An unbelovèd Haboob

Traveling at about 60 m.p.h., the dust storm moved into downtown Chicago…Thomas Gill, a professor of environmental science and engineering at the University of Texas at El Paso, said it was appropriate to call Friday’s storm a haboob.

-New York Times, May 18

A haboob in Chicago is maybe an act of God, no less than the election of a Chicago pope, or the destruction of Khartoum’s National Palace and Omdurman’s Khalifa House, one the redoubt of colonialism, the other the symbol of its resistance. And N.B. to beginning students of Arabic…the words Haboob and Habīb generate from different triliteral roots, the former’s first radical with an unemphatic H, the latter’s H very much so, as also in, Harāmī, Thief, of Camels, aka Billa Ali al-Qrayn, as might aspirate KhairAllah.

Not as hard as it looks

The modern Egyptians…have a horror of the desert. One journey in the desert furnishes them with tales of exaggerated hardships, perils, and wonders, which they are extremely fond of relating to their less experienced countrymen.

-Edward Lane, Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, 1836

Egyptian camel merchants were drawn to the drovers’ stories of the trail, tales of long days and short nights in the desert, of riding to the point of exhaustion, and that scared and fascinated them. Would I be able to do that, each one thought. Could I eat boiled millet, sleep on the cold ground wrapped in a thin blanket, sit in the saddle until my ass rubbed raw? They should have looked at me and thought, If a Khawaja can do it, how hard can it really be?

Camels in the picture

As for Egypt’s Oases…they are used to travel from the Nile Valley to the Land of the Blacks across deserts, but the way has lately been cut, although there are still many palm trees, human traces and fruit trees, and camels that have gone wild and conceal themselves…

-Ibn Hawqal, Kitāb Sūrat al-’Ard, Book of the Picture of the Earth, 977 CE

Ibn Hawqal wrote much about east-west caravan routes but little about those running north-south. He gave precise travel times between Ghana’s gold fields, to Gao, to the Aïr, to Kufra and Kharga and Siwa, and on to the Nile Valley, but said nothing about the Darb al-’Arba’īn’s forty days up from Kordofan and Darfur. KhairAllah should redraw Ibn Hawqal’s Picture, adding lines, connecting dots, unconcealing camels.

blanks on the map

We all slept with Herodotus…But in the emptiness of deserts you are always surrounded by lost history.

-The English Patient

The Father of History wrote about Nasamones, Garamantes, Numidians, Blemmyes, Ammonians, and Macrobians, the lands of Punt and Kush, following the Nilus to Æthiopia, and solving the problems of the Niger River, the Table of the Sun, and the Mountains of the Moon. KhairAllah spoke about Kawahla, Hamar, Shanabla, and the Kababish, Mahas and Sukot, Sodiri and Iyāl Bakhīt, Um Badr, Um Sunta, and Abu Fās, a mountain on the Wadi al-Milk, Father of the Axe.

Our Hot, sweet home

The last link to any other world was the clink of the fire-black tea urn…

-The English Patient

Our teapot was dented, sooty, and nicked. It was the first thing put on the fire and the last thing taken off. We waited for it to boil and then for someone to stir. When ready to pour, the cook said, Ta’āla Shai, Come Tea, and we all came, came back from wherever we were, to our hot, sweet home.

Water where the world ended

By Egyptian standards there was no water west of the Oases, and the world ended.

-R.A. Bagnold, Geographical Journal, March 1937

D’Agostino: I’ve never seen anything like it. There would have been enough water here to serve an army. Almásy: Which means we’re in the wrong place.

-The English Patient, screenplay

Michael Ondaatje cites Bagnold’s article in the Acknowledgments of The English Patient, writing almost the exact same sentence. Anthony Minghella’s film has this exchange between two explorers at Abu Ballas, Father of Pots, an archeological site of hundreds of amphorae in the Western Desert that allowed ancient Egyptians to cache water and travel far beyond the Oases. Hajj Bashīr’s drovers could have taken Almásy to Um Qirab, Mother of Goat Skins, even farther beyond.

The ghost in one's mouth

Even today caravans look like a river. Still, today it is water who is the stranger here. Water is the exile, carried back in cans and flasks, the ghost between your hands and your mouth.

-The English Patient

We drank not from cans or flasks but from Qirab, sing. Qirba, Goat Skins, and Edward Lane writes in such detail of how they were made- ”a goat about one year old”, “a patch of leather over the fundament”, “a seam from the throat to the belly”- that you wonder if he had sewn one himself, or only had dreamt that he drank from one, a dead animal held to his lips.

Stories of lost camels

…vague stories of something seen in the distance by wandering men looking for lost camels…

-R.A. Bagnold, review of L.E. Almásy’s Recentes Explorations, Geographical Journal, March 1937

Stories in the desert. Without them, we would have had forty very boring days. KhairAllah’s tale of looking for his lost camel, of tracking it day and night to the thief’s camp, of buying it back out of larcenous hock, of returning it to the herd and finding yet another camel stolen, the same stuttering drover having fallen asleep again on night watch, ended with…A-A-After all that!

Well, but—

I walked in a desert./And I cried,/"Ah, God, take me from this place!"/A voice said, "It is no desert."/I cried, "Well, But —/The sand, the heat, the vacant horizon."/A voice said, "It is no desert."

-Stephen Crane

We walked in a desert on a Darb, as from Wehr, a Path, a Track, a Road. And glowing overhead on our night rides was another Darb, as Wehr gives, the Darb al-Tabbāna, the Way of the Straw Barn, our Milky Way, and when we reached the Way’s end in Egypt, we were met by Hajj Bashīr’s agent Ahmad Hassan abd al-Majīd at his own Tabbāna.

It started in egypt

O, whither hast thou led me, Egypt?

-Antony and Cleopatra, 3.11.53

Egypt first led me to Bashir abu Jaib at the Imbaba camel market, who four years later led me to his son Mahdi in downtown Cairo, who led me to his second son Sayyid in Omdurman, who led me again to Hajj Bashir in El Obeid, who led me to his agent Sayyid abd al-Wahab in al-Nahud, who led me to his Khabīr KhairAllah Khair al-Sayyid at the Wadi al-Heleiwi well flats, who in forty days led me full circle back to Egypt.

Yā Khawāja, Marhaban fī Masr!

Welcome to Egypt, sir.

-Antony and Cleopatra, 2.2.207

We had a very strange welcome in Binban. Daoud and I were used to being objects of great curiosity, even greater surprise, whenever the Dabouka would come upon strangers along the Way. But here at trail’s end, when swarms of donkey-riding merchants came out to meet us, eager to reserve the fittest of the herd for purchase, they found nothing at all remarkable about us. Their eyes were on the camels alone, not the Khawājas.

Gazing at flies

What a gaze!

-Msgr. André Jarousseau, describing his compatriot Rimbaud in Harar, 1882

Forget thousand-yard stares, sun-burnt retinas, glare-tempering flats of the hand shading the eyes. The drovers were able to see a stray camel at almost any distance, peering directly into the sun. Once KhairAllah asked if he could look through the camera’s viewfinder on zoom, and after he did so, he pushed it away and said, Mā Yinfa’sh, It’s No Good. He said he saw only a fly.

Herding seals to egypt

I was broken-hearted when I heard that I must go back all that long and terrible voyage to Egypt; nevertheless, I answered, ‘I will do all, old man, that you have laid upon me…’

-The Odyssey, 4.11, trans. Samuel Butler, Menelaus speaking to the sea god Proteus, Herdsman of Poseidon’s Seals

Long and Terrible is not exactly how KhairAllah would describe the Darb. Miserable and Exhausting, maybe, but a Kabbāshi does not think that forty days on the trail is particularly Long, and nothing on earth would be considered Terrible…that is a matter between Man and God. But the way to Egypt is a trial nonetheless, whether herding camels or ‘Ujūl al-Bahr, Calves of the Sea, Seals.

What has the desert done?

“What I wanted to tell was the story of what the desert can do to us. That was all.”

-Paul Bowles, discussing The Sheltering Sky and “A Distant Episode”

What has done, what can do, the desert to us? It makes some see burning bushes and sand devils, and others see the Devil himself. It makes some feel clean and others feel lost, and some feel like they’ve become somebody else. I never asked KhairAllah about this, but if he were to consult Wehr for the triliteral root B-D-W, and find its various cognates for Desert- Baydā’, Bādiya, Badw- I bet he would most remark upon the Form VI verb Tabādā, He Posed as a Person of the Desert, and then ask himself, By God, What has the Desert done to Luwīs?

Great dunes on tip toes

And one night when the sun is going to go down, they come to the great dunes of sand and they think: “Ah, now we are in the Sahara, we are going to make tea.”

-The Sheltering Sky

Our Sahara was nothing like this, no great dunes at all, just wadi beds, gravel pans, and a few sand hills when we crossed the notch made by the Nile’s rectangular side step at Delgo, where that day’s lead Khabīr Muhammad al-Himri got us lost and he finally climbed the tallest of the low hills to see Sulb Temple, and we were no longer lost. My first glimpse of real dunes was ten years later on the loop road between Egypt’s Oases, when at the highest point I stopped the car, climbed on the hood, and standing on tip toes looked west at the Great Sand Sea.

Joint pain

Praise be to God, my father is fine. Sometimes he complains of joint pain, but he is fine.

-email from Soliman KhairAllah, April 25

KhairAllah must have mounted his camel thousands of times on the Darb, each iteration a series of forward and rearward articulated jolts to the human spine. He no doubt remembers the many additional dismountings and remountings that we Khawajas required of him. A loose saddle girth to be tightened, a dropped whip to be retrieved, a herd halt for his Maghrib prayer, when it was we who wanted to stop.