“A camel was crossing a swiftly flowing river. He shat and immediately saw his dung floating in front of him, carried by the rapidity of the current. “What is that there?” he asked himself. “That which was behind me I now see pass in front of me.”
-from Aesop’s Fables, translated by Robert and Olivia Temple
“Qifa nabki min dhikra habibin wa manzili…”- “Halt, both of you. Let us weep for the memory of a beloved and an abode…”
-from the mu’allaqa , or hanging poem, of the pre-Islamic poet Imru’ al-Qays
Camel dung may be an odd starting point in the search for truth both philosophical and emotional. But in the seven pre-Islamic poems called the mu’allaqat, according to the poet Gabriel Levin, one finds among “obligatory motifs” the so-called atlal, or traces [of the Beloved’s] abandoned campsite, physical cues such as blackened hearthstones, broken pottery, charred firewood, shreds of camel wool and piles of dung, which in turn lead to a sudden nostalgia for a long lost love.
Camel dung is perhaps the most powerful of the cues, for when mounded together where the camels couched for the night have laid it on thick, it fertilizes the ground for next year’s rains from which grows abundant grass amid the desert waste- a living reminder of something that had died in the past and refuses to remain dead.
A.J.Arberry’s translation of the seven odes includes such images as dung pellets as “peppercorns”, the couched nest made by a resting camel called a “trench” (as in a trench latrine), and the following image from the ode of Antara, “an untrodden meadow that a good rain has guaranteed shall bear rich herbage, but sparsely dunged…”
Camel dung does not burn as readily as cow or buffalo patties and is not as durable as the equally recognizable bits of petrified wood that lie grouped together where an ancient tree had fallen, dried, and become stone after the Sahara’s paleo-monsoon rains ended. But dung piles come across in the middle of the sandy nowhere, indicating where a herd had been couched for the night, does conjure in a traveler’s heart the same memories of well earned rest, overly sugared tea, and desert conviviality. Perhaps not with a woman as beautiful as Imru’ al-Qays’ beloved Unaiza, to whom I did not say, as did he, “Ride on, and slacken the beast’s reins, and oh! don’t drive me away from your refreshing fruit.”