Camel drivers have it bad

The times for conjugal duty prescribed in the Torah are: for men of independence, every day; for laborers, twice a week; for ass-drivers, once a week; for camel-drivers, once in thirty days; for sailors, once in six months. These are the rulings of Rabbi Eliezer.

-Mishna Ketubot 5:6, Marriage Duties Under Jewish Law, Written 190-230 CE

Compared to their ass driving friends back home, Ibrahim and Bilal were in the wrong line of work. And even so, the math doesn’t add, for how were they expected to get some every thirty days on the Way of the Forty? Never mind…

For your mother

According to Ismail ibn Musa al-Fazari [followed by the names of the next four oral transmitters of this account]…Al-Urani, Owner of the Camel, said…I was travelling on my camel one day when a rider appeared before me. “O Owner of the Camel,” he said, “will you sell your camel?” “Yes,” I replied. “For how much?” “A thousand dirhams.” “You must be mad,” he said, “Can a camel cost one thousand dirhams?” “ Yes…I’ve never gone after anyone without catching him,” I replied, “and no one has come after me without my escaping him…So whom do you want to buy him for?” “For your mother,” he answered. “He is yours then. Take him for nothing!,” I said.

-Events of the Year 36 [After Hijra], The History, Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari (839-923)

Billa Ali al-Grayn might have parted KhairAllah from his camel more simply by using the same three words Abdullah Mansour once shouted at a particularly recalcitrant Jamal as he yanked hard on its halter one morning when trying to load it, Ummak!, Ummak!, Ummak!…Your Mother!

His sons feed at home

And we set up our tents in the place where honor calls and stay there steadfast while other men travel away to richer pasture/The place of glory- those to whom it belongs do not drive their camels to feed abroad…

-Pre-Islamic Ode of Qutbah ibn ‘Aws, known as Al-Hādirah, collected by Al-Mufaddal al-Dabbi (d.780), trans. C.J. Lyall

KhairAllah keeps his sons Soliman and Muhammad close to him. His days on the Darb are in the past. Let other fathers send their sons overseas to work for a dirham or a dinar, he says. His Bayt is a place of glory because his camels feed well at home.

©David Degner. KhairAllah with sons Muhammad (l.) and Soliman (r.)

To cairo by Ghirniq

Have you thought of al-Lāt and al-’Uzzā? And about the third diety, al-Manāt? These are the exalted gharāniq, whose intercession is hoped for.

-Quran 53:19-20 and the expunged Satanic Verses which follow

Scholars question the meaning of the word Gharāniq (pl. of Ghirniq, Crane), better translated here in this theological context as High Flying Ones. In the desert we often looked overhead and saw contrails of passenger jets on their way to Cairo and the drovers would ask us why we were not up there too. On the Gharāniq, the High Flying Ones. And to that question we had no answer other than, We prefer it down here with you.

In answer to my query of September 28

I asked my father about your question about the camel's testicles. He said yes, this is true, but not all camels have one testicle larger than the other, Greetings soliman

-Email, October 27, 11:38am

There is another piece of information that my father told me, which is that if the camel’s right testicle is alive (larger than the left), then the camel is suitable for pollination of the female camel, but if the opposite happens, if the left testicle is larger than the right here, the camel is not suitable for pollination. Regards soliman

-Email, October 27, 12:24pm

So Robert Irwin was right about a camel’s mismatched testicles. But he didn’t say why this is. So I asked KhairAllah. In none of the scientific literature, not in “Seasonal Anatomical Changes in the Testis of the One Humped Camel: A Review”, Pasha, R.H. et al. (European Journal of Anatomy, 2013) nor in “Some Studies in Testis Function of the Camel”, El Doush, I.E. (MVS Thesis, University of Khartoum, 1988), have I found such a cogent answer as his.

A house worthy of a khabīr

He who becomes a camel driver must raise the door of his house.

-A Dictionary of Modern Lebanese Proverbs, Anis Freiha, 1953

KhairAllah has improved and enlarged his house in Umdurman many times over since retiring as a Khabīr, with air conditioning and ample seating in his Majlis. His riches come from other than livestock. He has many children, some well married, and frequent guests from Dar al-Kababish knocking on his tall door. None are unfed and none turned away, no ordinary camel driver he.

KhairAllah (rear left) with family in the outdoor Majlis

The hau and the lau of it

He doesn’t know Hau from Lau (the precise signification of “Hau” and “Lau” is doubtful, some interpreting it as “Yes” and “No”, and others as “Urging” and “Stopping” a camel.)

-Arabic Proverbs, Sigmar Hillelson, Sudan Notes and Records, No.2, 1921

I learned how to make a camel go and stop from hearing Peter O’Toole say Hut! and Ikh! in 70 mm. But when KhairAllah crossed trails with a Darfuri Dabouka and its Khabīr couched his camel with a Shh!, I rethought everything I’d learned about talking out loud at the movies.

full term to Cairo

Pregnancy and riding a camel cannot be hidden from others.

-Arabic Proverbs Collected by Mrs. A.P. Singer, Cairo, 1913

At times I felt like a pregnant virgin when meeting strangers on the trail to Egypt, such was the disbelief on their faces as KhairAllah told them my story. Was it because I rode a camel so badly, or simply that I rode at all? Or were they thinking, the Way of the Forty will feel to him like nine months.

Riding camels to paradise

Both camels and women serve men’s needs/Time never stops turning/The riverbank keeps falling/Let’s drink our wine at home/Let’s pass our time with women/Let’s roast our meat on fires/We all go to Paradise just the same.

-Song collected in, English-Arabic Vocabulary for the Use of Officials in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Captain H.F.S. Amery, 1905

Captain Amery worked for British Intelligence in Sudan immediately after it was retaken from the Mahdists in 1898. And what was one focus of his espionage? Camel riding songs. The lyrics of KhairAllah’s friend and poet Bilal Bakhīt’s riding song went like this…She isn’t flabby and her hips are wide/Her bum is high yet my hand reaches ‘round/Upon the life of the Prophet!/Upon the Meccan Pilgrimage!/Upon the Day of the Feast!…Both camels and women indeed. Report to MI6 that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

A monkey of a modus operandi

The Ababda: We ride the stallion camel on the attack/We ride the tall rutting camel/Who but us guard the desert?/We jest with men who jest with drawn knives.

The Ja’liyīn: We are not Arabs of common blood/We ride the rutting camel on summer nights/We do not hire out our camels to others/You wretched Arabs are bought for money.

-Sudan Arabic Texts, S. Hillelson, from a Disputation Poem between two warring tribes

Hillelson’s job in the Sudan colonial service was to record tribal folktales, riddles, nursery rhymes, gossip, anecdotes, proverbs, and prophecies to help the British Crown exert its authority. His transcribed texts offer many insights but none mention men like Billa Ali al-Grayn, who made a monkey of drovers by convincing them that he had found the camels that he in fact had stolen from them, and then talked them into giving him a handsome reward, and on top of this then inviting him to dinner.

Why motor when you can...?

The Road? The Bakhtiari Road? Why, you can go by motor.

-Twelve Days: An Account of a Journey Across the Bakhtiari Mountains in Southwest Persia, Vita Sackville-West, 1927

It might seem odd- nomads catching the imagination of cinema-going Americans- but…this was the beginning of the golden age of the motor car.

-Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World, Anthony Sattin

When I was ten I remember watching a Castle Films short of Merian C. Cooper’s Grass (1925) in my grandfather’s house, the same film that inspired Sackville-West a year after its premier to ride a mule for less than two weeks on the same forty eight day route from the Bakhtiari tribe’s winter to summer pasture. It was a bit longer for inspiration to take hold of me after seeing the movie, and there was no way to bail out early once underway on the Way of the Forty, but KhairAllah, like the Bakhtiari trail boss Haider Khan, did not tell his greenhorn guests to just go by car. He knew what they were after…saddle sores, and enough stories to last a lifetime.

Khawajas travel round trip

Then he went on a camel trek in Sudan. In some ways, he never returned.

-Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World, Anthony Sattin

Bruce Chatwin evidently didn’t have KhairAllah as his Khabīr. If he did, he would certainly have returned, for that was KhairAllah’s promise to Hajj Bashīr…Khawajas always travel round trip.

©David Melody Adam Hamid, KhairAllah Khair al-Sayyid, Billa Ali al-Grayn. Insets, KhairAllah

Ceci n'est pas un nomade

They are people who are not known.

-Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World, Anthony Sattin, 2022

KhairAllah was a professional herdsman, a Khabīr, an Expert. And he was widely known along the Darb, in villages in Sudan and Upper Egypt as well as in Cairo. Because a Kabbāshi handshake is multiphasic and takes a minute or more to complete, when he had just arrived at Imbaba and was among his camel market friends, it took an hour for KhairAllah to give all of them his Salām ‘Alaikums and answer each Hamdillah Salāmtak, Praise God for Your Safe Delivery.

©David Melody. Ceci n’est pas un nomade

A Dessert and a wine

A third of the world is desert, locked in the human brain.

-A Dictionary of Arabic and Islamic Proverbs, Paul Lunde

Riding the Darb for forty days can make one think that all the world was desert, less that day or two when riding in the sweet green sleeve beside the Nile and wondering, as the Quran’s 47th Sura put it, if it was not a river of paradise, running with “wine delicious to the drinkers.“

Steal the moon, read a book

If you love, love the moon. If you steal, steal a camel.

-A Dictionary of Arabic and Islamic Proverbs, Paul Lunde

Early evenings with the moon setting as we began our late night marches I wished that Billa Ali al-Grayn were still ahead in the shadows, for if he could steal a camel from under our nose surely he could steal the moon from the low western sky and put it back up high to light our way. Stars did that too but by even the thinnest crescent moon you could read a book or keep a diary.

No worry but boredom

For an hour or two I sat on my camel waiting for the things of which I had been warned- camel sickness and camel boredom. The ground looked far away and I was a little puzzled by the thought that there was no manner of brake to use on a runaway camel, but I had no other worries.

-The Desert Road to Turkestan, Owen Lattimore, 1928

Owen Lattimore started crossing deserts as a 26 year old riding from China to India in a camel caravan. His Inner Asian Frontiers of China was the first book I ever took off my grandfather’s shelf. If I’d read it then I probably would have seen his essay On the Wickedness of Being Nomads, ironically titled from the perspective of farmers, and been even more intrigued by people like KhairAllah.