Nothing but sand and wind

Our Ababde camel drivers remarked very simply that we took great pains for little profit, because, go where we might, we would see nothing but earth and stone.

-Journal of a Visit to Some Parts of Ethiopia, George Waddington and Rev. Barnard Hanbury, 1822

The drovers laughed and said something of the like when we first met them at the departure point and explained our purpose of travelling with them. And later, around about Day 25 when the wind was blowing sand into our tea and asīda, they said it again, but this time without humor.

Rughā', or a camel's growling

The sound produced by the camel is the same for every sensation and always expressive of discontent, as if every change of situation was painful to him; the same when he is unloaded and fed as when he is beaten.

-Journal of a Visit to Some Parts of Ethiopia, Waddington and Hanbury, 1822

I understand why, under the root R-Gh-W, Lane gives the noun Raghwa to mean, The Single Grumbling of a Camel, and, The Froth of Milk, and also why he gives the adjective Muragh to mean, as a modifer for Kalām [Speech], Language that Does Not Clearly Express its Meaning, and, as an epithet, A She-Camel Whose Milk has Much Froth. Because there were no she-camels in the Dabouka, we had no need of those second meanings, despite the fact that my Kalām was quite Muragh.

that which sometimes floats and sometimes cleaves

I am skeptical of desert views.

-New York Times, December 13, 2024

Lane gives two words for Mirage: Āl, that which raises figures as though they float above the ground, in the early morning, and, Sarāb, that which lowers figures as though they cleave to the ground, at midday. I do not remember seeing a Mirage even once on the trail and KhairAllah never exclaimed that he saw one either, but by night on our late rides many times we saw the unexplained. Shooting stars when our eyes opened, or were they phosphenes when closed? It was hard to know the difference, half asleep under that darkened dome.

An enthusiasm for the desert's end

It took effort to cultivate our enthusiasms in a desert, but it’s clear now that we took the desert’s role for granted.

-On Browsing, Jason Guriel

Guriel here means that it is difficult to have opinions, to care about something, anything, in a sensory vaccuum, because an opinion needs a point of comparison, a thing against which to react, to compare what we are experiencing with another thing that we might instead experience. Not a real desert, a Sahrā’ or a Baydā’, like the ground we trod in those last ten days. Because after thirty days on the trail, enthusiasm for what lay at its end was growing. A soft bed. A green vegetable. A night without camels.

The things he carried

Here, comprising the overall shape of a camel, are found images of demons, dervishes, embracing couples, rabbits, dragons, and even a Buddhist monk...The meaning of such images is open to interpretation…

-Metropolitan Museum, New York, Accession 25.83.6

Most striking to me in this Persian miniature is the look of wonder on the face of the Attendant, perhaps a Khabīr like KhairAllah who sees the jumble of everything and everybody the camel is packing and asks himself, Forty Days of this?

Composite Camel with Attendant, 16th C, Iran

Trail to the kingdom of nothing

The caravan has now entered the Kingdom of Nothing…the Madugu [Tamashek word for Khabīr] is the only one who knows the way. Only he can read the markings in the dunes. Only he can read the shadows thrown by the camels ears.

-Tuareg: Warriors of the Dunes, 2013, documentary film, about crossing the Ténéré Desert

The Salt Route between Agadez and Bilma Oasis may be emptier than the Darb al-’Arba’īn, but you should not call it a Kingdom of Nothing. Its dunes are no more unmarked nor its shadows more unreadable. What appears most daunting to the Khawaja is to the Khabīr, the Madugu, just another step forward on his trail.

Unchanged 40 days

After the terrible accounts of some travellers I was surprised by the ease of the camel’s motion, and the facility afforded by his size for a change of position and even repose.

-Journal of a Visit to Some Parts of Ethiopia, Waddington and Hanbury, 1822

It is true that, unlike a horse saddle, a camel hump offers an ample surface upon which to rest your buttocks, with crossed legs resting on the animal’s neck, but at the same time it is more difficult to move about in the seat, as you cannot stand up in stirrups to rearrange things down below.

Lisbon Tile Museum

Hobbled good sense

…The Prophet, peace and blessings upon him, said, Tie her and trust in God.

-Hadith 2517 from the Sunna of al-Tirmidhī (824-892)

The Arabic verb here for Tie is ‘Aqala, To Hobble a Camel. Lane gives an alternative meaning for ’Aqala as, To Be in One’s Good Senses, and a secondary meaning as, To Comb [One’s Hair], but KhairAllah when halting the herd to camp and shouting, I’qal!, gave no reason to think he meant anything other than Hobble!, despite our slightly crazed minds after a night ride into the hard north wind or the sandy muss its blow had made of our heads.

I've been to mileet, bakheet, al-teete...

He asked me if I'd seen a road with so much dust and sand./And I said, "Listen, I've traveled every road in this here land!"/I've been everywhere, man./Crossed the deserts bare, man…I've been to Moree, Taree, Jerilderie, Bambaroo, Toowoomba, Gunnedah, Caringbah, Woolloomooloo…l’ve been to Reno, Chicago, Fargo, Minnesota, Buffalo, Toronto, Winslow, Sarasota, Wichita, Tulsa, Ottawa, Oklahoma, Tampa, Panama, Mattawa, La Paloma, Bangor, Baltimore, Salvador, Amarillo, Tocopilla, Barranquilla, and Padilla…

-I’ve Been Everywhere, Geoff Mack, written (1959) with Australian place names, rewritten for Hank Snow (1962) with American (North and South) place names

No doubt KhairAllah could rhyme more villages he’s been to in Kordofan and along the Nile than those first three I myself heard him say. Maybe Nyāla, Bāra, Kenāna, Um Ruwāba, and Al-Dabba, where he now lives.

No better fat

Shoppers who fear canola can choose…the hump fat of a wild camel.

-New Yorker Magazine, Oct 7, 2024, article about the New Age grocery store Erewhon

Another benefit of eating hump fat (“40% of your daily Vitamin B12 in a single tablespoon!”, claims camel meat products supplier Desert Farms) that we learned when we slaughtered a lame Jamal and put its Sanām on the fire for crackling is that it also lubricated chapped lips.

18°03'18.7"N, 30°56'03.7"E

I will build it myself and my brothers and sisters will help me…There is water, the electric coming soon, God Willing.

-Email, November 1, 2024, Soliman KhairAllah

KhairAllah’s son Soliman has found for his father a building lot, here, on the outskirts of the river town Al-Dabbah in Northern Province where many Kordofan tribesmen have relocated in the war. The family has to start over, only some of their household effects have come with them from their home in Omdurman. Like hurricane, flood, wildfire, and tornado survivors, only they have had to dodge bullets to arrive.

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).