My walking patterns and the marks they leave are one more layer upon the thousands of layers of criss-crossings both human and animal.
-Stones and Flies: Richard Long in the Sahara, a film by Philip Haas, 1988
Crossed or straight, wide or narrow, Daboukas and drovers leave the same scuff marks on the Darb.
Richard Long
The hump, if it is mixed with the foam of an excited camel, given to a man to drink at the new moon with wine from the barrel, then he will stomp and stumble like a crazy excited camel.
-Book on the Useful Properties of Animal Parts, Ali ibn Isā, Court Physician to Abbasid Caliph al-Mu’tamid (870-892)
Forget the hump, the foam, and the new moon. Bilāl could have told you which was the one essential ingredient, which itself could be substituted with Merissa or Aragi, in the West better known as Budweiser and Arak.
Wild camel droppings, if they are dried, ground, and mixed with flour, then kneaded with vinegar and rubbed on a swollen throat, then the swelling will subside.
-Ali ibn Isā, Abbasid Court Physician, 9th C
Daoud rubbed his sore throat with Vicks. It didn’t work overnight but by Day 3 it was much better, as time cures all, and Vicks smells better than dung. Dr. Ali, Heal Thyself.
Camel marrow, if it is mixed with myrrh water and given to a man suffering from back pain to drink, then this will be useful to him, with God’s permission, let Him be exalted.
-Ali ibn Isā, Abbasid Court Physician, 9th C
Or take Ibuprofen, which doesn’t require you to butcher a camel, collect resin from a Commiphora myrrha tree, or waste precious Mayya, Water, which the drovers would much prefer to use for tea.
Tintin [eyeing a skeleton in the sand]- A camel! Captain- A camel? Tintin- We’re in the middle of the Sahara Desert. Captain- The Sahara? Then that animal…died...died…died of… Tintin-...of thirst! Of course! [Captain faints] What’s the matter? Captain [coming to]- The land of…The land of thirst! Tintin- Courage, Captain, we aren’t finished yet!
-Tintin and the Crab with the Golden Claws
Tintin’s Captain was a habitual drunk. Khabīr Bilal Bakhīt was only an occasional drinker, and he said to me on Day 31, with more than a week of the Darb before us, Yā Khawaja, O Foreigner, Lissa, Lissa! Not yet, Still more!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
…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.