Egypt, André Aciman

How many times did I answer KhairAllah’s dawn call to Irkab!, Mount Up!, with that universal Egyptian retort I’d learned early in my First Year Colloquial class, Mafēsh Mazāg, I’m Not in the Mood, and how many times did he respond with, In the Desert There are No Moods, Only Obligations.

Diocletian, camel trader

6. Bactrian Camel, 25,000 Denarii [sing. Denarius] Communis (DC) 7. Camel with two humps, 60,000 DC 8. Female Camel with two humps, 30,000 DC 9. Best Arabian Camel, 12,000 DC 10. Best Dromedary, 20,000 DC 11. Riding Donkey, 15,000 DC 12. Pack Donkey, 7,000 DC…18. Best Sheep, 400 DC…

-Edict of Diocletian, XXXII, 301 CE

A cap on animal prices would never have worked at the Cairo camel market where traders like Hajj Bashir risked many a dinar, an Arabic word from the Roman Denarius coin, assembling Daboukas in Kordofan and sending them up the Way of the Forty to Egypt. Price controls be damned. He sold at the far end of what the market could bear and was then driven home to his flat near Midān al-Opera sitting in his Mercedes-Benz feeling far wealthier than the Emperor Diocletian.