Ride the camel, beat the devil

Abu Huraira reported, The Prophet said, The believer will wear down his devils by obeying God, just as you wear down your camel by travelling.

-Hadith of Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780-855)

The verb translated here as “wear down”, Nadā, in Form I means “to undress” and in Form IV, as used by Ahmad ibn Hanbal, means “to wear out (a riding animal)”. When in the saddle ten hours a day on the Darb, feeling in my seat every jolting step my camel took, I never thought what I really felt wearing out were my devils, not my derrière.

A Walk on paper

When we had been on the road for a few hours I ventured the opinion that we had taken the wrong route, and a halt was called while I examined the map I had with me. The guide Hassan was equally certain we were on the El Agia road. A discussion ensued, which ended with Hassan telling me, with what he intended to be withering sarcasm, “I have never walked on paper (meaning the map); I have only walked on the desert…”

-A Prisoner of the Khaleefa, Charles Neufeld, 1899

Like the fox and the hedgehog, I knew many small things while KhairAllah knew only one big thing: How to get the Dabouka to Egypt. Rand McNally, Michelin, Freytag…it didn’t matter to him what I said I knew. Maps were printed on folded paper in those days, and that, from what KhairAllah saw when I walked off from camp each morning with folded paper in my hand, somehow always ended up covered in Khar’a, of which Lane gives the cognate Kharā’a, Retiring Alone and Sitting Down to Satisfy a Want [of Nature].

Khabīr of the digital dabouka

Nomad. A member of a people having no permanent abode. Origin. Late 16th C. from French nomade, via Latin from Greek nomas, nomad, “roaming in search of pasture”, from the base nemein, “to pasture”.

Digital Nomad. A person who earns a living in various locations of their choosing.

-Oxford English Dictionaries

Who is the Nomad and who is the Digital Nomad? KhairAllah’s son Soliman now sends emails, JPEGs, and MP3s of his father’s photos and greetings to the Khawajas. It was not always so; when KhairAllah was on the Darb, I could only send messages through Mahdi and Sayyid abu Jaib, delivered to them over the phone which they passed along when he was in Cairo or Khartoum, infrequently. I never heard back until KhairAllah went digital.

Osteomancer of the darb

Osteomancy is the use of animal bones to predict the future or to explain the unexplainable.

-Divination and Power: A Multiregional View of the Development of Oracle Bone Divination, Rowan K. Flad, Current Anthropology, June 2008

On the Darb, KhairAllah called a camel skeleton, Rimma, Cadaver, or, Rotting Bones, and Lane gives its doubled bi-literal cognate Taramrama as, He Moved his Lips without Speaking, as if communicating with a higher power, perhaps one who, after having thrown a rotten camel bone, seeks an answer to the question, Where am I?

Daoud, having thrown the bone

The likeness of nomads

Pelasgus- You speak beyond my credence, Strangers, claiming Argive birth but more like Libyans you seem…or the Nile may foster such a likeness of the camel-backed nomads I have heard neighbor the Ethiopians…

-The Suppliants, Aeschylus (525-455 BCE)

The King of Argos almost got it right about these Danaïd strangers, Greek by blood but Egyptian by their place of birth and rough dress. And because of the camel riding tunics and drawstring trousers the drovers wore when they went downtown with me, to Cairenes they looked nothing like their own galabiyya-clad peasant countrymen. Might they be Libyan? Ethiopian? Without his hippo-hide whip in hand, few on Midān Tahrīr knew KhairAllah to be from Dar al-Kababish.

Yā sawwāq! Sūq bi-but’, O Drover! Drive slowly

O Camel driver! Drive slowly, the comfort of my soul has departed. Camels are burdened on their back and we bear burdens on our heart

-Saadi Shīrāzī (1210-1291)

The comfort of Saadi’s soul was his Beloved, she riding ahead, he left behind. Our only comfort was the sugar and the kettle, the water skins and fire wood. Wherever went the camels, there followed we, until KhairAllah raised his hand to indicate, Here, Here we stop for tea.

The first to see a jamal

Le premier qui vit un chameau/S’enfuit de cet objet nouveau;/Le second s’approcha; le troisième osa faire/Un licou pour le dromadaire.

-Jean de la Fontaine (1621-1695)

There is something of a Sarāb, Mirage, to this fable. The first glance at a camel is deceptive. Blink and it’s gone, or has not gone away but rather has come closer, or was never in fact there. Lane gives Sarāb’s cognate word Sarb as, Pasturing of Camels, or, Camels, derived from the triliteral root S-R-B, He Went Out, or, the Water Flowed Swiftly, or, the Camel Went to Pasture without a Herdsman. KhairAllah would like a word with La Fontaine…No need to put a Licou, Halter, on a free-grazing Jamal.

Get up their chests and leave

Get up the chests of your camels and leave!, O Sons of my Mother. I lean to a tribe other than yours. Go! You have all you need, the moon is out.

-Lamiyyat al-Arab, Al-Shanfara (d.525)

Al-Shanfara was a Su’luk poet, an Outcast Thief, and his pre-Islamic ode, with all its lines ending with the letter Lām, begins with the denunciation of his own tribesmen. I wonder if this verse came to Yusuf’s mind when he abandoned KhairAllah at night midway on the Darb in order to race ahead of his mentor, companion, and fellow Khabīr whom he found too slow for his selfish desire to be first to Egypt.

The meaning of Jamal

Arabic has no word which means simply “camel”. Like Eskimo, which has dozens of words for various types of snow but no word which means simply “snow”, Arabic is specific, graphic but never prolix.

-Passing Brave: Two Americans Cross the Great Arabian Desert on Camel-Back, William R. Polk

Yes, Arabic vocabulary is specific, yet nevertheless Lane has Jamal as, “He-Camel, but Commonly Applied to the Camel as a Generic”, and adds the surprising qualifier, “Applied Exceptionally to the She-Camel, as in, I Drank the Milk of my Jamal, but Ibn Sidah Doubts the Correctness of this.” If I had told KhairAllah to drink the milk of his Jamal, he would have agreed with Ibn Sidah (1007-1066), compiler of the dictionary Al-Muhkam wa al-Muhīt al-A’zam, The Great and Comprehensive Arbiter, and called me Majnūn, Possessed by Jinns.

With myself, with a mood

Socrates was told that some man had not been improved by travel. “I am sure he was not,” he said. “He went with himself.”

-On Solitude, Michel de Montaigne

It was a mistake to think it easy to empty myself into an empty landscape. The drovers made sure that I could not. What are you doing here?, they asked. Why did you choose this? Who made you come with us? I had no answer for them other than my Mazāj, Mood, and I had brought all my moods with me.

The egotism of arrival

…there appeared a dark line on the edge of the forward horizon, and soon the line deepened into a delicate fringe which sparkled here and there as though it were sown with diamonds. Then before me were the gardens and minarets of Egypt, and the mighty works of the Nile, and I (the eternal Ego that I am!)- I had lived to see, and I saw.

-Alexander William Kinglake, Eothen, 1844

Those diamonds were moving fast, towards me…camel merchants, swarming the herd, riding donkeys at a fast trot, chalk-marking the flanks of those they wanted for first dibs. Nevertheless it was pleasant to see the Nile and its greenery after the last two desert weeks past Dongola. Was it egotistical of me to think, Hamdillah ‘Ala Salāmti, Praise to God for My Safe Delivery? and not to think of camels marching on to the slaughterhouse?

Sand and sand again

The endless sands yield nothing but…sand, sand, sand, still sand, and only sand, and sand, and sand again.

-Alexander William Kinglake, Eothen, or Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East, 1844

Kinglake must have gone a little batty in his ten day desert crossing from Gaza to Cairo. Or he had a bad case of palilalia. Imagine if he’d been on the Darb, KhairAllah would have called him Abu al-Rimāl, Father of, you guessed it, the Sands, or maybe, Abu Kalām Fādi, Father of Nonsense.

On nomads

Neither deserts nor caves nor hairshirts nor fasting can disentangle us…

-On Solitude, Michel de Montaigne

The French word Solitude, from Solitudo, Solitudinis- as in, Ubi Solitudinem Faciunt Pacem Appellant, from Tacitus- likewise has the secondary meaning in English of Desert, but Montaigne’s sense of Solitude is unmistakably ours. I would like to read his essay On Nomads which, if anything like On Cannibals, would conclude that a drover’s desire for drinking tea cannot be disentangled from an anthropophage’s desire for eating human flesh.

Crows and camels

I would, however, warn the enthusiastic tyro that, in the Libyan Desert, travelling as the crow flies is not always so simple and glorious an affair as it may seem when planning expeditions from a comfortable armchair.

-An Egyptian Oasis, H.J. Llewellyn Beadnell, 1909

The only crows I saw in the Libyan Desert weren’t flying but rather perching on camel carcasses to peck through the anus. Camel hide is thick and crows eat the soft part first. Beadnell, an old hand in the Egyptian Geological Survey, saw skeletons by the thousand along the Darb when he rode its last leg to the Nile. Eighty years later there were more.

The fact of the desert is cold

There can be few parts of the world where one is so much up against cold hard facts as in the desert.

-Mysteries of the Libyan Desert, W.J. Harding King, 1925

We Khawajas came prepared for cold nights but hadn’t figured on the cold mornings before the sun warmed the north wind. KhairAllah wore a woolen shawl and the drovers wrapped themselves in cotton, but what worked best was the fast pace set by his whip urging us to walk double time the first miles after breakfast.

Let us speak of its pleasures

But against such drawbacks may be set the many unspeakable pleasures of travel in the desert.

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

Those two trips on the Darb more than thirty five years ago have given me immeasurable pleasures in their remembering and recounting. Just today I emailed KhairAllah’s son Soliman to ask his father if he recalled the policeman Ahmad Diyāb as well as I did. I am certain that he does, even though Ahmad himself was one of those desert drawbacks, having treated us like a real Himār, Donkey, when we tried to get our camels past his border post.