Counting clouds

ȘiRMa, A Herd of Camels Consisting of about Thirty, or from Twenty to Thirty, or from Thirty to Forty Five, or to Fifty, or from Ten to Fifty, or Forty, or from Ten to Some Number between that and Twenty, or less than One Hundred. A Detached Portion of Clouds.

-Lane’s Lexicon

Arabic has several forms of the plural noun- Dual, Sound, Broken, Collective, and Countable, the last of these giving me no end of mirth when watching KhairAllah and Rabih count the herd as it was run through their standing gantlet one by one every morning and each invariably coming to wildly different numbers. Or maybe they’d been only counting clouds, Hamlet-like (3.2.406).

Understanding, driving, approaching

L-B-B…Form I verb, He was Possessed of Understanding, Intellect, Intelligence…LaBB, noun, A Camel Driver Who Keeps Constantly to the Work of Driving the Camels…LaBBaika, At Your Service!, said by a Pilgrim approaching Mecca, meaning, Lord, Here I Am!

-Lane’s Lexicon

None of the drovers had performed the Hajj, so none ever had the occasion to say, Labbaika!, but they all were to some degree possessed of intelligence about camels, and so they kept constantly driving the Dabouka, approaching Masr.

In the desert out at sea

Root Ș-H-R. Șahrā’, A Desert, a Waste, a Tract of Land Like the Back of a Beast. Șahīr, A Certain Uttering of the Voice of an Ass. Șuhār, The Sweat of Horses. Șahratan Bahratan, idiom, meaning, Openly and Unconcealed, lit. In the Desert, Out at Sea

-Lane’s Lexicon

Lane’s entry for this triliteral root is semantically all over the place but it does elucidate what comes in the following Sumerian text, Donkeys Braying Șahratan Bahratan. When we were in the desert, when we were out at sea, the voice of an ass carried farther than one might expect…leagues, nautical miles, Ayyām min al-Ayyām, Days upon Days…Forty to be precise.

Donkeys of the sea

anše.a.ab.ba [Sumerian, Donkey of the Sea] = ibilu [Akkadian, Camel]

-Sumerian-Akkadian Bilingual Word List of Domesticated Animals, Cuneiform Tablet Urra XIII, ca. Late 1st M BCE, Metropolitan Museum, New York

So now we know how camels came to be known as Ships of the Desert. Before Sumerian had a word for camel, they were called Donkeys of the Sea. I cannot imagine how to translate that old joke about Arab seamen in a way that might have gotten a laugh out of Rabih and the others. Camelmen don’t find donkeys to be at all funny.

Cuneiform Tablet Urra XIII, Sumerian-Akkadian Word List of Domesticated Animals

A callus to couch upon

The Bactrian camel differs from the Arabian; for the former has two humps and the latter only one, though it has, by the way, a kind of a hump below like the one above, on which, when it kneels, the weight of the whole body rests.

-Aristotle, On Animals, Book II:1

Wehr gives the word KhairAllah taught me for a camel’s chest callus, Zirr, as, Button, Tassel of a Tarboosh, or Bud of a Plant [cf. Zabīb, Raisin, in Egypt also meaning Forehead Callus, caused by an prayerful Muslim rubbing his head on the ground]. KhairAllah said that a Zirr roasts up well overnight in a pit of coals covered with sand, but I never tasted that particular festoon on my camel’s fez.

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.