I have come to the desert not to indulge in last year’s dolce far niente…
-Diary, Isabelle Eberhardt
Ask the drovers about their idle hours back home in Kordofan between drives up the Darb. Nothing Dolce about them…just eating asīda, still sleeping rough, and drinking half-sweetened tea. Sugar costs money, and theirs was already spent in Cairo.
If you give blood in the desert you won’t/Get it back…
-from “After” by Fady Joudah
This doctor poet has volunteered his time in field hospitals in Sudan. I was thinking it looked like a makeshift surgical suite, the hide opened and laid neatly flat on each side of the carcass like a sterile drape when they butchered that camel with daggers as sharp as scalpels. Adam Hamid was beaming, his hands as blood red as a boiled lobster claw, when he said, Lahma, Meat.
These stars Calypso the beautiful Nymph had bidden him to keep on the left hand as he sailed over the sea.
-The Odyssey, Book V
I wonder if it was the Nymph of Kit Kat, Cairo’s erstwhile red light district, who told KhairAllah to keep al-Jady, the North Star, always on his left cheek. Lane gives the Form II verb of the root J-D-Y as, To Saddle a Camel, almost as in, He Saddled Polaris. And he did, but stopped short of Kit Kat, at the Imbaba camel market, from where he made his way home to Um Badr, his own Ithaca, crossing the wine dark sand sea by rail and lorry.
We passed a few mud and straw cottages and came to the village of Dal where we sent for the Shaikh, who in answer to our demand for lodging showed us to a tree surrounded by camel dung.
-Journal of a Visit to Some Parts of Ethiopia, Waddington and Hanbury, 1822
In 1988 we were received much more warmly by Ahmad Shahīn, the Shaikh of Dāl village deep in its unnumbered cataract where basement basalt erupts from the sand for a five mile run along the Nile’s bed, a place known as the Belly of Stone, a better name for such topography than any geologist might offer, and from there we crossed by rowboat over to Farka and then to Halfa, Aswan, and finally Binban, where we waited for the Dabouka to come in from the West.
Dhzarf, pl. Dhzurūf. Envelope, Circumstance
-Wehr
Hasab al-Dhzurūf fīl-Tarīq, Depending on the Envelopments of the Trail
-KhairAllah, in answer to the question, When do we get there?
KhairAllah was right to have answered with the Arabic word for Envelope, although he may also have intended the word’s secondary meaning, Enveloping Circumstances that made him responsible for us greenhorns for forty days. Minding a Dabouka was nothing compared to minding a Khawaja, we who knew nothing of camels, nor that we had already crossed Egypt’s border yet continued to ask, Imta? When?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
…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.
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.
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.
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.