Chaque chameau a toujours son chamelier; c’est ce qui n’a pas lieu chez les Kababiches qui font le transit du désert du Kordofan…
-Journal de Voyage de Siout à El-Obéid, 1857-1858, Charles Cluny
On his desert crossing Cluny took his 11 year old son with the goal of teaching him to know his fellow man. Lucky for the boy that the men he travelled with were of the Kababiches.
Every desert traveller in every caravan is led by a principal camel driver called a Khabīr…This reminds me of the owners of boats on the Rhône. You call them Captain so that they not think badly of you, even though they know little more than an ordinary sailor.
-Journal de Voyage de Siout [Asyut] à El-Obéid, 1857-1858, Charles Cluny
It was good that Cluny did not tell his Khabīr how little he regarded the latter’s knowledge of the desert, knowledge so advanced that Al-Khabīr is one of Islam’s ninety nine names of God, as in the meaning given by Lane, He Who Knoweth What Hath Been and What Is and Will Be.
I have made most of my expeditions in an arm chair. I am an explorer in slippers.
-In Quest of Lost Worlds: Adventures in North Africa, 1937, Byron Khun de Prorok
This was said by a sedentary man who declined an invitation to cross the Sahara. If fifty years later he had joined Hajj Bashir’s Dabouka, as did the equally sedentary I, he would have met KhairAllah wearing leather slippers, a Kabbāshī’s usual footwear, who said to me, When you get home, then you may sit in a chair.
A bad ride was ahead of them and it was difficult to decide whether to go gently, sparing the animals, in which case they might fail from hunger, or whether to ride hard, in which case they might break down with exhaustion or sore feet in mid-desert.
-Robert Graves, Lawrence and the Arabs, 1927
KhairAllah always said, BiRāh, BiRāh, Go Easy, Go Easy. So we did that for those forty days, and when we arrived in Binban and Hajj Bashir saw that his camels were sound and fat for market, he was happy.
Nobody was anxious for him because he had a camel and knew the country.
-Robert Graves, Lawrence and the Arabs, 1927
A bit like flying a good airplane or sailing a good boat, knowing the lay of the land or the contour of the coastline. Whenever a lone camel rider crossed paths with us and we sat down with him for a palabra, and then he set off again into the desert, we all knew that he knew he could get to wherever he was going safely, as long as he stayed in the saddle.
Bentley: (incredulous horror) Ghira! Feisal: (smiling) Oh yes. I fear you have a long journey. Have you ever ridden a camel? Bentley: I’ve never tried. Feisal: Take a mule. If I were you, I should try…
-Robert Bolt, Lawrence of Arabia filmscript
Feisal smiled at journalist Jackson Bentley’s incredulity. All the way to Ghira? That was like Hajj Bashir’s amusement at my own surprise when he told me the Dabouka marched until midnight. All the way to Cairo? I asked. Take an airplane, KhairAllah said.
Close Shot. Tafas is eating a fist full of rancid mutton fat. Lawrence is eating thin arrowroot biscuits which he extracts from their package and eats as neatly as if he were in a vicarage…Tafas looks at Lawrence with a complex of emotions. He takes up his fat and has a brilliant idea. He hands it over eagerly. He laughs deprecatively at the mutton. Lawrence thrusts out his hand and takes a piece and puts it in his mouth, watched anxiously by Tafas. There is no comedy, and from the steely concentration of his face we see that the flesh is indeed mortified.
-Robert Bolt, Lawrence of Arabia filmscript
Bolt’s shot directions make me wonder how British explorer Leo Tregenza might have acted if his Ma’aza guide Salama Mir’i had done to him what in the opening scene Tafas did to Lawrence, offer to share with him bedouin food instead of the individual rations he ate apart. Salama told me this story fifty years after he’d led Tregenza up the wadis of Egypt’s Red Sea Mountains to the Roman quarry of Mons Porphyrites, Tregenza eating tinned bully beef while Salama and I ate bread baked on coals and slathered with ghee in those same mountains.
The latest news of the widely advertised tourist route to Timbuktu is that M. Citroën was forced to abandon it because of the attitude of the Saharan tribesmen.
-Ancient Trade Routes from Carthage into the Sahara, Count Byron Khun de Prorok, Geographical Review, 1925
I can imagine crossing the Sahara with a Citroën “suspension oléopneumatique”. A camel hump is spongy with fat and its foot pads are gelatinous, but if Monsieur had succeeded, we could have travelled in “self-leveling, driver-variable ride height”, and camel thief Billa Ali would not have needed the comfortable saddle whose name I wrote down as Bāsūr, but now I find that the only word spelled anything close to that in Wehr means Hemorrhoid.
Sand always wins in the end- remember that.
-Out of Egypt, André Aciman
Fill in the blank, Al-Ramla Bitākul … . The Sand Eats … . KhairAllah said that about Na’na’, Mint, when I bought fresh leaves in the Dongola souk and he bought dry. The next day, mine were a greasy rotting mess in a plastic bag. We threw his into the teapot until they ran out two weeks later. The Sand Eats … , Na’na’ Tāza, Fresh. So we drank of them Nāshif, Dry.
First there came the land of the Kau tribes. And then, farther to the south, the Wawat and the Sethu. Still farther south lived the warlike Mazoi. The land of the Arthat lived to the south again, and lastly, not much below the Second Cataract, there lived the almost unknown people of Aam. Who dwelt to the south of this, the Ancient Egyptians did not know…a distance that sufficed to twist the thoughts of the market-gossiper from the mortal to the immortal.
-Travels in the Upper Egyptian Deserts, Arthur Weigall, 1909
Weigall is speaking here as a souk seller looking upriver, measuring his life not in coffee spoons but rather in kilogram weights. I met such market traders in Dongola when the Khabīrs came to town to resupply, and I heard them whispering the tribal names of these camel men from the south…not Kau, Wawat, Aam, Mazoi, but rather Kawahla, Hamari, Shenabla, Kababish.
I could taste camel urine in the water…it was the attraction of the unknown rather than any love of deserts which was luring me...
-Arabian Sands, Wilfred Thesiger
That was all in the mystery of drinking water from a goatskin filled from a well whose name I hadn’t heard when KhairAllah said it. Mahtūl? ‘Idd Ahmad? Kalābsha?…How sweet would it taste? How dirty would it look? How sick would I get? It did seem odd that the risk of desert travel would be in the drinking and not in the traveling.
The old Darb al-Arbain caravan route…now enshrined in the mythology of the Western Desert…
-Alan Roe, The Darb al-Arbain and Kharga Oasis in Antiquity, Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt, Vol.42
As John Ford said about Liberty Valance, When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. The Darb in fact is just one damned day after another, forty if you’re fast and forty five if you’re slow, but that would make one hell of a boring movie, so we made KhairAllah on the screen what he already was on the trail, mythic.
…the course of the Nile describes a huge “S” curve- one of the largest meanders in the world. Here the name Nubia is imprinted on the map.
-Nubia: Corridor to Africa, William Adams
KhairAllah’s route was usually dead straight and he only meandered once, in the Nubian Nile’s Delgo Notch. Here the river’s northern course inexplicably turns 90° due east for ten miles, then due north for thirty miles, then back 90° to the west before bending again sharply north, leaving in the void a tangle of paths criss-crossing amongst the dunes like a mixed-up corn maze. When lost and if cloudy with no sun to steer by, one can go in near circles, as did we for much of the day.
Ibrahim appeared at one o’clock as if nothing were ready. “You are laughing at me,” he said, “but I tell you the camels are ready.” “Very well then, so am I; let us start tomorrow at dawn.” “Impossible,” he replied, “there are yet many preparations to be made.” “Well then Ibrahim,” I said, “you see I am ready; when the camels are ready, then tell me.”
-St John Philby, The Heart of Arabia: A Record of Exploration and Travel, 1922
Philby was adept at Arabic word play. Ready or not? Today or tomorrow? KhairAllah said he would slaughter a goat when we passed the wells at ‘Iyāl Bakhīt, but on the promised day, when we had not yet arrived and instead paused to pasture the herd, I asked him when, and he answered, “Did you not see that we passed the wells last night? I did not to stop because grass is better than meat.” To graze or to grill?, that is the question.
This was a long and painful and in two respects a dangerous journey; first, if they were to lose their provision of water, as for several days none could be obtained; secondly, if a violent south wind should rise against them while they were travelling through the wide extent of deep sands, blowing the sand together in heaps and raising, as it were, the whole desert like a sea upon them…
-Plutarch, Life of Alexander, On His Crossing the Western Desert to Siwa Oasis
We ran out of water once and it led only to grumbling, nothing dangerous, and when the wind rose it only blew sand in our tea, nothing dangerous, so no, either Plutarch exaggerated the perils of the Western Desert or crossing from East to West as did Alexander is longer and more painful than it is from South to North, as did we.
Jamalaka Allah (Meaning, May Allah Melt Thee, Just as Fat is Melted) is an Imprecation mentioned in a Tradition of the Prophet used by a Woman.
-Lane’s Lexicon
When browsing Lane’s entries for the triliteral root J-M-L, which I knew gave the meanings Camel and Beauty, I found three usage examples for the Form I verb Jamala…He became Beautiful, and, He Melted Fat, and the phrase, Jamala al-Jamal, He Put the He-camel Apart from the She-camel that was Fit to be Covered. So here is the Arabic etymological truth…Camels, Beauty, Sex, and Fat are all of one family.