So say the ammonians

But this is what the Ammonians [Siwans] themselves say: when the Persians were crossing the sand from [Kharga] Oasis…while they were breakfasting, a great and violent south wind arose, which buried them in the masses of sand which it bore; and so they disappeared from sight.

-Herodotus 3.26

What Herodotus wrote here is unlikely, for wind across the Western Desert is most often northerly, not southerly, and dead still at the breakfast hour. Nonetheless his account has inspired archeologists and filmmakers to try to locate the lost Persian army in mid-desert, most recently two shockumentarians whose other films showed severing a penis and skinning a corpse. KhairAllah, Batal al-Shāsha, Hero of the Silver Screen, would no doubt have been quick to turn down those two roles

Reveries, then a fall

The regular and scarcely audible tread of the camel sheds a drowsy influence on your reveries; your daydreams pass into slumberous visions; you waver in your seat and it is rather an instinctive impulse than a conscious effort that braces you in your saddle and saves you from a disasterous fall.

-George Perkins Marsh, The Desert, American Whig Review, 1852

There was never a danger of losing yourself to a slumberous reverie and falling off your camel as Gasim did in the Devil’s Anvil, the fear being not that you’d be left behind but rather trampled by the Dabouka.

The Smelling of the sand

The caravan of merchants wandering out of the direct way had a certaine blinde man in their companie which was acquainted with all those regions: this blinde guide riding foremost upon his camell, commanded some sand to be given him at every miles end, by the smell whereof he declared the place, but when they were come within fortie miles of this region, the blinde man smelling of the sand, affirmed that they were not farre from some places inhabited which some beleeved not, for they knew that they were distant from Egypt fower hundred and eightie miles.

-Description of Africa, Book VII, Leo Africanus (1494-1554), trans. John Pory, 1600

This is one of those old Saharan tall tales, that Khabīrs knew where they were by the smell of the sand. Maybe the story originated with Leo the African and European travellers after him repeated it to the point of making a commonplace. KhairAllah never pulled it on me but he did say how the feel of the wind on his left cheek told him to keep going straight, and thereby we did get to Cairo.

Thence unto nilus

Nubia bordering westward upon the kingdome last described, and stretching from thence unto Nilus, is enclosed on the southside with the desert...The principall towne of this kingdome calld Dangala is exxceeding populous...The townesmen are exceeding rich and civill people, and have great traffike with the merchants of Cairo & Egypt:

-Description of Africa, Book VII, Leo Africanus

I always liked Dongola, which the drovers called Al-Urdi, meaning military camp, because of the Ottoman army post there in the days of Muhammad Ali, the first Egyptian Khedive and last Turkish Wali, and because it is more than halfway to Egypt, its merchants trading as much with Aswan as with Omdurman, and it is near where KhairAllah now lives.

A road taken by sand

Then His Majesty found the road after the sand had taken it…And His Majesty brought a multitude of hands to carry away the sand…and His Majesty was using his own hands to carry away the sand himself before the multitudes of others for many days.

-Inscription on wall of Temple of Taharqa (690-664 BCE, Napatan Dynasty), Kawa, Sudanese Nubia

The Black Pharaoh Taharqa built this temple en route to Egypt while passing through Kawa, across the Nile from Dongola where we resupplied at the market stall of Hajj Bashir’s agent al-Amiri Yasīn on Day 25. It was sandy on our way too but now the road on both banks has been largely asphalted and the Temple itself has been moved to England, carried away by a multitude of hands.

The pathos of the hump

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.

-

'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.