Landing on an empty beach by small boat, just before being captured by mounted Arab tribesmen…PETERSON (played by Robert Morley, aka Fat Gut): Where do you suppose we are? DANNREUTHER (played by Humphrey Bogart): Africa. PETERSON: What part of Africa? O’HARA (played by Peter Lorre): Yes, that’s important. What part? DANNREUTHER: Not a bad place to land. No customs. No forms to fill out.
In jail…AHMED aka The Arab Inquisitor (speaking to Dannreuther): I believe you must have Arab blood. Westerners are not usually so subtle.
AHMED: Our country is in a state of unrest. PETERSON: Oh, I am sorry. AHMED: Agents of certain foreign governments sometimes try to enter it by stealth. PETERSON: Tsk, tsk. But surely Your Excellency, in our case one look is sufficient to convince you of our innocence. AHMED: No, one look is not enough…Would you instruct that one (pointing to Bogart’s wife, played by Gina Lollobrigida), that in my country, a female’s lips may move but her words are not heard…Tell me more about Rita Hayworth.
-Beat the Devil, a comedy about a gang of crooks going to Africa to get rich quick
Beat the Devil’s last twenty minutes bring to life so many things that happened to me in Sudan and elsewhere in Africa that it’s almost as if I had been unconsciously acting out Truman Capote’s screenplay. Here are some of them…
An empty beach with Arab tribesmen…The Mauritanian coast along the Banc d’Arguin, where Moorish looters lurked for ships to run aground on the unseen mud shallows far offshore and then send in rowboats to unload their Africa-bound European passengers with many jewels and much cash. Kevin and I walked on that beach but the only Arab tribesman we saw was our jeep driver.
No customs, no forms to fill out…We crossed the Sudan-Egypt border on camels in the dark of night and later had to go into Aswan for a passport stamp. The customs post at the ferry station wanted no part of us, so we were sent to headquarters where we explained how we had skipped past the check points a week earlier. Not possible, not permitted, the officer in charge said. But he gave us our stamp as if we’d arrived by ferry that same day. He didn’t want any part of us either.
Westerners are not so subtle…This is true. In Umbadr I lost my temper when I was pulled out of a film screening midway through and brought before the army officer who told me to wait until a soccer match he was watching on TV had ended. Here, Sit in the chair, said the soldier who brought out a rickety seat with broken legs and patchy nylon webbing, We are hospitable to guests here. I kicked over the chair and raised my voice, You call this no-good chair hospitality! Ana za’laan jiddan, I’m really pissed off.
Foreign agents enter by stealth…I have no idea why the drovers thought we khawajas wanted to ride with them forty days to Egypt. Fusha. Fun, we said. No one rides a camel for fun, they answered. Maybe you are a jaasuus, pl. jawaasees, a spy. But they still treated us like brothers.
Tell me about Rita Hayworth…My introduction to the world of camels was because of John Wayne, when Hajj Bashir, dressed in the immaculate white jallabiyya of a wealthy Sudanese trader, called me to his side when I was wandering alone through Cairo’s Imbaba camel market with no idea who to interview for my oral anthropology class. Tell me about John Wayne, he said, They say he wants to die. It was true, I too had heard that John Wayne was on his death bed back in LA, a long way from Imbaba but close enough to hear the news if you were a daily VOA listener as was Hajj Bashir, as I later found out and came to admire most about him.
His Shaikh is the Devil…KhairAllah was not my shaikh but he was everyone’s khabeer. Without his khabar, knowledge, and khibra, experience on the Way of the Forty, none of us would have made it to Day 2.