zha’n, trek (esp. of a caravan); zha’eena, camel-borne sedan chair of a woman, a woman in such a chair; zhaa’in, ephemeral, transient
-Wehr’s Dictionary, cognates of the verbal root zha’ana, to move away, to depart
Many of Wehr’s words will never make it into the everyday speech of the Kababish, especially those beginning with the letter zhaa’, the rarest of letters in Arabic’s alphabet (which also happens to start the word zharf, pl. zhuruf, envelope, or circumstance, which was part of my favorite expression on the trail, hasab al-zhuruf, depending on circumstances, used by khawajas like me when things looked their worst and the drovers looking on the bright side would otherwise say Insha’Allah.)
Does that make it true therefore that the trek of our dabouka was somehow a transient, an ephemeral thing? I don’t have an answer for that, but maybe Badawi and Hinds’ Dictionary of Egyptian Arabic does, which has the verb zharrata, to break wind or to worsen, in which case you could say that on more than one occasion on the trail, zharratat al-zhuruf… meaning either that our circumstances worsened or that the envelope broke wind, presumably the opposite of what you hope to read when opening a billet doux postmarked from the Darb al-Arba’een.
