The genesis of camel cookery

There are too many camels in the Bible, out of time and out of place.

-New York Times, February 10, 2014

Questions remain about the Book of Genesis. Did Abraham Ride a Camel? After examining animal bones from a Jewish burial pit and reading a Sumerian love song about camel milk, one Bible scholar answered, Abraham likely both rode one and drank of one. Our boy chef Ibrahim also rode and drank of camels, one that we had butchered on the trail and he then cooked, of which we all partook with gusto.

Kalabsha, kalābish...how could i forget?

“What? A camel? My daughter leave here on a camel? Not likely! There must be a Toumbeel!”

-Diary of a Country Prosecutor, Tawfik al-Hakim

That is the thing about Arabic linguistics, especially among the illiterate, and the difficulty of learning certain words from them. Drop a few long or short vowels here, add some there, and an Automobile becomes a Toumbeel. Or Kalābish, as KhairAllah called the Pharaonic temple Kalabsha when we drank from its sulphurous well and all got sick within the hour…a place I will never forget in any pronunciation.

One good to ride

Abdullah ibn Omar reports he heard Allah’s Apostle say, Men are like camels, out of a hundred, you can hardly find a single one suitable to ride.

-Sunnah of Sahīh al-Bukhari (9th C CE), Book 81:87

We were three Khawajas, three drovers, and one Khabīr, seven riders in all, in that Dabouka of one hundred fifty head, so according to the Prophet, six of us were on unsuitable, ungaited mounts. I needn’t have been a Believer to know I was riding one of them. Shahm, as Wehr gives, Animal Fat, so highly prized when eating mutton, is also the word Sudanese pharmacists call knockoff Vaseline Petroleum Jelly, which because of my camel’s irregular stride I consumed at the other end in great quantities.

You say Camelho, i say camelão

Camelho (Portuguese), Camell (Catalán), and Camello (Spanish, with the variant Gamello). Intra-Romance derivation. Spanish: Camella, Camellej/ro, Camellería; Catalán: Cameller, Camellí, Camella, Camellot; Portuguese: Camelão, Camelaria, Cameleiro, Camelote, Camelino

-Dictionary of Arabismos in Iberian Romance Languages, Federico Corriente, 1999

The root C-M-L generates almost as many Camel words in Iberian languages as J-M-L generates in Arabic, as in these examples from Lane: Ijtamala, He Ate of a Camel; Istajmala, He (a Camel) Became a Camel [ie, the Camel reached a sufficient age to be called a Jamal, rather than a Bājil, Ribā’, or other words for an immature camel]; Jamalūn, A Building in the Shape of a Camel; and Mujāmil, One Who Cannot Answer a Question [the camel reference being found there somewhere…], although Almaany Online favors etymologies from the root’s other meaning, Beauty, for example, giving Jumālī as Cosmetologist, rather than, as does Lane, Long-Legged, Resembling a Camel, the definition no doubt KhairAllah would prefer.

Excellent booze, tasty cat

Eating cat’s meat is permissible- they say jiddi qutta, meaning “tasty cat”-…They offered me some and I ate it. God Willing, it is permissible; I have not seen anything about it in the legal texts. And they have excellent Boza [a Turkish fermented barley drink, but here meaning Merissa, Millet Beer].

-Evliya Çelebi, Seyahatname, Book of Travels, Vol. X, on the town of Dongola, Nubia, 1685

Evliya travelled all over the Ottoman world but kept Nubia and the Upper Nile for the end of his life, much as Ibn Battuta did for Africa, Mali and Niger, and he always kept stricter Islamic dietary rules for what he ate than for what he drank. In 1984, Daoud and I spent a day and a night in Dongola but other than fresh bread and oranges we didn’t go looking for any other kind of food, or for booze.

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.