Date of birth…Place of birth…Profession…In my passport I am down as…That was a convenience when I first took one out. I thought of putting “Writer”, but border officials have complicated reactions to the word.
-Robert Graves, Goodbye To All That
يا أخي خيرالله إركب بعيداً
Sat I alone forsaken- a mange-stricken camel.
-from the Pre-Islamic Ode by Tarafa Ibn al-’Abd, collected in Al-Mu’allaqat, The Hanging Odes
Pity that Tarafa didn’t have A Field Manual of Camel Diseases by Ilse Köller-Rollefson et alia to consult back in the 6th Century, from which he would have learned of folk remedies for camel mange from outside the Hijaz, such as rubbing with engine oil, from Eritrea, or pond mud, from Rajasthan, or ashes from the burnt wood of Acacia mellifera, from Sudan, or an infusion of boiled root of the desert rose, from the Turkana, or juice squeezed from the Agnosceles versicolor bugs that have been smoked out of tree tops, from the Shukria, or heated bone marrow, from the Tuareg, or sesame oil and river mud, from the Punjab, or the juice of Euphorbia somalensis mixed with urine, from Somalia, or a modern treatment of Ivermectin, from MAGAland.
Mount thee on thy she-camel- Travel-stained and hard she is…
-from the Pre-Islamic Ode of Labīd Ibn Rabī’a
Jamals in our Dabouka were hot iron-branded with the merchant’s export number, marked by a bloody handprint made at the pre-departure sheep sacrifice asking God’s protection, and later, as birdlife ventured out to us from the Nile, splattered by the droppings of tick-eating crows perched on the humps of camels too exhausted to roust them with a shake or a nip. Travel-stained by the honorable scars of the Darb, as were some drovers and all the Khawajas.
I came to Cairo with a store/Of wealth,- my story’s known enough/…/And then my hand I opened wide,/I paid in measure grand and fine/…/And now the time at last has come/To leave the town- I cannot do less,/And I must trudge away towards home/Thus hungry, thirsty, bare, and shoeless.
-Egyptian poet Bahā al-Din Zuhayr (1186-1258)
KhairAllah said when asked about the heavy duty of being Khabīr, Trail Boss, I am driving millions [of guineas] before me in the form of camels. But when he got to Cairo, he handed those millions back to Hajj Bashir and returned home to became again the person he had been before taking the job in Dar al-Kababish, a man thirsty and shoeless, Miskīn, Miserable, in the words of drover Muhammad the Miskīn, although KhairAllah’s clothes were cleaner.
The Camel- Its urine brings a drunk man back to the state of sobriety.
-Al-Mustatraf, The Quest for Attainment in Each Fine Art, Mansour al-Ibshīhī (1388-1448)
The heavy scent of urea in the night air was overpowering when after a fast march all one hundred and fifty head in the Dabouka unloaded themselves at once, thick enough to dry out the entire nightclub district of Tawfikiya, if Egyptian native son Al-Ibshīhī’s folk medicine was to be swallowed in one big slug.
Richard (with concern): David. David (with contempt): Richard. Richard: How are you feeling? David: Bloody hot. Richard: It’s the Sahara old boy. David: I know it’s the fucking Sahara.
-The Forgiven (2021), based on the novel by Lawrence Osborne
Daoud didn’t wear a white dinner jacket as did Richard the night of the party in his Moroccan desert Casbah, but he still thought it very hot until the sun set, and when it quickly turned cold he then pulled on a wool sweater and sat closer to the tea fire. I remember giving my Icelandic fisherman’s sweater to Rabih when we got to Cairo because he was the only barrel-chested drover in our Dabouka and wouldn’t swim in it as might the boy cook Ibrahim.
It didn’t matter if one was in Dar al-Kababish that one knew about Aristophanes or Plato. The things that mattered were the knowledge of the way in which camels would be taken south at the beginning of the rains and west during the dry season…
-British Colonial Officer quoted in Bonds of Silk: The Human Factor in the British Administration of the Sudan, Francis Deng and M.W. Daly
We too came to Sudan with the wrong books, having read Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande and Talal Asad’s The Kababish Arabs: Power, Authority and Consent in a Nomadic Tribe, but not David Werner’s Where There is No Doctor or Murray Dickson’s Where There is No Dentist. Luckily we had trouble with neither indigestion nor our incisors, although knowledge of Aristophanean comedy might have helped KhairAllah when we first mounted our camels and he mistook it as tragedy.
My first impression was that despite the locusts we were better off in Kordofan than in Britain.
-British Colonial officer quoted in Bonds of Silk, Deng and Daly
It wasn’t the locusts but rather the Rukāb, Lice, that bugged me most about Kordofan although I might have picked them up anywhere, even on the EgyptAir flight outbound from Cairo. Yes, that must have been it, the Mummy’s Curse, King Tut’s Two Step, Cleopatra’s Claptrap.
By Allah, miserable would be the man who owns no camels.
-Qawdhan Duale, Somali Poet quoted in The Wall Street Journal, November 17, 2022, in the article How an I.T. Guy Found Career Happiness Owning 78 Camels
I’ve talked about this with Hajj Bashir’s son-in-law, who came to the USA forty years ago for graduate school in Range Management and had a career here in Environmental Science and now talks about going back to Kordofan to live a simple life in a tukul and raise camels. He certainly has the credentials to succeed on a theoretical level but would KhairAllah the Khabīr give him a passing grade in Khibra, Experience?
The Sahara is big. It’s the pictures that got small.
-KhairAllah Khair al-Sayyid, channelling Norma Desmond
Why read the words when you can look at the pictures, and why look at the pictures when you can go to the movies? On the Darb, KhairAllah earned his name Batal al-Shāsha, Hero of the Screen, even before the camera started rolling.
©Paulo Coelho
And on this day, he will tell me his story and I will tell him mine.
-Paulo Coelho, Forward to the 25th Anniversary edition of The Alchemist
Hajj Bashir was not an alchemist unless you think turning Sudanese camels into Egyptian guineas is a form of black magic. Perhaps it was so in the eyes of the drovers, whose employer got rich simply by sending them up the trail to the Cairo sale corrals where I had first met him. As for KhairAllah, he too was a kind of alchemist, turning camel stories into another sort of gold, the kind you want to hear him tell over and over again back in his Majlis in Omdurman.
©Paulo Coelho
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…
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!
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.)
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.
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.