The dunes did their job.
-New York Times, March 15, 2024
Fifteen thousand tons of sand moved in order to protect beachfront homes from the rising tide, all washed away by a single storm. No doubt a Geomancer, a Rammāl (the occupational noun of the root R-M-L, Sand), would be alarmed by what this means. But on the Darb al-Arba’īn, the Way of the Forty, we had no use for Geomancy, Darb al-Raml, the Way of the Sand. On our Darb there was far too much Raml for the other Darb to count.
Sugar breeds thirst…
-The Lost Oases, Ahmad Hassanein, 1925
Sugar is the desert’s white gold, Dune’s spice. Its Arabic etymon is Sukkar, as Lane gives, A Certain Sweet Substance, Well Known, and Sakar, as Wehr gives, An Intoxicant. It soothes the sick and the sore, the dry-throated and the trail-tired. But when it runs low or is no more and the drovers are left with bitter tea, tempers flare. So yes, sugar both begets and begones the thirst of the Darb.
Grete plente of Camelys schul hele þe, and dromedaries of Madyan and Effa schul come to þe, aƚƚ men schul come fro Saba, bryngyng gold and encense and schewyng̛ preysyng̛ to god.
-History of the Three Kings, Johannes de Hildesheim (1320-1375)
Carmelite friar John of Hildesheim was the first to put the Magi on camels. Matthew the Evangelist had written simply that they “came” and “went”, presumably afoot, during Christianity’s first thirteen hundred years. Until, suddenly, there was a Grete Plente of Camelys belonging to Midian and Ephah, son and grandson of Abraham. And now we can add the Dabouka belonging to Hajj Bashīr who, as his name reads, is himself a Pilgrim and Bringer of Good Tidings.
The lands of Khor [Syria] and Kush [Nubia] and the land of Egypt, You have set every man in his place…Tongues are separate in speech…Their skins are different, For you have differentiated the foreigners…All distant lands, You have made them live, For you have set a Nile in the sky…A Nile in the sky for the foreigners, And all creatures that go upon their feet.
-Great Hymn to the Aten [hieroglyphic inscription from the Tomb of Ay], Amarna, Middle Egypt, 18th Dynasty, Reign of Akhenaten (1353-1336 BCE)
The land of the Khawajas was presumably not part of Akhenaten’s world three thousand years ago but he still got us mostly right. Different tongues, whiter skins. And when riding north through Kush to Cairo we looked at the night sky and saw the Nile, it was our Milky Way.
“Two camels,” shouts the auctioneer from the block. The animals in question move wearily into the ring, their humps lop-sided and sagging pathetically. The asking price is too high, there are no bidders. “C’mon,” says the auctioneer, “Feed ‘em a little bit and those humps will go right back up.”
-Mangy Elk and Crippled Camels, The Wall Street Journal, June 14, 1996, on an Exotic Animal Auction in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.
That was not how the Cairo camel market functioned in 1979 when Hajj Bashir invited me to sit beside him on his bench in the busy sales paddock and explained its ins and outs. Let a prospective buyer, he told me, squeeze the hump as many times as he wants. Start the bidding low and watch the butchers gather. Never tell an Egyptian he can fatten a trail-thin camel, because everyone knows they get marched to slaughter within the hour.
Yearling Bull Camel. Leads, loads, stands to be brushed, and raised in a petting zoo. Been inside churches for Christmas events.
-5-H Ranch Sale Brochure for Exotic Animal Auction, March 15, 2024, Jackson, Missouri
The difference between camels in America and camels in Sudan…Here they go to church parades, there they go to desert pasture.
A Church Going Yearling Bull
The purpose of this expedition was to verify interpretations of photographs of the Gilf Kebir plateau taken by Gemini and Apollo-Soyuz astronauts that appear similar to images of Mars taken by the Viking and Mariner inter-planetary probes…we were surprised by the sight of a camel caravan emerging from the distant mirage.
-Farouk El-Baz, Journey to the Gilf Kebir, Geographical Journal, March 1980
This encounter brings to mind the Rod Serling story about two astronauts who think they have crash landed on a desert planet, and one killing the other over their water supply, only for it to be revealed when the camera pulls back that they had crashed outside of Reno. What might NASA scientist El-Baz have asked KhairAllah if the expedition had come upon him midway on the Darb…Take me to your leader?
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!
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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
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.