Guided by stars and some instinct less defined…whose romance on a route that ends, for the camels at least, on the butcher’s slab…animals, some hobbled, others too benign to seek escape from a harsh destiny, are paraded and sold in a market that seems to prosper in its melee of whip-cracking merchants and groaning, grumpy, growling beasts. Ancient ways endure.
-Imbaba Journal, New York Times, December 18, 1989
This was written ten years after I first visited the market as an observer and five years after I joined the melee as a participant. I know now that ancient ways do not endure, for the camels these days come to market not guided by stars in the desert but rather driven by lorries on asphalt roads. But the Cairene butcher still beckons the Kordofani camel. The laws of supply and demand still pertain, even if the Egyptian and Sudanese pound are wildly out of sync, no longer 1 for 2 as in my day on the trail. Now it is more like 1 for 25.