To Dakhla, For the Waters

Renault: And what in heaven's name brought you to Casablanca?

Rick: My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.

Renault: The waters? What waters? We're in the desert.

Rick: I was misinformed.

1979. Egypt’s Western Desert. Waha Dakhla. The Inner Oasis. According to Herodotus, an Island of the Blest. I had been invited by a student I’d met in a Cairo coffeehouse who was from Dakhla’s ‘Izbet Gharghour, the Hamlet of Gharghour, a tongue-twister of a name for a non-Arabic speaker because it has two of the most difficult to pronounce consonants in the alphabet, the letter ‘ayn, an unvoiced guttural stop, and the ghayn, a voiced velar fricative.

Saying it right was almost as difficult as getting there, by train to Asyut from Cairo, by bus from Asyut to Dakhla’s market town of Mut, via Kharga Oasis, and from Mut to Gharghour by donkey cart.

I arrived at the door of the student’s house. His father welcomed me and showed me in. I met his brothers, male cousins, uncles, and so many others. And so many questions for a guest who had come from so far away.

Several days passed in the majlis, the men’s room, talking, taking tea, eating dates and oranges from the trees out his window. One night we piled into a pick up truck to go into the desert a few miles to Deir al-Hajar, House of Stone, a Roman era temple built in the Egyptian manner, with dedications to Titus, Vespasian, Domitian, and Nero.

Just outside the enclosure wall was a water tank filled from a hot spring. We jumped in, under the stars. It was almost boiling, so it seemed. The air was very cold. We were in the desert. Cold air. Hot water. I was misinformed. Ghalat. Error. Spelled with a ghayn.

Seeking the Waters at Deir al Hajar in Dakhla Oasis,

A Tifoultoute Night

Bentley: What is it, Major Lawrence, that attracts you personally to the desert?

Lawrence: It's clean.

Bentley: Well, now, that's a very illuminating answer.

March 2003. On the Route of the Kasbahs, from Telouet to Ait Benhaddou, from Taourirt to Ait Ben Moro. From New York I thought I had made a reservation for the night at an out-of-the-way kasbah I’d found in the book, where the cast of Lawrence of Arabia had been billeted during the Morocco scenes shot in 1961. Tifoultoute. I had called the telephone number listed in my old guide, an aged voice had answered and I thought we had agreed on a room for four, two adults and two children, and a date. Was my French so bad? Was his?

We arrived late at the Kasbah’s half closed outer gate which I pushed and drove through. The main door was open but the reception area looked a mess. Unswept. No answer. Finally an elderly woman came, I said we had arrived. She said welcome, I said we’d like tea on the terrace, below the spire where the storks had built their nest, she said waha. We climbed stairs that had not been cleaned in years and watched the stork parents make strange stork noises towards their unseen young in the nest as the sun set.

I got up to find the lady and said we’d like to see our rooms. She looked worried. I said I’d made a reservation from America. She looked more worried. She showed us to one of the second floor rooms along the inner courtyard overlooking the reception. It had multiple beds, all unmade. I asked for sheets. She gave us rough Berber blankets. I asked when and where we could have dinner. The children were hungry. She looked worried again and said to wait in the room, she would call us.

From our window overlooking the outer courtyard I saw a bus unloading tourists who entered the reception room below which had been quickly set with low tables and stools. Food trays were also unloaded from the bus. A music group and line of dancers were waiting there.

I went downstairs to find our table. There was nothing for us. Wait, I was told. The floor show began, a spirited ahidous, the kind Paul Bowles had driven down from Tangier to see and record, in which he almost fainted because of the heat and claustrophobic press of spectators, a night he said “of fire and drums”. We watched from the railing above. I went down again to ask for dinner. A tray was brought up, one large bowl with boiled egg and rice, four spoons, and a pitcher of water. One glass. The music and dance ended, the tourists left, we ate in the room and slept. In the morning I looked for the lady, no one was there. We walked down the stairs and called again. Nothing. We left.

The desert was clean, of yellow sand. Kasbah Tifoultoute was less clean, of mud brick. Now I hear it is completely renovated. And cleaner.

Khodja and the Hijras

Having heard a story about a faraway land where all people walk naked Khodja was horrified: - “How can they tell a man from a woman! Poor people!”

-from a collection of sayings by Wise Fool Khodja, from Turkish Folklore

“But the hijras are not merely ordinary, impotent men. As performers, they are seen as vehicles of the divine power of the Mother Goddess.”

- Neither Man nor Woman, the Hijras of India, by Serena Nanda

Neither Man nor Woman. Third Gender. Dimorph. Intersex. Poor Khodja. How is he to know? Clothes won’t tell him the whole story anyway, not if he is looking at a sari-clad troupe of hijras singing and dancing door to door on commercial streets and into private homes, giving blessings and seeking alms to a tambourine’s beat.

Hijras may be India’s third sex but they mostly show up to tease its first sex and to celebrate its second. They come to bless newborn boys and sing such verses as these after a healthy delivery when all are in good cheer, to mock the fruit of the mother’s labor, as recorded by anthropologist Nanda…”What will this first male child be when he grows up? Headache, yes yes. Heartburn, yes. I cannot sit down, I cannot stand up. How will the pregnancy be? I’ll throw up, yes yes.” They come also to a groom’s house to sing lyrics, all in good fun, accusing him of being illegitimately born, of darker skin than the bride, of being too skinny to deserve such a beauty- all the while she listens in, blushing and knowing that hijras speak the truth..

I remember being in a dusty shop once when a hijra troupe came in, first I thought they were gaudily dressed Hare Krishnas, but no, they had no shaved heads. They were coming in advance of the Holi festival, when pockets are full and people are generous. Their singing was joyous and raucous, the customers did not mind the impromptu, the shopkeeper gladly opened the till, and out they happily went. No Khodja, there were no Poor People in that store. No one seemed to care if they were neither man nor woman.

Curator of Coins

“'Yonder is the Sahib.' said Kim, and dodged sideways among the cases of the arts and manufacturers wing. A white-bearded Englishman was looking at the lama, who gravely turned and saluted him… ‘Come to my office awhile.' The old man was trembling with excitement. The office was but a little wooden cubicle partitioned off from the sculpture-lined gallery. Kim laid himself down, his ear against a crack in the heat-split cedar door, and, following his instinct, stretched out to listen and watch. Most of the talk was altogether above his head.”

-when the Lama meets the Museum director, a stand-in for Kipling’s father Lockwood

The Lahore Museum’s Additional Director is a fascinating and widely-published numismatist named Naushaba Anjum, Keeper of the world famous Coins Collection held in a wood-paneled and red velvet-upholstered private room off the main gallery wing through a secret door. Ms. Anjum was brought up in this room as a protégée several generations removed of R.B. Whitehead, the great British scholar whose 2 volume catalog of the Museum’s (then known as the Punjab Museum) Indo-Greek and Mughal coins remains Ms. Anjum’s lodestar. Her life’s work is to bring the century old catalog up to date.

But Ms. Anjum is a far cry from Kipling’s white bearded museum director and father figure. Her hair is raven colored and drops below her waist, her face is made up like a knowing doll’s- cheek-rouged, lip-lined, eyebrow-penciled, and her voice’s register high and enthusiastic, not the hushed and muffled scholar-talk of a desk-bound curator.

The gold bangles dripping off her wrists and chains off her neck speak of a woman who dresses to impress the even weightier gold she hefts daily in the palms of her hands- such as a 2nd C. Kanishka coin with an Iranian kingly title, a 4th C. Samudragupta coin depicting horse sacrifice, and the Mughal Emperor Akbar’s, Jahangir’s, and Bahadur’s Islamic text and Zodiacal coins. Ask her about other rarities and stand-outs- Indo-Bactrian, Indo-Sythian, Indo-Kushan, and Indo-Parthian- and she will talk for an hour, and let you hold examples of each one in your own palm. Two stern assistants stand an eagle-eyed watch behind her.

The obverse of a 2nd C. BC Bactrian coin minted by King Eucratides shows a paired portrait of his parents, with his mother Loadice alone wearing a diadem proving that she alone of the two was of royal blood. Something that only Ms. Anjum, and something of a queen herself, would notice.

Hungry in the Wonder House

‘Ah! The Wonder House! Can any enter?' 'It is written above the door—all can enter.'

“Kim clicked round the self-registering turnstile; the old man followed and halted amazed. In the entrance-hall stood the larger figures of the Greco-Buddhist sculptures done, savants know how long since, by forgotten workmen whose hands were feeling, and not unskillfully, for the mysteriously transmitted Grecian touch. There were hundreds of pieces, friezes of figures in relief, fragments of statues and slabs crowded with figures that had encrusted the brick walls of the Buddhist stupas and viharas of the North Country and now, dug up and labelled, made the pride of the Museum.

- from the first pages of Kim, Rudyard Kipling

The Starving Buddha aka Fasting Buddha aka Emaciated Buddha is the star attraction in the Lahore Museum. Devout Japanese tourists have cried at the locked door when they arrived after closing hours. Asian art collectors from America quell their fears of terrorism to see it and it alone, even if all the other treasures in the Museum’s Gandharan Gallery were to be off view. It is alleged that one overeager conservator took it upon himself to fix with a messy glue job a crack in the left arm, which like the right is carved free standing unlike most other depictions including the headless one in New York’s Metropolitan Museum, that had long ago been made probably at the time of excavation in 1894.

The Lahore image is extraordinary because of the Gandharan signature perfection of the garment’s drapes and folds- seen here in the fabric creases over the legs and elbows that are carried over to the bony ribs and sinewed neck floating above the contrasting ovoid stomach cavity, also echoed in the equally empty eye sockets.

Kim’s lama is in appearance not unlike the Starving Buddha, “dressed in fold upon fold of dingy stuff”, "his eyes turned up at the corners and looked like little slits of onyx”, “his thousand-wrinkled face.” How was the moment of recognition between the two? But no, the lama did not stop there, but rather at another image…

“In open-mouthed wonder the lama turned to this and that, and finally checked in rapt attention before a large alto-relief representing a coronation or apotheosis of the Lord Buddha. The Master was represented seated on a lotus the petals of which were so deeply undercut as to show almost detached. Round Him was an adoring hierarchy of kings, elders, and old-time Buddhas. Below were lotus-covered waters with fishes and water-birds. Two butterfly-winged devas held a wreath over His head; above them another pair supported an umbrella surmounted by the jewelled headdress of the Bodhisat.”

…as if the lama was too terrified to stand before hell on earth, and instead opted for heaven in heaven.

The Sultan of Tajourah's So-Called Life

“The Sultan of Tajura had asked me to meet him, so at 5 o’clock I came back to the commandant’s house. The Sultan, a good-looking young man in an immaculate white robe and closely wound white turban, had a quiet-spoken dignity, unlike our host [the French commandant], who waved his hands about, lit one cigarette from another, and hardly stopped talking- mostly about the advantages of a refrigerator.”

-Wilfred Thesiger, Danakil Diary, May 20th, 1934

Thesiger ended his trip down from the Ethiopian plateau in the village of Tajourah, on the Gulf of that same name where almost fifty years earlier Arthur Rimbaud began his own caravan, heading upwards, waiting almost 9 months there, first for the rifles and pack camels, and then for a suitable European travelling companion. At this same time his prose poems Illuminations were published in Paris, his name there almost forgotten. Rimbaud’s impression of the Sultan, an Afar with 11 sons named Ibrahim Abou Bekr, was not good- “the most incorrigible bandit in all Africa”.

Nineteen years ago I was first in Tajourah, I stayed with the Sultan in an extra room of his house. It was Ramadan so the evening hours were filled with visitors to what passed as his throne room, a bare hall with cushions thrown against the walls. Much coffee, much tea, much qat. I asked the Sultan a few questions, about his duties, when as a shaman he assumes the form of a hyena to prowl through his realm looking for the news of the night.

I lost the thread of his French, my translator’s mouth was full of leaves so he couldn’t talk much anyway, and I wandered into the room next door where the hurma, the hareem, the womenfolk were watching satellite tv, from Paris, a show dubbed into French called My So-Called Life, written by a college classmate. I stuck with the women and Clare Danes over the hyena in the men’s room- their stories, their chewable stimulants, and their guttural Afar exclamations could wait until my other life called.

Fast forward ten years to 2010, I was back in Tajourah with an American tour group, I asked our driver to set an audience with the Sultan, it was agreed and we arrived and took our seats, now in a proper throne room with high back chairs ringing the perimeter. I told the Sultan that I had met him before, that I came to give him greetings and for him to meet retired Americans, all over 65 years. The group introduced themselves one by one, some were former lawyers, some former bankers, one had worked on a Detroit assembly line.

When we were exiting the room, an aged retainer stepped forward, he said that he recognized me from before, he told me in which room I had slept and what questions I had asked. And he remembered that I liked to watch television, beaucoup de télé.

The Sultan and Me

A Maharajah Without Elephants, as Best I Can Remember

Oh, come on Mother. It’s going to be a great adventure. A maharajah, we’re going to be the guests of a maharajah. Why, he’s so rich I guess he just has no idea how much money he’s got. And jewels. And elephants. Only think.”

-from The Murder of the Maharajah by H.R.F. Keating

New Years Eve 2006, we and the children were invited to celebrate at the Mehrangarh Palace with the Maharajah of Jodhpur, as were all guests at his Umaid Bahwan hotel. Seventeen foot long turban wraps were distributed to men and boys alike. I had previously shaken hands with the maharajah in London while visiting an art gallery which every Saturday at closing hosted bridge games- I was there to look at art, not to play.

A bus took us up the rocky crag to the steeply pitched and portcullised front gate. From there we walked, the children almost skipping. On the curving and corkscrewing approach to the palace proper we passed side niches staffed by singers, shenai players (Bismillah Khan had died that year), hijra dancers, and most important, attendants bearing ewers of opium water poured directly into the guests’ cupped hands. I slurped like a horse, not like a cat that was expected of me, and I recall little else of the evening. Ask the children for details. There were likely to have been jewels. Even I would have remembered the elephants, which I do not.

Will Buttigieg Lay an Egg?

Il-bierah kilt tiġieġa u llum bajda moqlija.    Yesterday I ate a hen and today a fried egg.

It-tiġieġa hija u tixrob tiżżħajr ‘l Alla.  The hen when drinking gives thanks to God. [because it always lifts its head high afterward]

Tiġieġa hawtiela bajjada. An active hen is a a good egg layer.

-from A Comparative Dictionary of Maltese Proverbs, Joseph Aquilina

Abu Dajaj [Father of Poultry, from Arabic], Buttigieg, Tiġieġa…look familiar?

Buttigieg is a common surname in Malta’s smaller island of Gozo, which if true makes Mayor Pete a Gozitano. I remember spending a cold rain-drizzling afternoon in an English pub in Gozo’s main town of Victoria- renamed from its Arabic-derived Maltese toponym of Rabat- after seeing in the nearby Museum of Archaeology the Maymunah Stone, a 12th C. Arab period headstone with an inscription extolling the deceased, a girl named Maymunah who died March 21, 1174, carved in Kufic letters on the back side of a Roman era marble slab with a rose carved on the front.

The inscription reads…

“In the name of Allah, the merciful and compassionate. May He be propitious to the Prophet Muhammad and to his followers and grant them eternal salvation. God is great and eternal and He has decreed that his creatures should perish. Of this the prophet of Allah bears witness. This is the tomb of Maymūnah, daughter of Hassān, son of ‘Ali al-Hudali, known as Ibn as-Susi. She died – Allah's mercy be upon her – on Thursday 16th day of the month of Sha'ban in the year 569, professing that there is only one God who has no equal. Look around you! Is there anything everlasting on earth; anything that repels or casts a spell on death? Death robbed me from a palace and, alas, neither doors nor bolts could save me. All I did in my lifetime remains, and shall be reckoned. O He who looks upon this tomb! I am already consumed inside it, and dust has settled on my eyes. On my couch in my abode there is nothing but tears, and what is to happen at my resurrection when I shall appear before my Creator? O my brother, be wise and repent.”

Buttigieg said he picked up some Arabic as part of his military training. But maybe he has Arab blood in his veins dating from Maymunah’s time….Was perhaps one of his Gozitano ancestors known as Abu Maymunah before he became the Father of Poultry?

A Clammy, Swooning Climate on the Hot Seat

Anuradhapura..."Those great assemblages of pillars, the storied Mahawansa, the humped dagobas, are not excessively beautiful in themselves, in spite of carved balustrades, 
carved moon-shaped stone slabs, sculptured Buddhas and ele- 
phants; what gives them aesthetic charm is their situation, jungle- 
surrounded, barely reclaimed, the green sward on which they 
stand, the scattered lakes, the delicious stone baths, the clammy, 
swooning climate which lies like warm, scented flowers on forest 
and clearing, the frisking monkeys, and, above all, the long reaches 
of the mysterious, exotic past, winding like a dimly seen river 
through green enjungled silence to the gorgeous heyday of 
royal and priestly magnificence of two thousand years ago, and 
beyond that to the earliest beginnings, when the bo-tree took 
root." 

-The Pleasure of Ruins, by Rose Macaulay

I felt no clammy, swooning climate or warm scented flowers- just raw, dry, baking heat. I heard no enjungled silence, only a pilgrim’s inner voice saying Ouch! Ow! Ouf! as he hurried in bare feet along the hot bricks of the sun-drenched path. The green sward was parched to brown dead grass, the delicious stone baths were half evaporated, and the fresh lime plaster of the humped Ruvanvelisaya dagoba blazed dead white under the midday sun.

Rose Macaulay was the queen of overstatement on the subject of the best and biggest of all the world’s ruined building, but she did not personally visit everything she wrote about. Not Anuradhapura certainly, for even sixty five years ago when she was writing The Pleasure of Ruins the jungle had been cleared and the ruined stupas had been fully reclaimed.

To walk from the shaded precinct of the bo tree to the Ruvanvelisaya stupa takes only ten minutes, but each step seems an eternity with bare feet on the brick paved path’s heated iron griddle. I should have worn socks or even better five finger running shoes. That may have fooled the watchful monks enforcing the stupa’s visitation rules, and certainly made it easier for a visitor such as I, so easily distracted from the highest sublime towards my lowest bodily part, to concentrate on the Buddha’s sacred footprint rather than on my own scorching feet.

To Mopti- With My Bootlace Up the Muffler

“…I had but little hopes of subsisting by charity in a country where the Moors have such influence. But above all I perceived that I was advancing more and more within the power of those merciless fanatics, and from my reception at Ségou I was apprehensive that in attempting to reach even Djenné, I should sacrifice my life to no purpose, for my discoveries would perish with me. The prospect of either way was gloomy.”

-The Travels of Mungo Park, 1799

My friend and I were in Bamako and needed to get to Mopti in a hurry, but with a few stops in between where we wished to make them, and when. I let out word at our hotel that we would hire a car and driver for a single day outbound. When the jalopy pulled up in front, I winced but checked its tires and dipsticks. OK they seemed. The driver was a young kid, he gave me a line that it was his “friend’s” vehicle, that it ran well, we could leave whenever I wanted and we’d be in Mopti by nightfall even with our planned stop overs.

We set off to the east towards the town of Ségou- a name familiar to any high schooler ever assigned to read but didn’t Maryse Condé‘s novel of the same name- where we planned to buy kola nuts to give out to the Tuareg chiefs in the Gourma region’s elephant country under the Boucle du Niger, the Niger River’s Buckle where it turns sharply north then immediately south again.

After Ségou we made sure to see Djenné, famous for its mud mosque but a bit off piste. But oh boy, the pneus and the chambres à air, they kept popping, puncturing, deflating and flattening, and we kept stopping at every roadside fix shop on Mali’s RN6. A dollar here, a dollar there, an hour here, an hour there, and we were way behind whatever schedule you try to keep in Mali. I came up with a few choice curses from way back, most beginning with the word maudit- in fact, not so bad. The driver just shrugged.

Just when we thought we were in the clear to fly down the Route Nationale, the muffler started dragging, grinding on the tarmac and sparking up enough to start a fire. We pulled off and the driver looked underneath, shrugged some more, I told him we needed wire to hold it up. Pas de fil, pas de cable, said he.

I untied my bootlace and handed it over, he crawled under and tied it up. We got to Djenné just after dark, the mosque’s facade was dimly illuminated as if by magic fairy bulbs, we got beds in a fleabag for the night, and at dawn found the mosque’s plaza multi-colored with marchandes wearing the most wildly electrified m’boubous under the Malian sun.

We got to Sévaré, Mopti’s crossroads, by noon. The driver wanted to be paid for the extra day, I told him it was his fault we were a day delayed but I paid double anyway, plus a tip. Just before he pulled out, on the hunt for return Bamako fares I guessed, I asked for my bootlace back. He shrugged for the last time, ducked under and handed it over, and burned the little rubber left he couldn’t afford to lose with a tire screech and the muffler’s sparks flying out behind like from a roman candle. At least my boots fit well again. I’d need them later in the boucle I guessed, and I was right.

Djenné Mosque

Arriving Agades in the Dark

“The road was now becoming frequented; and my companions with a certain feeling of pride showed me in the distance the high “Mesallaje”, or minaret, the glory of Agades…But arriving at a new place at night is never very pleasant and must be less so where there are no lamps; it therefore took us some time to make ourselves fairly comfortable…Having spread my mat and carpet on the floor, I slept well, in the pleasing consciousness of having successfully reached this first object of my desires, and dreaming of the new sphere of inquiry on which I had entered.”

-Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa, 1848-1855, Henry Barth

Barth arrived in Agades, the first European ever to do so, in the dark as did I. My friend and I had pulled into Niamey on a two day bus en brousse from Gao and needed to hurry on to Agades. The station master said we had to wait for a 9 person van to fill and it would leave immediately after, I told him we would pay for an additional seat each, so we needed 5 more passengers before setting off on the overnight drive.

I was impatient, it was getting late, but was told that few ever started that long trip- about 15 hours- in the evening. Better to wait til morning, he said. I knew from reading Peace Corps veteran Peter Chilson’s harrowing book on Nigerien bush taxi drivers, Riding the Demon, not to press one’s luck on the road at night.

I said we would pay for the whole van, all nine seats, so he rounded up the driver and co-driver and we set out from the bus parking. At the exit a few men were standing by hoping for a part way lift, which were not permitted from inside, but it was up to each driver to say yes or no once underway. I told the driver to consider the entire van full, no room at all, and any empty seat he saw had a phantom passenger I had paid for. But a boy stood out from the crowd at the gate, he said he was going pretty far up the road, to Dogondoutchi or some such place, so I told him it was ok to get on.

About an hour outside of Niamey, as dusk was settling in, we pulled off to eat in a roadside joint and bought plates of meat for the boy and the drivers. When dark was nearing we set out again, and I dozed off across the 3 person rear seat with my friend stretched out in the middle seat.

I didn’t know what finally woke me up, but when I came to I was squeezed upright between three people in the rear, my friend was squeezed the same way in the middle, and there must have been at least fifteen of us altogether. The drivers and the front seat passengers were having a loud conversation.

We were moving fast on a narrow tarmac road, good goudron as they said, through open ground, no electric lights, a few lamps lit at roadside. My watch read after midnight, a good 7 hours after we first set out from Niamey. Brighter lights ahead, Tahoua, halfway to Agades, from here forward bare desert another 6 hours. “We rest here a bit,” said the driver, “Don’t leave your seat, or we may leave you.”

I think I counted the time until we left, it was less than an hour, and we were back on the road in our flying coffin, as share taxis are called in Egypt. My legs were bent and achy, I elbowed my seatmates to mover over, to no effect. It was my van after all, all mine, but I was outnumbered. One in fifteen, or two in fifteen if you counted my friend in the middle seat, lucky to be deep asleep.

Dawn’s first streak came as we barreled down the Agades Depression toward the Aïr Massif which stands behind the town like a bodyguard and the sun was inching up when we pulled through the scrappy outskirts into the city center. And there it stood- tall, mud plastered, stuck with wood spars like a pin cushion- the minaret of Agades, the sight I had come all this way through the night to see. Now for breakfast, having wished that I, like Barth, could have slept on the floor last night.

My Bawaab's Unripe Dates

basara (v), to scowl, to frown

busr, pl. bisaar (n), unripe dates

baasuur, pl. bawaasiir (n), hemorrhoids

-A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic by Hans Wehr

Ahmad was the bawaab for my building on Darih Sa’d Street. He sat in the front and lived on the roof, he wore a rarely washed gallabiya and a ta’iyya, he kept his wife hidden behind a door and his dentures in his pocket. I learned many new vocabulary words from him, some dirty, some clean, but not how to pronounce them correctly. No teeth.

One day he was absent, and then the next and the next. Mahmoud the Makwagi, ironing man, who worked next door said that Ahmad had gone to Qasr al-Aini hospital for an operation- ‘amal ‘amaliyya, “they operated an operation”. I knew that expression because they had done the same to me on my collapsed lung a few months earlier. They did it to Ahmad on his bawaasiir, a word I had to look up, a broken plural.

Mahmoud said Ahmad was in Ward 5. I wanted to visit the hospital, Cairo’s big public hospital where people go to die, as the colloquial expression said it, but mostly to see if Qasr al-Aini was any better than Agouza Hospital, where they had operated an operation on me.

Ahmad had no teeth because he liked sugar. You can get your Egyptian sugar fix easiest by eating basbousa, a semolina cake soaked in sugar syrup. I went to a sweets bakery and bought a kilo and a half, wrapped up like a wedding gift, and took it to the place people go to die.

I found Ward 5, jammed with maybe 15 beds, and walked up and down at their feet looking for Ahmad. His face was even more shriveled than usual, without his dentures and with no food. He smiled at me, and played a “Woe is me” card. I didn’t buy it and handed over the package.

He didn’t know what was inside, so he unwrapped it hoping maybe for a new gallabiya or something imported. Instead, just three pounds of basbousa. Which he could not eat. Doctor’s orders. So he passed it around to his ward mates and they had a big sugar rush party. Broken bones and puncture wounds don’t impose Nothing by Mouth restrictions. Most Egyptians would not follow them anyway with so much basbousa in the room.

When Ahmad came home a few days later, I tried out my new joke on him, calling him Abu Bawaasiir, which did not go over well at all. In fact it hurt his feelings. So I did not have any use for that word until 5 years later in the Sudanese desert, when a camel thief came riding up to our camp in a strange looking saddle I’d never seen before, a kind of carved wooden cup, called a baasuur.

I was not sure if it was spelled the same way as the word I had learned in Qasr al-Aini Hospital. The people I was with could not spell. But it made sense. Riding camels all your life can give you a bad case of hemorrhoids. Maybe riding in a baasuur helps you avoid bawaasiir. Just ask Ahmad, I think he’ll know.

Now I am 'Genza

“On the evening of 20 June 1949, at Qena in the Nile Valley, I hired a donkey cart for my luggage and walked up with it to the Desert Outpost, a mile or two northwards across the low desert in the mouth of Wadi Qena. Three Arab guides who had come down from the mountains were waiting for me there…”

-from The Red Sea Mountains of Egypt, Leo Tregenza

In 1997 I traveled in Egypt for a week with 72 year old Salama Mir’i and his nephew Soliman along the Via Porphyrites, connecting the Roman imperial porphyry quarry at Jebel Abu Dukhan in the Red Sea Mountains with the Nile River port of Qena.

I was following the footsteps of Leo Tregenza, a teacher in Egypt after WW2 who spent his summer vacations not back in his native Wales but rather bashing up and down the wadis between the Red Sea and the Nile River, seeking out the secrets of Mons Porphyrites, the world’s only known source of that rare white crystal-speckled, deep purple stone, and Mons Claudianus, a granodiorate (a stone similar to granite) quarry from where came the cool white monolithic columns in Rome’s Pantheon, Santa Maria in Trastevere, and Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli.

Joe Hobbs insisted that I read Leo’s book before setting out, just as I had read Joe’s Bedouin Life in the Egyptian Wilderness, an ethnobotanical study of the Ma’aza bedouin in whose territory these quarries are located. Leo’s book was a delightful account of desert walking and discovery from a man who evidently needed to escape from the classroom as far as possible during his off hours.

Joe also put me in contact with a Ma’aza man named Salih, who had organized his own travels several years earlier. I wrote to Salih in care of a petrol station outside Hurghada, there being no other way, and told him that I would need his help in outfitting a camel excursion through the wadi system. Joe told me not to expect an answer but I might count on Salih being ready to help whenever I did arrive. And sure enough, Salih was waiting with a pickup truck when I arrived, and drove me a few miles out in the wadi to meet Salama and Soliman and their camels and readied provisions.

My trip with the two was very pleasant, we covered a lot of ground, shared many stories at night, and because of my snoring I was banished by my cousin-cum-traveling companion to sleep far from the campfire. No need for that, said Salama, because “al-nayyim huwa al-sultan”- he who sleeps is the sultan. Several times we ran out of supplies- macaroni, water, and ghee- and my cousin and I howled plaintively but also as a running joke shouted into the wind at any given moment, “Fayn Salih?”, Where is Salih?, who had promised to check in with us from time to time but always ran late.

One of Salama’s stories involved an Englishman he called ‘Genza, with whom he when younger had traveled through these same parts, who always slept and ate apart from the fire, opening cold cans of bully beef instead of sharing bedouin bread and porridge. ‘Genza, I thought, he must have been Leo. But Salama could not remember much more than that.

When I returned home, Joe gave me Leo’s telephone number for his cottage in Wales. He was hard of hearing and slow to move, so let the phone ring a long time, advised Joe. I would tell Leo about meeting Salama, and Salama’s memories of the old days, and how Soliman might remember me for the same strange ways- for my snoring, for my shouting into the wind- fifty years on.

The phone rang, Leo picked up, it was true he was hard of hearing, and when I finally made it understood that I had met one of his traveling companions from fifty years back, he said, “Next time you see those men, tell them that I think of them every day.”

I tried to imagine what Leo’s retirement years were like, living under a damp cottage’s low ceiling far from the starry canopy and bone dry air of the Egyptian Red Sea hills. And I thought then, how sad that after fifty years this is what he thinks about every day. But now that I am closer to Leo’s age in retirement than I am to what had been my own age with Salama and Soliman in the wadis, I catch myself likewise thinking of those men almost every day, and being happy and lucky to do so.

Smoking Hash in Darb al-Ahmar with My Teacher

“The leaves and capsules of hemp, called in Egypt “hasheesh”…The habit is now very common among the lower orders in the metropolis and other towns of Egypt. The preparation of hemp used for smoking generally produces boisterous mirth. Few inhalations of its smoke, but the last very copious, are usually taken from the gozeh [a water pipe with a hollow reed as the draw stem and often with an old motor oil can as the base, used more commonly by the poor, in contrast to the glass base and woven flexible hose type pipe used by the upper class] .

After emission of the last draught from the mouth and nostrils, commonly a fit of coughing, and often a spitting of blood, ensues. Hasheesh is to be obtained not only at some of the coffee shops, there are shops of a smaller and more private description solely appropriated to the sale of this and other intoxicating preparations- they are called “mahshesh’ehs”. It is sometimes amusing to observe the ridiculous conduct and to listen to the conversation of the persons who frequent these shops. They are all of the lower orders.”

-Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836), Edward Lane

Hash in my first time in Cairo was sold by the qirsh weight (an old piaster coin, one hundredth of an Egyptian pound) in the back streets of Darb al-Ahmar [Red Quarter], one of Cairo’s inner-most districts with the highest population density, oldest dwellings, and most twisting blocked alleys and mental map maddening cul-de-sacs of the whole city.

In 1979 I knew no mahshesh’ehs, I probably would not have been welcome in one anyway to order up a hash pipe, so it was easier to buy an qirsh of hash on the street and take it to a coffee house and ask the mu’allim, or waiter (literally “teacher”) to set me up with a gozeh and a load mixed with mu’assal, a plug of vegetable glycerol-rubbed tobacco (literally “honeyed”).

I don’t remember ever coughing or spitting blood, although I still can taste the gozeh’s Mobil motor oil dregs, because no doubt the water pipe was doing its job correctly to cool the smoke before it hit my throat. I also don’t remember having any ridiculous conversations, in any language- although speaking first year Arabic under such conditions would probably have seemed extremely funny- when high- it was more likely I gently nodded off after jotting a new vocab word or two in my notebook.

But I do remember repeatedly calling out, Ya mu’allim, Ya mu’allim, O Teacher, in my attempt to call over the waiter to refreshen my pipe’s dying lump of charcoal. And all of us, straight tobacco and hash smokers alike, called him over at the same time, as if to make a mockery of his divided attention and skilled hand at reviving the pipes, so that the coffee house’s tight confines echoed with this beseeching student chorus, located as we were right outside the back wall of Al-Azhar mosque and university, Islam’s oldest and most venerable, where a different type of teaching taught by a different type of teacher offered a much different lesson.

Yugoslavia before (the) Split

“…for the first time [I] recognized the fly blown, dusty, waking dream atmosphere that lingers in the Balkan districts where the Turk has been. In this hotel I found the most westward Turkish lavatory I have ever encountered, a hole in the floor with a depression for a foot on each side of it, and a tap that sends water flowing along a groove laid with some relevance to the business in hand. It is efficient enough in a cleanly kept household, but it is disconcerting in its proof that there is more than one way of doing absolutely anything.”

- Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West, Chapter on Mostar

We arrived by overnight ferry from Venice to Split in September 1990, a year before Yugoslavia’s real split began in earnest, but with so many flags flying wildly trailed behind honking caravans of cars driven even more wildly by young men through Diocletian’s narrow streets that even I was scared. I stupidly thought they were soccer fans cheering on rival teams. In a way, they were, for a game yet to begin.

We rented a car and set off for Dubrovnik, the Bay of Kotor, the Montenegrin prelatic capital of Cetinje, Sarajevo, and Mostar of the Stari Most, or Old Bridge- said by Evliya Celebi to be “like a rainbow arch soaring up to the skies”. This was at the end of communism but before hotel rooms had been upgraded from their concrete bunker-like decor and restaurant menus had been translated from the Cyrillic. Was it safe to order Serbian salads in Croatia, as long as you didn’t say the word but only pointed? We never did find out.

I remember Mostar’s bridge, and the boys jumping off into what seemed like the Neretva River’s smallest puddles below. I remember too the Ottoman mosque and minarets on the eastern Muslim side and not much about the western Croat side. I don’t remember the bathrooms, or the hotel rooms, or the restaurant menus.

Syracuse University professor Azra Hromadzic’s Citizens of an Empty Nation, an ethnography of Mostar’s high school integrated on paper by fiat but still only a phony integration, says that "the only place where students of different ethnicities come across each other is the school toilet…That is the place where they come for a secret cigarette. I just discovered that by accident while I was doing my research at the school. There are no professional guidelines on how to conduct an ethnographic study in a toilet."

The book has a chapter entitled “Bathroom Mixing”, with this as its take-away- “Pushing the school bathroom to the forefront of discussion about a postwar society illuminates how internationally guided state-making policies reinforce war-generated ethnic homogenization of territory that historically never existed as uniform.” Professor Hromadzic, you first should have read Rebecca West to learn there is more than one way of doing absolutely nothing.

Rukaab, or Riders in the Desert

The various Libyan nations inhabit their territories in the following order. Going west from Egypt, the first inhabitants of Libya one comes upon are the Adyrmachidians. The customs they follow the most are those of the Egyptians…Whenever they catch lice on themselves, they bite them back before throwing them away.

-The Histories of Herodotus, Book IV

KhairAllah only scolded me once in forty days, and I deserved it. I was sitting at the fireside, feeling itchy, my skin was crawling, and I reached into my sweater and pulled out a tick, a raakib (pl. rukaab ) as he called it, a rider. I threw it into the fire. “Why?” he asked. “Don’t do that again. They too are God’s creatures, just like you and me. And they too are riders, also just like you and me.”