Fatigue by camel

The key duty of the herders is their responsibility (mas’ūliyya) for the herd. They must fulfill this task responsibly (mas’ūl) and trustworthily (ma’mūn) and must obey the trader. Their job qualifications are characterized by dedication (ijtihad), service (khidma), and fatigue (ti’ib).

-Footprints in the Sand: Recent Long Distance Camel Trade in the Libyan Desert, Meike Meerpohl, in Desert Road Archaeology in Ancient Egypt and Beyond, 2013

I take special note of that last qualification, Ti’ib, which Lane additionally gives in its verbal Form IV as, He Fatigued Another, Himself, and his Travelling Camels by Urging them Quickly and by Hard Journeying, and I can say from personal experience that there is nothing else like the Fatigue made by Hard Journeying by Camel.

Luxury and lummox

Bearers of Eastern luxuries, camels carried connotations of opulence and splendour…

-Roads in the Deserts of Roman Egypt, Maciej Paprocki

KhairAllah would have laughed at the thought. After he had mounted us on his camels, unwashed for Cairo and ill-garbed for the trail, he took one look and saw that they each bore a lummox, not a luxury.

First time i rode the darb

Le premier qui vit un Chameau/S’enfuit de cet objet nouveau;/Le second approcha; le troisième osa faire/Un licou pour le Dromadaire.

-Jean de La Fontaine (1621-1695)

La Fontaine’s moral was that repeat experience teaches man to get used to anything. The trouble with riding the Darb is that such an experience comes only in multiples of forty days, and before you ride a second time, the appetite for more is sharply reduced by the ache in your trousers.

The fās and the axe

And when the Hill stood still, he was never a whit abashed, but said; If the Hill will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet will go to the hill.

-Francis Bacon, Essays, 1625

Jabal al-Fās, Mountain of the Axe, was our landmark for making progress along the Wadi al-Milk. Monotonous was the sand track to which its rocky silhouette promised only slighter interest. Approaching the Jabal, I looked for but didn’t see the Axe. Passing it, no Fās yet. Leaving it behind, still no Axe. Then KhairAllah said, Jabal al-Fās is ahead and we will pass tomorrow, InshāAllah.

Slave to your own Dabouka

In winter the camel is a marvelous animal, but in summer he cannot tolerate thirst, and thus every explorer of the Sahara becomes a slave to his own caravan.

-Mission Among the Touareg: My Two Saharan Itinerairies, October 1894-May 1895, Fernand Foureau (1850-1914)

Foureau’s charge from the French Colonial Office was to map a railroad route across the Sahara Desert. Chemin de Fer, Sikka al-Hadīd, Path of Iron. But KhairAllah might have said, Ride instead on the Chemin de Quarante, Darb al-Arba’īn, Way of the Forty, and you will arrive when you arrive, God Willing as a free man on a marvelous camel.

Grief or gout

A certain Camel heard him shout--
A Camel with a hump.
"Oh, is it Grief, or is it Gout?
What is this bellowing about?"

-from The Pig-Tale, Lewis Carroll

One thing I learned about camels…they don’t care about their riders. Maybe they’re too busy chewing, or thinking about their next watering, or bothered by the load they’re carrying, but for whichever reason, don’t count on them to ask their rider, What hurts?, or, Why me?, or, When do we get there?

Lucky not to be mongolian

The man who has stolen a camel shall return it to the rightful owner and pay the victim with nine animals of the same sort. If he cannot pay he shall give his children in place of the animals and if he has no children he shall be slaughtered like a sheep, his legs bound together and his belly ripped open and his heart squeezed by the slaughterer’s hand until he dies.

-Yassa (Legal Code) of Genghis Khan, 13th C

Lucky that the camel thief of Wadi al-Milk, Billa Ali al-Grayn, didn’t live in Mongolia. If so, it would have been he we slaughtered like a sheep and not the small goat we then roasted and invited him to share at dinner to show that bygones were bygones, so much that he smiled when Daoud took his picture the next morning.

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©David Melody

We blew our minds out on a camel

I think the thing that really blew our minds from the Pliocene is the camel. And this is where the finding of the High Arctic camel is so mind blowing, right? Because it’s not in a desert. It’s living in a complete opposite to a desert.

-NOVA, Hunt for the Oldest DNA, Natalia Rybczynski

I often wondered about the Sahara when it was an inland sea filled by the paleomonsoon. What about the camel in those days, and what about the camel in the High Arctic when it was a humid forest? No need then for the drovers to graze the herd whenever we passed through the Qushsh, what was left of that season’s dry grass.

On Khairallah, when rested and refreshed

All good things earthly, and so this essay, must have an end, and therefore I shall at this present deny you the natural history of the camel driver, and at some point well rested and refreshed discuss him as thoroughly as we have his camel.

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

KhairAllah wanted to discuss camels rather than be discussed himself. At the end of Voice of the Whip I asked him, in reference to Yusuf’s selfish behavior, Is it dishonorable for a Khabīr to leave his trail companions behind in order to arrive first to market? KhairAllah, dodging my question, answered, It is better for the camels to arrive alive, not first.

The wind at dawn

I remember one evening and night in Wadee Feiran. No water, thermometer at 110°, air deathly still, and camels very near. Oh! for a drought of Lethe! I faint at the recollection. Reader, in hot weather pitch your tents as far from your camels as you dare, and, if there be a breeze, to the windward!

-George Perkins Marsh, The Camel: His Organization, Habits, and Uses, 1856

We joked about camel flatulence and the different words used to describe it, but only about how it sounded, not how it smelled. At night with the Dabouka couched around us, we heard less their breaking of wind than their Jushā’, Belching, a word that Lane also gives as Daybreak and, more appropriate to our circumstance, the Blowing of the Wind at Dawn.

Clouds of the desert, camels of the sky

The figurative name, the Ship of the Desert, is known, but not the opposite metonymy, by which the ship is called the Camel of the Sea: so too camels are called the Clouds of the Desert, and clouds, the Camels of the Sky.

-Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, Das Kamel, 1834

When we looked up and saw neither clouds nor camels but rather contrails, KhairAllah would remark upon the Tayyara, Airplane, a word from the same root as Tayr, Bird, which sometimes would land on the camels’ humps to peck at their Rukāb, Riders, here meaning ticks.

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.