The ordinary person understands the camel, if in concept only, because it is an animal like himself.
The transition from camel to car is under way; it cannot be checked. But the passing of a romantic tradition is certainly sad. We can but console ourselves with the thought that it has all happened before- that Roman travellers must have felt the same sense of sacrilege when the hideous camel was introduced to penetrate the sanctity of mysterious desert fastnesses, destroying all the romance of donkey journeys.
-Libyan Sands: Travel in a Dead World, R.A. Bagnold
We never thought much about riding in a vehicle when we were out there. Once we had left behind Hamrat al-Shaikh there were none to be had and none to be heard even when their engine noise would have carried to us far over the desert. Petrol was expensive and the blond-haired Syrian lorry driver Gaby who drove the route El-Obeid to Nahud- David and I rode with him overnight that way in 1984- would have had no reason to go off piste to the north. No cargo up there, and no passengers, so no profit.
The export route to Egypt now ends at the Argeen border station and the camels are loaded onto trucks and sent north from there. Maybe now they are loaded in Dongola and shipped to the border because the road on the Nile’s west side has been paved. If so, you can cut the Way of the Forty in half, Darb al-’Ishreen, you lose a syllable and gain three weeks to market. Twenty fewer days of tea making, aseeda eating, and sleeping rough. It doesn’t mean you’re a romantic to say that’s a stiff price to pay if you are aiming to get away from everything but that.
I don’t think the Romans truly regretted to see the sun set on their trans-Saharan donkey journeys. From camel back the view is better, the horizon seems farther away and the gait is smoother. Riding a donkey is the same as riding in the cab of a Bedford whose suspension is so tight you feel every bump and see nothing but straight ahead through a dirty windshield. Jamal, n. camel; jameel, adj. beautiful. Humaar, n. donkey; humar, n. asphalt.
Bagnold needs a push