There was, it is true, always the possibility of being raided on the Arba’in Road by the Kababish, Bedayat, or other tribes, but the country traversed was far too barren to support a permanent population, and with a little luck one would avoid their occasional descents.
-Darb El Arba’in: The Forty Days’ Road, W.B.K.Shaw, Sudan Notes and Records, Part 1, 1929
I don’t think that Kababish raiders were still “descending” on daboukas when I made my trips sixty years after Shaw’s warning. The French and Italian North African colonial-era word for bedouin raid, razzia, comes from the Algerian Arabic ghaziyya, whose triliteral root has the strange cognate ghaaziya, a dancer, which implies more accurately how a razzia typically unfolded. A booty raid was less doing violence to enemies and more facing off against acquaintances in a choreographed if chaotic square dance, with less singing and calling and more hollering and whooping…girls in, men out…girls curtsy, men sashay…pass thru and all go home…with few if any ever getting hurt.
My only experience with desert thievery was with Billa Ali al-Qrain, more pickpocket than mugger, whose modus operandi was to ride out of the Wadi al Milk at night when a dabouka was passing, cut off a straggler from the back of the herd, then the next morning come into camp leading the “stray” to demand a customary finder’s fee.
KhairAllah knew Billa Ali from previous encounters but he also knew it was not worth arguing, for Billa was armed with an Enfield and the drovers only knives. Billa’s con was more like a mafioso’s pizzo, literally his bird beak or protection money, meaning, so what if he wet his beak from time to time off a passing dabouka. Better to pay up than to see if his Enfield was loaded. Better to invite him to eat with us than to deny him our hospitality. If we did not, how would we ever know the ghaaziya from the ghaziyya?