Iskandariyya Why?

No, first of all let him say hello, with a new and unexpected appreciation, to Alexandria. “Mahatta Ramleh”, he directed the driver.

As for beggars and bashas, they were like wallpaper in a house. One soon ceased to notice them, and one rarely asked what degree of moral or aesthetic hardening that obliviousness implied.

-Academic Year, D.J. Enright, a novel about an English teacher in Alexandria

Alexandria, I am here. On the fourth floor I ring the bell of the flat. The little judas opens, showing Mariana’s face. Much changed, my dear! It’s dark on the landing; she does not recognize me. Her white face and golden hair gleam in the light from the window open somewhere behind her. “Pension Miramar?” “Yes, monsieur?” “Do you have any vacant rooms?” The door opens.

-Miramar, Naguib Mahfouz

I spent an academic year in Cairo, and Egypt was getting me down. Since the word for Cairo used by most Cairenes is the same word they use for Egypt, from time to time I had to get out of Masr and go away to Iskandariyya. For that you had to go “down”, I mean “north”… let’s just say I had to go bahri, seaward. My cousin was visiting so we went seaward together.

We checked into a pension on the corniche that could have been in a Naguib Mahfouz novel. In fact he wrote one about this place. Miramar, with old timer pensioners sitting around the common room, its windows thrown open to the Mediterranean breeze, all complaining about their aches and pains and Nasser and his revolution. They preferred the king and wanted him and his days to return. The place certainly had not been cleaned since Farouk left, or even since Nasser died. That was eight years ago

I liked getting off the train in Alex, it was as if Cairo had never existed or was in another country. There were horse drawn carriages waiting at the curb, caleches you called them there, since Alex was much more francophone than Cairo. And also Hellenophilic. I was amazed to see three Greek papers for sale in the news kiosk in Mahatta Ramleh, just outside a taverna serving ouzo not zabeeb, with white table cloths and waiters in bow ties and whole fish in ice trays at the front door. It could have been Athens.

And just as in the Mahfouz novel, the pension’s desk clerk was a real misanthrope. A grouch and a complainer. And even worse, totally unimpressed that I spoke to him in what I thought was my pretty good Arabic. He must not have believed that I understood what he said to me, because he would turn to the old timers in the common room’s lounge chairs and make jokes about the dumb khawaja. Especially that I didn’t like.

So I did something I had never done before and never will again. I left without paying. On our third or fourth day, when it was time to check out, my cousin waited downstairs on the sidewalk while I went up to the room. The desk clerk scowled and didn’t answer my greeting. I threw our bags out the window to my waiting cousin and left the room again. Back soon, I told the clerk. Back to Masr. And as in that great Youssef Chahine film, Iskandariyya…leh? Alexandria…Why?

Qu’est-ce qu’il y a?

1. The Desert. Only mountains, rocks, sand. 2. A small village. Muck-colored houses. Figures go by, women with pots on their heads, children, camels, dust, men in long white robes, others in blue robes, other in black. And some soldiers. Everyday life. 3. A small street. A light wind blows curls of sand into the air…Nearby there is an old, rather battered car. Inside it there is a man, David Locke. Thirty three years old. Unshaven. There is a tape recorder on the seat beside him, and a case for a 16mm camera on the seat behind.

Locke: Je peux vous parler un moment?

Man: Qu’est-ce qu’il y a?

Locke doesn’t answer directly.

Locke: Vous êtes Musulman, n’est-ce pas?

Man: Oui

-The Passenger, Michelangelo Antonioni, opening scene

We all ate out of the same bowl and drank from the same water skin for thirty nine days. Maseehi and Muslim. Kababeesh and Cape Codder- David was from Barnstable. A man from Bara and a Brincetonian- Arabs can’t pronounce their “p”s. Even Adam Hamid of the Hamari tribe, the youngest drover in our group, fell in with our common eating, drinking, snoring, and shitting. Until Day 39.

We were close to Aswan by then. In Adam’s mind, whatever centripetal force brought us together out there suddenly turned centrifugal. He said he’d no longer eat with a Maseehi, a Christian. (Lucky for him he didn’t say with a Brincetonian.)

So he ostentatiously cut out a piece of aseeda and put it in a small bowl of his own and ate apart. It looked a bit silly.

And KhairAllah didn’t like it at all. His job was to keep up the esprit de corps at all times. So he got out his hippo hide whip and gave Adam a few lashes. He told him he was a young stupid idiot, that David and I had ridden and eaten and drank and snored next to him for the whole trip. And now this? So he whipped him some more. Adam came back to the common food pot, acted sullen for a few more minutes, then joined in the conversation as if nothing had happened.

I never held it against Adam, maybe because I didn’t really understand what was happening and why. Muslim? Aywa. Maseehi? Yes. Al-’itnayn ma’a ba’d. The two together, said KhairAllah.

Bint UmBahr was No Zabriskie Point

What are you waiting for to leave that crowded madhouse city? Move here today, for a new life in the healthy climate of the desert.

-Zabriskie Point, film by Michelangelo Antonioni

Early film industry publicity reports claimed Antonioni would gather 10,000 extras in the desert for the filming of the lovemaking scene but this never happened. The scene was filmed with dust-covered and highly choreographed actors from The Open Theatre. The United States Department of Justice investigated whether this violated the Mann Act – which forbade the taking of women across state lines for sexual purposes – however, no sex was filmed and no state lines were crossed, given that Death Valley is in California.

What we would have done to see 10,000 naked women at Bint UmBahr. We were almost too tired at that point to care, much less to see straight ahead or to focus our eyes on anything but a half-full water skin. Zabriskie Point was Antonioni’s answer to American capitalism, in the guise of desert real estate development run amuk.

Getting our dabouka of 150 camels up the trail to Egypt was Hajj Bashir’s Sudanese answer. He provided the capital and ran the risk. He hired the drovers and bought their supplies. He paid the permit fees and the bribes. In Sudan, his discerning eye chose those camels he thought would survive the trip. In Egypt, his bluff and bluster sold those camels for the highest price.

No naked women, no Mann Act to consider, no lovemaking en route except for one or two misguided bull camels who amazingly still had juice after walking 40 miles a day. I know I didn’t- even if our camp at Bint UmBahr, Daughter of the Mother of the Sea, had somehow been shape-shifted to Death Valley, and we had found ourselves suddenly surrounded by 10,000 dust-covered vestal virgins. Blow-up!

Zabriskie Point, Death Valley

To Sing to a Camel

On the road they are not driven with sticks and scourges, but the camel drivers walk after them, singing thus: Han na yo yo an ho ho oyo o ho, and so on.

-The Wanderings of Brother Felix Fabri Through the Holy Land, Arabia, and Egypt, 1483

Its function is to express a surge of passion on the spur of the moment. This may be a sudden recall of a past encounter, or an expression of joy or bewilderment at a given moment…or commendation of the rider’s mount, boasting, and love.

-Yousif Babiker, University of Edinburgh, on the dubayt poetical form of rural Sudan

Brother Felix should have had a better translator. That was not wordless scat singing he heard but rather finely rhymed and metered poetry, quite possibly a classical dubayt intoned as song. On the other hand, we had the best Sudanese man at the BBC who knew all the western dialects, including Kabbashi, so his understanding of the dubayt form from Dar al Kababish was excellent, and he translated this poem, sung by our drover Idris while on Day 25 of the Way of the Forty he was driving camels on foot at that day’s Mile 20, to a high level of fidelity.

Rocket, My camel of the Soviet Union,

Have you yet passed Addika?

Have you found her wadi and entered?

Have not I said to tell her that

Your rider is raving for her love?

Rocket, My camel of Sudan,

Have you yet passed Addika?

Have you found her smoky scent?

Have you told her that I am sick in love?

You deny every lad living between Kojam and this place,

Leave the water, you have slain the best of us.

Your strap is thin, your girth hangs loose.

Your rein is like an arrow aimed for gazelles.

Astride you I leave this world and all its fleeting comfort.

Beneath your rein your head glistens,

Blood boils through your neck.

Rocks strew the way to Majozer

And the morning will find you

Beyond the sands that none dare cross.

Ride 'em or Rid 'em

Either ride them or leave them alone.

-a hadith, or saying of the Prophet, as recorded by Ibn Hanbal, referring to the camels when he saw men sitting on them idly

To saddle a camel is no small task; it is rather like building a house.

-The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years, by Chingiz Aitamov

On our midday breaks, KhairAllah insisted on unsaddling our camels so they could rest or roll or graze without a weight on their backs. I thought this was not necessary, since once we’d dismounted, most of the weight they carried was gone, and they didn’t roll anyway. Other camels were always taking a dust and sand bath, but not ours.

But KhairAllah was a trail boss, khabir, a word that means expert or informed one, and he knew best how to get his men and more importantly his camels up the trail to Egypt in one piece. So we did as he said, even if we had to rebuild our house after every siesta, when all we wanted to do was to go in and close the door and take a longer rest. That’s how hot and tired we were on the trail. You can imagine how the camels felt.

Garbage or Baggage?

We now brought out all our baggage which was to be carried by the camels and began to load them. We had hitherto had no practice in the manner of doing this, neither did we understand the habits, words, or signs of the camel drivers, nor did they understand ours; wherefore for some days we loaded our beasts with many quarrels and much trouble.

-The Book of Wanderings of Brother Felix Fabri (1441-1502) Through the Holy Land, Arabia, and Egypt

The Arabic words for garbage and baggage are identical, ‘afsh, beginning with the hard-to-pronounce ‘ayn consonant. Mistaking the two can get you into a bit of trouble. I was never able to load my camel securely even after forty days. I carried the film rolls, Steve carried the sound gear, and Ned handled the camera and lens cases. We’d have hated to lose any of that, regardless of what we called it.

So we had to wait each morning for one of the drovers to finish their own chores to come over to help us with our “garbage”, as we usually correctly pronounced the right word’s wrong meaning. It always went smoothly unless that day’s drover was in a foul mood or preoccupied, in which case he would do a bad job and the girth or lashing would get loose almost immediately. They were both made of cheap plastic rope and would stretch out. Our gear was always getting loose. But we never lost any, or had any fall off our camels.

The drovers were as eager as we were to arrive safely so the film would get made. They wanted to be in it, to be up on screen, maybe to see it at El Obeid’s outdoor cinema ‘Arous al Rimal, the Bride of the Sands. We wanted to make it. Leaving behind for them the occasional polaroid picture was not enough. They wanted to be bigger than that, they wanted to be in the pictures. So we put them all in it. And as I told KhairAllah at the film screening, Everybody knows you now, from New York and London, from Paris to Moscow. He had heard of those places, just as everybody in Mileet and Kutum knew of him, “a famous khabir” as he says in the film.

A Beast Gentle and Tractable

A beast gentle and tractable, but in the time of Venery; then, as if remembering his former hard usage, he will bite his Keeper, throw him down, and kick him: forty days continuing in that fury, and then returning to his former meekness.

-A Relation of a Journey Begun An. Dom. 1610, Containing a Description of the Turkish Empire, of Aegypt, of the Holy Land…. by George Sandys

Forty days of Venery! That’s a long time with something you can’t get off your mind. I know that forty is a significant number in Near Eastern religions and folklore. Forty days of fasting in the desert or forty years of wandering in the desert. We were not wandering, rather going in a straight line, as straight as the grazing permitted, but still trying to arrive within forty days.

Both times I rode the Way of the Forty, it took a bit more than that. But luckier for us, our camels were never in their time of venery. For them, it didn’t matter whether it was four, or forty, or four times forty days on the trail. No need to return to meekness when entering the abattoir. No reprieve for a camel at the end of the Darb al-Arba’een. The knife and then the fork awaited. Khilis al-jins [see April 29], then ‘itfaddal. The sex is finished, then bon appetite.

The Camel Inside and Out

The camel - a most difficult animal to draw because although pronounced in its articulations, yet in its movements most loose and undecided.

-Journal of the Society of Arts, Vol 13, April 21 1865, a review of Walton’s The Camel

Among the numerous friends who have aided me during the progress of the Work, I am happy to record my special obligations to John Patterson, Esq., MD, of Cairo…for the loan of his instruments of dissection and other valuable services.

-The Camel: Its Anatomy, Proportions, and Paces, London 1865, by Elijah Walton, watercolorist and draftsman of illustrated books offering instruction on how to paint objects of natural history such as camels, mountain geology, clouds, and other atmospheric effects

Walton spent the years 1860-62 in Egypt and the Middle East painting and dissecting camels. The 94 plates in his anatomical atlas of the camel show a close attention to the muscles, veins, and bone structure of the head, the hoof, and other body parts. He describes the anatomy unique to the camel- its nostril flap, its flexible neck, its prehensile lip- and the footprints left by its walk, run, and gallop.

I only saw one camel being butchered for meat, this one midway on the trail as it was dying of exhaustion in a couched position. Its throat was cut and its head and neck pulled taut with a halter so it would fully bleed out. We made a deep cut along its back bone, diverting the incision around the hump, from shoulder to tail, then pulled the skin free on both sides to lay it out like a picnic cloth on the ground. With that, the butchers got busy and very bloody.

I imagine what Walton’s job was like. Just as our drovers cut the meat into cook pot-size pieces and pulled the skin from the head and hoofs after we had buried them in a sand-covered fire pit over night then dug them up in the morning, so he must have done a lot of pulling and cutting. The drovers carried daggers honed sharp on both sides of the blade. Thanks to his friend Dr. Patterson, he used an autopsist’s bone saws and scalpels. Both they and he did the job of loosening the camel’s articulations and deciding where next to dissect. One did it for art’s sake, the others for dinner.

A Film About Camels and Their Men

Those dromedaries and camels which are constantly ridden and carry heavy burdens are less vicious and will sometimes even place their lips against your cheek. It is the custom of the kind master occasonally to put his face against that of his own dromedary while speaking gently to it. Moreover the Bedouin seldom or never beats his dromedary, but treats him with as much kindness as his own children. If one runs away which it sometimes does for many miles in search of food or water, he will follow it and by using soothing sounds invariably induce it to be retaken.

-The Camel: Its Anatomy, Proportions, and Paces, 1865 London, By Elijah Walton

Ned and I had a pitch meeting with Robert Gardner, hoping he would support our plan to make a movie about camelmen from Sudan driving their herd to Egypt, of how they ride for 40 days then return to Sudan by ferry and lorry to ride with another herd, doing this sometimes five times a year. I told him I knew the trail boss from a previous trip and what we expected to film of their chores and life on the trail.

The pitch failed. He said that the film should be about the camels, not the men, and the extreme injustice with which they are treated after finishing the trail- with the slaughter house as their reward, or the lucky ones with a plow harness- and not like the men with a paycheck. At the least, he told us, we should focus on how the men and camels bond on the trail.

Gardner had a point. The camels and the men did not travel separately and apart, but rather together and as one. That is why camelmen are sometimes called camel ticks, rukaab, literally meaning “riders”. I cannot say how the camels felt about their riders, and I never saw their riders express anything like love and affection for their camels, but I did see what the camels, whether they were riding camels or herd camels, gave of themselves to the men. Their freedom. And patience. And direction.

We ended up making a film that I call an anthropology film, about men, but it is really a film about their camels. And that last scene, when they are being loaded onto rail cars for shipment to Cairo slaughterhouses, all those not sold in Upper Egypt for farm work, while the drovers observe silently from a distance and Egyptians load the train with clubs and shouts and whips, is a sad one. I think Gardner was right after all.

Don't Waste Our Water

He urinates and uses his tail to swish his piss about. All this spitting, drooling, and urinating- wastage of water- can be seen as a form of conspicuous display intended to impress the female- the male camel’s equivalent of the peacock’s tail.

-Camel, by Robert Irwin

When I would leave the campsite to walk a bit into the desert to urinate, I always got a question from the drovers when I returned. Luwees, why do you stand like a camel when you piss? Camelmen wore sirwaal pants without zippers, so they would have had to drop their drawers in order to pull it out and answer nature’s first call. So they squatted instead.

The male camel’s throat bladder, a part of the soft palate called the “dul’a”, or the palatine diverticulum- which he expells with a deep gurgle when aroused, looks like he is blowing a pink chewing gum bubble. The English call it “a flaming grimace”, pronounced with a long “a”, which gives what is merely a rank sexual display a bit of upper class dignity, like a peacock’s tail.

Ah! Aseeda

In the meantime having pitched the tent under a great tree where we were sheltered from the rays of the sun and in tolerable security, I fed on polenta (aseeda) and water with the camel drovers…

At length a bowl of polenta and another of dried meat was set before us. My illness deprived me of all inclination to eat; and observing the company not much inclined to invite me to join them, and yet embarrassed on how to avoid the ceremony, I relieved them by declining it and desiring them to begin. When they were satiated, and they lost no time in eating…

-Travels in Africa, Egypt, and Syria in the Years 1792 to 1798, William George Browne

My first taste of aseeda was not the same aseeda I would eat for the next forty days. That first day I ate with some elderly camel merchants with delicate stomachs, which required them to eat wheat flour aseeda with milk, which had a disgusting gelatinous look and taste. One of them said to me, Luwees, you will eat this for the next forty days, and I was worried because I really hated it.

Lucky for me, on the trail the drovers eat a millet flour aseeda with sauce made from vegetable oil, onions, hot red pepper, and dried okra and tomato powders. Millet is used as animal feed in America because it is highly nutritious despite its rough taste. On the desert trail, good nutrition makes all the difference between life and death.

I learned to like millet aseeda mostly because I liked to burn my lips on the red pepper. And everyone in the dry desert likes to lubricate themselves inside and out with seed oils. The meat was another story. Once we bought and slaughtered a goat but it did not go very far between 10 men shared by two campfires. Another time we slaughtered a camel that was near death from exhaustion, and if an Islamic slaughter can be performed before death, the meat is okay to eat. So we hurried up and cut its throat.

We ate fresh camel meat that day and the next, and after we tried to dry the meat without salt, by cutting it into thin strips and hanging it on a rope line during the night, hoping that the wind would do the job of the sun. It did not, and it began to spoil. We ate it anyway for a few days before we all began to gag on it. Dried meat is called sharmout, and a prostitute is called a sharmouta. I never asked what the etymological connection might be.

At the aseeda bowl when many men crowd around, you have to squat not side by side but rather front to back, with the right hand pointing inward to make the food grab. It was always fun to watch a late arriving straggler join the bowl when it had already been served; he had to squeeze himself between two others, a bit like the runt of the litter fighting his way to the hind teat.

I don’t think I ever missed a nighttime meal even when I was feeling sick, for I knew that riding on an empty stomach all the next day would make me feel much worse than however bad my upset stomach was making me feel that night. And you have to eat fast if you wanted sauce on your millet, because the boy cook always shorted us on the sauce, making it so a large cold unappetizing lump of aseeda was always left over, that even the yearlings were reluctant to eat the next morning.

Of Donkey Pads and Camel Saddles

O’Toole, having got a sore bottom from so much rding, when he had a few days off in civilization, purchased a layer of foam which thereafter he put under the saddle, whereupon the Bedouin called him Abu Isfanj (The Father of the Sponge); several of them took to following his example and this can be seen in the film.

-Camel, by Robert Irwin

Hajj Bashir thought that khawajas would need extra padding underneath so he ordered his agent Abdul Wahab to buy cotton pillows for our saddles. He thought that the Kabbashi way of building up their saddles, with folded blankets and waxed ground cloths, would be insufficient for his guests. The pillows were a good start but not up to the task, they quickly fell apart and David and I were soon riding on nothing but the wooden saddle frame. That hurt.

At the first opportunity, three days on when we passed Sodeiri’s souk, we each bought thickly upholstered leather donkey saddle pads tanned orange. We had to drape them over the saddle so they edged over off both sides, then rope them down with a second girth so they wouldn’t fall off.

We got a lot of guff and grief from the drovers for riding like donkeymen, as they called us, but we had the last laugh when after forty days of hard travelling we got to Binban and the Egyptian merchants, between their shouted offers to buy this camel or that one, having spurred their donkeys out to greet us at the desert fringe before others could approach and compete, offered us ungodly sums for the pads. They made their money buying Sudanese camels low and selling them dear, but the pads were more valuable than money. Soft seats prevented saddle sores, and that was cash in the bank.

KhairAllah and Talal of the Cubba-Beesh

The vicinity of the Bir al Malha is occasionally infested by the Cubba-Beesh, a wandering tribe, who, mounted on the swiftest dromedaries, rapidly traverses the desert, and live by plundering the defenseless. As they are, however, unfurnished with fire arms, so numerous a body as ours was not in much danger from their attack.

-Travels in Africa, Egypt, and Syria, from the year 1792 to 1798, William George Browne

I met Talal first because he lived in New York and I had read his book. I told him I was going to Dar al Kababish and asked him for pointers. He reminisced about the old days of his field research, living in UmBadr village in the late 1960s and feeling like the weekly supply lorry from El Obeid would never arrive. Later I heard from Mahdi that he had worked in the family shop in UmBadr and remembered “Talal the Khawaja” coming in often to buy jam and cheese and macaroni.

Talal wrote an ethnography on the Kababish with its focus on the political control exercised by their paramount shaikh, or nazir, who, in a rare case among pastoral tribes in western Sudan, had unusually close ties to the central government. The book included flow charts and organigrams of how the tribe’s lineages were structured and where high level decisions originated and through whom they were executed down below. I did not find much helpful advice on such topics of how to dress, when to go, and what I should expect to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

I met KhairAllah later, at the wells from where we were set to depart in a day or two. He was to be our khabir, and he was of the Kababish, the Arabic broken plural noun whose root gives the singular adjective, Kabbashi, meaning “of the Kababish”. I liked the tribe’s doubled consonant “b”. KhairAllah al-Kabbashi.

Contrary to Browne, KhairAllah did not plunder and did not ride the swiftest dromedary. He was a hired man in the employ of Mahdi’s father Hajj Bashir, who agreed against all common sense to let me and David ride with his camel herd to Egypt. KhairAllah was to be the herd’s leader and perhaps our babysitter.

As khabir, on the trail he had much power and authority, but consent he did not have in the matter of being stuck with two khawajas never before having ridden a camel. He worked for Hajj Bashir, and Hajj Bashir said that we were going with him. It was going to be a rough forty days for all three of us.

You must ask KhairAllah to be sure, but I would say that he had to baby sit David and me only once or twice, and that was in the first few days. After that, we both got the swing of things on the trail pretty fast. If an anthropologist had been along, he would have written an ethnography about inter-cultural joking and comic misperceptions, of why not to wear blue jeans in a camel saddle and how to fit five men around a four sided bowl of millet stew.

Arms and the Khabir

The Chabir, or leader, chose to notify his approach to the town by beating drums, (two of which he had borne before him as marks of his office, and as occasion might require, to collect the travellers when dispersed,) and by other tokens of joy, as firing small arms, shouting, &c.

-Travels in Africa, Egypt, and Syria, from the Year 1792 to 1798, William George Browne

Browne traveled the reverse of the Darb al-Arba’in, the Way of the Forty (Days), along its original inland route, from Egypt’s Kharga Oasis to Darfur and Kordofan. I rode in the opposite direction, from south to north, almost 200 years later and along a more Nile-sided route, but I found its sands and its gravels, its stones and flints, its petrified rocks and ostrich egg shell shards were no different than before.

Nor was the job of the khabir, the leader of the caravan, who chose which path of stones and rocks and sands to follow- in my case a man named KhairAllah KhairaSeed (spelled al-Sayyid), the Goodness of God, the Goodness of the Prophet.

Browne and his caravan were approaching Kharga Oasis, coming off the Asyut Plateau, when he described how its khabir notified the townspeople of his arrival by beating drums and firing small arms. KhairAllah when approaching a village with his herd of 150 camels would be much more discreet. He and his four drovers carried no drums or guns, only knives and, in one man’s saddle bag, a flute.

But out in the open desert, where thieves often lay by to cut out a camel or two from our night march, or where in broad daylight we might find ourselves approached by men unknown, most likely armed with Enfield rifles left over from WW2, but perhaps with automatic weapons- kalash, as they were called- spilled over from Libya, KhairAllah did indeed want to make a show of military force. That is when he asked Ned to shoulder his film camera as if it were a stinger missile and to get out in front of the herd for all to see.

This worked well for us in several ways. Ned always got good footage of approaching camel men. The camel men would greet us with genuine emotion- fear- on their faces, rather than the slack-jawed looks of curiosity that a foreign film crew in the desert usually elicited. And KhairAllah would get the jump on whoever might be approaching, friend or foe.

Lucky for us, they were always friends, and we all got good laughs when they finally figured out our weapon only shot 24 frames per second.

Aaton

Stinger

Of Dromedaries and Camels

The camel and the dromedary in Arabia are the same identical genus and creature, excepting that the dromedary is a high-bred camel and the camel is a low-bred dromedary…The dromedary is the race horse of his species, thin, elegant, light of step, easy of pace, and much more enduring of thirst than the woolly, thick built, heavy footed ungainly and jolting camel. But both and each of them have only one hump.

-A Year’s Journey through Central and Eastern Arabia 1862-63, William Palgrave

In 1984 I think I killed my dromedary. I had arrived at the half way mark, Day 20, on the Way of the Forty, and left the herd for a few days to take some rest in Dongola. I dismounted from my white dromedary, of the Kabbashi breed, of noble blood and as they all said, a great honor to ride. Nevertheless, he- as almost all camels exported to Egypt are bulls- was not easy to maneuver, I thought always needing a whip to steer through the bunch and past the thorn trees. Go lighter on the ‘oud, the stick, and gentler on the rasad, the rein, said KhairAllah, he knows what to do.

Maybe I had whipped too much over those twenty days. When I returned to the herd, I sought my familiar dromedary- to use a term of respect that now I know he deserved- but he was nowhere to be found. Huwa maat, said KhairAllah, he has died. Lucky for me, he did not say, Inta mawwithu, you killed him, but that is what he meant.

I could not believe that he had died, maybe in my absence KhairAllah had returned him to the herd, freed now of a foreigner’s burden, but I did not see him. There were not many all white camels to look among, and none had mine’s tell tale scars and tribal brands. No, he was gone.

KhairAllah gave me a new mount, this one brown and twice Ole Whitey’s size. He lumbered along in ungainly fashion but walked steady and straight. No fancy steps from him. I was happy all in all, even when thinking I had killed the most valuable asset in Abu Jaib’s export herd- if it had not been for one troubling thing.

Little by little I picked up on the drovers’ inside jokes and whispers and backward glances. The khawaja is riding a khasi, a gelding, they would say with a suppressed chuckle I might as well have been sitting in the corner with a dunce cap on my head, it was that obvious. Whenever we encountered others, all gave me the same smirk- thinking to themselves, You are riding a khasi, and that is bad enough, but even worse, that khasi is a camel, not a dromedary.

Visiting Friends in Omdurman

The native town of Omdurman which was the capital under the Mahdi regime…with room for upwards of 100,000…became the scene of the most atrocious cruelties and the most extravagant orgies…

The warlike oppression before 1899, the fanatical enthusiasm for pilgrimages, the desire for plunder, and the devastation of whole provinces have assembled here a confused medley of the most diverse races and stocks…[and] tribes from the desert, such as Nuba, Baggara, Kabbabish, Gowameh, and Kowahleh Arabs...

-Baedeker’s Guide to Egypt and The Sudan, Seventh Edition, 1914

Karl Baedeker and his son Ernst were the Frommer and Fodor of the 19th Century, but Ernst died of sunstroke in Egypt in 1863 in the month of July, which if he had followed his own advice would not have happened because one should never go in high summer.

Their 1914 edition covers the Sudan just 15 years after it was retaken by Lord Kitchener in the Battle of Omdurman, killing 10,000 Sudanese against a handful of Britishers, as narrated in the cold-blooded derring-do voice of Winston Churchill’s The River War- “Talk of fun! Where will you beat this?”

By then safely subdued, Baedeker described Omdurman as a tamed beast. His fold-out map identifies the city’s British-made ruins- “Arab Quarter Ruins”, “Khalifa’s Body Guard Quarters Ruins”, “Ruins of Taishi’s Quarter”, etc.- right beside the new “Polo Ground” and “Golf Links”- as if Baghdad’s Oz-like Green Zone was adjacent to Bush’s shocked and awed busted bunkers, never having been rebuilt.

But fast forward seven decades to 1984 and years following to my own visits to Omdurman, to sit in the office of my camel merchant family friends located where golf and polo were once played, in a city grown twenty if not fifty times larger than Baedeker said it had room for.

Despite Baedeker’s recommendation to tour Omdurman by donkey and not by tram, I took a taxi from Khartoum across the old White Nile bridge, then along the river’s west bank past the Mahdi’s tomb and into the rabbit warren streets of the city proper. On each new visit I forgot the route and each time the taxi driver and I had to navigate by dumb luck. But we always managed to find the ‘Imaarat Abu Jaib, the Abu Jaib Building, where I might have to wait downstairs if Sayyid had not yet arrived with keys to open the office.

When he was late, Khairallah would be sitting with Sakeena, the jebena coffee-making lady whose stall and low seats were near the front door. We all laughed about Sakeena, maybe because the word “sakeen” means knife, and Sakeena’s tongue was sharp. She knew me by name which was satisfying, and she knew KhairAllah as my friend from the camel road to Egypt, which was even more so. In the streets of Omdurman, “desert cred” got one far, since most people there were from the western provinces and knew the way of the sand.

I took my coffee unsweetened, which made Sakeena joke that I must have a very sweet girl at home not to need any sugar here. KhairAllah and I told her stories from the desert, about camel thieves and bedbugs and such, before Sayyid would pull up in his chauffer-driven blue Mercedes diesel sedan, and then we would go upstairs to the majlis to talk more about camels, leaving Sakeena on the street to make coffee for people wearing shirts and trousers, not ‘araagis and sirwals as her tribal compatriot KhairAllah wore.