Gamal /n camel. Ma shuftish il-gamal wala il-gammaal, I saw neither the camel nor the cameleer, meaning, I didn’t see anything. Ma gaash fi-gamal, He didn’t come on a camel, meaning, He isn’t asking for everything [to pack a camel with it]. Ya gamali, O My camel!, meaning [when said by a widow], O My husband!
-Dictionary of Egyptian Arabic, Badawi and Hinds
I never asked KhairAllah if he used any of these expressions, but I doubt that an Egyptian peasant’s world and his own ever overlapped, either idiomatically or otherwise. Besides pronouncing the word with a hard g rather than a soft j as do the Sudanese, Egyptians had no proper understanding of camels. If his wife were to say, O My camel!, even from the grave he would have thought her crazy.