Sūf and the sahrā'

…even the Sahara, a planet upon which, in the twinkling of an eye, you could change climates…but beautiful, there was no denying its beauty, fatal or cleansing as it happened to be, the beauty of the Earthly Paradise itself.

-Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry

This sounds like we’re getting into Paul Bowles territory, but with tequila not kīf, and the same isotherms in Sol y Sombra, freezing nights and frying days, Serapes and Sūf, Woolens, from which comes the word Sufi, one who seeks Heaven on Earth in itchy clothes.

Dolly and dollars

Jeremy Morris won his four-year fight with his homeowners association over his Christmas display after a jury ruled he was facing religious discrimination. Despite the jury verdict, the northern Idaho man says this will be the second year in a row he’s canceling his Christmas setup, while he goes searching for a new house in a location where his live camel named Dolly won’t run afoul of HOA rules.

-The Washington Times

Renting one humpers to living Nativity scenes helps to keep exotic animal farmers in business. Sayyid Bashir once asked me about Australian feral camel round-ups as a business proposition but I never thought to tell him about this better idea, even in the cold of winter. Earning $100 a day for dressing as a Wise Man would have seemed like easy money, America being in his mind a land of milk and honey, but not a place to let the HOA come between you and your camel.

Goha rides again

On another occasion Goha said to the assembled company, O Muslims, Do you know why Allah gave no wings to the camel? We do not, O Goha, said his hearers, But surely you in your wisdom do. If camels had wings, explained Goha, They would perch on the flowers of your garden and, being very heavy, crush them to the ground.

-Addendum to the 922nd of the 1,001 Nights

Goha the Wise Fool appears in some editions when Schehrazade sees she is losing the King’s attention [“soon his face grew dark again”] and must improvise something more at the conclusion of that night’s tale, and then tells stories of the so-called Master of Laughter, but nothing she says about camels would have kept the exhausted drovers from their sleep even a second longer after their last glass of tea.

camel Tacos

And he gathered up all the food of the seven years, which were in the land of Egypt, and laid up the food in the cities…And Joseph gathered corn as the sand of the sea…

-Genesis 41:48

Some of the camels in our Dabouka were sold in Upper Egypt as draft animals but most were butchered in Cairo as food for the poor. I never asked KhairAllah what he thought about seeing their dressed quarters hang from fly-ridden meat hooks in sūq stalls, the irony of them being DOA in Africa’s largest city, the opposite perhaps of Bernardino de Sahagún’s visit in 1550 to the food market in Tenochtitlan, Pre-Columbian America’s largest city, and seeing dog meat tacos for sale to the rich.

When totomoxtle Entered egypt

…with their camels bearing spicery and balm and myrrh, going to carry it down to Egypt.

-Genesis 37:25

The Bible doesn’t say if their camels also carried totomoxtle, dried corn husk. By the looks of Angélica Santiago Matías’ puesto #3 on the Noche de Rábanos in Oaxaca, it was already well worn in Egypt by the time the caravan that carried Yusuf ibn Yacoub, Joseph Son of Jacob, had arrived.

Goodbye to all this

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

Now mange has a cure

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.

Travel-Stained by fire, blood, and shit

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.

Arriving with many, leaving with few

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.

Pissed and unpissed

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.

Daoud was Bloody hot

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.

Aristophanes in DAR AL-kababish

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.

All in all I'd rather be in al-Nahud

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.

Khibra can't be bought

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 desert so huge, the screen so small

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

If it hadn't been for the stories

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