We're all Lessepsians now

The term “Lessepsian migration” is as yet of only limited circulation…

-Lessepsian Migration: The Influx of Red Sea Biota into the Mediterranean Sea by Way of the Suez Canal, Francis Dov Por

One of these South-to-North migrants is Tetrosomus gibbosus, the Camel Cowfish, an aquarium favorite but not easy to keep alive in captivity, and I wonder now if the Sudanese Abbāla tribes (from the Arabic word Ibl, Camels) might have had a jump on the Baggāra tribes (from the word Baqara, Cow, pronounced Bagara) once the Darb al-Arba’īn opened to the live-on-the-hoof trade, not long after Ferdinand de Lesseps opened of the Suez Canal in 1869.

You are a khabīr

Geel nin aan lahayn geeridii war ma leh. The death of a man who does not own camels is no news.

-On Somali Proverbs, Georgi Kapchits, Bildhaan: International Journal of Somali Studies, Vol. XXI

This is not true, for a man who only leads camels, or herds camels, or pastures or waters or milks camels, this man will be in the news for a long time. And if he has appeared in a documentary film televised the night before on the Blue Nile Network, he might be recognized on the streets of his country’s capital, as was KhairAllah when I walked with him in downtown Khartoum and a stranger approached. I know you, the man said to him, You are a Khabīr.

Making tracks to kerma

There is something very imposing to the imagination in the idea of an iron track laid in the pathless sands, over which long trains move swifter than the swift dromedaries, carrying burdens greater than the longest caravans.

-From Egypt to Japan, Henry Martyn Field, 1877

If you can get yourself to Kerma on the tarmac, as I did once, you will see a steam locomotive abandoned on a side track off the narrow gauge laid south from the Second Cataract by the British Army to rescue General Gordon. It never got past Kerma, and most Kermāwīs have forgotten how it got there in the first place, seeing it something like a cargo cult barrel washed onto a South Sea beach, but these days much less meaningful now that camels pass on the opposite beach, the Nile’s western bank, direct to Cairo.

Counting Camels

One cannot see a camel atop one’s own head, yet one manages to see a straw atop another’s.

-G.L. Permjakov, From Proverb to Folk-Tale: Notes on the General Theory of Cliché

It’s a matter of perspective. An Indian proverb says, You can only measure a camel’s height when he’s standing before a mountain. Just as I couldn’t know how many camels altogether were in our Dabouka until KhairAllah drove them one by one through a gauntlet, counting to Mi’a, One Hundred, but then confused the tally… Mi’a (Wa) Wāhid…One Hundred (And) One…Mi’atayn (Wa) Wāhid…Two Hundred (And) One…TultuMi’a (Wa) Wāhid…Three Hundred (And) One…etc…etc…

We, the heavy

Awr xamil waa qaadaa, xarig qalloocanse ma qaado. A camel can carry a heavy load, but not a crooked one.

-On Somali Proverbs, Georgi Kapchits, Bildhaan, Vol. XXI

If our camels only knew how very crooked we Khawajas were, saddled so sideways and cock-eyed that at first we couldn’t get them to their feet, much less know Gee! and Haw! from Ikh! and Shh! (couching sounds made respectively in Kordofan and Darfur).

Twisting tongues, bending knees

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Xarig keliya geel ma wada xiro. You can’t tie the whole herd of camels with one rope.

-On Somali Proverbs, Georgi Kapchits, Bildhaan: International Journal of Somali Studies, Vol. XXI

‘Aqala…Camel Hobble, Twisting of the Tongue when One Desires to Speak

-Lane’s Lexicon

The hobbles had wooden toggles that rattled when at evening camp the drovers went through the herd to tie back one of each camel’s front knees. Picketting them on a one rope high line as one might picket horses wouldn’t have worked because camels couch at night while horses sleep on their feet, all four of them.

What did you see, khairallah?

What do you see, Walt Whitman?…/I see the jungles and deserts,/I see the camel…

-Poem of Salutation, Walt Whitman

Beside the camel, what else did Walt Whitman see? He saw nomadic tribes, muezzins and muftis, goats, fat-tail sheep, gazelles, and the tracks of expeditions, ancient and modern. And so did we, but more. Wadis and well flats, watering troughs of mud and the village of Wawa, where we would have seen pre-historic artifacts of the Chellean type had we crossed the Nile to the east bank when we were passing Soleb Temple on the west. But KhairAllah whipped the herd fast that day and we had no time to stop.

Living on a memory, riding on a hump

Late in life we live by memory, and in our solstices or periods of stagnation; as the starved camel in the desert lives on his humps.

-Memory, Ralph Waldo Emerson

I think of myself as KhairAllah’s aide-mémoire when I remind him of the drovers from the trips we made together. How could he remember them any other way, names from forty years ago on two of the twenty or more Daboukas that he has led. Mas’ūd abu Dūd, Abdullah Mansour, Rābih Muhammad Na’īm, and the others…I had written their names in my diary and recently put them in an email to his son to read aloud to him. And when he sent an audio message back to me in which he repeated their names, saying all were in good health and sent their greetings, I wonder if he too thinks of them every day, nameless or not.

Sniff the breeze, seek the shade

One of the stars of the TV show 1,000-lb Sisters has been arrested following an incident at a Tennessee safari park. Police were initially called to the park to reports a guest had been bitten by a camel. Upon arrival, they noted 'suspicious odors'...

-Daily Mail, Sept 3, 2024

Domesticated thousands of years ago by perfume traders, the camel went on to become the desert dweller’s primary source of…shade…

-Long Island Game Farm, Manorville, New York

I pass through Manorville frequently and never once stopped to pet the camels. I would be curious to see if at sunset they cast the same long-legged shadows that our Dabouka cast on the sand sheets of the Wadi al-Milk at the golden Maghrib hour. As for me ever going to Tennessee, Mish ‘Ayyiz Ashamm Nasīmhu, I Don’t Want to Catch its Drift, from the Egyptian holiday after Easter, Shamm al-Nasīm, Sniff the Breeze, which Lane gives from Shemu, the Pharaonic calendar marking the Nile’s lowest flow before its late summer flood begins.

Stiff back atop a hump

…strange to say, after a month’s experience of camel riding I do not find the experience in the least unpleasant. The spine must be made flexible- not itself a bad thing for a man who is by nature stiff-backed.

-On the Desert: A Narrative of Travel from Egypt to the Wilderness of Sinai, Henry Martyn Field, 1884

Daoud’s doctor told him that the best cure for his bad back would be forty days riding on a camel. And if that didn’t work, he could always walk to Egypt.

Ruminating on the darb

If you must get exercise, go in search of the springs of life…Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only animal which ruminates while walking.

-Walking, Thoreau

Much of the time we walked beside our camels, not riding while they walked. Either way, we ruminated on that eternal question, When do we get there? But before that, other queries occupied the mind. Where is the Nile? How are some camels faster than others? Who knows the route better, KhairAllah or Bilāl? What is the Arabic word for saddle sore? And more importantly, Why is it that the slower we walk, the more tired we feel?

Ignorant of my ways

…it was some time before the drovers succeeded in catching my camel. Whether it had taken a sudden fright from something on the road, or whether it resented being ridden by a Frank, ignorant of its habits and ways, I did not ascertain.

-Early Adventures, Sir Austen Henry Layard, 1887

My lithe and spritely camel learned well enough of my ignorant ways of riding him, before he died. Maybe my ways in fact had killed him, KhairAllah said, after I’d rejoined the herd from my overnight R&R in Dongola. I didn’t see him anywhere in the Dabouka and KhairAllah remounted me on an ox-like Khasiy, Gelding, to which Lane gives the secondary meaning, Poetry with no Amatory Effusion. On this point, his lumbering gait did seem to sap me of all exclamatory vigor for the second half of the Darb.

Giving, taking, remembering

…tramping across the desert with camels and Arabs, a proceeding not conducive to the preservation of delicate instruments…

-A Memoir of Colonel Sir Henry Yule, by his Daughter, Amy Frances Yule, 1903

We had with us an Aaton film camera and a Sony Walkman Pro. The drovers and the camels both were exceedingly gentle with the equipment, but the sand was not. Al-Raml Hiyākulu, the Sand Will Eat It, said KhairAllah, by which he meant, Whatever you have to give, the desert will take. Yet by the end of the Darb we had turned the tables. It was the Sahara which gave, and we who did the taking. Pictures, audio, movies, stories.

Circumcised Saracens

…the Arabians themselves named Sarracens (for Sarra signifieth a desert in the Arabique tongue) or else, if not of their place, yet at least, as learned men certainely thinke, of their property, they might obtain that name of Sarracens, namely, because they lived much by rapine (for that the word Saracke in Arabique doth import) to which above all nations they ever were and still are addicted, for by deduction of the name Sarracens, from Sara, as if they claimed descent from her, being indeede Hagarens (the progeny of Hagar) is a meere fancy and fable. They claime it not.

-Hakluytus Posthumus, 1625, Samuel Purchas, Footnote to his disquisition on Semitic circumcision ritual

This etymology of the word Sarracen (in a 17th C misspelling that makes a possible cognate of the also misspelled word Sarra, Sahara, or alternatively, as descendants of Abraham’s lawful wife Sara, not as generally thought through his concubine-slave Hagar) contradicts its more commonly accepted origin from the Arabic word Sharqi, Eastern, and not as Purchas gives, from Saraqa, to Steal, nor from Saraha, to Roam. And what might the drovers say about such tortured wordplay? The opposite, no doubt, of how they urged Bilal to recite poetry each night at the campfire. Iftah al-Bāb! Open the Door!

The wonders of egypt

…they owned vineyards, wineries, papyrus marshes, perfume businesses, and camels…where one kneaded dough with one’s feet and wrote from right to left, where Herodotus asserted that “women urinate standing up and men sitting down.”

-Cleopatra, Stacy Schiff, describing women’s right to property in Ptolemaic Egypt

Who is to say which one of us, KhairAllah or me, was more astounded by what we found in Egypt. Electric lamps after so much moonlight, stewed fava beans after so much boiled millet, beer and wine after so much well water. And we hadn’t yet even peeked into the Ladies.

Couched beside al-thurayā

With twenty small stars, as if they—and he in the sky if he could speak—/Were camels that he led riding widespread, riding camels about to scatter,/Both connected and dispersed…

-Abu al-Harīth Ghaylān, aka Dhū al-Rumma, He of the Worn Out Rope (696-735 CE), describing the asterism Al-Thurayā, known in the West as the Pleiades

Only six of the more than one thousand stars in the so-called Seven Sisters are visible to the naked eye, but the Arabs, being accustomed to seeing camels graze in the distance, saw twenty, and as Mas’ūd, when early one morning I asked if he had seen my camel, answered, I saw him couched far in the west just as Al-Thurayā was setting.