When the holy Abba Anthony lived in the desert, he was beset by accidie [mental and spiritual sloth] and attacked by many sinful thoughts. He said to God, “Lord, I want to be saved but these thoughts do not leave me alone; what shall I do in my affliction? How can I be saved?”…Abba Anthony also said, “He who wishes to live in solitude in the desert is delivered from three conflicts: hearing, speech, and sight; there is only one conflict for him and that is with fornication.”…A hunter in the desert saw Abba Anthony enjoying himself with the brethren and he was shocked. Wanting to show him that it was necessary sometimes to meet the needs of the brethren, the old man [Anthony] said to him, “Put an arrow in your bow and shoot it.”
-The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, about Anthony the Great, the father of Egyptian monasticism and asceticism
Often during our midday rest stops in the Egyptian and Sudanese deserts, some of the camels- only males were allowed for export- would engage in horseplay with each other, trying to pin the other’s neck to the ground and otherwise exhibit sexual urges. The drovers would say, ayyiz yaneek kitir, he wants to fuck a lot, using the verb naak, yaneek defined in Wehr’s dictionary as “he engaged in sexual intercourse, he engages in sexual intercourse”.
But you must be careful in your pronunciation, because the word for she-camel is naaqa, with its final consonant the different but near homophone letter Q, or qaf. And Wehr gives an odd Xth form of the verb from the tri-literal root n-w-q, as istanwaqa, meaning “he mistook a he-camel for a she-camel (proverbially as a mistake)”, so one can only surmise that Abba Anthony- the patron saint of butchers- had committed istanwaaqa (n.)- mistaking a male for a female- when he was among the brethren- or maybe not.
