The camel took pity on the mouse. “Jump up,” he said, “and sit on my hump.”
-The Masnavi 2:3451, Rumi
A Fār upon a Fīl, a Mouse upon an Elephant, a Simian asaddle a Sanām, a Hump…just as we Khawajas felt when mounted…Day 1, King of the World…Day 40, Abdication.
It stuck filthily in the Camel’s Stomach…that a Creature of his Size should be left naked and Defenceless.
-from Aesop’s Fables, trans. Roger L’Estrange (1616-1704)
A camel’s stomach is indeed filthy, by the foul odor of what comes out either end. In the fable, Camel asked Zeus for a set of horns to rival Bull’s, and Zeus for this impudent request clipped his ears. Thus whatever our camels could not hear, our drovers would smell.
Have you seen a mountain amble like a camel?
-The Masnavi 3:16, Rumi
Mountains turning to dust, moving like shifting sand, ambling like camels…such are the Quranic metaphors for worldly impermanence. On Day 29 of the Darb when we passed Jabal Bint Um Bahr, Mountain of the Daughter of the Mother of the Sea, I thought I’d seen a mirage of water at our approach on the sand plain, that the mountain had become an island in a lake. But then my camel stumbled and what was real suddenly reappeared, or so it felt at the time.
You will empower any rider who seeks a glorious mount…You climb to the stars and the sky and the nib of a pen…Your hooves emanate fire as you move…Nobody could even dream of a steed with such virtue…None will ever rival your speed.
-Persian praise poem, Calligraphic Embroidery on a Central Asian Saddle Cover, 19th C, Private Collection, trans. M. Ekhtiar and A. Gouchani, unpublished
Our camels were a sorry lot compared to the Prophet’s flying horse Burāq, his white mule Duldul, or even to his talking donkey Ya’fūr. No surprise there, because Hajj Bashir selected our camels only for the prices they’d bring him at a slaughter house. And our saddle blankets too were sorry cover, in which we wrapped ourselves to sleep rough for forty nights on the Darb.
Your intellect is like the camel driver and you are the camel.
-The Masnavi 1:2497, Rumi
Our drovers were to the last one of them men of thought before action, adding the sugar before the flake when brewing tea for a reason only they could say. And we Khawajas were ever at a disadvantage, for they were both smart about driving camels and about camels in the general sense, while we were smart about neither. And the tea that we sometimes brewed for them never tasted right.
A bedouin asked the Prophet about a lost camel. The Prophet turned red in the face with anger and said, You should have no concern for it because it has a fat hump and sound feet and thus it can reach water to drink and trees to eat. Leave it until the owner finds it.
-Sahīh al-Bukhāri, Book 45:14
KhairAllah no doubt would have had a different opinion about this lost camel, for how exactly is one to determine the identity of its rightful owner. Billa Ali or Abu Jaib? Yes it carried Abu Jaib’s brand but it was Billa Ali who rode it, armed with an Enfield rifle that KhairAllah had no reason to doubt.
You have lost a camel, O Friend, and everyone gives a clue to where to find it. You know not where the camel is but you know that the clues are wrong.
-The Masnavi 2:2975, Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-1273)
Every other day KhairAllah and Rabih ran the herd through their counting gauntlet, knowing the number they’d set out with from Al-Nahud and wanting to arrive in Binban with the same. Wahid, Ithnayn, Thalātha…One, Two, Three…but everything they counted past ‘Ashara, Ten, went off the rails. Hid’ashar, Ithna’ashar, Thalāth’ashar, Thalāthawa‘ishrīn, Thalāthawathalāthīn…Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen, Twentythree, Thirtythree…decimal arithmetic always stumped them.
Shepherds and farmers sit all day in wait for rain, while camel drovers move freely…humps will lead their way.
-Poem, recited by camel trader Muhammad Hussein Dhu’ al-Nur, in the film Camel Culture, at Sudanmemory.org
Hump is an apt synecdoche for Camel, especially at the start of the drive when it is fat and full and stands tall over the Ra’s, Head. But after days without water, it shrinks and sinks. Ra’s Māliyya, Capitalism, literally Head of Wealth, was thus the first thing Hajj Bashir counted when his camels arrived in Cairo, their Hump, Sanām, almost too Saghīr, Small, to see.
Here lieth the lesson of the camel and the gentoo: Heat will move us, one way or another.
-Bill Weir, Life As We Know It (Can Be)
Here the reference is to penguins, not to the non-Muslims of India as Portuguese explorers called them (after their word Gentio, for Gentile), before the word Hindu- a Persian mispronunciation of Indus- entered Western usage, and after whom these penguins were named perhaps for their turban-like white cap on a black body. But to talk about camels and penguins is also to talk about sand and snow, and heat everywhere, as in rising temperatures that feel now more like the Sahara than Antarctica.
Jābir reports the Messenger of Allah forbade the use of camel bones or droppings for wiping (after excretion).
-Sunnah (Tradition) of Sahīh Muslim (9th C CE), Book 2:263
That makes perfect sense, there being so many smoother objects found on the Darb. Ostrich shells, petrified wood, Siyal leaves, Colocynth gourds. As a Tradition never put it, When holding a hammer in the desert, what doesn’t look like a nail might still scratch your ass.
Anas reports that the Prophet was on a journey and a slave named Anjasha was chanting so that the camels be driven fast. The Prophet said, O Anjasha, Drive slowly with the glass vessels. Abu Qilaba said, By glass vessels the Prophet means women.
-Sunnah of Sahīh al-Bukhāri, Book 78:6210
In the minds of the drovers, were the Prophet’s vessels the saddle-soft Khawajas or the brittle glass from which they drank tea? We never cracked but their tea glasses one by one broke, so by the middle of the Darb all the drovers were drinking from our own dull tin cups.
His genital part is confected and standeth upon a sinnew insomuch as thereof a stringe may be made, for the bending of the strongest bow.
-Edward Topsell, History of Four Footed Beasts, On Camels, 1607
I’d heard of tennis rackets strung with cat gut but never long bows strung with camel penis, giving new meaning to the idiom cited by Lane, Ayru Kān Tawīl, He had Many Male Children, literally, His Cock was Tall.
The camel takes its name from its characteristics, either because when they are being loaded, they lie down so that they become short and low, for the Greeks say “χαμαί” (lit. “on the ground”) for “low” and “short”, or because their backs are curved, as “καμουρ” means “curve” in Greek…
-The Etymologies, Book XII.i.35, Isidore of Seville (560-636)
I am surprised that Isidore did not consider the Arabic origin of the Latin word Camelus. If he’d only listened to KhairAllah speak to his Jamal, he would have heard him say, Yā Jamīl, Yā Jamāl, Yā Ajmal min al-Jimāl, O Beautiful One! O Beauty! O Most Beautiful of Camels!
Camelles bée beasts that beare charges and burthens, and are milde and softe, and ordayned to beare charge and cartage of men…when they be charged they bowe and lye downe, and are méeke to them that charge them…for when they take charge upon them, they bende and crooke the knées.
-Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things, Book 18:19, 13th C CE
Bartholomew might have taken a lesson from KhairAllah on how to charge a Camell that is not méeke, milde, or softe. Often he had to couch a recalcitrant one with a downward yank on his head rope and gargle Ikh! Ikh! Ikh! to keep him down when loading his burthen in place, in our case, a burthen of Khawaja’s duffle bags and camera cases.
His knees became hard like those of a camel, in consequence of him constantly bending them in prayer.
-Eusebius of Caesarea, Early Church Historian, 4th C, referring to the Apostle James
Abu Hurairah reports the Messenger of Allah as saying, When one of you prostrates himself, he must not kneel like a camel, but rather put down his hands before his knees.
-Sunnah of Abu Dawood (9th C), Book 2:840
The drovers didn’t pray daily, certainly not five times a day, but their hands were busy whenever they did, first standing, then bending forward at the waist, then going to their knees, then dropping their forehead to the ground in a manner I’ve never seen a camel couch. I guess they believed Abu Hurairah over Eusebius, either that, or when they did their Sujūd, Prostration, they did so on their Sajjāda, Prayer Rug (in their case, a saddle blanket, and thus protected their knees).
I heard a camel’s frightful groan, that awesome, existentially discontented noise. The souls of the damned speak through the throats of camels. The camel debates life’s miseries with the sun. Etc. Etc.
-To Asmara, Thomas Keneally
Keneally’s protagonist spews every camel cliché he has ever heard, and by the time I was in Sudan for more than five minutes I had heard plenty and could even have added a few of my own. Trust in God but tie your camel…He who steals an egg will steal a camel…If he is idle, buy him a camel…The camel limped because of its [split] lip. Or as KhairAllah once called out to a troublesome one, O Donkey!