A camel herder at guantánamo

Like all true camel herders, he was smart, intuitive, lighthearted, and funny.

-Mohamedou Ould Slahi, The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga

Ould Slahi published this fantasy, a sort of 1002nd Night- about a camel lost, tracked, and finally found- after being imprisoned at Guantánamo for 14 years in a story of false arrest, black site rendition, extraordinary methods of interrogation, unlawful detention, delayed release, etc., etc., etc…and then as a Hollywood movie and best-selling memoir. Much of The Actual True Story… Ould Slahi must have written in his head as a mental escape while being tortured, and if so…lucky that memories of his camel herding days saved his life.

Two steps after three words

But the camel, as they say, rests in two steps. Legend has it that an urban dweller rode a camel with a Bedouin. The Bedouin sat in front of the hump, and the urban dweller behind it so he could steady himself by grabbing the Bedouin. When they arrived home, the camel bent his front legs to come to rest, and the Bedouin, caught off guard, lost his equilibrium and fell to the ground. The urban dweller couldn’t help laughing at the Bedouin. The Bedouin looked at his friend and said, “Too soon to be happy: the camel rests in two steps.” And indeed, as soon as the camel bent his rear legs to come to his final rest, the urban dweller fell on his face.

-Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Guantánamo Diary

KhairAllah and I never rode double, but if we had, he would not have been caught off guard by a couching camel, which under him never knelt until he himself spoke the three magic words Ikhh! Ikhh! Ikhh! that to me meant nothing.

Sniff the Breeze for smooth sailing north

It is easier to cross the desert from north to south.

-The Conquest of the Sahara, Douglas Porch

Not true. Heading up the Darb you’re always facing a fierce headwind. If you want the wind at your back, you’d have to wait until the Khamāsīn (pl., from Khamsīn, Fifty, meaning, the sporadic south-to-north winds that blow in the fifty days following Coptic Easter Monday, in Egypt celebrated as the pre-Islamic holiday Shamm al-Nasīm, Sniff the Breeze!) blows.

No camel "under him"

The normal age of a camel is reckoned to be…the period, as the Arab counts, between the marriage of two generations of the same family- a camel, which comes in its youth to a man as his wife’s dowry, being expected to be yet “under him” on the occasion of his son’s marriage.

-The Heart of Arabia, St.John Philby, 1922

Human generations are widening everywhere and maybe too the lifespans of camels. KhairAllah’s first son Soliman is nearing forty and still unmarried. Much has stood between him and a future bride. University study, a shop-keeping start-up, the marriages of two older sisters, moving the family to safety in a time of civil war, and now building a new house for all. Try legalizing a land purchase without a functioning law, or making mud bricks without running water, or cutting a houseful of lumber with only a hand saw. Soliman may well be over forty before all that is finished and he marries, about the average lifespan of a camel.

Easterne windes in the eies

…dust and sand which is tossed vp and downe the aire with easterne windes entring into their eies doth at last miserably weaken and spoile their eie-sight.

-Description of Africa, Leo Africanus, 1526, from the Hakluyt Society 1896 edition

At our departure from al-Nahud it was uncertain whether RahmatAllah could join KhairAllah as Hajj Bashir’s second Khabīr. RahmatAllah was nearly blind from trachoma, or so I imagined because it was a common affliction in those parts, but it may have been from sand blown into the eye. If that were the case, I’m now glad I wore glasses. It was Bilal who was ultimately chosen, perhaps because he could see well except when he got cross-eyed on Merissa.

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.