Humps, Guns, and wallets

Abba Anthony said, The camel needs just a little food. It conserves it until it goes to where it lives. The camel regurgitates and ruminates it until it goes to its bones and flesh…let us be like the camel, reciting one by one the words of holy scripture…

-Apophthegmata Patrum Aegyptiorum, Sayings of the Desert Fathers, circa 5th C

This brings to mind two verbs, Khazana and Hafidha, To Store and To Preserve, when a camel eats and drinks, and when a religious student memorizes the Quran. And both verbs give nouns with related meaning, Makhzan, A Gun Magazine, Stuffed with Bullets, and Mahfadha, A Wallet, Stuffed with Cash, and Hāfidh, A Man, Stuffed with God.

Get thee behind me, yā shaytān

An old man dwelt in a distant desert and he had a female relative who had wanted for many years to meet him. She arose and set out for the desert. Meeting a camel caravan, she penetrated the desert with it. Now she was drawn to the devil…

-Anonymous, Apophthegmata Patrum Aegyptiorum

This fear of women of a Rāhib, Desert Monk, from the verb Rahiba, To be Frightened, is not how Hāmid heard Hanan al-Bulubulu’s, the Nightingale’s, love song Zurni Marra, Visit Me Sometime, when we listened at the campfire on my tape player. It was he, not she, drawn to the Shaytān, Devil.

Flying o'er the sands

…While the sands o’ life shall run.

-Robert Burns

We knew all about singing sands, shifting sands, drifting sands, white sands and painted deserts…but we hadn’t seen running sands until they ran straight at us, we riding north and they blowing south. They stayed near the ground and erased our camels’ legs below the knee so that, looking down, we felt we were flying over clouds.

Water, mixed

The water of the two rivers is very different in terms of taste and appearance. Neither is considered first class for drinking by residents of Khartoom, but after it has mingled well together, the mixture is deemed excellent.

-James Augustus Grant, A Walk Across Africa: Domestic Scenes from My Nile Journey, 1864

Grant was the first man known to drink from the White Nile both at its source and at the Muqran al-Nilayn, the Meeting of the Two Niles, the White and the Blue, while KhairAllah and I drank first at Khilaywah downriver from Old Dongola where, even if the water didn’t taste like mixed wine, it was cleaner than in Khartoum, where the city put more into it than took out.

A wintry Complaint

On the western side of the Egyptian valley lies a great dry ocean of sand, called the African Sahara…a plateau near the coast is of sufficient height to condense passing clouds into rain. As the natives say, “There is a hole in the sky overhead.”

-Adventures in Morocco, Gerhard Rohlfs, 1874

When we left the herd to catch the Aswan ferry, avoiding arrest by the Egyptians, it became cloudy, strange to see after forty days of blue sky. It rained at Wadi Halfa and we knew the drovers were miserable. When we met again at Binban and asked about the Matar, the Rain, I heard them answer, Al-Jaw, Weather, was Shitty, but what they maybe said was, Al-Jaw Kān Bishitti, the Weather was Wintry, even though they may also have said, Bishtiki, Complaining.

Thirsty again

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.

A stupid stand up

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.

Love your psammos

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].

The desert- in part or in full

…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.

Wetting our feet in cush

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.

Dongola in the public domain

…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.

Mount the ass lest your feet swell

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.

chanting, professing, and retching

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.

The Herb we found

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.

On the way from Khartoum

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.

Flies, clouds, or the pits

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.