A kabbāshi Cuppa

Small, white-enamelled tin cup with blue rim. Production Ethnic Group, Kababish (used by). Made, 20th C (late)

-Description, Object # Af1993,05.10, British Museum

Drinking tea from a glass was de rigueur in the first days’ marches of the Darb, and then one by one the glasses broke and everyone waited to drink their turn from Ibrahim’s kitchen cup, from which he measured millet flour, cooking oil, and a spice mix of dried tomato, okra, and chili pepper into the asīda, which we still tasted no matter how much sugar was poured on top.

British Museum, tin cup used by the Kababish after their tea glasses had shattered

Duchamp among the kababish

Double-mouthed water-skin made of leather with plaited suspension loops at both ends. Made from the complete skin of a small animal, the neck and leg apertures being tied up. Pieces of pink plastic cord and cotton string have been tied to the suspension loops. Production Ethnic Group, Kababish. Made 1988.

-Description, Object # Af1993,05.9, British Museum

No doubt to his great surprise, I will tell KhairAllah that he drinks from a British Museum-worthy work of art, right next to the Rosetta stone and Elgin marbles, and not far from where camels are stabled at the Regents Park Zoo alongside pygmy hippos and African bullfrogs.

A Duchampian Readymade

where we first tasted the nile

Hello Louis, Thank God, I arrived in the northern state (Al-Dabba locality) yesterday, after the efforts and difficulties of the road, and the family preceded me two weeks ago, and now we are I am fine and well. Greetings soliman.

-Email, January 11, 2024

I’d been waiting for this news for days, worried after I read about mass starvation in Omdurman. Now KhairAllah and his son Soliman have returned with the family to the Nubian Reach of the Nile where in 1984 we bought fresh oranges and mint after coming in from the Wadi al-Milk, and Honey.

Going north, not on the darb

…when we reach the north I will call you at a time God willing you are not sleeping…

-Email from Soliman KhairAllah, December 18, 2023, 6:17am

After a half year of urban war, KhairAllah and his son Soliman have decided to move the family out of Omdurman up north where there is no fighting, but he seems worried that I might be roused from sleep by a call that they have safely arrived. On the Darb I tried to explain the rotation of the earth to KhairAllah, how it was night in America when it was day in Sudan. He never believed me because he thought I meant to say therefore it was always night in America.

The camel's difficult sounds

Without the camel, the Arabic language itself would lose a vast number of words and ideas and possibly also a great many of its difficult sounds.

--Zigzag Journeys in the Camel Country, Samuel and Amy Zwemer, 1911

Austrian orientalist Joseph von Hammer’s 100 page monograph Das Kamel collected 5,774 words related to camels, from the collective plural Ibil, masculine singular Jamal, and feminine singular Nāqa, to Jafūl, a Camel Easily Frightened, and Harīb, a Female Camel that Walks in Front of Others, not to mention Qa’ūd, a Male Camel under Six Years, and Ba’īr, a word for livestock, such as a camel, that makes round dung, both these latter nouns having as their middle radical the consonant ‘ayn (ع), given in transliteration here as ’, phonetically called a Voiced Pharyngeal Approximant, a nearly impossible sound to make that I was taught to call a Guttural Stop, made deep in the throat, as distinct from a Glottal Stop, made at the back of the mouth. All of this is to say that I made for a very inept student among drovers much better versed in camel lexicography than von Hammer.

Topsy turvy ships

A few months ago a British traveler crossed Arabia in a motor car. How the camels must have been surprised!

-Zigzag Journeys in the Camel Country

Camel Country, which these husband and wife American missionaries in the Middle East call Topsy Turvy Land, and camels as topsy turvy ships of the desert because their masts, their legs, point down not up, their sails stay furled flat as saddle blankets, and their rigging is nothing but their tail, was never the same once such steamships as the Bedford lorry plied the Sudanese Sea.

Hard ships of the darb

It was the longest camel journey I had ever made…I was convinced that the camel is not only the ship but also the hardship of the desert.

-Zigzag Journeys in the Camel Country

It wasn’t much of a ship that delivered us to Egypt but it was better than having no ship. Try swimming up the Darb, its current, the north wind, against you day and night, the sand it blew stinging the bare skin like jellyfish, and some of the dunes like whitecaps, others like pelagic swells.

Thorny tit-bits

Where even a thorny bush is considered a tit-bit and where water costs money, it is not at all fun to be a camel.

-Zigzag Journeys in the Camel Country

Camels are not in the desert for the fun of it, or for the water. Thorn trees are what they’re after and we liked them too for what little noonday shade they gave.

Easy going for those who know

…the Libyan Desert was an otherworldly mystery, stretching 1,000 miles south from the Mediterranean and 1,200 miles across, from the Nile to the mountains of Tunisia, a bone-dry realm of howling winds and dead silence, of dunes as tall as a 15-story building, rocky escarpments, hidden wadis and temperatures that could soar to 140 degrees by day and plunge below freezing at night.

-New York Times, January 5, 2024, Obituary of Mike Sadler, Chief Navigator for the Long Range Desert Group, British Army commandos, North Africa Campaign, WWII

“Ragtag buccaneers in Arab headdresses and pirate beards”, as the obituary described Sadler and his mates. But they weren’t really commandos, just jeep drivers trained to dodge those 15 story sand dunes and hidden wadis. Or they could have picked a better route, where the going was flat. Bi Rāh, Go Easy, KhairAllah always called out from the head of the Dabouka.

Arise and follow the gaza road

“Arise and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt.”

-Matthew 2:13

And so Joseph took Mary and Jesus from Bethlehem to Egypt, hugging the Gaza coast, right about this month 2,024 years ago, to escape the wrath of the Roman client King Herod and his Slaughter of the Innocents.

1948, 1967, and October 6

Israel’s prime minister is fighting yesterday’s battles…

-Ha’aretz, December 23, 2023

Israelis say they want to turn back the calendar to October 6, when Negev ravers still considered Gaza’s immurement as “normal” enough to dance at its wall, Arabs want to turn back to May 1948, before the Nakba, and the State Department no doubt wishes it could turn back to June 1967, before settlement building precluded the creation of a Palestinian state. But time and the tide wait for no one, neither the Chosen People, nor the Sons of Ishmael, nor for the Indispensable Nation.

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.