Other Sudanese tribes will say that the Kababish are white-skinned Arabs.
-The Problem of Dar Fur, Mohamed Fadlalla
The pot calling the kettle…Daoud had a very difficult time avoiding under-exposed close-ups of KhairAllah’s face when backlit by the midday sun. So he often waited for the golden hour when everything seemed possible, even another eight hours on the go before making camp in the pitch of a moonless night when we all appeared black, even the white camels.
They are of fine physique, black with dark wiry hair, carefully arranged in tightly rolled curls which cling to the head, with regular features and rather thick aquiline noses. Some of the tribes wear large hats…
-Encyclopedia Britannica, 1911 Edition, entry for Kababish
I didn’t see any large hats in Dar al-Kababish, not cowboy, neither kepi nor ch’ullu, but plenty of turbans, for which Lane gives the word ‘Imāma, as in the example, Arkhā ‘Imāmatahu, He Loosened His Turban, or figuratively, He Felt at Ease. Only then did I see that KhairAllah was becoming Asla’, Bald, which Lane gives in a secondary meaning as, A Tree whose Leaves have been Easten by Camels.
Considering the Sahara in the très longue durée as a conduit rather than a barrier…
-The Trans-Saharan Book Trade, eds. Krätli and Lydon
Sudanese war refugees still anchor at Egypt’s Mīnā’ al-Barrī, Land Port, one of the maritime terms used by Saharan explorers in times past- Harbors for caravan cities, Shores for the desert’s edges, Islands for oases, Wrecks for caravans swallowed in sand storms, and Ships of the Sea, that old chestnut, for camels. Forty years ago KhairAllah sailed our Dabouka across the border late one night after the Egyptian police had gone to quarters, swinging in their hammocks, rocked to sleep by wave after wave of an incoming tide.
This is not the only site where engraved or incised vulvae- possibly an expression of the loneliness of men in the desert- were found in the context of ancient Egyptian desert roads, thus pointing to a symbolic convention that was understood by contemporaneous travellers.
-Chapter 1, Desert Road Archaeology in Ancient Egypt and Beyond, Förster and Riemer, 2013
We had only one laugh about girls in those forty days, when Rabih saw a honeymoon tent in the distance and we shared his joke about what the groom, his fire fed by wedding sweet meats, might be doing to the bride. At least he’s eating better than us, Rabih said. But who’s working harder? asked Abdullah.
Those are they who perish by their own deserts. For them is drink of boiling water and painful doom.
-The Meaning of the Glorious Koran, Chapter 6, Verse 70, translated by Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall
One might think Pickthall’s translation is incorrect because the verse’s literal meaning reads, Those who die by what they have earned. Thus Deserts would better be Desserts. Yet in fact he is correct, for the OED’s second entry of Desert cites not Ecclesiastical Latin’s “desertum” but rather Old French- “deservir”, to Deserve, and “desservir”, to Clear the Dishes, thus explaining KhairAllah’s order when, having scraped the Asīda bowl, he poured tea and said, Ishrab Halāwa al-Sahrā’, Drink the Desert’s Dessert!
“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.