Message from Nubia

…the telegraph poles and wires which here come striding along the edge of the desert and vanish southward with messages for Nubia and the Soudan.

-A Thousand Miles Up the Nile, Amelia Edwards, 1877

The downed wire drooping from tipped poles gave notice we were soon to reach the Nile. I was surprised the metal had not been scavenged. Mustapha’s camel got tangled and bolted. There must have been a functioning network elsewhere because two days later I sent a telegram home from the Dongola post office. Arrived Nile Day 20. Halfway To Cairo. More To Come.

Qashsh or no qashsh

The wind has been blowing for days…Camels closed their nostrils…Yet almost inch by inch man is conquering the Sahara.

-Desert Caravans, Charles Joy, 1960

So much for the Age of Saharan Optimism. Twenty five years after this book was published, while on the Darb I saw that the Sahara wasn’t blooming, the wind still blowing hard, drying and desertifying. KhairAllah was worried where to graze the Dabouka. Up ahead, would there be Qashsh, Grass, or no Qashsh?

Ummi to him

Another great relief to the uncontrollable feeling of ennui and sense of monotony, which comes over most people on a long day’s ride on a camel’s back under a broiling sun, is reading. The scenery may be impressive and full of interest of all kinds, and your companions may be kindred in spirit and pleasant to talk to, but nevertheless a book is an agreeable change. And not a stiff book either, but rather a novel or some such light reading.

-Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Egypt, 1847

I took only one book with me on the Darb, a very stiff English-Arabic dictionary, but it did me no good with the Kababish, whose word for Water is pronounced Moiyya, while my Concise Oxford gave me Mā’. At least KhairAllah didn’t think that whenever I felt thirsty I cried for Mother. That would have been Ummi to him.

Sand in flux, by god

The dune model consists of a system of continuum equations in two space dimensions that combines a description of the average turbulent wind shear force above the dune with a continuum saltation model which allows for saturation transients in the sand flux. Unusual dune shapes including the wedge dunes observed on Mars appear within a wide spectrum of bimodal dune morphologies…

-Dune Formation Under Bimodal Winds, Eric Parteli et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, December 29, 2009

This reminds me of the Little Prince’s Turkish astronomer, whose extraterrestrial discoveries no European believed because he wore native dress and a turban. KhairAllah could have told Parteli how sand dunes were formed, by angry Djinns, Wallahi, By God.

Peine forte et dur for the hell of it

One tries in vain to imagine a crime for which the peine forte et dur on camel-back would not be a full and sufficient expiation.

-Amelia Edwards, A Thousand Miles Up the Nile, 1877

The drovers asked what might we have done to deserve being sent on the Darb with them, in their mind a terrible, awful, miserable forty days. We answered, Al-Mizāj Kidda, We just feel like it. Some did not believe us, and others thought we were Majnūn, Crazy.

Mish battāl

The Writer and the Idle Man boldly mounted camels and rode out into the Arabian Desert.

-Amelia Edwards, A Thousand Miles Up the Nile, 1877

I am struck by Edwards’ reference to her fellow British traveller as the Idle Man, knowing that the Arabic word for Idle, Battāl, comes from the root B-T-L, which also gives the words Batal, Hero, and Mubtil, which Wehr has as Prattler, Windbag, and Liar. I was taught in Cairo that you answer the question, How Are You?, with, Mish Battāl, Not Bad, literally, Not Idle, which contradicted everything I saw on the street, Idleness being what most Cairenes seemed to strive for.

Green in the desert

In the morning, the waterskins filled and the baggage carefully divided into separate loads, the unwilling camels received their burdens and I mounted a dromedary for the first time. Thenceforth for many days, the only green thing to be seen in all the wilderness was myself.

-A Journey to Central Africa; Or, Life and Landscapes…, Bayard Taylor, 1854

A word of warning to first time camel riders setting out on a long trip…unless you toughen up your backside by Day 2, it won’t be the color green you’re seeing, but rather black, blue, and blood red.

Humpy dunes

The mountains will become dunes of shifting sand.

-Quran 73:14

The Quranic word for dune here is Kathīb, defined by Lane as a Gibbous Hill of Sand, the English word Gibbous from the Latin Gibbus, meaning Hump, as in a Camel’s, Sanām in Arabic, which Lane gives in its superlative form, Asnama, in construct with the word Raml, Sand, to mean, the Most Elevated, or Humpiest, of the Sands.

Go north like hounds

I captured lions; I took crocodiles. I seized the people of Wawat (Nubia). I captured the Mazoi (nomadic Nubians). I caused the Bedouin to go like hounds.

-Amenemhat I, XII Dynasty, Middle Kingdom, 20th C BCE

Amenemhat I launched the first of the XII Dynasty’s many raids into Nubia, recorded in his poem, Instructions to Sesostris. I am thinking of the modern equivalent, British accounts of punitive forays and gentlemen’s exploratories going South, like Churchill’s The River War and Bruce’s Travels. And some Kababish still ride North as far as the Cairo camel market.

The Wonders of invention, broken

After three days march across scrubby undulating country (waterless) we came upon the ferik of Ali al-Tom, Nāzir of the Kababish. Ali al-Tom is an exceedingly intelligent and clever Arab chief...a short and dapper little man with piercing eyes, a sharp turn of humor, and a way of asking questions which demand a deal of answering. The wonders of invention aroused in him a polite interest.

-North Kordofan to South Dongola, H.C. Maydon, The Geographical Journal, January 1923

Ali al-Tom’s interest in the wonders of Western invention reminds me of the drovers, when Daoud gathered them around him to demonstrate his hand pump filter that turned the water in our newly tanned goatskins from black and stank to clean and clear. When after only four strokes the pump jammed and broke, they were too polite to say more than, Māshā’Allah, What God has Willed.

Fade to Desert power

EXT. ROCKY RIDGELINE - DAWN

The tribe moves single file along an elevated ridge. Far-off, silhouetted against the sunrise, a SANDWORM passes, traveling on the surface. On its back, FREMEN are riding -- robes fluttering in the wind. Paul watches the worm pass by in awe. Paul turns to whisper.

Desert power! …

Fade to Black. The End.

-Dune Part I, Shooting Script, Final scene, Denis Villeneuve et al.

A tribe. Riders at dawn. Robes aflutter in the wind. Dreams of sandworms. Awakened by one hundred camels impatient on their night couches, black fades to light. In awe of sunrise. So begins Day 2.

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.