“Desert” is not an innocent term…unlike other landforms there is, inbuilt in its very name, a sense of foreboding.
-Desert: Nature and Culture, Roslynn Haynes
The desert’s sense of foreboding depends entirely on where you sit on the Darb. Day 1 or Day 40? Day 1, Hell yes, I felt it. Day 40, Hell no, Give me another Arba’īn, Forty.
Where the Derb al-Arbain passes, a hundred tracks spread carelessly apart where thousands of padded feet have pushed the small stones aside…Time will not alter them; it only blows sand to fill them so they become like yellow ribbons…a series of wiggling, vacillating, haphazard, characterless lines, like a hank of hair from a poodle’s coat, illustrating the I’ll-go-as-I-damn-please-and-you-can’t-hurry-me nature of the camel.
-The Paradise of Fools: Being an Account of a 6,300 Mile Expedition Through the Libyan Desert by Motor Car, M.W. Mason, 1936
Mason didn’t mention that those sunken parallel trails collect more rain than the pebbled ridges separating them, so in springtime they sprout grass and desert flowers that look like the combed fur of a chia pet laid out as flat as the Sahara.
Ancient trans-Saharan routes show little correspondence with existing modern maps which in particular for the Libyan Desert present non-existing fantasy roads. Modern cartographers seem to have chosen arbitrarily some early desert explorers’ routes to satisfy their horror vacui, without considering that inexperienced travellers trusting this information might well be led into a limbo, where truly the world ended.
-Rudolph Kuper, Prologue to Desert Road Archaeology in Ancient Egypt and Beyond, Förster and Riemer, 2013
Kuper sums up my own case, setting off on a fantasy desert road that I call the Darb al-’Arba’īn, which in fact lies a hundred miles to the west, carrying only a torn National Geographic map on paper, hoping to follow its dotted line to Egypt and which KhairAllah said was good only as a fire starter.
…“invisible nomads”…the idea that human beings on the run would leave nothing behind in their path, or that what remained of their journeys would be too flimsy and short-lived to be recognized by an archaeologist…the view of a journey as a means to an end- “the primacy of destination”- rather than simplying “being on the move”.
-Chapter 1, Desert Road Archaeology in Ancient Egypt and Beyond, Förster and Riemer, 2013
Yesterday’s asīda tossed aside by Adam Hamid after breakfast, a camel hobble left in haste by Mas’ud Abu Dūd, KhairAllah’s broken tea glass, a couple of dead batteries from the Khawaja’s tape recorder…just a few of the artifacts that an archaeologist studying desert roads might recognize somewhere between the Ma’toul and ‘Idd Ahmad wells.
Desert roads are to a certain extent defined by the imagined existence of previous travellers, those who have gone before and ‘made’ the road. A desert road is by definition well remembered.
-J.Gates, The Well-Remembered Path: Roadways and Cultural Memory in Roman Egypt, 2012
I had read the accounts of Old Kingdom caravan leader Harkouf and 18th C English explorer W.G. Browne riding south on the Darb, but nothing drove home the reality of riding north- not Harkouf’s tomb inscription, “I came bringing gifts from the Land of Yam in great quantity, the likes of which had never before been seen”, not even Browne’s “much indifference to personal accomodations and enjoyments”- like the question KhairAllah asked me, “By God, Why did you choose this?”
The two Roman cities of Leptis Magna and Sabratha stand today amid almost total desolation…erected upon “carcasses des chameaux”.
-The Myth of Trans-Saharan Trade during the Roman Era, 1975, John Swanson
When I knew John Swanson in Cairo in 1978, the same year I met camel merchant Hajj Bashir, I wish I’d asked him how the great cities north of the Sahara were built upon their carcasses. I’d only seen them at the livestock market, some thrown onto burn piles after succumbing to the Darb, others sold by Hajj Bashir live on the hoof to Egyptian butchers in a trans-Saharan trade that made him a rich man.
Life in Chartum is a strange, slipshod, uncravatted sort of existence…a sort of black Regent Street where every variety of vice stalks abroad with a publicity as shameless, if not as importunate, as in our own. With all this, and perhaps on this very account, a stay of a few days is highly agreeable and not without instruction.
-Wanderings around the Aethiopian Desert from Sawakin to Chartum, James Hamilton, 1857
Khartoum has changed a lot between Hamilton’s visit and my first. I remember that Sayyid Bashir took me to a soccer match in Omdurman where we ate peanuts, not a vice in a country that calls them Sudanese Beans, but I was not reluctant to leave its bright lights for Kordofan. Forty years later the war has almost destroyed Khartoum, making it even stranger, more slipshod and uncravatted than ever before.
When I was in Sudan I plead guilty to having imbibed more Aragi than I had drank in my whole life previously; I sometimes took even a pint a day without feeling any effects of intoxication.
-Wanderings around the Aethiopian Desert from Sawakin to Chartum, James Hamilton, 1857
In 1988 Mustapha smuggled a bottle of whiskey through Sudanese customs. Because I didn’t want us to drink alcohol in the presence of the drovers, we paid our Khartoum hotel bill with it in lieu of cash, but when we met the Khabīr Bilal and saw that he drank Aragi like water, I wished we’d brought it after all, a peg for him and a peg for us after each day’s ride.
The desert is a hard and hungry home to which nomads have adapted their nature and their character. Other men do not try to go out into the desert or to live with the nomads…nay, should a nomad see the possibility of exchanging his condition with that of a settled person, he would not fail to do so.
-The Muqaddimah, Ibn Khaldoun (1332-1406)
Maybe KhairAllah would call himself neither nomad nor settled, living as he once did as a camelman and as he does now on a street with sheep and goats behind his door. Would he agree with Ibn Khaldoun that he hadn’t failed to swap one life for another? Perhaps hesitated is the better word, because even though no one moved into the desert as he moved out, Omdurman has never been a place of dreams, especially now in war.
We went forth to the desert land…
-Line 9 from Stela JE59499, Jebel al-Asr (Chephren’s Quarry), 65km NW of Abu Simbel, Reign of Amenemhat III, 18C BCE
I wish I’d known about this Stela, inscribed by a royal stonecutter no doubt angry to have been sent so far from the Nile, when our Dabouka passed close by in our last days on the Darb. We too had gone forth to the desert land and also returned with words worth writing. I read recently that this Pharaonic quarry site, desert no longer, has been bulldozed and levelled for the Toshka Canal’s pivot irrigation scheme.
The postman came to me bringing a letter from your paternal magnificence about a camel and I am very grateful for having been deemed worthy after so long of your honored words…To my master the most magnificent comes Peter, from Theodosius
-Letter 1164, circa 6C CE, The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, Vol. viii
I wonder what papyrologists might make of the letter I wrote as KhairAllah’s scribe in mid-journey when we crossed paths with a friend who agreed to carry news of a lost camel back to a third party, KhairAllah having instructed me to take dictation, writing in pen on lined paper from the notebook I used as a trail diary. I opened with the greeting, Yā Akhī ‘Adzīm, as KhairAllah addressed the letter’s recipient, O My Magnificent Brother, which I knew to spell correctly, but everything else I wrote was in first year student of Arabic gibberish.
The Khabīr had to be fair...During the crossing he had virtually the authority of a general in wartime.
-Khabīr Ali at Home in Kubayh: A Brief Biography of a 19th Century Caravan Leader, Michael La Rue, African Economic History, No.13, 1984
It should not be thought extraordinary that Khabīr Ali bin Ibrahim’s name is remembered still today. Like Ali, caravan leader of the Darb al-Arba’īn, Khabīr KhairAllah also commanded an army of sorts, a camel cavalry on its death march to the slaughterhouses of Cairo.
Form I, Fāza, To be Successful, To be Victorious, To Triumph. Form II, Fawwaza, To Cross the Desert.
-Wehr
Form II verbs (formed by doubling the middle consonant of the triliteral root) give an Intensive or Causative meaning to Form I verbs, such as, Form I, To Break, Form II, To Smash, or Form I, To Enter, Form II, To Bring Inside. So the fact that the verb Fāza (with its middle consonant W, one of Arabic’s “weak letters”, disappearing in Form I) when Intensified means this says much about KhairAllah’s good fortune crossing the desert, or perhaps Causatively, what made him do it at all.
Is there any way he can sit on a camel in Egypt? I’m dying for him to be on a camel.
-A criminally charged US Senator’s wife, writing to an Egyptian spy, New York Times, June 25, 2024
Of course there is a chance for that! replied the spy. Of course, replied Hajj Bashir when I asked if I might join his drovers on the Darb al-’Arba’īn. But let this be known, Sitting on a camel, Being on a camel, is very different from Riding on a camel. Lane gives Rakiba as, To Mount, to Ride an Animal, and in a metaphor with Raml, Sand, as, He Went upon, or Trod, or Travelled the Desert. Wehr further gives Rakiba’s secondary meaning as, To Commit a Crime.
I forced my legs to move on north…I took my shelter in the bush…Thirst struck, it overwhelmed me, I panted, my throat parched, I said, This is the taste of death…
-Story of Sinuhe, early 12th Dynasty, circa 1950 BCE, Middle Kingdom
Sinuhe, “Servant of the Royal Chambers”, worked for the Pharaoh Amenemhat I. KhairAllah, Khabir al-Darb, worked for Hajj Bashir. For their work they left their families, slept rough, drank little, ate less. And then they returned home, Sinuhe to honors and rest, KhairAllah shortly to leave again to the desert, the same trail again leading north, his throat again parched, the taste of death again in his mouth…or was it only yesterday’s Asīda?
You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.
-Matthew 23:24
In the film there is a great shot of Bilal with a camel hobbled behind him, the howling wind stirring up sand all around while he crouches at the breakfast fire covering his tea glass with the flat of his hand and looking at the sky with bloodshot eyes after a short sleep, as if thinking, Better not swallow any more of that shit.