Living in the mafāza

Fāza, Form I, He Attained, Acquired, or Won Good Fortune, He Perished, He Died…Fawwaza, Form II, He Went to the Desert…Mafāza, A Place of Safety, A State of Temporary Safety Between the Present Life and That Which is to Come, A Desert in Which is no Water for the Space of a Journey of Two Days or More

-Lane’s Lexicon

This root is just one of Arabic lexicography’s many head scratchers, its meaning containing multitudes, as Lane says, Two Contrary Significations. But the drovers may not have seen the apparent contradiction in what he gives for Mafāza, because I too sensed that the Darb was a State Between Two Other States, the Past Perfect and the Future Conditional.

12 journeys twixt Egit and nubye

And between Egipt and Nubye it hath well a twelve journeys of desert.

-The Travels of John Mandeville

It is amazing that this 14th C pseudonymous plagiarist of others’ Travels should be accurate about the day stages between Nubia and Egypt, let us say Dongola and Binban, for in fact it was twelve days of riding, passing Kerma, Argo, Solb, Abri, Hamīd, Farka, Argīn, Toshka, Abu Simbel, Kalabsha, the High Dam, and Aswan, headed north, not stopping.

Meat in trees

And for that cause men pass that desert with camel. For the camel find alway meat in trees and on bushes, that he feedeth him with.

-The Travels of John Mandeville

The fruit of a desert gum tree is truly a poor man’s meal, a tiny legume in a tiny pod, much smaller than the carob pods and seeds that fed John the Baptist, and it seems near impossible that browsing them our camels could find nourishment of any kind, Bread or Meat, Leaf or Thorn.

Majhal on the darb

It seemed to the nineteenth century admirable, but not remarkable, that Chinese Gordon put on a clean white suit and held Khartoum against the Mahdi.

-Joan Didion

The drovers thought it remarkable but not admirable that I was making my second trip on the Darb. The first could be forgiven as the mistake I had made in ignorance, but to ride a second time, knowing full well…? Jāhil, Ignorant, which gives the concept of Al-Jāhiliyya, Time of Ignorance, and more pertinent to my case, Majhal, as Lane gives, A Desert in Which There are No Signs of the Way, or, A Habit that Induces a Man to Believe Something to be Different from What It Is.

Camels, neither fish nor foul

Rather hear the flatulence of the camel than the prayer of the fish.

-Arabic Proverbs, 1830, J.L. Burckhardt

Burckhardt notes that Egyptians so fear a one day sea voyage that they’d prefer a one month camel caravan. I wonder what message we were sending the drovers when, pointing to a jet passing overhead, they teasingly asked why we had not taken it. Riding in our usual positions at the rear of the herd, we replied, Ahsan Hina, Better Here.

Handsy for the gravy

He descends [his hand into the communal dish] like a crow’s foot and ascends like a camel’s hoof. (Said of an ill-bred person affecting refined manners)

-Arabic Proverbs, 1830, J.L. Burckhardt

Burckhardt must have shared many a bowl with those who daintily dipped in their fingers and pulled out the mutton. And just so ate I at the beginning of each meal, pulling out not mutton, for there was none at our dinner, but rather as much pepper sauce as my fingers could sop, because there is nothing worse than when your side of the aseeda dish has only millet and the man squatting opposite has all the gravy.

Unbelievers still

A camel is a retromingent animal…When a bull camel is sexually aroused, however, its penis moves forward, changing the direction of urination.

-The Daily Wildlife

Do they [Unbelievers] not look at camels, how they were created.

-Quran 88:17

Allah thinks that it takes only one look at a camel to become a Believer, yet we Khawajas kept company with camels for forty days and ended the drive just as we’d set out, Unbelievers still.

Laugh, pink, laugh

Dala’a…Form I, To Stick Out, to Loll One’s Tongue..Form IV [used idiomatically in Egypt], A Nauseating, Disgusting Thing..Form VII, To Flare Up (Flame), To Break Out (Fire)

-Wehr

Male dromedary camels have an organ in their throat called a Dulla…like a large pink tongue…they extrude it to attract females and assert dominance. Comments…So, a mouth penis…Attracting chicks with a throat scrotum…Serves the same purpose as a Porsche, got it!…But can a Porsche dangle?

-SubReddit r/Awwducational

I had a hard time finding the Arabic origin of the English word Dulla, knowing that transliteration is often imprecise. In Wehr, I tried Dalaqa, To Spill, Pour Out (Liquid), and Dalaha, To Go Out of One’s Mind Crazy in Love, and Dalw, To Let Dangle, and finally, Dala’a. In English I’d heard it called, incorrectly, a Flaming Grimace, which later I learned to be a Flehmen [in German, To Bare One’s Upper Teeth] Grimace, among equestrians known as a Horse Laugh, related to a Dulla as a similar sexual response, but funny rather than revolting, more Mr. Ed than Dirty Old Man.

A discourse on the absurd

A camel’s fart is neither on the earth or in the sky. (Applied to something in one’s discourse absurd or incongruous)

-A Collection of Proverbs in the Persian and Hindoostanee Languages, 1824, Thomas Roebuck

One night at the campfire I elicited a long drovers discourse on the difference between voiced and unvoiced camel flatulence, Dzarta and Faswa, but we never got to the generic word Nafkha, which Lane gives when attached to its definite article to mean, The Blast of a Horn on the Day of Resurrection.

A camel truly lost

And he who has not lost a camel, he too seeks a camel, just like he who has truly lost a camel.

-The Masnavi 2:2976, Rumi

KhairAllah’s camel rustling story goes like this. A thief cut one from the herd when the night watch had fallen asleep and was long gone by dawn. KhairAllah tracked him for a full day and dismounted at his camp at sunset, acting friendly and nonchalant. That looks like the camel I lost yesterday, he said. It can’t be, said the thief, I’ve always owned him and never lost him even once. Then let me buy him from you, KhairAllah replied. He handed over the cash and told him, And don’t you dare seek another camel that you have never lost.

Ahmad diyab, that old shaytān

Yahya reports that the Messenger of Allah said…When you buy a camel, take it by the hump and seek refuge from the Shaytān [Devil].

-Sunnah of Al-Muwatta (8th C CE), Book 28:52

Abu Jaib bought one hundred fifty camels for KhairAllah’s Dabouka. He was not in Nahud to take each by the hump but he did seek refuge from the Devil, giving us his writ of protection to show to anyone along the Darb. It worked its magic before entering Egypt when we were stopped and then freed by bribe-hungry border guard Ahmad Diyab, that old Shaytān.

A hump, jumped

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.

Sound and Smell

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.

Sand and water

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.

Poem in a blanket

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.

Tea and sympathy for camels

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.