“If you’re going down to Minya,” he said, “watch out for the camels. The Thieves’ Road runs through there and camels have a way of disappearing.”
-The Mamur Zapt and the Men Behind: A Suspense Tale of Old Cairo, Michael Pearce
We were making good time moving parallel to the Wadi al Milk headed to the Nile, hoping to arrive by Day 20. We made camp one evening with no light still in the sky, and a lone rider approached from behind, driving two unsaddled camels before him. It was Billa Ali, KhairAllah’s old acquaintance and a notorious camel thief. He carried an Enfield rifle wrapped in a blanket and rode a basuur, a goblet-like saddle that teed his buttocks up like a golf ball.
Billa Ali greeted us all, glancing at me and David with a side eye, and sat down to palaver with our trail boss off to one side. Back and forth they spoke, seeming to agree finally to something. When they came back over to us, the fire had already died down to coals and we threw on the remaining side of goat. Billa Ali joined us for some fine mashwy, ate his fill, stood up and walked over to Muhammad al Hamri’s campfire. From the distance we all saw he did the same there- held a side bar with the trail boss, sat down for more goat, then came back to our camp and stretched out in his bedroll. The next morning Billa Ali saddled fast and moved off to the rear after a hurried glass of tea and a few parting words, leaving the two camels he’d arrived with.
KhairAllah filled me in. Billa Ali, said KhairAllah, stole straggling camels from fast-moving daboukas after dark by coming out of the Wadi’s tree cover and cutting them off from behind, then approaching the herd after it had been settled and hobbled for the night and asked for his finder’s fee. He did that once to KhairAllah and once again to Muhammad al Hamri. That he was armed meant that he could be friendly about it.
Thirty five years later, KhairAllah still retells the story- not that Billa Ali was a thief who sold stolen camels back to their rightful owners, or that he carried an Enfield and rode a basuur, but that he ate goat mashwy twice in one night.