As you see him, so you see me

I am the son of my father, as you see my father, so you see me, he is honest and has fidelity, and I am so proud of him.

-Email from KhairAllah’s son, June 2, 2024

KhairAllah moved his family north during a pause in the fighting in December 2023. His son followed a week later after he’d secured their house from armed marauders as best he could. Soliman was born of a camel man but not of the camel life, so for that he’ll have to listen to his father’s stories of the Darb, or to mine, that I tell of his father.

A lit fuse burning north

The greatest tragedy is that none of it was necessary.

-Samawal Ahmed, Khartoum resident, quoted in New York Times, June 5, 2024

KhairAllah and his family escaped war-torn Omdurman at the end of last year for Al-Dabbah, a river town in Northern Province. The news photos of death and destruction in the capital’s tri-city, which I knew well, punch the gut, more Gaza than Darfur. KhairAllah’s son Soliman tells me that Al-Dabbah is quiet, but the fighting might at anytime run down the Nile from Khartoum like a lit fuse.

Abode of peace

Hi louis, how do you do, I hope you are fine and your family too, We thank God we are alive and safe too…I returned home to Dar el-Salam four days ago looking for the internet…regards Soliman

-Email from KhairAllah’s son, October 23, 2023

It had been two months since I’d last heard from Soliman. The family had moved away from home in search of safety and Soliman returned to his Omdurman neighborhood Dar al-Salām, Abode of Peace, now all shot to hell, looking for a connection. Forty years after first meeting his father, I want to tell Soliman, We have never lost it.

No word, then word

Hi louis, how are you doing, we are fine, but we are not far from the line of fire, we have nothing to do about it, no internet, no network all the day but for a few hours, most markets are closed these days, no bank is working, Greetings Soliman 

-Email from KhairAllah’s son, August 23, 2023

I was worried, their mobile phones had not answered for three months, maybe the cell towers were down, maybe they had fled to Um Badr and left behind their phones, worthless in unserved Dar al-Kababish, but then this came through.

The Sahara suggests

I know a young man who declares after reading a certain explorer’s account of his journey across the burning Sahara, he found to his amazement that his nose was covered with freckles.

-Travels in the Upper Egyptian Deserts, Arthur Weigall, 1909

Thus the desert works on the mind. If merely talking about taking a drink conjures a vision of an oasis pool, or if merely by reading about the noonday sun, your face erupts in red, then equally sure, a rocking saddle when crossing a dune field causes you to dream of a rolling ship in a rough sea. But maybe I was too tired to dream at all. When once in the night our herd’s yearling bit me in the ass, mistaking my sleeping bag for his feed sack, I awoke thinking, My God, A camel just took a bite from my backside.

Echoing red river

After some travel until the middle of the day, we arrived at a new landscape. Here was a brackish tarn, or moor, or heath- a desolate land, most resembling a desert, yet not sandy and dry, but damp and soggy…The Northmen call this place the desert of dread.

-Eaters of the Dead: The Manuscript of Ibn Fadlan, Relating His Experiences with the Northmen in A.D. 922 , Michael Crichton

Crichton’s fiction mashes up Ibn Fadlan’s travelogue to the Russian North and the horror of Beowulf, with a bit of Borgesian metacommentary. I on the other hand couldn’t keep echoes of the Chisholm Trail’s cowpuncher diaries, Howard Hawks’ Red River, and the tall trans-Saharan tales of Leo Africanus from creeping into Voice of the Whip.

Voicing names

I met a traveller from an antique land/Who said…/The lone and level sands stretch far away.

-Mad Shelley

Much is missing between those two verse thoughts, filling forty generations, far more than the Darb’s forty. Permit their names be heard…Bilāl Bakhīt, Yusuf, Muhammad al-Himri, KhairAllah Khair al-Sayyid. And these were just those, Khabīrs all with cold command, who Voiced the Whip, Sawwata al-Sawt, on a trail stretching far away.

Worthless Scattered dust

Wind is the Alpha and Omega of the Western Desert. It creates and destroys…blasting…carving…sometimes a breeze, more often a blast.

-A Guide to the Oases and Western Desert of Egypt, Cassandra Vivian

I can hear Mas’ūd still today, saying something about the Sāfiyā’, on a day when the north wind blew hard, a word I didn’t know until just now when I found it in the dictionary next to Saqat, a word I also heard said that day, thinking it then a synonym for Wind. But no, Wehr gives Saqat as, Any Worthless Thing, and Sāfiyā’ as, from its verb, To Raise and Scatter (Said of Dust in the Wind).

Names on shards

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, I, Gôlthě, write to David the Camel Driver, saying, I direct thee, and here is the Word of God, to see to the Camel of Apa Philotheos…and again, here is the Word of God, thou mayest go North and thou mayest go South, for I demand no other but this...

-Ostrakon No.5894, Coptic and Greek Texts of the Christian Period from Ostraka in the British Museum, 1905

David, Joseph, Zaël, Mathias, and Hôr are camel drivers from antiquity known to us from their names written on Ostraka, Pot Shards. Yusuf, Bilal, Rabih, Ibrahim, and Abdullah might be so lucky if history remembers their names after driving camels on the Darb, Inshā’Allah.

Rain is melted snow

Each of us had on a tunic and over that a kaftan and over that a sheepskin-lined robe and over that a felt cloak and over that a burnoose…so that each of us after mounting his camel found he could barely move because of all the clothes.

-Risalah, Ahmad Ibn Fadlan (879-960 CE), writing of his journey north to Rūs

No need to convince KhairAllah of the Nordic adage, There’s no cold weather, only cold clothes. When I told him about our winters, he cared less if I spoke of snow in feet or inches. For him, it was all equally bad. Even cold rain near Kalabsha was bad.

Dabouka Dust

Saharan Dust Blowing Across The Atlantic Could Reach South Florida…Still, many Floridians might not notice.

-New York Times, July 9, 2023

No one wanted to ride Ja’āb, Drag. Too much dirt and sand kicked in the air. Only drovers like Mas’ood Abu Dūd, Father of the Worm, and Muhammad the Miskīn, the Miserable, could take it. As for Floridians…Better marching powder than driving dust.

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.