Basbousa by the shawāl, for the shawalqī

You should eat Basbousa, it’s so gooood! Is it good, or noooo good?

-KhairAllah’s voice communication to me, March 1

KhairAllah and I had a running joke when we plunged our right hands into the asīda bowl. Basbousa, I would say. Gooood Basbousa, he would answer, Bil-Kīlo Aw bil-Shawāl? By the Kilogram or by the Gunny Sack? The joke was that Egyptians most often sold sweetcakes not by the single portion but by an iron weight on a scale. Only later did I find in Wehr the word Shawalqī, Sweet Tooth.

Getting smaller in the sahara

Houston, Apollo 11. We’ve got Africa facing toward us right now, and of course everything is getting smaller and smaller as time goes on…and of course, the Sahara.

-Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, in orbit 160,000 miles above Earth en route to the Moon, voice communication 48 hours, 32 minutes, 35 seconds after launch, July 18, 1969

That is also how I felt on my second day on the Darb. Everything getting smaller and smaller, especially me, and my camel, and my reason for being there.

Disguised as a woman...weird

Friday, September 12, 1930…Our way crossed camel-caravans…the shouts of the drivers…camel screams…weird…

-Smara: The Forbidden City, from the chapter “Disguised as a Woman”, Michel Vieuchange, 1932

Vieuchange was the quintessential Saharan flâneur, dressed in native costume, joined to a caravan of women, worried that his falling face veil and bare ankles would betray his identity before reaching Smara, and when he did, so overwhelmed by its shabbiness, he stayed only three hours before turning around, and, hallucinating a visit from Arthur Rimbaud, died three days later. As Rabih asked me, O Khawaja, Why do such things?

scheherazade would choke

Then Jawan the Kurd put out his hand, which was very like a raven’s claw, scooped up therewith half the dishful and drew out his neave as it were a camel’s hoof…

-Arabian Nights, from the tale of Ali Shar and Zumurrud, on the 321st Night, translated by Richard Burton

This is what it is to eat asīda when hungry, you reach into the bowl with fingers extended like a dainty bird’s foot and pull out a fistful of millet paste so lumpy that it fills the hand as if it were a misshapened camel pad.

Hot and cold arabian nights

Alone. In the middle of the desert. A wave of panic sent her heart pounding wildly. The tent swam. She staggered. Was she ill? Too much sun perhaps. Not enough water?…

-Hot Arabian Nights: The Widow and the Sheikh, Marguerite Kaye

Romance novels have a thing for orientalism stripped bare. Other titles in the same “And the Sheikh” series include the Harlot, the Blackmailed Mistress, the Virgin Bride, and the Desert Princess. Pity I didn’t have any along to read out loud. Instead we listened to a voice-like-a-nightingale sing Zurnī Marra, Visit Me Sometime, on cassette. And unlike a Harlequin novel written to appeal solely to housewives, the lyrics of songs by Hanan Bulu-Bulu aim straight at camel drovers seated around a campfire, keeping warm on a cold night.

Resisting a hundredweight

The camels of the Kababish must indeed be stronger and have greater powers of resistance because the Jellaba of Dongola frequently place a load of 8 hundredweight on their animals…

-Gustav Nachtigal, Sahărâ und Sûdân: Ergebnisse sechsjähriger reisen in Afrika, 1881

I thought I’d killed my white camel when KhairAllah mounted me on another the day I returned from visiting a Jellaba merchant in Dongola, saying he’d died in my absence, adding with a laugh that the bits of petrified wood I’d collected along the Wadi al-Milk had broken the literal camel’s back. But now I’m not so sure. Those few bits I’d packed up, much to KhairAllah’s mockery at the time, came no way near to adding an extra five pounds to my saddle bag, much less a hundredweight.

Sleeping rough, eating rougher

Desert life today is much the same as it was ten centuries ago, the same as it will ever be. Free and charming in its simplicity, yet with certain terrors ever present…

-Zoraida: A Romance of the Harem and the Great Sahara, William Le Queux, 1894

Plus ça change…KhairAllah said, interviewed standing in a usually reliable pasture in the Wadi al-Milk, When I arrived here, Astaghribt…, I Was Dumbfounded [not, in that verb’s secondary meaning, I Was Westernized]…To see how little grass was left since I last passed by. So no, desert life is not much the same as before, not with a changed climate and deeper droughts, not ten centuries ago and not even ten weeks.

Eat Asīda and Die

…asida, the Bedouin national dish…an utterly simple meal, but with what keen appetite one attacks it!

-The Lost Oases, Ahmed Mohammed Hassanein, 1925

Lane has the Form I verb of the root ‘-S-D to mean, He Made ‘sīda [Asīda], but also gives, He [a Camel] Bent his Neck towards his Withers in Dying, or simply, He Died. So when the boy cook Ibrahim called out to the drovers, Ta’āla Kul Asīda, Come Eat Asīda, there was good reason perhaps they did not all rush to the common bowl.

Flat feet and square toes

In like manner, the footprints of a Sudanese, whatever their differences may be, agree in exhibiting peculiarities which it is vain to seek in the tracks of a fellah or a bedouin. The Sudanese is flat-footed, shows no instep, and has square toes.

-Trackers and Smugglers in the Deserts of Egypt, André von Dumreicher, 1931

The sand was so soft when I went on foot myself, and so exhausting if taking more than five steps, that I never could tell if another’s tracks were made by a camel or a drover. In any case, by the time our herd’s one hundred fifty head- 600 individual feet!- had passed, there was nothing left to see. That is why I think that Dumreicher, a German in the service of the Egyptian Camel Corps, couldn’t tell a fennec fox’s mincing from a dung beetle’s scuttling.

Sand all the way north

…sand in everything…we chewed rice and sand, bread and sand, and drank foul water and sand…my pencil scraped as I attempted to use it…

-The Great Sahara, H.B. Tristram, 1860

Rereading my trail journal from 1984, written with a stubby pencil that I pulled from my valise at every camp stop, I find grains of sand stuck between its spiral bound pages. Day 1, just outside Al-Nahud, the sand is fine and dusty. Day 15, in the Wadi al-Milk, the sand is reddish and clean. Day 23, beside the Nubian Nile, the sand is silty. Day 40, approaching Binban Bahri, the sand is dirty, Egyptian.

Where wanted, we went

…the confusion of camel loading…caracolling in every direction, except where wanted.

-The Great Sahara, H.B. Tristram, 1860

On our early mornings of the Darb, loading our camels was a placid affair. A bit of growling and shifting their couched legs, a tight cinching of rope girths, and then words of encouragement to take to their feet. Ht! Eg! Hy! And off we went for another eighteen hour day.

Pleasant idleness in the desert

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.

Blood and meat

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.

Hope your road is a long one

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.

Mud and dāl

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.

Depending on, when?

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?