Up, south, left, off

…Provide three good camels for wine…Whenever they are coming up*, inform us, so we can load them [with wine] to go down*.

-O. Sarga (Ostracon) 93, Monastery of Abba Thomas, Wadi Sarga (Asyut, Egypt), 6th-8th C CE

In Sahidic Coptic, the same word is used for Up and North, and for Down and South, and so the direction of travel is uncertain. Bilal drank Millet Beer and Date Whiskey, not Wine, but he was never uncertain about his direction, keeping the North Wind on his Left Cheek all the way to Cairo. And the fact that Sudanese Arabic has the same word for North and Left? He never paid mind to that even when, drunk, he fell off his saddle.

Ai in the sahrā'

A journey in the Sahara gives you a unique opportunity to discover camels in their natural setting and to experience peace and quiet in a harsh environment.

-ChatGPT-generated Arabic text, then translated, containing the Arabic prompt words Safar, Sahrā’, and Jamal (Journey, Desert, Camel), instructed to be written as a generality

I should have asked AI to write ironically, or in the manner of the absurd, or as a poem in the meter known as Rajaz (meaning, “a tremor, spasm, convulsion as may occur in the behind of a camel when it wants to rise”, so named because of its offbeats, as given in the Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature), because as an expression of mere fact these words are as bland as asīda.

Beau geste on monsieur Hulot's holiday

Monsieur, chameau wander puit, haboob approach, très mystérieux.

-ChatGPT-generated text containing the prompt words Chameau, Puit, and Haboob, instructed to be written in broken English in the style of a French explorer of the Sahara

I was maybe expecting something of a cross between le Petit Prince and Pépé le Moko but instead AI seemed to channel a French-speaking Tonto talking to the Lone Ranger. Kemo Sahbee, Yā Khawāja.

Virtual lamb kababs

Venturing into the vast Sahara desert, astride a noble camel, I, a humble explorer, braved scorching sands and endless dunes. My encounters with the nomadic Kababish tribe revealed secrets of survival amid this barren expanse, as we shared stories beneath the shimmering stars, feasting on succulent kababs.

-ChatGPT-generated text containing the prompt words Kababish, Sahara, and Camel, instructed to be written in the style of a 19th C British explorer

The ghost in the AI evidently has an unprompted appetite for lamb kababs, or maybe it tripped on the Kababish. But it’s never a bad idea to give that rusty machine a lube job of greasy meat. I guess the millet flour we ate forty straight days would only have thrown more sand in its gears.

Nodding off on a camel

About twelve days of nodding on a camel ought to loosen a man’s spine into chronic politeness.

-American painter Frederic Church, in a letter describing his camel trip to Petra, February 1868

Horsemen-turned-cameleers must forget all they’ve learned about how to hold their bodies in the saddle…back stiff, legs straight, thighs pressed tight, shoulders squared, heels down in the stirrup. Everything done on a camel is looser, and another three or four feet off the ground. Church was right, the spine nods off first, followed by the mind.

The way of the sand

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, Sukkar, sakar

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.

Madya, effa, and hajj bashīr

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.

A Nile in the sky

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.

Camels on the block

“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.

A church-going camel

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

Darbonauts

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?

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