Nothing more natural than a camel

A desert is only a place where you have to be reasonably prudent about your water supply. A camel is really a more natural object than a motor car.

-High Tartary, Owen Lattimore, 1930

More natural indeed than a motor car. I remember approaching Dongola and being so eager for fresh bread and a shower that I flagged down a lorry and told KhairAllah I’d meet up with him next day in the market, and then spending half the night with a flat tire far from town, arriving just in time for the bakery’s late shift but missing everything else I’d promised myself.

Memories Of men and their marches

As he talked of men and marches, half consciously he tricked out his memories with the words and phrases of the camelmen of our caravan days, and the winged words carried with them the pungency of camel dung smoke…

-High Tartary, Owen Lattimore, 1930

My memories of caravan days are pungent and so are KhairAllah’s of the two trips he took with me, but I think they overlap in his mind even being four years apart. That he forgets the names of the drovers I understand because he made the trip many times and the number of drovers who accompanied him is that many times four. But of the Khawajas, how could he mix up Nedu with the Aaton, Mustapha with the Sony, and Daoud with the Nikon? To the subject of a documentary, do all documentarians look alike?

camel pulling in dar al-kababīsh

The men who lead camels through the Hou-Shan, the Country Behind the Mountains, never call themselves anything but la-lo-t’o-ti, which is to say, “camel pullers”.

-The Desert Road to Turkestan, Owen Lattimore

In college I often sat at dinner with a classmate and member of the Afghan royal family who invited me to visit anytime I wished. This was a few years before the Soviet invasion so I’d missed my chance when I finally thought seriously about his offer. If I’d taken him up on it maybe I’d have met a la-lo-t’o-ti and ridden with him on an Inner Asian caravan, but then later I would likely not have met KhairAllah, the Kabbāshi eqivalent of a Camel Puller on the Darb al-’Arba’īn.

Sedately witching marching

I had yet to learn the knack of wandering through a labyrinth of dreams and memories and lazy half-thoughts, through the endless but sedately witching marching hours. The mingled ache and eagerness of final departure, mixed with the thrill of being free of houses and wheeled things, died slowly in me.

-The Desert Road to Turkestan, Owen Lattimore, 1928

I remember that moment too, leaving wheeled things behind when we saddled up at the Khileyu wells and started out for the north. My first days were anything but sedate, filled with Khawaja bravado and acts of derring-do with my whip hand. Only later came the endless witching marching hours and dreams of favorite foods and thoughts of being lazy again when I returned home.

Kindness unwatered

He who has been kind to another and then finds that his kindness has been thrown away passes the remark, A camel only makes water from behind.

-Wit and Wisdom in Morocco, Edvard Westermarck, 1930

There is something in this proverb that speaks of pissing away a good turn done to another, but it also suggests a different reading, that you shouldn’t look left or right when doing what you’d rather leave in the past.

Barking, biting, and braying

He who rides a camel is unafraid lest the dogs should bite

-Wit and Wisdom in Morocco, Edvard Westermarck, 1930

We’d all heard and sometimes laughed at that other proverb about barking dogs and moving caravans but we never saw dogs in the villages we passed. Just donkeys, and they only brayed.

A drover's head

If an apprentice pretends to know more than his master, the latter says, What is in the head of the camel is not in the head of the drover

-Wit and Wisdom in Morocco, Edvard Westermarck, 1930

The drovers often grumbled about KhairAllah’s choice of campsites and pasture stoppages. What was in their heads, Allah huwa ‘ālim, God knows, and it was also usually wrong.

Mine and thine

Choose your companions, then choose the road

-A Dictionary of Arabic and Islamic Proverbs, Paul Lunde

I knew where and by which road I wanted to go but had no idea of how to get there or go until Hajj Bashir chose the Khabīr and the Khabīr chose the drovers. So I got the proverb backwards, by me first choosing the way and second having the wayfarers chosen for me.

The burden of A hump

Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel

-G. K. Chesterton

Odd that Chesterton should use the example of a camel to make his case about essentialism and Catholic natural law, even squeezing in an oblique reference to the hump as a cross to bear. If he’d known anything about camel physiology, he’d have instead described it as a stoup for holy water, or perhaps the icon of Zoödochus Pege, the Spring of Life Giving Water outside Istanbul’s old city walls, where monks sell bottles of the stuff to pilgrims to take home. Not Qirba size, but enough for wetting the mouths of drovers on the Darb.

Al-hawa hilwa

It is better to endure the wind of a camel than the prayers of a fish

-A Dictionary of Arabic and Islamic Proverbs, Paul Lunde

Al-Hawa Hilwa, The Breeze is Sweet, said by Ahmad the Bawāb on Darīh Sa’d Street whenever the Cairene summer wind wafted ever so slightly. I once used the same words on the drovers when a camel farted and they looked at me like I was crazy. How then to explain this proverb? Some say that camel flatus after they’ve browsed the leaves of a myrrh tree is quite aromatic, and that the prayers of fish cannot be heard on land, so yes, ‘Tis better to smell it than not to have heard it.

The way to slaughter

No camel knows of God until he dies

-A Dictionary of Arabic and Islamic Proverbs, Paul Lunde

I cannot imagine what the Dabouka made of our drovers when assuming the five positions of prayer…Takbīr, Standing with Hands at Ears; Qiyām, Standing with Hands at Waist; Rukū’, Bowing; Sujūd, Kneeling with Head Prostration; and Julūs, Kneeling on Haunches. Did camels too accept Islam, Submission, when couching and uncouching themselves, folding and unfolding their crazily articulated hock and hip joints? After forty days on the Darb and facing slaughter in Egypt, what more was there for them to know of God?

Fraternity of the fadfad

Live in any community for forty days and you will become a member

-A Dictionary of Arabic and Islamic Proverbs, Paul Lunde

Lane has Fadfad as, A Waterless Desert Wherein Is Nothing, a fitting name for the community to which we all- Drovers, Khabīrs, and Khawajas alike- belonged after the Darb’s forty days and we’d arrived in Cairo. But then, on the forty first, we disbanded and went separately home, some to Dar al-Kababish and some to Amrīka.

A fact known to few

His right testicle is slightly larger than the left. (Not many people know this.)

-Camel, Robert Irwin

Through his son Soliman I’ve asked KhairAllah, Are a camel’s testicles of equal size or does Robert Irwin, author of The Arabian Nightmare, not know what he’s talking about? No matter how KhairAllah answers, I doubt the question bothers his sleep.

A conspicuous waste of 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 a peacock’s tail.

-Camel, Robert Irwin

However much of their own water the camels wasted, the drovers made up for it by conserving ours, poured carefully and sipped thoughtfully, drained from tea glasses to the last drop, rinsed lightly to only half wash the cook pot so that by Day 40 we could still taste Day 1’s asīda. The camels arrived in Binban thirsty while we arrived well refreshed, our Qirbas still sloshing.

Piss and the paleomonsoon

A stillsuit is worn in the desert designed to absorb the body’s sweating and urination and to filter the impurities so that drinkable water in catch pockets could be sipped from a tube near the neck.

-DuneWiki

They don’t call it a CamelBak for nothing, although KhairAllah preferred to drink sweet well water deposited in the Sahara’s paleomonsoon rains, caused by a rotational wobble on the Earth’s axis 11,000 years ago, from a Qirba and let the camels carry it.

A camel to Please paradise

Buraydah ibn al-Hasib reported, A man asked the Prophet, Will there be camels in Paradise? He answered, If Allah admits you, you will have whatever your soul desires and whatever pleases your eyes.

-Hadith of Imam al-Tirmidhi (824-892)

Yet still the Prophet had no answer about the camels. At the Egyptian end of the Darb, the Dabouka no longer pleased my eyes as it had in Kordofan. For a drover I suspect it is something similar at the end of his life, to look at a camel will not be as it was for him at the beginning. The Jamal will not be as Jamīl nor the Lahza, the Sight, as Lazīza, Sweet.