Two hours between sips

True saleb leaves a taste in your mouth that you want again in less than two hours.

-Muhsin Kadem, Salep wholesaler in Balkapan Han, Istanbul

I have spent many hours in coffee houses waiting for day’s end, starting in the morning reading that day’s newspaper and ending with the evening edition. I tried to ration my cups, not that it ever mattered to waiters- they never cared how long you sat and read or watched the street- but I always thought it unseemly to drink so much as to be seen as a nervous type.

Sometimes I’d arrived too early to announce myself at someone’s door, so I had to wait, sometimes I had the whole day before the next day’s flight out and had to wait even longer, and sometimes I had finished whatever had brought me to that place, to put down on paper information for later, so I could put away my pen. That was the best feeling of all- to need make note of nothing more.

I felt that way in Istanbul writing about salep. I’d interviewed Turkey’s leading orchid wholesaler and in tea houses waiters and a couple who I’d seen drinking it. I’d spoken with a professor of orchid biology, and I’d gone to Ali Usta to taste dondurma, the taffy-like Turkish ice cream made with salep powder from Kahramanmaras.

So I spent my last day in Kadikoy seated outside the Fazil Bey coffee house with Murad Celik, a waiter about to retire after forty years on the job. He didn’t speak much English and I wasn’t in too talkative a mood- it was raining, cold and miserable under the awning- and all I wrote in my notebook was that according to him, hot salep was good for suppressing a cough. But Murad must have smoked an entire pack of cigarettes that afternoon, so I didn’t believe him. What did he know about causing or curing a cough.

Incidental to a camel

The pursuit of an animal, whether for the purpose of hunting it or with more innocent intent, depends for its attractiveness less on the animal itself, or even on the ultimate success of the quest, than on the surroundings into which the pursuit takes you, and the sights, sounds, and experiences incidental to it.

-The Red Sea Ibex, T.R.H. Owen, in Sudan Notes and Records, Vol. 20, No.1, 1937

I guess you can say that driving a dabouka through the Sahara Desert from Sudan to Egypt counts as being in “the pursuit of an animal”. And our intent was certainly innocent, not lethal. That was left to the Cairo butchers they were sold to. It was also true that my primary attraction to the camel was because of their desert surroundings, the subtle sights of dawn coming quickly after a short sleep and dusk dragging its feet after a long ride, the soft sounds of 150 camels crunching sand under foot while driven and chewing their cuds while couched, and the way everybody- Kababish, Kawala, and khawaja alike- laughed together when somebody fell off his mount or tilted a water skin to take a drink and found it dry.

Camels Judged on their own terms

Judged on its own terms, Voice of the Whip is an excellent film….One problem is that the filmmakers’ implicit organizing device (a comparison of Sudanese drovers with American cowpunchers) is never revealed. Without this clue, the viewer finds it difficult to discover the film’s purpose…We need to know why the drovers are drinking such repulsive, dark brown water, what the dusty brown objects are that they eat, and why one drover rubs his hands in the dirt. Above all, the narrator must stress that we are not watching ordinary life…There is no sustained focus on human problems or relationships, and so we tend to pay more attention to the camels…

-Film Review, William C. Young, in American Anthropologist, 93, 1991

When I presented Voice of the Whip at the Margaret Mead Film Festival, from the stage I mentioned that I’d been enthralled since young by the yarns of the Chisholm Trail, and especially by Montgomery Clift’s hot-headed cattle drover in Red River. But that wasn’t my implicit organizing principle on the Darb al-Araba’in. William Young got it wrong.

Instead it was Clint Eastwood’s bad hombre in A Fistful of Dollars, when he is filmed walking unburdened across a desert flatland as night falls, having been left behind on foot by his mates, and there he lies down, sleeps without cover, gets to his feet at dawn with barely a yawn, and then continues his trek after a short tug on his poncho. No breakfast, no toothbrush, no mouth rinse, his pillow wherever he lays his head.

So yes, on the trail there was repulsive water to drink, dusty objects to eat, and dirt to wash our hands. That’s what the drovers and I called ordinary life, the camera uninterested in anything more about us. It was all about the camels, and we knew that before setting out for Egypt from the wells of Al-Nahud. It’s what we’d signed up for.

In those days We were all Ashab al-Jamal

The battle, referred to in written sources by the pre-Islamic phrase yawm al-jamal, The Day of the Camel, immortalized Aisha’s presence in the closed litter atop her camel. The Battle of the Camel would forever remain synonymous with Aisha’s participation in the first internecine Islamic conflict. Even her troops would be referred to as ashab al-jamal, the companions of the camel.

-Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past, Denise A. Spellberg.

Egypt’s Battle of the Camel; The Day the Tide Turned…In a scene reminiscent of the Middle Ages, men on horses and camels entered Cairo’s Tahrir Square on 2 February 2011…to disperse the week long sit-in calling for the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak. The events that followed came to be known as the Battle of the Camel. The battle left 11 dead and over 600 injured…the sight of camels galloping through the square had spooked the protesters. The duo [of pro-Mubarak activists] allegedly hired thugs [baltagiyya] with camels from the Nazlet al-Saman district [near the Pyramids, where the tourist stables are located]…

-Ahram Online, Yasmine Fathi, February 2, 2012

Thugs on camels. Baltagiyya al-jamal. Those two words used together should not be possible, but maybe yes only in Egypt. In Dar al Kababish and its desert surroundings, we were all Ashab, Companions, of the camel, Abbala, People of the Camel, from the word where the collective noun Ibl, camels, is put into the occupational form of the word, People who work with —. Baltagiyya [from Wehr, meaning gangster, pimp, sponger, parasite, hanger-on] ride in cars and carry sticks. All the Abbala I knew rode on camels and carried whips.

When I first read about Cairo’s Battle of the Camel in Tahrir Square, I joked with my Sudanese friends that maybe Mubarak had hired KhairAllah and the other drovers. But when I saw the photographs I knew quickly they were not Abbala. Look how this rider does not cross his legs in front of the saddle horn, but instead he lets them dangle astride as if searching for their stirrups. Stirrups on camel saddles are for tourists.

A true son of the Abbala, a true son of the Ashab al-Jamal would know to cross his legs over the camel’s neck. That way you can press down with your legs to leverage your body upward and so resit yourself in the sirj whenever you wish and so avoid saddle sores. Look at that baltagi in the photo. His rear end must be hurting. KhairAllah would be laughing. Even I laughed. The two of us were Ashab al-jamal, companions and friends. He, the one wearing tennis shoes and blue jeans, dressed like a thug, was clearly not.

Thugs on Camels in Cairo

Hasal Eyh fil haqeeqi? what Really happened?

‘Right!’ said the Chief of the Secret Police. ‘So we’re not in the story now; we’re in what really happened?’ ‘Yes, Effendi, that’s right. And there was Mustafa, lying in a pool of blood- ’. Owen sighed. ‘What really happened’ was always a relative matter in Cairo.

-The Mingrelian Conspiracy: A Mamur Zapt Mystery, Michael Pearce

Whenever you might wander upon a Cairene dowsha just a bit too late to have seen what had really happened, when it was all over but the shouting, it always made for a fruitful lesson in colloquial Arabic to try to gather facts from the other bystanders, and of those in Cairo there were always many, very very many. Hasal eyh? What happened. Hasal eyh fil haqeeqi, What happened in fact? As a khawaja you would be met with many puzzled faces, some shaken right to left to right as if to say, Say what? What could be more improbable for an aimless Cairene to find on the street, say on the grand Talat Harb just outside Groppi’s famous tea room- an Arabic speaking foreigner or a real rip-roaring dowsha, [Wehr gives its meaning as “din, noise, clamor, uproar, hubbub, hullabaloo”, from the verb dawasha, meaning “to irritate or drive someone crazy with noise”], such as an overturned donkey cart hauling watermelons, a minor fender bender between two already beat up cars, or a woman claiming she had been rudely touched by a man. The last may not result in Mustafa lying in a pool of his own blood, but something else would certainly have been spilled by the time her shouting was over. Irregular verbs in the imperative mood, much idle time spent on this one street corner rather than any other in the city, perhaps even that morning’s third or fourth glass of tea, although tea is really too valuable to spill in that city. It helps you tolerate the next dowsha.

Billa Ali of Wadi al Milk, the Man Behind

“If you’re going down to Minya,” he said, “watch out for the camels. The Thieves’ Road runs through there and camels have a way of disappearing.”

-The Mamur Zapt and the Men Behind: A Suspense Tale of Old Cairo, Michael Pearce

We were making good time moving parallel to the Wadi al Milk headed to the Nile, hoping to arrive by Day 20. We made camp one evening with no light still in the sky, and a lone rider approached from behind, driving two unsaddled camels before him. It was Billa Ali, KhairAllah’s old acquaintance and a notorious camel thief. He carried an Enfield rifle wrapped in a blanket and rode a basuur, a goblet-like saddle that teed his buttocks up like a golf ball.

Billa Ali greeted us all, glancing at me and David with a side eye, and sat down to palaver with our trail boss off to one side. Back and forth they spoke, seeming to agree finally to something. When they came back over to us, the fire had already died down to coals and we threw on the remaining side of goat. Billa Ali joined us for some fine mashwy, ate his fill, stood up and walked over to Muhammad al Hamri’s campfire. From the distance we all saw he did the same there- held a side bar with the trail boss, sat down for more goat, then came back to our camp and stretched out in his bedroll. The next morning Billa Ali saddled fast and moved off to the rear after a hurried glass of tea and a few parting words, leaving the two camels he’d arrived with.

KhairAllah filled me in. Billa Ali, said KhairAllah, stole straggling camels from fast-moving daboukas after dark by coming out of the Wadi’s tree cover and cutting them off from behind, then approaching the herd after it had been settled and hobbled for the night and asked for his finder’s fee. He did that once to KhairAllah and once again to Muhammad al Hamri. That he was armed meant that he could be friendly about it.

Thirty five years later, KhairAllah still retells the story- not that Billa Ali was a thief who sold stolen camels back to their rightful owners, or that he carried an Enfield and rode a basuur, but that he ate goat mashwy twice in one night.

I say Bacon, you say khanzir

Suspicions were understandably aroused, and local officials arrived to search the ship, but the Venetians had covered their prize with quantities of pork, at the first sight of which the officials, pious Muslims to a man, cried, “Khanzir, khanzir!”- Pig, pig!- and fled in horror.

-A History of Venice, John Julius Norwich, describing the theft and smuggling of St. Mark’s body from Egypt by Venetian merchants in the year 828

Word spread through our group that the Meridien Hotel had a great Sunday brunch buffet. With bacon. It was not easy to find pork in Cairo, I knew that Copts kept pigs out by the garbage dump, and we read about the culling of their herds years later during the swine flu outbreak, which some said was another sign of Egypt’s anti-Coptic neo-Islamomania. And maybe, like the forced closings of tourist hotel beer terraces visible from the sidewalks, another way to crack down on khawajas flaunting their Christian ways in public.

So my roommates and I walked over from our apartment and crossed the bridge to Roda Island’s northern tip where the Meridien sticks its nose into the Nile. The breakfast room was full of tourists, and us. I never did learn how to say bacon in Arabic. And none of the waiters fled in horror when I went back for seconds.

On the Madeira River, Under the Green Wall, Entering the Green House

¿Te acuerdas cómo quemamos tus mapas?- dijo Aquilino. -Pura basura. Los que hacen mapas no saben que la Amazonía es como mujer caliente, no se está quieta. Aquí todo se mueve, los ríos, los animales, los árboles. Vaya tierra loca la que nos ha tocado.

-La Casa Verde, Mario Vargas Llosa

I was waiting for a boat in Porto Velho that would take me to Manaus. They said it may be a week or more. The hotel man told me the next day to go to the wharf, cargo- hundreds of crates of empty Coca-Cola bottles- was being loaded and the boat may be able to take me. The captain said yes, if I didn’t mind sleeping on deck. And take food for 4 days, he said.

There were 3 crewmen onboard and we got along well. They invited me to their table for meals and we ate fish stews and feijoadas with farofa. Once or twice we ran aground on mid-channel sand bars and the bottles tinkled like wind chimes, it was low water and the unbroken green wall was built upon high mud banks. Only when the channel twisted could I see left or right past the trees.

I spread my books out before me on deck. Vargas Llosa, a Spanish dictionary, and Cowan’s Arabic grammar in paperback, which I still have, although its front cover has been ripped off, I don’t remember but it may have happened somewhere mid-stream on the Madeira. But that quote about maps I copied from The Green House onto the inside cover of the dictionary I still see whenever I look up the difference between scatology and escatology in their Spanish spellings. News Flash- There is no difference.

I also had a National Geographic map of the Amazon basin. Not all of the rivers were named, many were not even marked, but it was in small scale so there wasn’t room to write every igapo and restinga, varzea and campinarana. So I was not expecting to see Humaita- now a town of 50,000, then a flyspeck- when it appeared around the bend.

I had a bad cold and was very congested. Cachaça, the crew laughed. Cachaça is what you need. So we tied up there for the night and went out drinking. I blacked out somewhere and woke up back on board. I never found out how. But no more chest cold, no hangover. And no map needed. It was all downstream from there. It was a crazy country, a tierra loca, Brazil in the year 1976.

I'll take the Goat

[Meat is] the edible part of the muscles of the bovine declared suitable for human consumption by an official veterinary inspection…Meat will be clean, healthy, and properly prepared…

-Codigo Alimentario Argentino, Chapter 6, Alimentos Carneos y Afines

I arrived hungry in Buenos Aires by bus coming up from Patagonia and heading to Bolivia. I thought I’d try the station restaurant and sit at the counter. There had been a lot of sheep down there which made me want anything but lamb stew. Quite a menu even so, and all the steaks were given by weight in grams. I asked the bow-tied waiter, Este es el mas grande?, pointing to a cut weighing half a kilo. No, hay peor todavia. There’s still worse, he replied.

I looked again and saw that the cabrito al horno was double the price of his biggest bife. I’ll try the goat, I said. Good choice, he answered, our Sunday special. The roast kid he put in front of me was small and shriveled and dried out. Really? I asked the waiter, this is special? On weekends, he explained, Argentina tires of beef.

I looked closer at the wording of Argentina’s Food Law 18284, Article 247…Con la denominacion generica de carne, se entiende la parte comestible de los musculos de vacunos, bubalinos, porcinos, ovinos, caprinos, llamas, conejos, nutrias de criadero, pollos, pollas, gallos, gallinas, pavitos, pavitas, pavos, pavas, patos, gansos, codornices, declarados aptos para la alimentacion humana. So yes, there was a lot more than carne de res on the menu. I didn’t ask if the special was suitable or properly prepared or even legal to feed to humans, but it sure was different…

Hello Bahriyah, Goodbye Cairo

Until the year 1969 the road to Bahriyah was only a desert track starting near the Pyramids of Giza following an ancient caravan route. It was considered the most difficult and in the meantime the most dangerous desert road to the oases of the Western Desert because it was not well marked and in many places it crossed sand dunes. Cars frequently lost their way or broke down during the journey, and numerous travelers suffered severely; some indeed lost their lives.

When young people come to ask my opinion before treading the desert, I always ask them why they do not take camels. The answer is invariably the same, their time is limited. But I see something else in their eyes. They think they are talking to an old fashioned man probably half crazy who wants them to endure endless trouble…They are extremely mistaken, because traveling by car sometimes involves more trouble than using a camel.

-Ahmed Fakhry, The Oases of Egypt: Bahriyah and Farafra

The first time I went to Bahriyah was in 1979 by public bus, and I wanted to go again in my own car, so in 1997 my cousin and I set off for Luxor via the Western Oases, heading first to Bahriyah and then Farafra, Dahklah, Khargah, and back to the Nile via a newly opened road just north of Baris village. It was to be a desert adventure.

We rented our car from the Hertz desk in the Inter-Con Hotel and they offered to bring it to us the next morning, so we gave them the address of my cousin’s friend in Garden City where we were staying and waited. The drop off man had us sign more paperwork and wanted to say goodbye but I said, Wait a minute, We don’t know how to drive in Cairo- this made his eyes widen with alarm- so please take us to the edge of town.

Cairo then had over 10 million people and sprawled in all directions, so in fact there is no real “edge of town” except in Giza, where regulations once forbade building anything in the desert behind the pyramids. Now there is 6th October City and much more illegal junk out there, but back then, not as much. So we asked him to take us to the Bahriyah turn off.

City traffic was terrible and there was no way I could have found my way across the Nile bridge to the so-called Pyramids Road, famous then for its belly dancing clubs and now for its downscale tourist hotels that have recently been bombed. Along the way the Hertz man kept looking at his watch but seemed amused by our waylay and his chance to chat with khawajas in our broken Arabic. He knew the English words for things like carburetor and battery cable but not for anything related to the jiggle joints we were passing, so we taught him a few.

All was well until we got to our turn off to Bahriyah. OK, this is good, see you later, we told him. The turn off was a bit out of the way, not the kind of place to catch a cab or bus back to Cairo, so he looked worried. Here are five pounds for a taxi, I said. Mish kitir, wa ma feesh. Not a lot, and there aren’t any, he said. Then grab a camel, I said pointing in the direction of the pyramids stables where tourists always get ripped off. Irkab jamal, and my cousin and I were off to Bahriyah in a fast car on an empty and newly asphalted road.

Why does Philip the Arab remind me of another Pretender to the Throne

Philip, the successor in the praefecture, was an Arab by birth and consequently in the earlier part of his life a robber by profession. His rise from so obscure a station to the first dignities of the empire seems to prove that he was a bold and able leader. But his boldness prompted him to aspire to the throne and his abilities were employed to supplant, not to serve, his indulgent master…he preserved a sullen silence till he commanded that he [Emperor Gordian III, who Philip served] should be seized, stript, and led away to instant death….On his return from the East to Rome, Philip, desirous of obliterating the memory of his crimes and of captivating the affections of the people, solemnized the secular games with infinite pomp and magnificence…Philip’s shows and entertainments dazzled the eyes of the multitude. The devout were employed in the rites of superstition, whilst the reflecting few revolved in their anxious minds the past history and the future fate of the empire.

-Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, in his chapter on Emperor Marcus Julius Philippus, known as Philip the Arab

The role played by a Roman military praefect was a bit like being a high ranking prince vying for your own upward turn of the wheel. You finally fight your way to the top and become Crown Prince, then wait ‘til you can wait no more, then seize and strip your half brothers, uncles, and cousins, and in order to obliterate these memories you allow movie theaters and Western pop concerts, amusing the kingdom’s WhatsApping, twitter-fingering youth with dazzling rites, all the while those few capable of self-reflection worry about their homeland’s post-peak future and risk jail or death and dismemberment.

Philip the Arab

Calcutta to Tocopilla

I know some twenty capitals. Bah! But then there is Calcutta.

-A Barbarian in India, Henri Michaux

I've been everywhere, man. I've been everywhere, man. Crossed the deserts bare, man. I've breathed the mountain air, man. Of travel I've a-had my share, man. I've been everywhere.

I've been to Reno, Chicago, Fargo, Minnesota, Buffalo, Toronto, Winslow, Sarasota, Wichita, Tulsa, Ottawa, Oklahoma, Tampa, Panama, Mattawa, La Paloma, Bangor, Baltimore, Salvador, Amarilla, Tocopilla, Barranquilla, and Padilla, I'm a killa.

-I’ve Been Everywhere, Johnny Cash version

We went to Calcutta in the summer of 1979 for a bit of rest, squeezed between getting off the morning train from Patna and onto that same day’s evening train to Puri. It may have been a mistake. I think we spent most of our time in an air conditioned tea shop. But we did check a lot of boxes that summer. Delhi, Agra, Srinagar, Khajuraho, Benares, Bhubaneswar, Madras, Madurai, Trivandrum, and Cochin. Somehow we missed Bombay. And before that there had been Colombia and Chile. Barranquilla, Padilla, La Paloma and Iquique, Antofagasta, and Tocopilla in between.

Some abstain from wine and Don’t own camels

And Scheherazade noticed that dawn was approaching and stopped telling her story. When the next night arrived, however, she received the King’s permission to continue her tale and said,

After I told them about my country, I asked them about theirs, and they said they were of various castes…some who are the noblest …others who abstain from wine…and live in delight and pleasure and own camels…

-from the First Voyage of Sinbad in the Arabian Nights

For me and the drovers, swapping camp fire tales of each other’s country did not go as smoothly as Sinbad said. They were more interested in my not abstaining from wine. Some thought I owned my own airplane the way that camel traders owned their own cars. I wanted to know who among them owned their own camels. Very few as it turned out. So yes, a 747 was their equivalent of a stout four year old bull.

I told them about elevators that ascend to the 100th floor and restaurants that have sold one billion hamburgers, sometimes right through the car window, the way in Khartoum street peddlers sold packs of face tissue and chewing gum to you in stalled traffic. I told them about 7-Eleven’s Big Gulps and Double Gulps and they told me about having to drink camel urine when their water ran out. I told them that in America only farm animals ate sorghum, and they told me to finish my boiled sorghum cake, which we ate every day on the trail for forty days straight. I told them that America had homeless people who were so poor they slept outside every night, and they said that in Sudan everyone slept outside when it was hot.

We swapped stories like this almost every night, but we did not stay up until dawn telling them. We were too tired for that, and by dawn we were already breaking camp. But one thing we could all agree on, the delight and pleasure of owning camels, or at least of driving them in a dabouka to Cairo, feeling that we were all of the noblest caste.

"In its fastness, See me"- and then, Boom!

And when Moses came to Our appointed time and his Lord spoke with him, he said, “Oh my Lord, show me, that I may behold Thee! Said He, “Thou shalt not see Me, but behold the mountain- if it stays fast in its place, then thou shalt see Me.” And when his Lord revealed Him to the mountain, He made it crumble to dust, and Moses fell down swooning.

-Quran, Surah VII, (Arberry trans.)

Desert mountains glow and shimmer at dawn. But do they stay fast in their places? The answer depends on how good are your eyes, and how strong is your belief, and your sense of reality and your willingness to be awed by paradox. If you say to me, Look at that mountain, it’s name is Father of the Ax, and just then the Father of the Ax crumbles to dust, what do you say next? You tricked me, there was never a mountain? Or, Where did that mountain go? Or, How did you make that mountain crumble?

I have long been curious about this verse. If God says, My mountain’s majesty is proof of My own majesty, why would He play with man by making it less than majestic? By making it crumble? As proof of His unknowingness, as a Job-like test, as a mockery of man’s constancy despite all that he sees in this world?

I was told to believe certain things on the trail which turned out to be untrue. As in, We will soon be drinking from a sweet water well, and the well turned out to be sulphurous. Or, there is a bakery in the next village we pass, and then finding there is not. Or, we will arrive in two days, and then it taking us five of the longest days we had ridden so far. So I learned soon enough to accept the unknowingness of the trail. I was in the company of people who did know. That at least is what I believed. And I was not wrong, for after forty three days on a trail called the Way of the Forty we arrived in Cairo.

Wasting time in the desert, seeing only their eyes

I see the desert as a fantastic lesson in modernity. First because there is no one, and the only individuals you come across allow you to see nothing but their eyes. And you are far away from people in only a very short period of time; people are far away at four meters distance. The environment is on an even footing with man. Perhaps man is slightly smaller. This is part of the environment, just as a tree or a stone is. Man is not predominant or dominant. The desert is a place where you have to waste time; you have to deserve the place you have in the desert.

-Raymond Depardon, from “The Desert”, Fondation Cartier, Paris

It is true that time and distance bend in unusual ways in the desert. To see a lone rider approach our group small as an ant and then become gradually larger until he is our size seems to take only a bit of time when you don’t know who he is or might be. If he is a rider you do know, say one of the drovers sent to an out-of-the-way well in order to fill water skins, and you are thirsty and longing for his return, it seems to take much longer.

Waiting for someone to approach from afar on a flat horizon line, anticipating for example either the water a known person is known to bring, or maybe the unknown news an unknown person might bring, is not a waste of time. Anticipating something new, anything new, is welcome in an empty place of sand and gravel and sun. Resupplying water for a delayed round of tea-making, or getting news for palaver even if in a mostly unintelligible language, are some of my best memories of those forty days. Because they made a difference to what otherwise would have been another of the same kind of day.

Point to point, with nothing in between

[The desert horizon] triggers a vertigo in me which, like the other kind of vertigo with respect to falling, incites me to run, to roll along the ground as far as the eye can see.

-The Solitary Meditator, Ernst Junger, who joined the French Foreign Legion in 1913, was posted to Algeria and deserted to Morocco after only 1 year

There is nothing as earth shattering as already envisioning, from the place we are about to leave, the place we will be reaching that evening, or the following day, without anything in between.

-Méharées (“Camel Trails”), Theodore Monod (1902-2000), who explored the Sahara for almost 80 years

Whether for 1 year or 80, living in the desert can lead to a derangement syndrome of the five senses. Sand becomes a white noise. Wind is like an erasure, leaving nothing of the color wheel. What you taste is what has blown into your mouth when you speak. Peace be upon you, you say, Salaam aleikum. Silica and calcium is answered. Wa aleikum salaam wa ramlatAllah wa barakaathu. And upon you, peace and God’s sand and his blessings. I found little rahmatAllah, God’s mercy, on the trail.

Several days in a row we rode up a trail exactly as Monod described it. Nothing in between us for the twelve hours the sun shone nor the five more hours we rode in moonlight. Maybe the gravel and sand changed size and color, but not much. Not a tree to cast a midday shade for our rest stop. Not a camel skeleton or a piece of petrified wood. Not a dune, no barchan nor seif, no star nor lunette. Shadows, only our own shadows.

I never experienced vertigo while riding. I never wanted to run or roll forward as far as I could see. Some drovers recited poems, maybe they were pop songs, I do not know if any were in the rajaz meter, said to have originated in the pacing of a sick camel whose back leg trembled when it walked. The rajaz has many variations (“relaxations and illnesses”, they are called), just as a lame camel’s pace varies from step to step. There is nothing in between, only relaxations of our progress. Fast, faster…Slow, slower… Empty, emptier.