Each year these caravans in Egypt carried three or four hundred camel loads of elephant tusks, 2,000 rhinoceros horns, 20 or 30 kantars of ostrich feathers, 2,000 kantars of arabic gum, 1,000 of tamarind and as much natron as was gathered along the way, as well as food suppplies that are eaten...Every year, two caravans travel to Darfur, each comprised of four to five thousand camels; the trip to Assiut takes 40 days.
It is above all essential in such a journey to be sufficiently well mounted to keep up with the caravan, as this stops for no one, and he who goes slower than the rest is necessarily left behind.
-Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt, During the Campaigns of General Bonaparte in that Country, Vivant Denon, 1803
A kantar is an Egyptian unit for weighing cotton, about 100 pounds, and a camel in a desert caravan would be packed at about 500 pounds of load at the upper limit, thus there might have been six to ten camels carrying feathers along the Way of the Forty at the time of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. I cannot imagine having to slow down for or catch up with or hang on to a camel carrying feathers.
On my first trip on the Way of the Forty I was fascinated with the many large pieces of petrified wood lying about. We often used them in threes in our camp fires for setting the cook pots above the flame. Sometimes I packed them up in my duffle. When KhairAllah saw this he thought I was crazy.
Why make a camel carry rocks to Egypt? he asked. There are plenty rocks there too, he said. But I want to take them back home with me, I said. Are there no rocks in America? he asked. These were once trees, I said. Then why don’t they burn like acacia wood? For that I would have had no answer, unless I went back to the jinns and Iblis and the shaytan, Satan, for which I saw no need, so instead I threw most of them away.