Let scent hounds sleep

My dog, by the way, thinks I have much to learn about partridges, and I agree. He persists in tutoring me, with the calm patience of a professor of logic, in the art of drawing deductions from an educated nose. Perhaps he hopes his dull pupil will one day learn to smell.

-A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold

Olefacio ergo sum

-with apologies to Descartes

Perro Bravo. Cilgin Kopek. Boser Hund. Txakur Txarra. Caine Rau. Plokhaya Sobaka. Gos Dolent. Chien Mechant. Warui Inu. Droch Mhadra. Cane Cattivo. Kelb Hazin. Qen i Keq.

Many ways to warn about a bad dog, but basset hounds need no warning, because they are never bad. Cave canem? No need if he has velvet ears, knock kneed legs, rheumy eyes, and twitchy nose when napping. What is he sniffing in his sleep? Himself? Some hole in the ground? A day old rabbit trace?

I had travelled late into Christmas Eve to reach Antigua Guatemala and the next morning in the Parque Central I saw two leashed and well groomed bassets sitting near the life size creche. Camels, donkeys, sheep- the manger had been almost full. Now it was. The gift of the Magi… Bark! The herald angels sing…On the first day of Christmas my true love scent to me…It’s getting to smell a lot like Christmas…

A Saharan fish tale

fils (pl. fulous). A small coin, an obolus or anything of similar shape; as the scale of a fish, the boss on a bridle or book

-English and Arabic Dictionary, Joseph Catafago, 1873

I had never considered that my use of the word fulous, which I always meant and understood to mean money as a collective noun, was actually the plural of the singular noun fils, which had a secondary meaning as any object shaped like a round coin, such as the decorative brass buttons attached to a horse bridle, or the iron bosses that covered the outside of doors along a public street, or fish scales.

A common response to a beggar is fulous ma feesh, there is no money, which might also be translated in a jokey bilingual way as money, not fish. Some Sudanese used an alternate word, qirsh (pl.quroush), meaning the coin of 1/100th the value of a guinea. In Sudan and Upper Egypt, the letter q is pronounced as a g, so guroush ma feesh is as commonly heard as fulous ma feesh.

Either way, the scale of a fish or one hundredth of a pound, a fils or a girsh was not much to fill one’s pocket, jaib (pl.juyoub), as in that belonging to my friend Abu Jaib, one of the wealthiest camel merchants in Sudan at one time, so wealthy that a camel drover I knew, Mas’ood abu Dood, told me that Abu Jaib would send a herd of female camels with a single bull and a few drovers to look after them for a year or two into the desert, telling them not to return until they had all foaled, and in that way he would double his fulous, which in the desert is as hard to come by as either a fish or a girsh.

a goat hair tent, a mud hut, or a $9,000/night honeymoon suite?

But who had ever heard of a honeymoon house made of mud?

-Guests of the Sheikh, Elizabeth Fernea

Why Dubai is a dreamy honeymoon destination. It’s an easy transition from any American city, while still feeling wildly exotic and exciting for those seeking romance. Arabian design is grand, royal, and enticing…high ceilings, arabesque archways and intricate lanterns…dripping in diamonds, 24 karat gold leaf, 30 types of marble and a revolving bed…which starts at almost $9,000 per night…other musts- a journey into the desert which may include a camel or two…with a bottle of bubbly, of course.

-Brides Magazine, April 15, 2017

We were three days past the Ma’toul wells and the desert colors had faded to a dull dun. All day. Nothing to catch the eye. A few hills and low spots in the wadi, but all dun. Suddenly, white. Something white at the top of the rise. It looked square. A tent.

Shahr al-’asl, yaniiq kitiir, said KhairAllah. Al-’ariis ta’baan tul al-yom. Month of Honey, much fucking. The groom is tired all day long, he laughed. So this is what a newlywed Kabbashi couple does in their first month, pitch a tent and never sleep. Who feeds them, I asked. Their people leave them food beside the tent fly. Fucking food. Meat and basbousa, eggs and milk.

At the aseeda bowl later that night, I looked at the leftovers. Gummy hunks of boiled millet flour. Cold smears of cooking oil. A stray fried onion. I wanted my second honeymoon to start that very night. I would even agree to marry Mas’ood abu Dood, he of the crooked rotten teeth and ragged riding shirt. Meat and eggs sounded pretty good when you can’t choke down one more bite of millet paste. A month of honey, and we had thirty days of trail ahead of us. Put the bubbly on ice for later, much later.

wrap your head around that!

On one road alone, I saw thirty men in voluminous turbans. I was in headwrap heaven. Geographically, of course, I was in…

-Headwraps: A Global Journey, Georgia Scott

In a niqab, they can’t tell if she has a ski jump nose or bee stung lips. In a burkini, they can’t tell if she has a thigh gap or a six pack. In a hijab, they can’t tell if her hair is blonde, brunette, or hennaed. In none of those can they tell who she really is, especially if she’s in a burqa and doesn’t speak or shake your hand. Speech recognition software and finger print analysis cannot outwit the 10th century. The police don’t like that, especially the French fashion police.

I was equally thrown by men in turbans. They all were wearing them, when I first met them and always thereafter. I associated their turbans’ folds, color, size and state of cleanliness with their eyes, nose and teeth. All were essential inputs in my own facial recognition system.

But on the trail, when sleeping or washing next to these men, they took off their turbans and I was frequently shocked by what I saw underneath. No hair! Gray hair! Skull bumps ! And I had a hard time recognizing who was who, as if the beardless ones had suddenly grown beards, and the bearded ones had suddenly shaved. If the men were no longer mu’ammam, turban wrapped, how could I tell which ones were my ‘amm, my uncle, the courtesy name we called our friends among the group.

If it is true that the turban really does make the man, then the man with no need for a burial shroud wrapped on his head is an angel. The shroud of Turin is 14 1/2 feet long. Natural cotton shrouds sold for organic funerals are 15 feet long. Both twice the height of a man with tail ends long enough to wrap two times around the body and then tie it off.

I never saw a turban that long in Sudan. Maybe the camel drovers didn’t think of their headwraps that way. Maybe sometimes a turban is just a turban. As that college dorm poster of Sigmund Freud with the dual use bushy eyebrow put it, What’s on a man’s mind. Eros, Thanatos, a glass of tea with plenty of sugar….I always knew what the drovers were thinking about, and it wasn’t either of the first two.

A haunted Desert

The desert can be a scary place at night. Darkness descends very quickly upon the barren landscape. The night brings with it a bone-tingling chill. But it is the silence that is most unnerving. The slightest noise is amplified tenfold as it echoes across the vast empty spaces. The wailing of a lonely jackal sounds menacing…’This is not a good place to be in. I have heard stories about this place…it’s haunted.’ The others hushed up, looking around nervously for any sign of the supernatural. The sudden sound of creaking metal startled all of them, making two of the men spill their tea.

-The Spinner’s Tale, Omar Shahid Hamid

Many times as we sat around the fire at night with the camels crowding in always closer, we talked about ghosts and demons, genies and specters. The wind often blew with strange effect along the sand, making it moan and sometimes almost laugh. The word we used most to describe these frights was ‘afreet. But what we heard most was the ‘afeet, farting, of the camels. They were all around us. They had us surrounded. We huddled closer to the fire. We could not get away, but we felt better about our miserable situation alone in the desert, short on sugar and firewood. The ‘afeet would protect us from the ‘afreet, someone said. All we had to do was to hold our noses and not spill our tea.

I am dazzled

I am dazzled by a Frankish woman whose body exudes sweet perfume,

A sweet-smelling branch has slipped beneath her dress,

And her cape is made of the silvery moon.

Her eyes are as blue as the glinting steel of a lance.

-Ibn al-Qaysarani, or Son of the Caesarean

This lyric from a qasida by Ibn al-Qaysarani (1056-1113) known as Ibn Tahir of Caesarea was sung and recorded on the album Arab Music from the Time of the Crusades by the Al-Kindi Ensemble, led by the late Julien Jalal Eddine Weiss. The album has a photograph of the Aleppo citadel, the city’s symbol but because of the war now much damaged, on the cover. Julien and his takht, a grouping of soloist-quality classical musicians, had previously recorded The Aleppian Music Room in his own 16th century house in the old city, featuring a central domed room with circular second floor balconies, which had been rehabilitated by the architect, preservationist, and urban historian Khaldoun Fansa.

In the fall of 2003 I attended a concert there as Khaldoun’s guest. I do not remember the singer’s name but it may have been Omar Sarmini who sang on the Crusades album. The room resonated through the night with the driving notes of Julien’s qanun and the hand drums, flute, and oud. The piercing lyrics rose to the top of the dome near where I was sitting in the balcony and nearly loosened the keystone. I was dazzled. Or better said, to translate that first part of the lyric- laqad fatinatni- more precisely, she seduced me.

King Hiarbas Threatens Dido, and All Foreign Women like her everafter, for Spurning Him and his Fellow Moors

He, when he heard a fugitive could move
The Tyrian princess, who disdain'd his love,
His breast with fury burn'd, his eyes with fire,
Mad with despair, impatient with desire;
Then on the sacred altars pouring wine,
He thus with pray'rs implor'd his sire divine:
"Great Jove! propitious to the Moorish race,
Who feast on painted beds, with off'rings grace
Thy temples, and adore thy pow'r divine
With blood of victims, and with sparkling wine,
Seest thou not this? or do we fear in vain
Thy boasted thunder, and thy thoughtless reign?

-Book 4, The Aeneid, John Dryden trans.

King Hiarbas gave his love to Dido the Tyrian princess when she arrived on his North African shore in flight from Phoenicia fearing for her life, but she preferred the Trojan fugitive Aeneas, and he her, so Hiarbas invoked the anger of Jove who had long protected his god-fearing people. Foreign women unwilling to be faithful, he declared, must forevermore sacrifice their blood in order that such sexual humiliation be avenged.

Maybe Raphael Patai, author of The Arab Mind, a study of Arab psychology from the school of so-called “diaperology”, as was Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, by which an entire people are reduced first to the shame of their toilet training and later to the humiliation of their initial sexual stirrings, was on to something real- not just the bad Freudian joke that Patai’s work and all diaperology is known as today. And maybe Virgil got there first with the idea that Arabs, Moors, Numidians, Garamantians, Gaetulians, Berbers, etc. all have the same kinds of problem with foreign women, especially those who reject or are unfaithful to them with other men. Othello, in whose painted bed lies Desdemona tonight?

Boy scouts earn merit badges in nuremberg, nc

Greenville, NC. July 17— Some raised campaign signs or fists to the rhythm of the crowd as they yelled. A few were children, following the lead of the adults sitting in the front row seats behind President Trump. “Send her back! Send her back!” they yelled in unison.

-The Washington Post

Continuing a downward trend in the rankings of the Tar Heel state…in a new report card on public education, North Carolina received a C- grade and a score of 70.6 out of a possible 100 in the 2018 Quality Counts Report…below the national grade of C and score of 74.5…40th out of the 50 states.

-The News & Observer

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. If you’ve never been taught about the past in the first place, you won’t feel bad for not being able to remember your own state’s long history of lynching. Or the Holocaust. “Send her back!” ?- they’re not talking about the MS St. Louis and its Voyage of the Damned, are they? And oh yeah, Santayana sounds like a Mexican name, or sumpin’.

Papa don't preach just 'cause you can't sin no more

Les vieillards aiment à donner de bons préceptes pour se consoler de n’être plus en état de donner de mauvais exemples.

-La Rochefoucauld

Less rib eye, more shut eye, less red eye. More chicken, less bacon, no bakin’. Eat the fish and cut out the bait. Is it still good advice if no one listens to the sound of one hand clapping? Today’s top news is on the bottom of tomorrow’s canary cage. And the day after, it wraps a dead duck. Don’t replay late night jokes if you miss them live- backing up isn’t worth the punch. Onward Christian soldiers. Aux armes, citoyens. The first one to leave, remember to turn out the lights. It’s better to live in the dark than to die at the dimming of the day. Bons préceptes, n’est-ce pas? Vive la vie, Ô Vieillard!

His pen pens them

An escape-proof stockade of a presidential signature. A signing statement that cages children behind its own black ink metal bars. Executive orders that order indefinite lock-up until they want to go home and sleep in a bed. No hot meals, no clean clothes.

How to decipher that paranoid palisade of a signature? Does it say, Keep out! Does it say, Merry Christmas, from Grandpa? Does it say, Throw away the key! Does it say, I am as angry as this Rorschach test says I am, the one I just scribbled over with a Sharpie? Does it say, I really don’t care, Do U? Does he even know what it says, about America, to others? Their drawings are not all heart-breaking. Some show blue skies and happy faces. Children, they say, are resilient. But are we?

Two Louis Werners, One a Typo

James Joyce name drops not one but two Louis Werners, one in the Hades episode and one in the Clashing Rocks. The Werner spelled correctly is billed as the conductor and accompanist of the touring American actresss Mary Anderson at Ulster Hall on the night of 16 June- Bloomsday- 1904 performing Juliet’s Balcony scene, and the other Louis, misspelled as Lewis through a typesetting error, owns a house with cheerful windows at 31 Merrion Square North at the corner of Holles Street- just across from 39 Merrion Square where the British Embassy was fire bombed and burned during the Bloody Sunday protest- who according to the Dictionary of Irish Biography was a prominent Dublin ophthalmologist. I have never read Ulysses and probably never will, but it is nice to know that anyone cyber stalking me under either spelling will fall down that very deep rabbit hole.

31 Merrion Square, Louis Werner’s “cheerful windows”

Us Versus Them, Over There

A Knyght ther was, and that a worthy man,
That fro the tyme that he first bigan
To riden out, he loved chivalrie,
Trouthe and honóur, fredom and curteisie.
Ful worthy was he in his lordes werre [wars],
And thereto hadde he riden, no man ferre,
As wel in cristendom as in hethenesse [Islamic lands],
And evere honóured for his worthynesse.
At Alisaundre [Alexandria] he was whan it was wonne; …
In Gernade [Granada] at the seege eek hadde he be
Of Algezir [Algeciras], and riden in Belmarye [Ben Marin, the Merinid Dynasty].
At Lyeys [Ayas, now Yumurtalik] was he, and at Satalye [Antalya],
Whan they were wonne; and in the Grete See [Mediterranean]
At many a noble armee hadde he be.
At mortal batailles hadde he been fiftene,
And foughten for oure feith at Tramyssene [Tlemcen]
In lyste thries, and ay slayn his foo.
This ilke worthy knyght hadde been also
Somtyme with the lord of Palatye [Balat, in Turkey]
Agayn another hethen in Turkye;

-Geoffrey Chaucer

Over there, over there
Send the word, send the word over there
That the Yanks are coming
The Yanks are coming
The drums rum-tumming
Everywhere
So prepare, say a prayer
Send the word, send the word to beware
We'll be over, we're coming over
And we won't come back till it's over
Over there

-George M. Cohan

The Battle of the Pyramids. The Invasion of Algiers. The Seige of Kut al-Amara. The Massacre at Fallujah. Each in their own century, and all over there. Yet over there, nothing is ever over. But isn’t it pretty to think so, said he who had also fought over there.

Chaucer’s knyght had trouthe, worthinesse, and honóur on his side. A Navy Seal commander, the modern knyght equivalent in our werre in the hethenesse, was just acquitted of murder for plunging his knife through a wounded and shackled prisoner’s neck. Chivalrie? Curteisie? If your throat can swallow such war propaganda without choking, you can kiss my…- No!, let Chaucer say it…But with his mouth he kiste hir naked ers.

Rapinoe Tells Him Where She'll Kick His Ba'- -

Tho’ I to foreign lands must hie, Pursuing fortune’s sliddery ba’- -, With melting heart and brimful eye, I’ll mind you still though far awa’.

- Robert Burns

“obviously not myself…and I suspect not many, if any, of the other players.”

- Megan Rapinoe

New York will give the Women’s team its tickertape. The White House can fold its invitation five times and put it where the sun don’t shine. Let him sniff Tiger’s.

East of Suez

Passage to India! Lo, soul, for thee, of tableaux twain, I see, in one, the Suez canal initiated, open’d, I see the procession of steamships, the Empress Eugenie’s leading the van; I mark, from on deck, the strange landscape, the pure sky, the level sand in the distance; I pass swiftly the picturesque groups, the workmen gather’d; the gigantic dredging machines.

-Passage to India, Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman

Ship me somewhere east of Suez, where the best is like the worst, Where there aren’t no Ten Commandments an’ a man can raise a thirst.

-Mandalay, Rudyard Kipling

In the summer of 1979 I planned to go to India, but first I wanted to see one last corner of Egypt. If you went east of Suez in those days, you had to go via Israel- which occupied Egypt’s Sinai coast on the Gulf of Aqaba. The Camp David Agreement was supposed to give it all back but the Israelis were already dragging their feet.

The beach’s level sand at Dahab with sun-tanned hippies’ one pieces already shed and Mt. Sinai- Jebel Musa as Arabs call that strange landscape- with sun-reddened Christians’ Jerusalem hungers still unsated were too good to miss no matter whose flag flew. Picturesque groups both, with or without their clothes.

So I went that spring not as beach bum or religious pilgrim, but simply as curious idler- the kind I always hoped to meet when on the road myself. Bedouins rented beds in seafront huts and monks at St. Catherine’s Monastery rented beds at the trail up the mountain. Sin and skin below, sky and spirit above, the best like the worst as they ever are.

And very few of either bum or pilgrim, Egypt and Israel then being still in a state of war- official peace was to take effect the next year- despite the vigorous three-way handshake I had watched on television from a raucous Cairene coffeehouse just a few weeks earlier. When Sadat kissed Rosalynn Carter the place went beserk, which just proved how hard it would be for Egyptians to make peace between the sexes- forget about Jews and Arabs.

A Cairene Nightmare

Cairo is different, and in the Cairo I know, more than in any other place, the stranger needs a guide, for, though the city’s principal monuments are obvious to the eye, its diversions are transitory and less easy to find, and though the inhabitants may welcome the foreigner with a smile, beware, for they are all charlatans and liars. They will cheat you if they can. I can help you there.

-The Arabian Nightmare, Robert Irwin

I was taking a mid-afternoon, mid-summer, non-air-conditioned nap and awoke from a dream with indigestion. Was it my lunch? Rancid oil in the fryer? Too many pickles? Spoiled white sauce? Damn my ta’miyya- “tasties”, as Egyptians call their falafel- man on the street corner. Poisoned again.

The knot in my stomach was getting tighter, deeper, and higher. It was hard to take a breath without hurting. I had to lock my chest, no twist or turning, if I wanted relief. I figured it was worth walking back to campus, five blocks in the heat, to visit the school infirmary.

The nurse took a look and asked what I’d eaten for lunch. No problem, he said. Chickpeas OK, fava beans bad. He palpated my stomach. Knock, knock. No problem there. Then he palpated my chest. Thunk, thunk. Problem, he said. He gave me the address of a chest doctor, not too far, he said, and I set off into downtown. It hurt less if I walked in a straight line. Good luck with that on Cairene sidewalks.

The address was a belle epoque building covered with a mixed up checkerboard of doctors signs, white on black and black on white, that hang everywhere in central Cairo- a city of hypochondriacs, I always thought. Not me. The elevator was out of order and the office two flights up. Oh well, I wasn’t dead yet.

There were a few patients in the first room waiting for the doctor, duktour giraah Gamal Abu Sinna, Doctor Surgeon. His receptionist didn’t speak English but in my first semester Arabic I explained that it hurt. My kirsh, my belly. She read the chit I’d brought from the AUC nurse and took me right in. Khawaja courtesy or emergency? I hoped the former.

Dr. Abu Sinna had a thoracic fluoroscope in the office, what you might see in a Daffy Duck cartoon when he stands behind the glowing screen and you see the hammer and nails he’s just swallowed. When I stood behind it, Abu Sinna couldn’t find my left lung. It had popped and shrunk inside my chest to the size of a plum. Pneumothorax, he said. Istirwah al-sidr, Airing of the Chest. It must really hurt when you breathe, he said.

He said, I’ll see you tomorrow, bukra, in the morning at Agouza Hospital. Don’t eat or drink until then. We must operate. Next, he shouted to his receptionist. I walked out and back downstairs and hailed a cab to my apartment. I hated to think it, but I did anyway. In Egypt, IBM runs everything. InshaaAllah. Bukra. Ma'aleesh.

I was curious about the word hypochondriac, which comes from the Greek word for the upper abdomen, exactly where I was feeling bad. The ancients thought that melancholy and morbid thoughts originated there. Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy said the condition was caused by swallowing too much spittle. After seeing Dr. Abu Sinna, I can say that it is not caused by eating too much ta’miyya. And if melancholy is all in the mind, or maybe spit in the stomach, the problem in my case was altogether different. Air in the chest. And Abu Sinna was right, it really hurt.

The Police Come to Binban, Looking for Khawajas

The fellahin…a uniform, autochthonous mass, they may be rightly called the people of Egypt…They have changed their masters, their religion, their language and their crops, but not their way of life…A receptive people, yet unyielding; patient, yet resistant…they remain as tranquil and stable as the bottom of the deep sea whose surface waves are lashed by storms.

-The Egyptian Peasant (1938), Henry Habib Ayrout, S.J.

Binban Bahri, a village so far up Upper Egypt that you would bottom out in the First Cataract if you went any farther south. That is where I met Ahmad Hassan Abd al-Majid in 1984, a straw boss for the camel herds as I liked to think of him, but you could better call him a well-off fellah. He had a milk cow, a water buffalo, and many crops. He had a big family and a welcoming majlis, or men’s sitting room. I stayed there several times and in 1995 I went back to ask him a favor.

I was part of an evaluation team on a Maternal and Child Health project funded by USAID and we were supposed to organize focus groups, separate ones for men and women, in Upper Egypt on the topic of family planning. Our Egyptian government handlers were putting on Potemkin Village gatherings, and the team and I did not like it. When I ask canned questions, I hate getting canned answers. I knew Ahmad could help us break through the thought control by gathering his own friends, and his wife hers, to speak their minds.

Ahmad agreed as did his wife, and we returned the next day. Someone must have told the police, because once the discussions were underway, held in rooms on opposite sides of his courtyard led by our team’s male and female doctors respectively, they showed up in paddy wagons. What ensued was a big dowsha, or shout-down, as they would call it in a Cairene street when a car runs into a donkey cart.

Ahmad’s friends included the mayor, the school teacher, the prayer leader, and some pretty big-bellied farmers- and they all added their voices to the dowsha. So did the women. It seemed like everyone wanted to speak their minds about contraception.

The police looked like they’d rather be somewhere else, but said they were just doing their job, and they’d heard there was an unlawful gathering of foreigners in the house. Unlawful?, yelled Ahmad. These are my friends. So the police left.

In thinking about this later, I wondered if Father Ayrout, wearing his clerical collar and showing his Paris-educated manners while visiting Upper Egypt for his field work, a khawaja like me if there ever was one, asking fellahin about plows and blood feuds and such, ever ran into something like this. A dowsha. Just for asking questions. Just for looking like he, as did we, had dropped down to the bottom of the deep sea from somewhere up in outer space.