With thee, in the Desert-/With thee in the thirst-
-Emily Dickinson
On our first day on the trail, KhairAllah made lemonade and we thought we’d have that treat every day, but when we saw how the water was made black by the newly tanned goatskins, we were glad that we did not.
You fell asleep standing up? What are you, a fucking camel?
-Seth Rogen
Maybe it’s because Rogen is a pothead that he thinks camels copulate standing up, or maybe he didn’t consult Lane who gives the verb Anākha as, He (a Stallion-camel) Made a She-camel to Lie Down upon her Breast with her Legs Folded so that He Might Cover Her, or maybe he hadn’t read Wehr on the Forms II and IV of the verb Baraka, who gives the same that Lane gives for Anākha. And lucky that Rogen didn’t mix up the verb Nāka, To have Sexual Intercourse, with Form X of the verb Nāqa, To Confuse a He-camel for a She-camel, or proverbially, To Make a Stupid Mistake.
Dev Shah, 14, won the 2023 Scripps Spelling Bee when he correctly spelled “psammophile”: a plant or animal adapted to live among sand. The word combines “psammos,” the Ancient Greek for “sand,” with “phile,” which means “lover” in the same language.
-Washington Post, June 2, 2023
I doubt that Dev Shah and KhairAllah have anything in common, but the boy cook Ibrahim and he would have a lot to talk about…phobias and philias…how one fears the sand blowing into his Asīda pot and how the other loves reading his dictionary. Would that Dev Shah and Ibrahim might both read Lane, who gives as a cognate of the noun Raml, Sand…Ta’ām [Food] Murammal [Into which Sand has been Thrown].
…but we are not the desert…We are part of the desert, and when we go home we take with us that part of the desert that the desert gave us, but we’re still not the desert.
-Ntozake Stange, interviewed by Anna Deavere Smith, from her A.W. Mellon Lectures, April 2024
It is strange to say that when we were in the desert for forty days- what happened there was quite unlike the Bible’s forty days- we received no unearthly visions, or unknown voices, or messages from above. We heard only the yips and haws of the drovers, driving camels on their death march, but we not on ours.
He says, I was a valiant servant of the ruler of Cush, I washed my feet in the waters of Cush, in the suite of the ruler Ndh, and I returned safe and sound to my family.
-Hieroglyphic Inscription, Stela found at Buhen, Second Cataract, now in Khartoum Museum, Second Intermediate Period, 1700-1550 BCE
We drove the herd north through Cush, Nubia, and passed not far from Buhen Fortress, now submerged by Lake Nasser, and at that last watering from the Nile, before skirting wide around its Khors, lateral bays, on the way to Egypt, we did indeed wash our feet in its waters, and each of us later returned safely to our families.
…as far south as Dongola, only an idiot would have assumed that travel in the region was safe.
-The Last Camel Died at Noon, Elizabeth Peters
One shouldn’t need to read mystery novels- like this one, or Michael Pearce’s Mamur Zapt and the Mouth of the Crocodile, or Agatha Christie’s Death Comes at the End- to learn about Nubia, but where else might the general public ever hear the place name Dongola, except in Little Egypt, Southern Illinois.
We were to pass thro' a Desart, where there was neither Brook nor Fountain. The Heat is so excessive, and the Sands of those Desarts so burning, that there is no marching bare-foot, without having one's Feet extremely Swell'd.
-A Voyage to Aethiopia in the Years 1698, 1699, and 1700, Charles Jacques Poncet
Pity Marlene Dietrich’s camp-following Amy Jolly, close behind in the Moroccan sand tracks of her Legionnaire lover Gary Cooper, as she unstraps her high heels and grabs a donkey’s neck rope for better balance crossing the dunes. Her dainty feet will surely swell. O Madam, Mount the ass. Irkabi al-Himār Yā Sitti.
Do camels really spit? Yes, and it’s most unpleasant. They aren’t actually spitting, though—it’s more like throwing up!
-Camel Fact Sheet, San Diego Zoo
In Cairo I’d learned the verb To Vomit as Rajja’a, the intensive Form II of Raja’a, To Return, but Wehr instead gives Rajja’a as, To Sing or Chant in a Vibrant, Quavering Tone, and Lane gives it as, To Repeat the Profession of Faith [There is No God But God…], First in a Faint Voice, Second in a Strong Voice, although neither dictionary does justice to the sounds of our retching after we drank from the sulphurous Kalabsha wells.
Those vast Wildernesses, where there is neither to be found Bird, nor Wild Beast, nor Herbs, nor so much as a little Fly, and where nothing is to be seen but Mountains of Sand, and the Carcasses and Bones of Camels, Imprint a certain horrour in the Mind.
-A Voyage to Aethiopia in the Years 1698, 1699, and 1700, Charles Jacques Poncet
You would be surprised by the herb we found on the Darb, some in the genus Alhagi (from Arabic’s al-Hajji, Pilgrim, whose roots are the deepest of all plants in proportion to their height), Camelthorn or Manna Tree, used in folk medicine as a purgative, expectorant, diaphoretic, and diuretic to treat piles, warts, and migraine, which none of us had, Al-Hamdu LiLlah.
Courtesy prevailed however, and as we withdrew I contented myself with saying only, You are on your way to Khartoum, I presume. A long, arduous journey.
-Guardian of the Horizon, Elizabeth Peters
Mahdi Abu Jaib’s friend Ali al-Hajj accompanied me on that first midnight flight from Cairo to Khartoum forty years ago. Mahdi had said to him, Ali, Take care of the Khawaja. The flight took only a couple hours. It was the journey back with KhairAllah, to whom Mahdi’s father Bashir had said the same thing, that was long.
Dhibāb, Thin Clouds like Smoke. Dhibn, [Camel] Armpit. Dzibāb, [the Common Fly] the Black Thing that is in Houses and Falls into Vessels and Food
-Lane’s Lexicon, Entries for the triliteral roots Dh-B-B, Dh-B-N, and Dz-B-B
In Sudanese Arabic, the consonants Dh and Dz are pronounced as D, so the colloquial word I learned for Fly was Dibāba (sing.), Dibāb, Dibbān (pl.), and thus I heard the name of the village we passed early on the Darb as Um Dibbān, Mother of Flies, but later I saw it spelled as Um Dhibbān, which can be read as Mother of Thin Clouds or, with a bit of linguistic license, Mother of Armpits. If it wasn’t Mother of Flies, I knew how KhairAllah must have heard it, for he didn’t like the smell of Um Dibbān either.
There are highlights to riding…a great view almost twelve feet above the ground, and at night you can close our eyes, hold tight to the saddle, and imagine yourself anywhere.
-Letter from Daoud to Yousef, written mid-journey in March 1984, posted from Cairo some weeks later
It may seem odd for years to imagine yourself in the Sahara, and when finally you are, riding at midnight with drovers pushing the herd north under a starry firework, then to imagine yourself in altogether another place. As Cavafy warned from Egypt, Don’t hope for things elsewhere: there’s no ship for you, there’s no road.
I was in the store across from my old house, donuts were on the counter, spongy, warm, and so fresh, but when I reached for my money, Sudanese coins fell from my pocket. I opened my eyes and night poured in…Well, it’s the middle of our 34th Day, is it possible?…Fortunately now the days go by easily, but in the beginning, each day seemed like a year…aware of each step, always awaiting the next.
-Letter from Daoud to Yousef
By days and steps, that is how we measured the Darb. Also by the phases of the moon, and the slackening of the goatskins, and the distemper of the drovers, but for the Khawajas, by the clarity of our dreams…Daoud’s of a donut, mine of a baguette. If we’d told the others, they would have laughed and said, Al-Nāyim Huwa Sultān, The Sleeper is a Sultan…Why waste your wishes on a bakery?
But this journey had beggared our language; no words could express its horror.
-The Worst Journey in the World, 1922, Apsley Cherry-Garrard
For its title alone I had wanted to read this book, about a near fatal expedition to collect Empire penguin eggs from Antarctic rookeries in mid-winter. Back in London while waiting to hand them to the Director of the Natural History Museum, a secretary told Cherry-Garrard, Sorry, He’s too busy to see you now, Why don’t you leave the eggs with me. I might have felt the same about the petrified wood I’d picked up along the Darb, thinking it was something unique, only to later learn what any fool already knew, that the Sahara had once been green.
Their camels could no more be counted than the sand at the seashore.
-Book of Judges 7:12
Strange that the Hebrew Bible’s most common expression, As Uncountable as [Sea] Sand, should specify the beach, not the desert, just as the whole of the Quran contains no mention of Raml, Sand, so I begin to think that both Israelites and Muslims when at their prayers were happy to forget their natural habitat.
Before beasts of burden were banned in the 1990s, the city was more pastoral…Sadly, the herds of camels that once beguiled Cairo traffic while loping across the Giza Bridge have been detoured to a market outside the city.
-Cairo: City of Sand, Maria Golia
It isn’t said that those camels had only a few hours left to live on their way from the Imbaba livestock market to the slaughter house in Masr Qadīma. I saw plenty when I lived in Cairo and later saw where they had come from in Kordofan and how they had gotten to the Giza Bridge. If I’d known in 1979 what I learned in 1984, I’d certainly have been more beguilted than beguiled everytime I ate camel meat kufta in a Bab al-Lūq restaurant, not to be confused with Bab al-Lūk, Gate of Chewing.