too steep for a moor to sigh

I was once conversing with a Moor in Madrid with whom I was very intimate, about the Alhambra in Granada of which he had visited. Did you not weep, I asked, when you passed through the courts, and thought of the Abencerrages? No, said he, I did not weep; wherefore should I weep? And why did you visit the Alhambra? I demanded. I visited it, he replied, because being at Granada on my own affairs, one of your countrymen requested me to accompany him thither, that I might explain some of the inscriptions. I should certainly not have gone of my own accord, for the hill on which it stands is steep.

-The Bible in Spain, George Borrow, 1843

Mounting my horse, I followed up the route of the Moslem monarch from this place of his exit…I spurred my horse to the summit of a rock where Boabdil uttered his last sorrowful exclamation as he turned his eyes from taking their farewell gaze; it is still denominated el ultimo suspiro del Moro.

-The Alhambra, Washington Irving, 1832

Upon a rock, Sigh of the Moor, they call/Boabdil sat and cast/On far Granada and Alhambra’s wall/A long look and the last.

-The Sigh of the Moor, Theophile Gautier, 1890

The Moor’s Last Sigh, a myth perpetuated by Irving and updated by Rushdie, painted by Pradilla and poetasted by Gautier, can almost make you lose your breath from laughing so hard at its tired maurophilic cliche. The Moor’s Sigh Pass is at 865m on the autopista south to Motril, at the last point of land where Granada is still visible before cresting the Alpujarras and heading downhill to the Costa Tropical’s nude beaches. There you can sleep at the Moor’s Sigh Campground, buy food from the Moor’s Sigh Groceries, swim in the Moor’s Sigh Pool, and sell tin cans to the Moor’s Sigh Scrapyard.

Borrow’s Moorish friend was right. The Alhambra is up too steep a hill to weep over. I walked there one morning from my hotel down near the Plaza Nueva and huffed and puffed right through the employees entrance before it opened and had the Partal Garden to myself for a few minutes before the tourists poured in. I was moved by its tranquility but not to the point of a sigh or a tear.

I had been interviewing Spanish historians and philologists at the Escuela de Estudios Arabes in the 15th C. Moorish mansion Casa de Chapiz in the San Pedro district. They were all fully versed in Washington Irving’s maurophilia and how to temper it with the counter-narrative of the Reconquista’s religious fervors. Even better, Read George Borrow, they said. He was an anti-papist Protestant bible salesman who disliked both Muslims and Catholics.

The Moor’s Last Sigh, Francisco Pradilla Ortiz

much to lose, much to remember

I wrote Books 2,3,4,5,6,7 and 10 in Paris...Afterwards in England I wrote Book 11 and then lost all but the Introduction and drafts of Books 9 and 10 at Reading Station while changing trains…My war time notes, on which it was largely constructed, were destroyed as each section was finished. Only three people read much of it, before I lost it. A month or so later I began in London to scribble out what I remembered…Naturally the style was careless. (Preface)

For years we lived anyhow with one another in the naked desert, under the indifferent heaven. By day, the hot sun fermented us; and we were dizzied by the beating wind. At night we were stained by dew, and shamed into pettiness by the innumerable silences of stars. (Chapter One)

-Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph, Lawrence

It seems quaint today to lose your written work, all 250,000 words, in a train station and not as is more usual in a computer crash or a failure to push the save button. And then so heroic to recreate all that work in the following 3 months as did Lawrence, and once in a single twenty four hour day- “sunrise to sunrise” as he said- when he rewrote Book 6’s 75 pages.

That rewrite came to 400,000 words, and a year later he cut it to 335,000, this version not published in full until 1997. On my bookshelf, I have copy number 98 in the limited Doubleday 1935 edition of 750, consisting of a word count cut back to 250,000. However many words you care to read, each of them regained- welled up by will again- one by one from his memory after all had been lost, they still fly by.

But what if your written work is not left behind but rather combusts before your very eyes, as did my notebook when interviewing an Agadezi on the roof terrace of the Hotel de l’Aïr, overlooking the Grand Mosque’s wood spar-impaled, red mud-daubed, four-sided minaret. He was smoking a cigarette and put it down near my book. He was gesturing broadly, I was looking intently at him to catch his words as they came from his mouth in order to get them transcribed correctly, and suddenly we both smelled them burning.

His words on my paper were going up in smoke. We put out the fire tamping it with the palms of our hands, and only some pages were all consumed, the others merely scorched. I quickly rewrote the pages I’d lost as I best remembered them, including the words of others I’d previously interviewed. The style was careless but it didn’t matter at that note-taking stage, much more careless than Lawrence’s polished finished work, because Seven Pillars in its published third draft is a lodestone of first person narrative about other places, other people, written by a man who by then was calling himself T.E. Shaw, “somebody else” as Rimbaud called himself after a similarly soul-shaking sojourn in those parts.

In such a torrid room what is stirring?

The mouchrabieyah shuts out all sound but the cooing of the doves and the soft flutter of their wings as they circle the plashing fountain. In such torrid rooms…the women, the wives, concubines, slaves and families of the Pachas or Beys knew no other life but that centered round their lord, obtaining or sharing his affections, or, greatly daring, embarking on intrigues and mischiefs to which their sensuality impelled them.

-Pavilions of the Heart, Leslie Blanch

Our shaaqa mafrusha (furnished apartment) on Tomb of Sa’ad [Zaghloul] Street felt appropriately tomb-like, being on the first floor behind a gas station next to the air compressor that switched on constantly and made us keep both windows and shutters permanently closed. It was dark as death inside. And torridly hot.

Egyptians don’t read much- as per the adage “Egypt writes, Beirut publishes, Baghdad reads”- so dim light bulbs were the norm, especially in rental apartments where the landlord had to pay the electricity bills, despite them being minimal because of the Aswan Dam’s cheap power supply.

There was no mashrabiyya filtering the dappled sunshine, no cooing of doves or “plashing” of fountains. We had only 40 watt bulbs and pumping air pistons in our three stifling bedrooms and shared sitting room. Robert was out every afternoon at the movies, I stayed late on campus full of real doves and fountains and natural sunlight, and Michael usually came home right after class to hit the books and start dinner. He liked to make Egyptian dishes and with our hired cook-cum-cleaner Adeela was pleased to share the kitchen.

Once I came home to find him stirring the big pot with the big spoon. What are you cooking, I asked. Oh nothing, said he, just my underwear. Adeela couldn’t get them clean with the warm water from the shower’s heater so I had to put them on to boil.

The French traveller Francois Bernier visited the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb’s court 300 years ago and made special note of “the drawers worn by females so delicately fine as to wear out in one night". That precious Indian trade reached Egypt and Gujarati textiles have been found in early Cairene Islamic burial sites. I doubt that Michael’s boiled briefs could pass that test of time. Or should be asked.

In Cairo as in Kabul, Getting to Yes

“Our story begins at the very dawn of history, circa 3,000 B.C….” (Interrupting herself:) I am reading from an outdated guidebook about the city of Kabul. In Afghanistan. In the valleys of the Hindu Kush mountains. A guidebook to a city which as we all know has…undergone change.

-Homebody/Kabul, Tony Kushner

"Things change, prices go up, schedules change, good places go bad, and bad places go bankrupt. Nothing stays the same."

-The Lonely Planet

…the present edition [is] no less useful…in protecting the traveller against extortion…

-Egypt, A Handbook for Travellers, 1902, Karl Baedeker

In Cairo it can be fun to ask random passers-by for directions to out of the way places that it soon becomes obvious none have ever heard of, such as how to get to a certain medieval-era mosque or fountain or madrassah- if by the word “fun” you mean getting a good workout in expressing yourself with the inverses, obverses, converses, and reverses of logic in your student grade colloquial Arabic.

Such as, Where is the al-Hakim mosque? Is it this way (pointing left)? Is it that way (pointing right)? Is it this way (pointing right) or that way (pointing left)? Am I going in the right direction (walking left)? Am I walking in the wrong direction (walking right)? How would you get there? Do you know where it is?

This need to triangulate your questions with alternate expressions of fact is because of two things you quickly learn about Cairenes. In the eyes of foreigners, they hate to appear ignorant about their own city and they are reluctant to disagree, if by disagreeing it means to contradict, which then makes them appear to be disagreeable.

Thus you must ask twice or three times, each time in a different syntactical manner, for directions in ways that at least in one instance requires a definitive answer in the negative. It is also helpful to begin by asking a question to which you already know the answer, such as, Is it this way (pointing in the direction you have come)? If the answer to that is Yes, then you know that your interlocutor is not to be trusted about even the time of day. If the answer is No, however, then at least you can assume that your interlocutor is not a complete dunderhead, or a recently arrived rural migrant in from Zahaliq, Zifta or Zagazig, as bewildered by Cairo as you are.

in the wadi al milk, Seeking rest and refreshment

The Khan of Kohkand, in his turquoise palace in the Fergana, beyond Bokhara, cannot have had much time for the pursuit of true love, for it is said there were three thousand or more concubines chattering, parakeet-shrill about the roof-top terraces which overlooked the wastes of Central Asia. Here man’s life was composed of hunting sorties and battle. Like many other Orientalist overlords, the Khan regarded his harem in the light of an oasis- somewhere he found refreshment (though scarcely rest) after the violent tempo of these territories.

-Pavilions of the Heart, Lesley Blanch

I doubt that three thousand chattering concubines can rest or refresh any man, even if he were the Khan of Kohkand. We were twelve men with only four hundred naaqas to mind, and we were dead tired whenever we made camp and set about hobbling them in the Wadi al-Milk, as close to an oasis as you can find in Dar al-Kababish. Driving camels on the darb al-arbai’in is every bit as tiring as hunting sorties and battle, although its tempo is certainly less violent than it is virulently monotonous.

Lesley Blanch wrote about famous trysting places- “the four walls of love” she called them- including a few in the seraglio, in Pavilions of the Heart. Her joint biography The Wilder Shores of Love, about Western women who defied the boredom of convention at home by heading East and going native in dress and/or in bed, is perhaps more on point.

I gave my copy (not the edition shown here with cover art certain to prompt much spirited critique of the male gaze) to the library of the women’s university in Omdurman to be read as an anti-orientalist deconstruction of Western sexual stereotypes. Let’s see if by reading it, any co-eds there are inspired to sail along the Wadi’s even wilder shores. There they might find a camp of camel drovers, all of them too beat to chatter back, but glad to have a woman stir their aseeda.

Do Camels belong in a zoo?

What in hell were those jangling monstrosities; those big, toothy, snooded goats?…Their eyelids are thatched with the loveliest lashes that God ever loomed. They are sturdy from their ears to the soles of their feet. And their great height lays all the horizon to view.

-Inland, Tea Obreht, a novel in part about the US Camel Corps in Arizona, led by chief drover Haji Ali, aka Hi Jolly, an Arab Christian who converted to Islam and took a muslim name in order to make the haj, then immigrated to America and late in life reverted to his birth name Philip Tedro, born in Smyrna to a Greek mother and Syrian father

Hi Jolly was a camel driver a long time ago, followed Mr. Beale [commander of the Camel Corps] a way out west, didn’t mind the burnin’ sand in that God forsakin’ land, but he didn’t mind the pretty gals the best.

-Hi Jolly, folk song recorded by the New Christy Minstrels

The drovers found it extraordinarily laughable that camels were kept in American zoos. They knew all about a zoo, the jeneinat al-hayawanaat, garden of animals, the Arabic for garden being the diminutive form of the word paradise. A little paradise of animals.

The drovers thought that lions and elephants and giraffes belonged in the zoo, not cows or goats or chickens….or camels. I tried to explain that camels were so unusual in America that people would pay to see them behind a fence, next to the elephants. I told them about petting zoos, where city kids could pet farm animals. That made them laugh too.

Camels living outside their home territory fascinated the drovers. I told them about Australia’s feral camels, they said they would go there to herd them. I told them about the US Camel Corps, and how when it was disbanded the camels were released into the wild. They said, why did they give away valuable livestock? America must be so rich that it doesn’t matter to waste, they thought.

Paris to Calcutta, For the Music

There is someting incredibly beautiful about the first glimpse of an unknown city in twilight. ———— gave us a shock in the evening light. It was so unlike any of the European towns we knew, yet neither did it remind me of any Eastern cities…People were dancing in the restaurant. The stars were up in the dark sky over the dark trees. The dance band went on and on, melancholy music with a lively rhythm. The sound of laughter. A drunken singer went past our van, his voice stumbling like his feet.

Otherwise I had grown fond of the desert’s austerity…It is only the smell of shish kebab hanging around the cafes and street corners which gives character to the Islamic quarters in a city.

-Men and Music on the The Desert Road, Deben Bhattacharya

Deben drove from Paris to Calcutta in 1955 and recorded 40 hours of music in villages, cities, and desert camps along the way, starting in a girls school in Salonika, Greece and ending with temple bells in West Bengal. A single sampling on LP was released in 1956 and Frank Zappa said that he listened to it every day when growing up in southern California. Freak Out! would not have happened otherwise, perhaps.

A four CD set was just released with Deben’s field notes and diary published for the first time. In some recordings he had to cajole tribesmen into giving him a recital. Other times he’d stop in a village and ask around for ”the musician” to identify himself. It was a bit like Paul Bowles’ method in Morocco, recording tribal and city music for the Library of Congress at about the same time.

In 1984 I rode from Sudan to Egypt on a camel drive and had with me a small cassette tape recorder, player, and radio. On the radio we heard about the outbreak of the renewed Sudanese civil war, an attack on a Chevron oil camp not far to our south. On the cassette we played Hanan Bulubulu’s “Zurni Marra”, Visit Me Sometime, a love song, which drove the drovers wild. It wasn’t bad. Prince had the top hit in the US that year, When Doves Cry. Hanan and Prince should have recorded a duet.

But mostly I recorded work songs- at the wells and when driving camels, and also poetry at the campfire, chitchat between the drovers, and some straight up interviews with them, especially KhairAllah who seemed to like the microphone best. These recordings were all low-fi and sand in the gears slowed the speed to make them sometimes almost unrecognizable as human speech.

Back in New York I played the recordings for Alan Lomax who said the well working songs reminded him of throat singing. This was not quite true but they were unusual all the same because of the heavily stressed and syncopated vocal strikes made at each breath exhalation of the two drawers’ alternating cranks while working on a two handled drum to wind the long rope up from the deep well.

As the drum cranking and winding got more and more tiring, the leather bucket becoming heavier and heavier, the pitch, deeper, and speed, faster, of the double vocalized exhalations changed, until the bucket reached the surface and a third man emptied it into the trough while shouting the word, Barra, Outside. Then there was silence other than a splash of water. Either live or as recorded sound, an unexpected splash of water in the desert cannot help but jolt you to attention.

The men liked reviewing the recordings I had made of them. They seemed to like most these work songs. They also liked Polaroid picture portraits we took of them until the camera broke down. They would pull out the pictures from their vest pockets and listen to their voice recordings at the same time. Four years later I made a documentary film about them.

Seeking a sand grain in a sand county

Socrates- Heraclitus says you cannot step twice in the same stream.

Hermogenes- True

-Plato, Cratylus 402

We must make shift with things as they are…The whole world is so greedy for more bathtubs that it has lost the stability necessary to build them, or even to turn off the tap.

-A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold

I first read A Sand County Almanac more than thirty years ago. It was a library book so I did not mark the margin when I came upon a quote that made me stop short and start to daydream upon it. The quote stayed fresh in my mind for some days and then faded completely away. But all these years since I have not forgotten that somewhere in that book is a quote that might again stop me short…if I’m the same person now that I was then.

So I recently picked the book up again. The hunt was on. Leopold writes often about hunting, but not much about rehunting…if that means stalking the same game trails as he had last time, or tracking a deer he’d shot and wounded, or going after a gargantuan size lake trout he remembered, after his line broke, usually swam at 20 feet. I was rehunting in his old grouse cover, waiting in his old deer stand, hunkered in his old duck blind.

Nothing doing. Crickets. I came up dry. Not a word, not the words, could I find.

The best I could come up with was this thing about bathtubs. I like it now because I’d never before seen this idiom “to make shift”, but I doubt this was what first caught my eye. Maybe the makeshift was more familiar to me then. Hunters are supposed to stay unwashed when they go into the wild. Soap scares off game, so says my cousin who hunts for all kinds of things in his woods on the banks of the Missouri River. And we both hate to waste running water, so we turn off the tap.

Barbarians r us

Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?

Those people were a kind of solution.

-Constantine Cavafy

But last year stories began to reach us from the capital of unrest among the barbarians…Of this unrest I myself saw nothing. In private I observed that once in every generation, without fail, there is an episode of hysteria about the barbarians. There is no woman living along the frontier who has not dreamed of a dark barbarian hand coming from under the bed to grip her ankle, no man who has not frightened himself with visions of the barbarians carousing in his home, breaking the plates, setting fire to the curtains, raping his daughters.

-J.M. Coetzee

Que barbaridad!

-Emma Nunez, Arequipa, Peru, 1973, said about her husband Tomas when he came home drunk late at night

For the Egyptians call all men barbarians who do not speak the same language as themselves.

-Herodotus, The Histories

There is a commonly perceived thin line between civilization and barbarity in marriage just as there is in foreign affairs and matters of national security. Those outside our gates, our hedge rows, our shores, our marital bed. But how to tell us from them? By skin color…vocabulary that is considered either polite or impolite…Knowing the soup spoon from the salad fork from the fish knife…

Emma considered Tomas’ kisses to be barbaric when he’d been drinking pisco, as she told me at the breakfast table the next morning when she would often, because she was feeling gaseous and wanted to be well mannered in the presence of a gringo guest, turn her head away and let out a lady-like belch. I shared a room with their eight year old son, our bed room was beside theirs separated by a curtain, so yes, I can say that there was indeed a thin line between civilization and barbarity in Arequipa that summer.

Egyptians didn’t like me not knowing the difference between the words aywa and na’am. Both mean yes, each used at different times. My Arabic improved over the 12 months I lived in Cairo and near the end of my stay I had a conversation on the street with someone who thought I was Lebanese, because of my accent he told me. No, he didn’t think that I was a khawaja, a European foreigner, a word that when used by an Egyptian often made me feel like a barbarian, but rather that I was an Arab. In that case, I seemed to fall on the civilized side of the line. My Arabic had become a little less barbaric at least in one man’s eyes.

In Peru just as in Egypt I don’t believe that I ever became a solution. I always felt more like a problem, especially whenever I opened my mouth. But I plead guilty to being perceived as a barbarian from time to time, and it is probably even more true today, when all an American has to do is to show their passport, than it was yesterday, when we had to incorrectly say aywa instead of na’am to an Egyptian, and thus sound terribly barbaric in their most civilized of languages.

Beau Geste from Camel Back

Where we were going, we neither knew nor cared. That it would be a grueling murderous march, we knew and did not care…Anyhow, it seemed the best thing to do, but how I longed for a camel!

-Beau Geste, Percival Christopher Wren

The dramatic story of the French Foreign Legion, where men hid from the law or from a woman- but never from death!

-from the cover of the 35 cent Pocket paperbook edition

I had heard them all. When I told friends I planned to ride a camel from Sudan to Egypt, I heard all the names of those who had already beat me to it, or something like it…Marco Polo…Ibn Battuta…Lawrence of Arabia. And the same lame jokes…Ship of the Desert…Arab Seamen…One hump or two.

I knew nothing of any of that when I was little. But if I had only pulled a book off the downstairs shelf, I might have discovered a cheesy paperback’s 1939 movie-inspired cover art of Gary Cooper as Michael “Beau” Geste in French foreign legion kepi, polished black boots, and blue tunic kissing Susan Hayward (but hadn’t he done this nine years earlier in the film Morocco, kissed Marlene Dietrich, with fade out as she follows him on that “grueling murderous march“ across the sands, barefoot with high heels in hand?), and thus encountered my first Saharan cliche. Lucky that edition was published before the movie’s 1966 remake with Leslie Nielsen and Telly Savalas, on whose Algerian sun-scorched bald-pate Nielsen could have fried an egg.

Too bad none of the movie adaptations were made on site. The original 1929 silent was intended to be shot in Algeria but trouble in the Riff moved production to Burlingame, California. Yuma, Arizona and a sand pit near Dorset, England made do for the following 3 remakes.

David made the only French foreign legion gesture on our trip. He sewed a handkerchief to the back of his baseball cap as a nape veil. I made do by popping my shirt collar. A turban would have worked well too. Or a foulard.

Can Publius Ovidius Naso Say, MĂMĂLIGĂ VĂ Rog?

But no one in Tomis speaks my tongue, and for nearly a year now I have heard no word of my own language; I am rendered dumb. I communicate like a child with grunts and signs, I point, I raise my eyebrows, questioning, I burst into tears of joy if someone- a child even- understands what I am trying to say.

-An Imaginary Life, David Malouf

Corn polenta smothered in sour cream, feta, and butter would have made Ovid feel right at home. Some say that the word mămăligă originates from the Latin mamilla, nipple, so it was as close to his mother’s milk and tongue as one can get without pointing and unbuttoning her blouse. The Romanian etymologist Bogdan Hasdeu’s authoritative dictionary however gives the word a pre-Romance Dacian source, which makes sense because before New World maize was introduced to the Lower Danube, the Dacians were eating millet mămăligă long before the Emperor Trajan latinized them in the second century’s first years.

No mămăligă is seen being made or eaten in Trajan’s Column’s spiraled scenes depicting his victory in the Romanian Wars, but Ovid in his Black Sea Letters says that he wrote poems in the Dacian, or Getic as he called it, language- a lost Thracian tongue, so mămăligă , the word and the polenta both, were presumably on his lips during his ten years of exile.

We were walking around the outside of the National Museum in Constanţa, modern Tomis, and found a funerary stele memorializing a man named Lilis. He could not have been of my wife’s same family, for they arrived on the Euxine Sea only in the 20th Century, and not in Tomis but rather in another Greek colony, ancient Callatis.

This stele is not far from the main square’s statue of Ovid with his self-written epitaph- Be not severe, Lover, as you pass by, say “Easy may the bones of Ovid lie”- inscribed on the base, from Book III of the Tristia, which carries a bit of unintended embarrassment to the city, because its previous lines go like this…”How do you think I feel, lying here in a vile place among Getics and Sarmatians? I can’t stand the climate, I’m not used to the water, and the land itself, I don’t know why, displeases. There’s no house suitable for the sick, no food that’s any use…” Mămăligă , Vă Rog!

Would KhairAllah Really want a Sage Like Me?

It appeared to my mind impossible and contrary to all sound custom that so good a knight should have lacked a sage to undertake the writing of his unparalleled achievements, since there never was one of those knights errant who go out on their adventures that ever lacked one. For every one of them had one or two sages ready at hand not only to record their deeds but to describe their minutest thoughts and most trivial actions.

-Don Quixote, Part I Chapter 9

In Arabic, a faaris is a knight, a horseman, from the Arabic word faras, mare. KhairAllah was a camelman but nonetheless I thought he needed a sage. I wrote about him in 1984 and made a film about him in 1988. I always called him batal al-shaasha, hero of the screen, and wanted more than anything to show the film Sawt al-Sawt, Voice of the Whip, at el Obeid’s outdoor cinema Arous al-Rimal, Bride of the Sands. It was not to be because when the film was finally finished, VHS had killed commercial cinema even in rural Sudan.

I thought that the film review in American Anthropologist was a snarky hit job. The reviewer must have attended a screening at the Margaret Mead Festival when from the stage I tossed out a throw away line about “the romance of the road” and my childhood desire to ride the Chisholm Trail, because he called me a starry eyed dilettante with no business making self-styled ethnographic films. This was the same guy who lied about his religion to his informants when writing his own ethnography of Arab nomads, in order as he said to fit in better.

At least he correctly picked up on the title’s wordplay, which reverses its Arabic consonants’ near homophones t and s- in Arabic, t and s both have emphatic and plain versions and create totally different words. Arabs like clever manipulations of their language, even illiterate Arabs.

I never once told KhairAllah that I was a Muslim and I never dressed as an Arab, much to my regret when before the forty day mark my blue jeans became so oppressively dirty that I wished I had worn a pair of sirwal, light breathable cotton riding pants, like my college friend Steve wore. Steve is Jewish and gave himself the Arabic name Mustafa, meaning the Chosen One, as the Prophet Muhammad was called, in order for the drovers to always remember his name. To fit in better, he thought. It gave us both great pleasure around the campfire to tell the men, No, Mustafa is not Muslim, he is Jewish. He just chose the name, the Chosen One, because he likes how it sounds.

It reminded me of the anecdote told by my graduate school teacher, a State Department adjunct originally from a small town in Oklahoma, who said by way of trying to open our eyes to cultural difference, Back when I was in high school, we had a Djew, an A-Rab, and a Terk, and we all got along OK. All I could later say was, You should have been around our campfire on the darb al-arba’in.

Waste Not, Want Not Nigh of al-Wiz

I’d forgotten it had taken me twelve hours in 100 degree heat on the train to reach El Obeid from the River Nile.

-African Calliope, Edward Hoagland

Muhammad was the most miskeen, the most wretched drover on my first trip. His riding shirt was the most ragged and he always ate last, having had to run after the most distant wandering camels before they were all hobbled. Once when we were just outside Hamrat al Wiz, he jumped off his camel when he spied a rusted tobacco tin half buried in the sand. He said he could keep his chaw in it, too poor even to afford to buy Abu Fil, Father of the Elephant cigarettes. That old tin reminded me of the story of the Mahdist sword scabbard found after his army was wiped out by the British in the Battle of Omdurman, 1898, that had been repaired with a strip of sheet metal from an imported English biscuit tin.

My cousin Kennett Love was visiting my house in St. Louis the same day my Sudanese friends Hashim and Umalhassan were visiting from Jefferson City. Kennett joined us on the riverside, with a view just upstream from the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, which I told Hashim was just like the Mugran al-Nilayn, the meeting of the two rivers in Khartoum.

Kennett asked where they were from and they said Sudan. He asked where abouts in Sudan and they said El Obeid. I’ve been there, he said. Back in the 1960s. Umalhassan and Hashim were quite amazed. They had lived in Missouri long enough to know that few people there had ever heard of Sudan, much less knew where Sudan was, even less El Obeid, much less had ever been there. Me and Kennett, that made two Missourians who had been to their hometown.

Kennett told the story of how he had gone there as a reporter for The New York Times. In those days there was no paved road so only high clearance four wheel drive vehicles could get through. He was in the back of a Bedford lorry with a bunch of men and he was just finishing a bottle of whiskey which he threw out behind. He said there was a great shout and the lorry screeched to a stop, two men raced back to get the bottle, one came back with it and the other empty handed. A glass bottle. Something precious. If he had taken the train like Hoagland he would have missed it.

The Arabic verb to store or to warehouse something is khazzana, which by extension means to chew tobacco, as in, to keep tobacco in one’s mouth. An Arabic noun from this is makhzan, a storage place. The French word magasin comes from this, as does the English word magazine, as in an ammo or gunpowder magazine. I once went to the roof of a department store in Paris and thought of Muhammad chewing his chaw. The view of the Seine was nothing like the Nile and the Galeries Lafayette was nothing like his tobacco tin, or a high capacity ammo magazine like we see today.

I need a translator for my translation

This is how the discovery occurred…in one of the parchment books the lad was selling I saw characters I recognized as Arabic. But though I recognized them I could not read them and looked around to see if there was not some Spanish-speaking Moor about to read them to me; and it was not difficult to find an interpreter there. In short, chance offered me one to whom I explained what I wanted, placing the book in his hands. He opened it in the middle and after reading a little began to laugh.

-Don Quixote, Part I Chapter 9

We were in the middle of nowhere when a lone rider approached to palaver with KhairAllah. I could not follow the conversation in real time but finally KhairAllah turned to me and spoke in the pidgin Arabic that he thought I spoke and thus would understand better than his dialect. He said that this man had lost three four year old camels two days ago and wanted to write a letter for another man in another group to pass to a third man who was coming up behind. KhairAllah asked me to put all this down with pen and paper.

I didn’t know why just passing a verbal message from man to man would not suffice. After all, this was the land of oral transmission. But I wrote it as best I could, getting the salutations and invocations right at least. In the name of God, Praise be to God, Greeting Upon You, etc. etc. I probably scrambled the message itself.

That letter floating around the desert from the hand of one illiterate camel drover to another will be a collector’s item someday. Just like the postcards I liked to send back to the States from rural post offices in distant countries, some with good postal services like India, some with not such good services like Sudan. In fact most of those postcards would eventually arrive at their destination, to my kids back home, and I would marvel at the untold number of men, to me strangers all, who had to pass those cards from hand to hand in order for my children to get to read them at the far end. Like a game of telephone that works out to the very last syllable. Greetings from Sudan. Love, Daddy.

A Taste of Sheeya

“Grilling is by far the world’s most common live-fire cooking method, practiced on six continents by rich and poor alike. Grilling is essentialy the same whether it’s done over a campfire-size pit in Argentina or on a shoebox-size sate grill in Bali” [or over a gum arabic wood fire in the Sahara Desert by four Sudanese camel drovers en route to Egypt who are dead tired of eating nothing but millet porridge.]

-The Barbecue Bible

In Egypt I learned the word for grilled meat, mashwee. It was always a cause of celebration, and it always meant lamb, and you ordered it by weight- a quarter kilogram if you were feeling dainty, a half kilo if you were feeling hungry, and a full kilo if you were famished- in grill restaurants. The word comes from shawaa, a doubly weak verb, meaning that two of the three consonants in its tri-literal root are waw and ya. After eating a kilo of mashwee, you always felt doubly strong, not weak.

The camel drovers call grilled meat sheeya, not mashwee, which is just another arrangement of vowels inserted between that same tri-literal root’s consonants, which sometimes go silent but never disappear. They rarely eat it on the trail because it’s hard to come by in the desert. Millet flour is easier to carry. We once bought a goat and once butchered a camel. Then we ate sheeya and the fatty meat tasted really good in that dry place.

When we arrived in Cairo I invited the men into downtown to eat and shop. They bought wool shawls outside al-Azhar and window-shopped in the Muski. The highlight was sitting down in a grill restaurant to eat sheeya, or mashwee as we called it there. My old dictionary has the word shawwaa, meaning grill man and is a noun in the occupational form of its doubly weak tri-literal root.

Sawwaaq, meaning driver (or drover), is another example of a noun in the occupational form, which always doubles its medial consonant and elongates its following vowel a. Saaqa is its verbal form and because its medial consonant is wa, a weak consonant, it is called a hollow verb. You could say that the drovers that day really were hollow. Their stomachs were empty and they were famished. A kilo of sheeya per person kind of hunger.

I did the ordering, saying to the waiter, talata kilo, then kamaan itnayn kilo, then wahid kilo kamaan, then kilo taani. The kilograms added up. I think we got to eight for the eight of us at the table. The bill came to about half of their pay for their forty day job. They could not believe how much money I handed over. Fulous kitiir, sheeya galeel. A lot of money for a little grilled meat.

People of the (Please Re-) Wind

I became Kalantar at the age of 20, in those days I had to fight my way through these mountains. I lived with my own armed gang and we punished those who did not respect us…Ali Aga has told his men he wants them to kill a fat young sheep. He wants to make an impression. I accept Ali Aga’s hospitality but it doesn’t make me forget that fight a few years ago. It was caused by a cow.

-The Babadi tribal Kalantar (chief) Jafar Qoli, voiced by British actor James Mason, in the documentary film People of the Wind (1976), about the spring migration by sheep and goat pastoralists of the Bakhtiari tribal confederation

A staggering trip. The film fills and stuns the eye. Remarkable!

-Los Angeles Times

There are two hundred miles of raging rivers and impassable mountains to cross. There are no towns, no roads, no bridges. There is no turning back.

-publicity material, DVD release

I had grown up looking at a 16mm Castle Films short of the silent documentary film Grass (1925), about the same migration route filmed in People of the Wind fifty years later, made by the same co-directors who made the Hollywood movies King Kong and Mighty Joe Young. It stuck me on the idea of animal migrations still made across long and hard open spaces in modern times, and some years later I heard about this film. It had not been commercially released despite being nominated for an Academy Award, it was hard to find in the educational market, and few people outside anthropology circles had ever seen it. Those who had, said it was great, a worthy successor to Grass.

When I was thinking about how to edit Voice of the Whip in the mid 1980s, my partners and I discussed our options how to present recorded dialogue and testimonial. Subtitles? Voice over? With what kind of English language voice artist? Arabic accented or not? With the field recorded sound audible or inaudible? Textually accurate or loosely edited?

I wish I had been able to have seen People of the Wind at that time, but it was not released on DVD until 1999. If I had been able, it would have answered a thorny question about the ethics of representing reality in ethnographic filmmaking- which of the two, subtitling or voice over, is the closest to the lived truth, both at the time of filming and on screen?- because it uses the plummy voice of James Mason, unforgettable in Lolita, North by Northwest, Quentin Tarantino’s blaxploitation favorite Mandingo, and Genghis Khan in which he played a Chinese nobleman. Mason’s voice answered my question.

In the documentary, Mason speaks the well crafted lines of a tribal chief’s imagined interior monologue, with perfect Oxbridge diction and the best RSC dramatic effect. And this got me thinking- what if I had gone that route for Voice of the Whip, with Hollywood actors voicing the lines, maybe Robert De Niro as KhairAllah, Samuel L. Jackson as Bilal, and a gaggle of B listers for the others.

KhairAllah might have turned to Yousef, the headstrong apprentice khabir who challenged him for being too old and too slow to set the pace for the others, and asked, You talkin’ to me? Or we might have remade What’s Up, Tiger Lily? along the darb al-arba’in, with forty thieves led by Phil “KhairAllah” Moskowitz on a forty day trail delivering forty camel loads of egg salad to Egypt…