Cheap to keep

Camels are cheap to keep…

-A Manual for the Primary Animal Health Care Worker, FAO, 1994

…but not cheap to send to Egypt. Hajj Bashir and his sons Mahdi and Sayyid ran a sprawling network of hiring and supply agents and authorized buyers and sellers. Sādiq abd al-Wahāb in Nahud, al-Amīri Yasīn in Dongola, Hasan abd al-Majīd in Binban, Muhammad abd al-Azīz in Imbaba…these were just a handful of those who kept accounts for the Abu Jaib family, not to mention the drovers and Khabīr recruited and paid for each Dabouka, and not to mention the occasional Khawāja who showed up looking for a free ride.

Even Cheaper to keep

Unlike a human [camel] jockey, a robot rider is cheaper to maintain and would not have to undergo the same physical hardship.

-Sheikh Sultan bin Hamdan Al-Nahyan, Chairman of Protocol, UAE Ministry of Information and Culture

They say that AI teamed with robotics will put most people out of work, including the drovers and Khabīrs of the Darb. Look out KhairAllah, you’re next. And to think, camel-riding robots don’t need to stop and make tea.

Il cammello finito

It's too bad, the camel has been part of our lives for 3,000 years. Now the romance is over. As a means of transportation, the camel is finished.

-Mansour Fares Hussein, Dept. of Agriculture, King Saud University, quoted in The New York Times, “Desert Sun Sets on the Camel’s Glory Days”, April 10, 1989

By our second trip together in 1988, the Darb was already feeling past its prime. Maybe old Bilal was retiring at the top of its run, and maybe KhairAllah was entering the sheep trade just at the right time. In Egypt, camels were in demand less and less for transport and traction, and mutton more and more for roasting and stewing.

Exitus acta probat

The camel is a means, not an end.

-Thoughts on the Bedouinisation of Arabia, William Lancaster et al., Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies, Vol.18, 1988

Lancaster was on to something, that there were many ways to consider oneself a Bedouin, not just by herding camels, and he cited as other examples the fishing Arabs living at the sea shore who had given up their desert mounts for ocean going skiffs, leaving out of this world altogether such working stiffs as Ahmad the drover and Yusuf the Khabīr, who showed me their passports and recounted airplane flights to Iraq as contract laborers.

A saharan price too high

Sahara is too little price
To pay for thy Right hand.

-Emily Dickinson, I Did Not Reach Thee

Some see the Sahara as a metaphor, its burning sand, its miles between wells, its mirages that test man’s sanity, the place where Emily Dickinson sought God in its fiery furnace. But to the drovers, the desert was just a desert. I never met a drover named al-Yamīn, the Right Hand, or even Ibn al-Yamīn, but if I had, I wouldn’t have thought, like her, that he had been underpaid.

An englishman, a frenchman, and a german enter a bar...

There is a story somewhere of an Englishman, a Frenchman, and a German being each called on to describe a camel. The Englishman immediately embarked for Egypt, the Frenchman went to the Jardin des Plantes, and the German shut himself up in his study and thought it out!

-Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911), Middle East explorer and botanist

Hooker was said to have been Charles Darwin’s closest friend so presumably he knew a bit about the taxonomy of camels. But even if he had visited Egypt, which he never did, could Hooker have outdone KhairAllah when he shouted at a particularly recalcitrant one, Yā Himār, O Donkey!

Crush the dogs, ride the camels

The two armies [one Egyptian, one Greek] that went up to the fields of Cush [Upper Nubia] with Amasis [Commanding General of Pharaoh Psamtik II’s punitive raid, 593 BCE, and later Pharaoh himself] crushed the dogs.

-Phoenician graffito carved into the right calf of the Second Colossus, Abu Simbel

The legs of the four 22m high seated Colossi are tagged with graffiti in Greek, Phoenician, Arabic, French, Italian, English, and polyglot gibberish [“imbeciles’ names written everywhere” Flaubert called them on his visit in 1850]. In 1988 I was awake at dawn on the deck of the Lake Nasser ferry when it passed Abu Simbel, and all I was thinking about was the Dabouka I’d left behind in the Batn al-Hajar, Belly of Stones, in Upper Nubia.

An ox is a khasī too

As the ox said to his fellow-servant the camel when he refused to ease him of his burthen, It won't be long before you carry my burthen and me too, which fell out to be true when the ox died. So it happens to the mind when it refuses that little relaxation and comfort which it needs in its labor.

-Plutarch, Rules for Preservation of Health, Moralia

When it became evident to KhairAllah that the weight of my body plus my gear was over-burdening my camel, a small pure white called a Kabbāshi and considered an honor to ride, he did not offload my kit but rather mounted me on a stronger animal, a plump gelding. The drovers’ jokes aside about me riding a Khasī, a Castrate, I was relieved to no longer need a stick to beat its rump, which allowed more time for daydreams in the saddle.

Sleeping in the sahāri

North African desert theme was conveyed only minimally in the Sahara’s architecture. Outside, the only depiction consisted of fake camels and fake Arabian people.

-Stripping Las Vegas: A Contextual Review of Casino Architecture, Karin Jasche

I stayed often in Khartoum’s Sahāri Hotel, nothing fake about it, no fake camels, no fake Arabs, but outside the door, the desert theme was everywhere, the real Sahrā’ starting right on its sandy sidewalk.

Sudanese camels and soviet cologne

Competition in the Egyptian cattle market has arisen with an increase in arrivals from Soviet Russia. The native trade in Sudan camels by the desert route to Upper Egypt continues and there is a steady demand for this kind of meat.

-from Chapter 5, Livestock Trade, Governor-General’s Report on the Condition of the Sudan, 1929, Presented by the Command of His Majesty

When we rode past the Aswan High Dam that night with its floodlights ablaze, I told KhairAllah that Egypt had repaid its Soviet construction loan with flowers for making perfume because Communists found it easier to cover their body odor with cheap cologne than to heat bath water in the Russian winter. He asked me, What strange thing might Communists make of these camels?

La bella deserta

…and Lybia, he calleth Sarra, for so the Arabians call a desert.

-Samuel Purchas (1577-1626), Purchas His Pilgrimage, 1613

The OED gives the first English language use of the word Sahara, albeit misspelled, to Samuel Purchas, although he is quoting the “Moore” (also misspelled) Leo Africanus’ Descrittione dell’Africa, from the Italian, but if he had wanted to be perfectly correct, he’d have called it Sara, la Bella Deserta, because in Arabic it is a feminine noun.

Sahara, a word imperfectly declined

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…”

A saharan first

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)…!

Chewing our own cud

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.

They drop by night

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 Rat and the camel

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.