The Black Death moved from region to region carried by fleas which then infected animals such as marmots, rats, and camels, who themselves became carriers.
-The Mongol Storm, Nicholas Morton
Camels carried other things as well, Rukāb, Riders, we were called- Ticks, Lice, and Men- and in some cases a camel carried a rider ridden by another rider, a drover riding a camel and a flea riding the drover.
The wheels of the Queen’s plane touched down punctually at twelve noon. Senior Sudanese officials at the Khartoum airport looked at their watches and applauded loudly…In Western Sudan, tribal leaders assembled hundreds of camels and their riders in a large pageant of joyful disorder. The Queen loved it all.
- Watch Your Step, Khawaja: A British Teacher in Sudan, 1956-1966, Peter Everington
There is a scene early in the film with the camera pointed at Yousef on his camel when a question is shouted at him, What time is it? He consults his wrist watch at length and answers, A Quarter to…Four. Never would I have imagined such precise time-keeping on the Darb. But later, Idris sang a driving song with this lyric addressed to his camel, O My Rocket, Your eye is like a Seiko, and we all loved it.
Ra’a, To Graze, Pasture, or Depasture the Herbage. Ra’āk Allah, May God Guard (lit. Pasture ) You.
-Lane’s Lexicon
The first conversation I ever had with Hajj Bashir was about his favorite actor John Wayne, Rā’i al-Baqar, Pasturer of Cattle, a Cowboy. To Pasture, that seemed a verb I would need to know on the Darb, but I did not hear it spoken once. KhairAllah usually used the Form II Causative verb ‘akkal, To Give, or Make, to Eat, and I also heard it as a Form I verb from our cook Muhammad. Kul!, Eat!, he would say in the imperative mood whenever he saw my appetite flag at the asīda bowl. Lucky I never heard him say, May Allah make you eat millet paste.
Theon to Philumene, my Mother, Greeting. Before all else I pray for your health. Receive four metretae [1 metreta = 39 liters] of fine aphrodisiac oil and having done so let me know. I do this not on our own account but rather on that of the camel men…
-Letter 1293, circa 117-138 CE, The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, Vol. X
Two millennia later one still wonders about Theon’s aphrodisiacs and his camel men. Hajj Bashir supplied his drovers with several kilos of sugar for their tea, which if taken in excess W.K. Kellogg of Corn Flakes fame insisted “powerfully excited the genital organs”. As KhairAllah called out every morning before dawn, Itla’ Wa Irkab, Rise Up and Mount!, before we ate our millet porridge.
Shai’, Something, (with neg.) Nothing. Shāy, Tea. Shiwā’ [pronounced Shiyā’ in Sudan], Grilled Meat.
-Wehr
It was easy to cross-pronounce these words, but on the trail, after the pot had boiled, it mattered little. Holding out my empty glass, eyes full of longing and my body begging for sugar, Ibrahim the Cook could have told me anything once it had brewed. Something. Nothing. Shāy. Kubb! Pour! Shiyā’ Tomorrow, In Shā’a Allah.
The most baggage carried by strangers is their difference.
-Yasmina, citing a Sufi sage, quoted in Scheherazade Goes West, Fatema Mernissi
The camels carried our extra baggage, but our difference in customs unlike our weight in pounds was felt at mealtime rather than in the saddle. Rabih and Abdullah saw that every time we crouched at the asīda bowl, for a moment we hesitated, uncertain, before reaching to eat. Which hand must we use, our left or our right? And how to stop ourselves from toppling over?
Tea in the Sahara…With cups full of sand…
-Sting
That’s right. Unless you cover your glass with the flat of your hand between sips, what you’ll be drinking is a cuppa sand.
To Theanous, I wish you to know that the caravan comes to Didymoi on the twenty seventh. So I write to you to get your things ready. [Signed] Theophilos
-Ostracon 404, from the Red Sea Desert fort Didymoi on the Berenike-to-Koptos Road, French Archaeological Institute, Cairo, 2011
I received a letter from Hajj Bashir in Sudan, its message much like that on this Ist C CE pottery shard, giving me two weeks notice to get myself to El Obeid in January 1984 if I wanted to join his Dabouka to Cairo. Lucky for me, KhairAllah was its Khabīr and I arrived on time.
The transition from camel to car is underway; it cannot be checked. The passing of a romantic tradition is certainly sad. But we can console ourselves with the thought that it has all happened before…when the hideous camel was introduced…destroying the romance of donkey journeys.
-Libyan Sands: Travels in a Dead World, 1935, Ralph Bagnold
The Kababish never were told their Jamal days were ending. Camels were still driven up the Darb fifty years after Bagnold, the original Saharan Motor Punk, first bashed the dunes in Model-T Fords, and I’d never met a Kabbāshi who knew First Gear from Irkab! Mount Up! But that was back in the 1980s. Now there is a blacktop road to Cairo, high gear all the way.
I will give your camel driver 150 talents and 50 drachma, I will convey your goods inland through the desert, until loading at the Nile, and I will convey them downriver to the warehouse, and I will place them under your ownership…
-Papyrus, 2nd C CE, Conveyance Contract for imported goods through the Egyptian Desert on the Berenike-to-Koptos Road
KhairAllah would be thrilled to lead a herd of value equal to 150 talents (1 talent = weight of water in an amphora, 33kg)- and here we assume talents of silver (150 talents = $3 million), not of gold (150 talents = $250 million)- even though his trail was triple the length of the Berenike-to-Koptos Road. But surely KhairAllah knew this when he said, I drive before me millions, and he would have thought 50 drachma (1 drachma = an unskilled worker’s daily wage) as mere bakshīsh for his forty day job.
The Messenger of God performed the Hajj with a ragged saddle under him and a shabby plush that was worth only four dirhams; and he circumambulated the Ka’aba on a camel to let people see his method and customs. Then he said, “Learn from me your rites.”
-Secrets of the Hajj, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058-1111)
I wish that KhairAllah had taught me to ride a camel by showing rather than making me learn by my own doing, for I might have been saved the error of thinking the Secrets of the Darb are found in fancy Camel Tack, as in the Sufi adage, The Saddle doesn’t cause your Sores, rather, Blame them on your Behind.
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!