The label's background of temples, minarets, an oasis, and pyramids was much like it is today, but the camel in the foreground was a pathetic, one-humped beast…
-Greensboro Daily News, November 29, 1974
Plus ça change…except in the desert.
Old joe and abu fīl
Is this a camel?, the Reynolds people asked each other when Barnum & Bailey came to town. A photographer visited and found a dromedary, but Old Joe wouldn't hold still. The trainer gave him a slap and Old Joe raised his tail and threw back his ears as the shutter snapped. From that photograph, a new label was designed and Old Joe became the most famous dromedary in the world.
-Greensboro Daily News, November 29, 1974
None of the drovers were habitual smokers, most preferring a good chaw of glycerined tombaq, but a few always had a loose Abu Fīl, Father of the Elephant. They laughed when Mustapha showed them a pack of Camel Filters but readily accepted his offer of Pierre Cardin 100s, brought to Kordofan straight from Paris.
Something about a jamal
When examined closely, some people claim to see a man with an erection on the camel's left leg. Another legend says the leg image is a nude woman.
-Greensboro Daily News, November 29, 1974, Article on Camel Cigarettes’ first advertising campaign
If Hamlet could convince Polonius to see a camel in a cloud, I could have convinced the boy cook Ibrahim to see a Bint in a Jamal. But probably it would have been more like Big Jim looking at Charlie Chaplin and seeing a chicken. If in the desert all you eat is Asīda, ground millet, American chicken feed, imagining a leg roast for dinner would make anybody, or anything, stand straight.
Ishrab! before you irkab!
The desert has a way of rearranging priorities.
-Beatríz López Gargallo, Mexican Consul General for Nogales, Arizona, speaking about a border crosser who stopped to help an American boy and was deported
The Sonoran Desert is a fraction of the size of the Sahara yet people have a harder time crossing. I guess KhairAllah could teach them to rearrange priorities for the better. First, Kubb Shāy! Pour Tea!, second, Ishrab! Drink!, and third, Irkab! Mount Up!
Exhausted by my khawajas
[On the desert crossing] I was exhausted by my women. One woman had grown thin, the second was hungry, the third was sick, this one had run away, that one was afflicted by the guinea worm. When we encamped they all did much to occupy my time.
-An 11th C merchant from Ouargla, Algeria, known as Al-Nakhkhās (The Drover, or Slaver), cited by T. Lewicki in “Quelques Extraits Relatifs aux Voyages des Commerçants au Pays du Soudan au Moyen Âge”, Folia Orientalia, 1960
Swap in the word Khawajas for Women in this account of trans-Saharan travel and you have a hint of how KhairAllah felt about his own helpless companions. None of us ran away from the Dabouka, nor grew thin, got sick or hungry, but, yes, I did pick up a bad case of crab lice from someone else’s saddle blanket.
A perfect instrument of the ridden
…the perfect instrument for the raider; the mount of the brigand and not of the soldier…
-Henri Lhote, Le Cheval et le Chameau, 1952
KhairAllah would have been amused to hear Henri Lhote speak on the subject of camels and their riders. Raiders? Brigands? Soldiers? He was neither of the three, but rather a Jammāl (in the occupational form of J-M-L, which also gives Jamal, Camel), whose root makes the Rider the perfect instrument of the Ridden.
A burro, not a turk
“Bu-r-r-o! Get on! The garfla is leaving. Hurry! Your master is angry.” “I have no master. I am a Turk now,” said I.
-The Gateway to the Sahara, Charles W. Furlong, 1909
At least Furlong dressed the part…pith helmet, safari jacket, waist bandolier, even if he did get the Arabic word for caravan (Qāfila) wrong. One morning KhairAllah told me to hurry and mount, and I said as a joke, Barkab al-Himār, I’m getting on my Burro.
Furlong
Bestir and mount
Come, bestir your camels, Brethren, it is time Ye were away! I incline to other comrades; solitary let me stray.
-Al-Shanfara [“He of the Large Lips”], first line of his pre-Islamic ode to camel brigandry, Lāmiyyāt al-Arab, trans. George Hughes, 1896
Could Billa Ali recite the Lāmiyyāt? Unlikely, unless his memory was as rich as what he wore, bright white cummerbund, pin-striped silk vest, and ‘Imma, Turban, jauntily skewed over a trimmed goatee. But He of the Large Lips could have stolen the verse from Billa Ali’s very own mouth when we mounted the next morning, the matter of a stolen camel having been settled over dinner, he going one way and we another, to Egypt.
©David Melody. Billa Ali, Camel Thief
The Scribe pebes, son of phibis
You have satisfied my heart with the money for the black cow, which is sturdy on her feet, branded on the neck, able to lie down and get up, and is unhurt by any fall. I have given her to you for money and she belongs to you from today for all future time…Written by Pebes son of Phibis, scribe of legal documents
-Sale contract, on papyrus, dated November 2, 106 BCE, Hermopolis, modern day Al-Ashmunim, half way between Minya and Asyut
I first met Hajj Bashir at the Cairo camel market in 1978. He was talking to the market’s founder Muhammad Abd al-Aziz, whose job was to decree a fair price for each animal and guarantee payment between buyer and seller. And much like Pebes, Abd al-Aziz’s scribe recorded each sale, the ledger book he carried around the paddock being so massive that the little man seemed always about to fall and hurt himself.
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'Āthār
A walk is a line of footsteps. A sculpture is a line of stones…in a continuum with animal marks…
-Richard Long, Land Artist, in southern Algeria
‘Athar, (pl) ‘Āthār, A remain, relic, trace, vestige, footstep, track…Ma’thūr, A camel having a mark made on the bottom of his foot by an iron instrument called a Ma’thara so that his footprints upon the ground may be known.
-Lane’s Lexicon
I doubt that KhairAllah has heard of Richard Long but he can recognize the prints of a camel whose ulcerous footpad is mended with a sewn leather patch, something like ‘Āthār, in the second meaning given by Lane, Monuments from Any Time Past.
Richard Long, Algeria
Shai-hulud
So one August night I found myself a part of a Saharan caravan, one of the vertebrae of a monster sand snake which wormed its way through the Great Desert.
-The Gateway to the Sahara, Charles W. Furlong, 1909
No one would mistake our shape-shifting Dabouka’s jostling camels for the neat nose-to-tail back bones of a sandworm, in Dune called Shai-Hulud, from Arabic, Shai’ al-Khulūd, Thing of Eternity, because most were sent to slaughter as soon as they had arrived in Egypt.
Saharan Scuff marks
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, the foam, the moon
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.
Turds in the throat
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.
Marrow, myrrh, and Mayya
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.
Of thirst, of course
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!