My guides, Zeki ibn Belal and Hamed ibn Hussein, both belong to the Kababish tribe. The Gilif mountain is their home country and they knew every path. We unsaddled our camels… “We have come into our own country and she will protect her son,” said Hamed. “Have no fear, as long as we live you need have no misgiving.”
-Fire and Sword in the Sudan, Rudolf Carl von Slatin, the Mahdi’s prisoner who identified for him Gordon’s severed head
KhairAllah ibn Khair Al-Sayyid, The Goodness of God, Son of the Goodness of the Master, was my guide if you want to call him that. But he was much more and much less. Once he got lost amid the criss-crossing trails of the Delgo Reach of the Nile- where it turns sharply east, then north, then west, then north again, leaving an odd notch on the western bank where we travelled- when he was that day’s dabouka leader, and Muhammad al-Humri gave him endless grief for being a terrible guide, until he climbed the highest sand dune and saw finally that we were close to the river after all. That day he was less than a guide. But most days he was more, much more.
The British may have called him a dragoman, from the Arabic tarjumaan, translator, a kind of crafty Cairene fixer in the old days for Europeans on a deluxe Pyramid and Sphinx tour who dickered for you with the clamoring donkey boys and dancing girls outside the Shepheards Hotel. Others would call him a murshid, a guide to Al-Rushd, the Right Way, but that is making it a bit too theological for KhairAllah’s taste. His idea of following the Right Way was simply “to keep the North Star on the left cheek”- north northeast from Dar al-Kababish all the way to Cairo.
He called himself khabeer al-sikka, Expert of the Route. That he was, and when people met him for the first time and heard him called that by others, they followed wherever he led through his desert home country knowing that “she will protect her son”.