صحراء [Imperfectly declined though not an epithet, or it is an epithet in which the quality of the substantive predominates, and is imperfectly declined because it is of the feminine gender, and because the letter characteristic of the feminine gender is inseparable from it]…
-Lane’s Lexicon, Explanatory Note to the word entry Sahrā’, under the triliteral root S H R, alongside the words Suhār, Horse Sweat, and Sahīr, Uttering of an Ass
…“A Desert…”
Saharan sand-winds
Seared his keen eyeballs...
-Matthew Arnold, from Consolation
The OED says this poem from 1849 used the adjective Saharan for the first time in English. KhairAllah would have only said, Yā Ingilīzi, O English(man)…!
The camel chews cud out of its own stomach.
-Arabic Proverb
A classic case of eating your own seed corn, spitting in your own well, or getting high on your own supply. KhairAllah would have said the same about my wanting to make lemonade from our depleted Qirbas, Water Skins, not tea.
Camels are called Daughters of the Night.
-The Life of Animals, Kamal al-Din al-Damiri (1341-1405)
Al-Damiri doesn’t explain the origin of this sobriquet, but since he immediately continues by saying they are also called Ba’īr, Round Dung Makers, I can only wonder if he meant that each pile of turds dropped by a night-couched camel reminded him of a big family of girls.
The camel has a big body, is readily led…and even if a rat takes hold of its halter will go wherever it wishes.
-The Life of Animals, Kamal al-Din Al-Damiri
We told a lot of jokes about mice and once I grabbed KhairAllah’s bare toe when he was looking the other way and said, Khali Bālik Min al-Fīl!, Watch Out for the Elephant!, when I’d meant to say, al-Fār, the Mouse, and then tried to tell him that elephants and mice have a common ancestor, which only ruined my gag even more.
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
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
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.
…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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
…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 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.
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.