Coaxing camels

Mongol herders perform a coaxing ritual to encourage a female camel to accept a new-born calf or to adopt an orphan. The mother is tied close to the calf and a singer begins a monotone song accompanied by gestures and chanting. Performance of the ritual takes place at twilight and requires great skill in handling camels.

-Coaxing Ritual for Camels, Mongolia, UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage List, 2015

Sheepherders perform a bloodier form of this ritual by jacketting bummer lambs and grafting them to wet ewes, fitting them into the flayed skins of stillborns whose mothers recognize their scent and thus allow another’s orphan to suckle. When I asked KhairAllah about the Saudi taste for stillborn camel meat, he said only one word, Harām, Sinful!

Preparation h[ump]

The fat taken out of the bunche [hump] and perfumed cureth the Hemmorhoids and the blood of the camell fryed is pretious against the bloody flix or any other loosenes of the belly.

-Edward Topsell, History of Four Footed Beasts, On Camels, 1607

Pity we had no bloody camel meat when the sulphurous wells of Kalabsha loosened our bowels. We could have been cured, and likewise Ahmad the Bawwāb, whom we called Abu Bawāsīr after that other malady down under, could have cured himself by the perfumed fat of a hump, perhaps by the very one I’d ridden for forty days that had nearly stricken me with Ahmad’s same complaint.

Fingers on a seiko's hands

Al-Heda’a is an oral polyphonic expression accompanied by gestures or musical instruments played by herders to communicate with their camels.

-Oral Tradition of Calling Camel Flocks, Saudi Arabia, UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage List, 2022

If Lane is correct in his explanatory note for Hudā’ [inaccurately transliterated here as Heda’a]- “It is said that it originated from the fact of a Desert Arab beating his boy and biting his fingers, whereupon he went along saying Dai! Dai!, meaning Yā Yadaiyya! [O My Two Hands!], and the camels went on at his cry”- one can imagine that this cultural practice comes from a dark place, far darker than Idris tapped when he sang to his camel, O Rocket of Sudan!, Your Eye Like a Seiko Watch.

Camels and cadillacs

We suppose that a second millennium [BCE] camel would have been a prestige item for its owners, not unlike a sports car or Cadillac in our world…might not one of the messages of patriarchal camel ownership be that Abraham and his family had done very very well in Canaan.

-Sweeter Than Camel’s Milk, Wayne Horowitz, Bible Lands e-Review 2014/S3

If a Chaldean can make it in Canaan, for sure a Kordofani can make it Cairo. And that goes double for Hajj Bashir when I rode with him to the camel market there in his chauffered Mercedes saloon car. When five years later I found that he’d brought it back to El Obeid, it was as if he’d returned home in a Triumph, as if Abraham had returned to Ur driving a Jaguar XK-E

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