I called Bashir early and found him in the souk, glad to see me- whoever I was, for he didn’t remember me from when we’d last met in Cairo, and after so many years I wasn’t sure of his face either, whether we’d ever met at all, until he opened his mouth and started in again about John Wayne, and then no doubt about it, this was the Bashir Abu Jaib I remember, talking about his favorite Hollywood cowboy.
-Diary, El Obeid, January 12, 1984
That first trip on the Darb started with a shot in the dark. I’d met Hajj Bashir in 1978 at the Cairo camel market. After discussing the recent death of the Duke which he’d heard about on Voice of America, I asked him if one day I might ride with one of his herds up from Sudan. He assented, and no doubt thought that was the end of that. So blame it on the well functioning Egyptian postal service, which delivered my letter to his Cairo apartment five years later saying I was ready to ride. His son Mahdi, whom I’d never met, answered, Welcome Anytime. Daoud and I showed up at his door a week later and he put us on a plane to Khartoum. There we were met by another son Sayyid who put us on the El Obeid bus to their father. Hajj Bashir didn’t seem to remember me, nor I his face, but nonetheless he sent us on to Nahud where his agent Sadiq abd al-Wahab and his trail boss KhairAllah Khair al-Sayyid were mustering drovers and camels. And so we mounted up.