A bad Riding habit

Travelling, I think, is the greatest bore in life, so I’ll not weary you with an account of the journey from Calcutta to Kabul. It was long and hot and damnably dull…In desert, on scrubby plain, through rocky hills, in the forests, in the little mud villages and camps and towns- the heat was horrible and ceaseless; your skin scorched, your eyes burned, and you felt that your body was turning into a dry bag of bones. But in those loose robes and pyjamy trousers, one felt cooler- that is, one fried without turning quite black.

-Flashman, George MacDonald Fraser

A riding habit, no matter what the fashion happens to be, is like a uniform, in that it must be made and worn according to regulations…Correct riding clothes are not fashion but form!

-Etiquette, Emily Post, 1922

Steve and Ned were waiting to be dressed correctly. Outside the fabric store, standing before a row of footpedal sewing machines, the tailors already at work after having taken their key measurements- arms, inseam, shoulder spread, head circumference, and leg length. Six yards of cotton, thirty minutes to put camel riding clothes on their backs. Walk in a dude, walk out a drover.

I said no to all that. I didn’t want to give up my blue jeans and rugby shirt. That scene when Peter O’Toole plays make-believe bedouin dress-up, to the great derision of real bedouin…I’d rather die. Sayid had warned me, You’ll be more comfortable in sirwal and araagi, pyjamy trousers and loose knee length pull over. He proved himself right four days later when trail dust and grime plugged the jeans so they no longer breathed and I began to overheat.

Steve and Ned made it okay, it turns out Sudanese cotton wears out after about forty days of hard use...more than the single night that Francois Bernier said a Mughal harem girl’s finely woven muslin panties lasted, and long enough to get them to Egypt fully clothed. As for my jeans and rugby shirt, I think I burned them. But I did leave behind my Brooks Brothers crew neck sweater that Sally Fordyce had given me for Christmas a few years back. Woolens are always welcome on the trail and years later I still wondered which of the drovers was dressed like a Georgetown preppie while drawing water from the Maatoul wells under a cold night wind.

Say it in hindi, say it in saho

I say, dragoman, Jildi jao, sub admi push karo [Hurry up, everybody push] !

-Flashman on the March, George MacDonald Fraser

When Flashman gave those orders to his dragoman, he had just landed in Zula, near the Buri Peninsula in what is now the country of Eritrea not far from the Axumite seaport of Adulis, known perhaps as Wddt to the ancient Egyptians, cited by Pliny and visited by the 6th C. Greek merchant Cosmas Indicopleustes who thought the world was flat. Flashman did not mention Adulis which at the time had already been surveyed by French archeologists. He only cared about bints and birr, not basalt and burnt bricks.

Why he gave his orders in Hindi is not known. Why not Saho or Afar, the local tribal linguae franca, or maybe Arabic or Amharic, or Himyaritic or Sabaic if he wanted to go way back. I don’t know why he used the English word Push in the middle of a Hindi imperative.

I can say with almost complete certainty that I am the only person within five miles of here who has been to Adulis two times- why once more than is strictly necessary I cannot say, other than that the second time I was leading an American tour group that for some reason included a fully covered, chain smoking Norwegian convert to Islam. If it were up to me I would have said Idfa’ou kullkum, Everybody push, in Arabic when our jeep sank into the sand there.

I was the dragoman, key grip, and best boy on the second camel trip. I translated and pushed and sometimes pulled and always ran after Ned carrying his camera bag if he needed it. Steve was our sound engineer, the muhandis, a title which gave him a lot more respect among the drovers than had Ned, who in their eyes was only the musawwar, cameraman. Engineers knew how to drive trucks and fix pumps at bore wells and get the electric lights to work. Musawwars were mostly tourists, clicking away at silly things like ruins and camels and sand dunes. I was just Luwees, who ate his aseeda with one finger, not two or even three as did the drovers who knew enough to eat heartily at every meal, because it may be their last for some time and tomorrow was another day on the Way of the Forty.

Naseem, hawa, reeha, miasma

Cycladean simplicities which were like a fond embrace- for which I knew I should be longing when once more the miasma of Egypt had closed over my head.

-Clea, Lawrence Durrell

We were finally in the air, putting that summer in Cairo behind. The collapsed lung, the two hospital stays, the chest tubes and fluoroscope scans in Dr. Abu Sinna’s office. Cleared for take off, cleared to fly, on our way to Greece, and Lesbos. Not the Cyclades, but close enough.

We were seated next to another American, a man about fifty years old. Even before we’d leveled off he opened his briefcase and pulled out a bottle. Want a shot? he asked, Glad to be out of there. A journalist covering the Camp David mood in Egypt. Before the treaty signing but after the news was released. Egyptians expecting a peace dividend, a break from their war. Me expecting a vacation, a break from my pneumothorax.

If there had been a miasma that summer, I would not have known. My right lung had shrunk to the size of a peach so I wasn’t smelling anything, not the night blooming jasmine, the full, not even the ful, horse beans stewed all day with cumin. But maybe it would be waiting my return. Shem al naseem, they say, Sniff the breeze. Al-hawa hilwa, The wind is sweet, said Ahmad our bawwaab. Al-reeha wihsha, said KhairAllah when we passed a stinking camel carcass swarmed by vultures. Just don’t sniff any Egyptian wind too close, or let it close over your head.

Khartoum's last stand

Hell of a place the Sudan, all rock and sand and thorn….Charley Gordon had governed it in the ‘70s and spent most of the time pouring over Scriptures and chasing slavers…Mad as a cut snake he was…It was the mention of Gordon’s name more than my own that brought the sweat out on my brow…Well, soldiering under Joe Wolseley [Lord Viscount Wolseley, British hero of the Sepoy Rebellion and other imperial misadventures] was bad enough but at least he was sane. Gordon? I’d just as soon go to war with the town drunk.

-Flashman and the Tiger, George MacDonald Fraser

Narrator- Enter the Sudan. A million square miles of desert and scrub. It was here out of the vast, hot African nowhere that a man of the Nile, a man of vision, and mystery and vanity rose up..He called himself the Mahdi, the Expected One…..Gladstone- You don’t bore me, Gordon. You’re illogical and insubordinate. I know if I send you to Khartoum, you’ll play tricks, you’ll exceed your orders...and in the name of some mystical necessity apparent only to yourself, you’ll do your ingenious best to involve this government up to the hatband. Gordon- But you’re in a very poor patch, and you have no one to turn to but me. Gladstone- This must be understood. No British troops will come up the Nile. I will not assume a responsibilty to police the world. If you can help the Sudan, your country will be grateful. If you can’t, my country will understand. Gordon- I’ll go. Gladstone- Well Gordon, God go with you, and I don’t envy God.

-Khartoum, the movie. Charlton Heston as General Gordon, Ralph Richardson as Prime Minister Gladstone

In a fit of absence of mind. That’s how British historian J R Seeley described in 1883 his nation’s acquisition of an empire that contained half the peoples of the globe. A year later Britain with Gordon’s conivance was to start down the path that in 1898 added one of the final jewels to that crown, a territory that upon independence in 1956 would be the continent’s largest country, “a vast, hot African nowhere”.

To say as Flashy did that a town drunk might have made better choices than did Gordon in Sudan is no understatement. In the movie, his bearer Khaleel- played by the Senegal-born Johnny Sekka, who had Christianized his name from Lamine, Amin, in order to get his British movie roles upgraded from khawaja’s houseboy to gentleman’s gentleman- knew how to fix Gordon his favorite B&Ss, brandy and sodas, even when under siege first the soda and then the spirits gave out, which maybe in truth would have put him about on par today with Omdurman’s biggest merissa lush.

What was founded as Gordon Memorial College is now the University of Khartoum. I met with the university’s Dean for the library, a proud graduate of Michigan State, and although we never got around to comparing Gordon’s last stand on the steps of the National Palace just next door to that of another proud Spartan, Leonidas at Thermopylae, we did both bemoan the sorry state of the main reading room. And as asked by its author Robert Kramer, I did turn over to the stacks a copy of his recently published Holy City on the Nile: Omdurman During the Mahdiyya 1885-1898. I bet Gordon would have enjoyed reading it if he’d lived a few more years, just to see how it all turned out.

Umri Ma Bansa- my whole life long I won't forget

This song marks two important events in the history of Kordofan; the arrival of the first lorry and the beginning of Abdel Gadir Salim’s career. The first lorry drove into western Sudan- and into the folklore of its people- in the 1930s. Salim takes this as the theme of a passionate love poem. “The lorry drove me to the valley,” he begins, “it brought me to her whom I’ll never forget.”

-Songs of Kordofan, Abdel Gadir Salim, sleeve notes by Dr. Mahi Ismail and M.H. Yassin

Maa Jannanteeni Ana. Maa Bahdalteeni Ana. “You didn’t drive me crazy. You couldn’t bog me down.” Abdel Qadir doesn’t say who was behind the wheel when they tried to run him off the road, the Bedford or the bint, but we can guess. Maybe that’s why so many drovers on The Way of the Forty asked me and David why we didn’t climb aboard.

Faster, more fun, wilder than by camel…and according to Abdel Gadir, far more tragic. “We perished in utter perdition, it utterly destroyed our hearts.” Have you ever steered a heavily loaded high clearance two ton truck through deep sand? She bucks and whines and groans and grinds and with a little luck gets you through. But if she ever mires down, and you with her…forget it. You’ll be lost a lot longer than forty.

An egyptian always has an answer- a proverb

If turbans complain about farting, what would your panties say? In love, pregnant, and perched on a camel. Cairo is a prison of men and a paradise of women. The city of Cairo was built by a confectioner. If you can reach a camel’s ear, you can make it couch. If you must love, love a goddess; if you must steal, steal a camel. Even when flogged with a camel whip, a prostitute can’t forget her debaucheries. He said to the camel, play the clarinet; it answered, I have neither tight lips nor thin fingers. It’s not the death of my donkey that saddens me but rather the pleasure of other donkey men. While afflicted by hemorrhoids, someone said to him, give my cat some meat. You have to be a lame donkey to fart so well. Like a goose, tenderness without tits. A donkey unwilling to be mastered takes vengence on its saddle.

-The Spicebox, Egyptian Proverbs, collected by Ahmed Rassim

Rassim was a Cairo-born Francophile, a dandy, and a surrealist, in that order. Over the years of his youth he must have heard a flood of imprecations and immodesties from the family’s cook and wet nurse without understanding a word of them. Only later did he revisit the language and lessons of his childhood. Was it like the idiom list I memorized during my year in Cairo, overlooking a frenetic Midan Tahrir from the Old Campus’ second floor classrooms and wondering, what else is out there?

Probably not, for we only deciphered the Kawkab al-Sharq’s lyrics in her biggest hits Al-Atlal, Inta ‘Umri and Amal Hayati, and I swear their more literary double entendres- “Water me, and drink the ruins”, or “Take me to your sweetness, take me”, or “Let me beside you, allow me your bosom, and leave me there”- compare well to the more Sa’eedi proverbs Rassim recorded....She went to bed thirsty tho’ her husband sells water…A slut, and still she must bring vaseline…He’d want a plucked pussy and a napkin on the side. Looking out the window, I never could have imagined that world.

eau douce à 1mm

Le voyage en véhicule isolé est déconseillé

-Michelin Map 953 Afrique Nord et Ouest

We had set off from Niamey near dark and arrived in Tahoua a few hours before dawn. From there forward to Agadez it was open desert on a piste partiellement améliorée. The map showed the points d’eau and their sondages along the way: Kissmane eau à 80m, Al Mota eau à 60m, Ameloulou bonne eau à 30m. Thank God we were not passing Assamakka eau sulfureuse or Tegguidda-a-Tessoum eau saline or Agadem eau médiocre or Agaraktem eau saumâtre. Even luckier not to pass the Arbre du Ténéré eau très mauvaise. The tree is marked on the map as a monument, the only growing thing for hundreds of miles in all directions in the middle of Ténéré Desert. It was knocked down by a lorry driver some years ago and has been replaced by a man-made monument, something of a coat rack for a giant’s burnous.

Raj-mania in the House

The Queen of course had her nose into everything…And after years in purdah, she had taken to gallivanting on a grand scale…But what had tickled her most, it seemed, was being photographed in full fig as Empress of India; it had given her quite an Indian fever…hence the resolve to learn Hindi. “But what else, SIr Harry, would best mark our signal regard for our Indian subjects, do you think?” Baksheesh, booze, and bints was the answer to that, but I chewed on a muffin, looking grave, and said…

-Flashman and the Mountain of Light, George MacDonald Fraser

Reading the Flashman Papers was once one of my bad habits. Now I’ve kicked it, after all twelve books. Yes there was bawdy talk and history turned on its head, and I especially liked the send-up of imperial galumphery, but I have been to many of the places where Flashman played his bit parts and I am not impressed. Fraser apparently never went there himself.

But I do like the straight lines that Flashman draws between Buckingham Palace and the many battle fields in Africa and Asia where Britain stood its ground for no good reason and to no good end. The Afghan Wars, the Sepoy Rebellion, the Great Game, the Charge of the Light Brigade, the March on Magdala whose booty the V&A still has on display…all places where Kim grown up into a drunken lout would alongside Flashman have made an equal mess of God and Country.

Whiling away on a camel's back, thinking of an armenoid nose

When walking not in haste/Her laughter not misplaced/Guest of the Desert/You’d say, “A flower in the waste”.

-Poem collected by C.G. and Brenda Seligman, “The Kababish”, Harvard African Studies 1918

A short lyrical outburst in praise of camels, girls, or what not, often sung to while away a journey.

-R.Davies, describing a typical Kababish poem, in his review of the above, Sudan Notes and Records, 1920

The Seligmans, husband and wife, he a medical doctor and ethnologist at the London School of Economics and she his field work companion, were in Dar al-Kababish for only a few months before writing an ethnography of the tribe. Reginald Davies was a British colonial officer with a 25 year career in Sudan, much of that time serving as Inspector of the Kababish roving throughout Kordofan Province, and a Seligman antagonist in the scholarly literature.

Their back-and-forth letters to the editor published in Sudan Notes and Records read as a comedy of mistimed score settling, with the editor often appending the note- “Currently Mr. Davies is somewhere along the Darfur border and cannot be reached for comment.”

The Seligmans must have greatly bothered Davies for their parachutist approach to studying the tribe he lived and rode with and sang songs and recited poetry beside while passing long days on camel back for his appointed rounds between Bara and Nahud, or Mellit and Kutum, or UmBadr and UmSunta, incredulous no doubt of the Seligman obsession with Kababish physiognomy, making much as they did of the pure Arabid Armenoid nose and dark skin due, they assumed, to the admixture of slave bloodlines into what its shaikhs claimed as Sudan’s noblest tribe. You can read this in C.G. Seligman’s “Some Aspects of the Hamitic Problem in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan” and his “Races of Africa”, which divided the continent’s peoples into the four categories of Bushmen, Pygmies, Hamites, and Negroids, plus half steps in between where the Kababish found themselves put.

Davies’ memoir of his time with the Kababish is titled The Camel’s Back, and I stand with him against the Seligmans, remembering as did he many things about a camel’s back and nothing at all about KhairAllah’s nose.

bakra, naqa, fuswa, zurta...let's call the whole thing off

There appear to us to be so many misconceptions in Mr. Davies’ criticism of our paper “The Kababish” that some comment seems necessary. We would point out to Mr. Davies that a virgin camel is still a she-camel. A more careful perusal of the article might have indicated that in writing “a she-camel called bakra” we were not making an inaccurate statement nor confusing bakra for naqa but rather stating precisely that…by analogy with the use of the word for virgin, it is clear that virgin camels are indicated. For greater clarity the passage might read “she-camels of the kind called bakra”.

-Letter to the Editor, C.G and Brenda Seligman, Sudan Notes and Records, 1921, in reply to a negative review in a previous issue

The virginity of the she-camel was not in question. I was merely pointing out that bakra should be spelled with a kaf and not a qaf.

-Letter to the Editor, R.Davies, in the same issue

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the back and forth between the Seligmans and Mr. Davies about their study of the Kababish published in the Harvard African Studies series seems much like a sand storm in a goat skin. So what?… they got the word for a virgin she-camel wrong. I once got the word for a camel fart wrong. I said fuswa when I meant ‘afeet, and in fact I should have said zurta. KhairAllah said, The sound camels make out their back end depends on what they’ve been eating and when last they’ve been watered and how fast they’ve been walking. It all makes a difference, especially to the Ingeeleez in the old days and to you Amreecaan these days. By Allah, why does it matter?

KhairAllah Fills in the Blanks

The southern half of the Libyan Desert, which reaches from the Tropic of Cancer to where the grass-covered steppes of Northern Kordofan and Darfur begin, has remained until this century a terra ignota and is still largely unexplored…a country where in default of spot-levels and of contours, the old mapmakers set down unicorns and basilisks, tailed and dog-headed men, and hideous figures with faces set in their bellies. Others, less artistic but more direct, simply wrote across the waste space, “Here dwelle very eville men”.

-A Desert Odyssey of a Thousand Miles, D. Newbold, Sudan Notes and Records, 1924

I took with me a map, the Northeast Africa quadrant from the National Geographic World Atlas showing a few towns and villages- El Obeid where we were greeted by the herd’s owner Hajj Bashir, Nahud where for three days we awaited the herd’s departure in the house of Hussein Hamadami, Khuwei’s shallow wells where we saddled up, and ‘Iyal Bakheet’s bore well which we passed without stopping.

I was able to see where we were in those first few days and felt reassured, my location being known at the least to one mapmaker, somewhere.

And then we fell off the map. For the following twenty days I couldn’t follow our progress because nothing was marked. Jebel Abu Fas, ‘Idd Ahmad, Karabat al-Sireer, Wadi Abu La’oot, Baqariyya al-Taweel- we passed them all, KhairAllah told me their names, but I couldn’t find any of them. Was I lost, were we all lost, or did the villages of Zureit and Maraheet not even exist, despite having drawn water from their wells? The Wadi al-Milk was marked, running northeasterly to the Nile and we were following it, but I had no sense of our forward movement.

Newbold says that old mapmakers wrote about this part of the desert, Here dwelle very eville men. Let me quote from my 1984 trail diary.

“Day 8, Toum Hassan came in on a donkey, with a sleepy dog and shotgun, to speak to us about Allah and to ask for sugar and tea, Adam gave him a pound note from his own pocket, with the money he rode off southwest to his hut amid the acacia trees…Day 9, Um Kheirwa wells, Idris Abd al-Rahman is our watering agent, organizing the mud troughs and dividing the camels between them, helping women fill skins and load donkeys…Day 15, Buqaan village, an old man in a tattered black long coat patched with white thread asked for sugar and our form of government in America, said one ripe watermelon was up ahead somewhere and we were free to eat it. His parting words, Why don’t you take a truck?”

Do Toum Hassan, Idris, and the old man sound very eville to you?

is it Ya Saa'i or Ya Saaqi

Ya Saa’i Wayn al-Raa’i ….O Owner of the Herds, Where is Your Herdsman

-Proverb collected by H.Jackson, in Sudan Notes and Records, 1919

In the digitized archive of Sudan Notes and Records (1918-1951) I came upon a proverb collection which included this one. But I could not find the word saa’i with that meaning in Wehr. I began to suspect that the Arabic given by Jackson may have been incorrect, and what he meant to write was saaqi, cupbearer- with the letter qaf replacing the letter ‘ayn. Cupbearer made also perfectly good sense, given that a saaqi is a person directly addressed in the vocative in many Arabic, Persian, and Urdu poems celebrating the intoxicated life, both spiritual and alcoholic often in equal measure, in which the poet asks his cupbearer- Ya Saaqi!- to refill his cup throughout the night.

But no, I was told by a Sudanese friend, saa’i does in fact mean what Jackson had it as, which brings the proverb even closer to home, because I knew well both the herds owner and his herdsman. O Hajj Bashir, where is KhairAllah…

An Occasional Descent on the Way of the Forty

There was, it is true, always the possibility of being raided on the Arba’in Road by the Kababish, Bedayat, or other tribes, but the country traversed was far too barren to support a permanent population, and with a little luck one would avoid their occasional descents.

-Darb El Arba’in: The Forty Days’ Road, W.B.K.Shaw, Sudan Notes and Records, Part 1, 1929

I don’t think that Kababish raiders were still “descending” on daboukas when I made my trips sixty years after Shaw’s warning. The French and Italian North African colonial-era word for bedouin raid, razzia, comes from the Algerian Arabic ghaziyya, whose triliteral root has the strange cognate ghaaziya, a dancer, which implies more accurately how a razzia typically unfolded. A booty raid was less doing violence to enemies and more facing off against acquaintances in a choreographed if chaotic square dance, with less singing and calling and more hollering and whooping…girls in, men out…girls curtsy, men sashay…pass thru and all go home…with few if any ever getting hurt.

My only experience with desert thievery was with Billa Ali al-Qrain, more pickpocket than mugger, whose modus operandi was to ride out of the Wadi al Milk at night when a dabouka was passing, cut off a straggler from the back of the herd, then the next morning come into camp leading the “stray” to demand a customary finder’s fee.

KhairAllah knew Billa Ali from previous encounters but he also knew it was not worth arguing, for Billa was armed with an Enfield and the drovers only knives. Billa’s con was more like a mafioso’s pizzo, literally his bird beak or protection money, meaning, so what if he wet his beak from time to time off a passing dabouka. Better to pay up than to see if his Enfield was loaded. Better to invite him to eat with us than to deny him our hospitality. If we did not, how would we ever know the ghaaziya from the ghaziyya?

The other Soudan, which some mistake for the true

The real Soudan, known to the statesman and the explorer, lies far to the south- moist, undulating, and exuberant. But there is another Soudan, which some mistake for the true, whose solitudes oppress the Nile from the Egyptian frontier to Omdurman. Destitute of wealth or future, it is rich in history. The names of its squalid villages are familiar to distant and enlightened peoples. The barrenness of its scenery has been drawn by skillful pen and pencil. Its ample deserts have tasted the blood of brave men. Its hot, black rocks have witnessed famous tragedies. It is the scene of the war.

-The River War, Winston Churchill

“Moist, undulating, and exuberant”…Sir Winston certainly seemed seduced by Sudan’s lower parts, but it was its upper half- deserts hot, barren, and oppressive- that wanted to kick him out of bed. Once at the Khalifa Museum in Omdurman, I came across a student video team conducting interviews with visitors, asking them the significance of the year 1898, when Great Britain established its sixty year long Sudanese imperium. They were surprised to find a foreigner with a different kind of answer.

I told them about the US invasion of the Philippines that same year, the beginning of American colonialism and the first of its many long wars against foreign nationalism. The students didn’t know any of this, I spoke to them in mixed Arabic and English but I got the idea across….that the year 1898 was a turning point both for the United States in the Philippines and for the United Kingdom in the Sudan. The Battle of Manila Bay took place only four months before the Battle of Omdurman.

Sir Winston wrote The River War in 1899, with emotions still high for taking revenge for the death of Gordon. That same year Mark Twain wrote that the American invasion of the Philippines was a “quagmire”- sound familar?- and said American soldiers- “uniformed assassins” he called them- were firing “the Golden Rule into those people…piling glory upon glory” . I don’t know if what I told the student journalists made it onto Sudanese television.

in a language not Arabic

The only language of loss left in the world is Arabic-/These words were said to me in a language not Arabic.//…O, this is the madness of the desert, his crazy Arabic//…You’ll all pass between the fleeting words of Arabic.//…Well, it’s all now come true, as it was said in the Arabic.

-Ghazal, Agha Shahid Ali, where Arabic is the poem’s radif, refrain word

The very first time, I was not prepared to spend forty days speaking to the drovers in a language not Arabic, or rather not the Arabic I had been trying to learn for the past four years. After that intensive year in Cairo I barely spoke Egyptian Arabic well enough to follow coffee house conversations, even when sitting across the table from my interlocutors and could watch their lips move.

The Arabic of tribal Kordofan is different from the Arabic of Khartoum. I once bought a colonial-era English-Sudanese Arabic primer, with practice sentences such as “Please direct me to the British Embassy”, but I didn’t see much use for it in the Wadi al-Milk, so I gave it away to some Sudanese-American girls who had left Sudan when young and in America were forgetting their mother tongue. They came from an educated family in El Obeid, so I don’t know if their mother’s spoken Arabic was more of Kordofan or more of Khartoum. But I gradually learned to get my meaning across to the drovers, to KhairAllah better than the others, to the point where they would only sometimes have to call him in to translate for me…another one of his unpaid jobs on the Darb al-Arba’een.

When I see him these days, KhairAllah and I speak less in full Arabic than in only the few prompt words that recall our eighty days together on the trail. Billa Ali, the kindly camel thief we invited to dinner…Masood abu Dood, the drover with the funny name, Father of Worms…Al-Khuwei, the well flats outside al-Nahud where he and I first met…Bilal waqa’a, Bilal fell, off his camel drunk with millet beer. That is a language not really Arabic, it is a language of words not even spoken, but rather of people and places and events remembered, thirty five years later and still good for a chuckle or two.

The Nile as Vagabond, as Bedu

I must without further delay withdraw as vociferously as possible the objection I made to your word vagabond as applied to the Nile: "Que le Nil vagabond roule sur ses rivages”. There is no designation more just, more precise, and at the same time more all embracing. It is a crazy, magnificent river, more like an ocean than anything else.

-Gustave Flaubert, March 13, 1850, Aswan, Egypt, letter to Louis —

I thought we were the only vagabonds when we finally arrived at the Nile after 20 days in the desert, sometimes wandering and sometimes circling in search of pasture, then later always moving straight and fast to our mid-point rendezvous with its Nubian rivage. Camel drovers from Kordofan are bedu, the ones who wander. Nile riversiders are farmers and traders, filling and emptying their sedentary lives from sacks of peanut and millet scoop by scoop.

When we arrived in Dongola, I tailed KhairAllah walking through the souq and felt all eyes there falling upon him, for the first time not upon me. He was the curiosity, not me, dressed as a desert man washed up in a river city. The whip dangling from his hand gave him away. I never did ask why in town he’d need a sout, a whip- a punning counterfoil to its Arabic homophone sawt, a voice. Sawt al-Sout.

No Donglawi would call the Nile a vagabond. And neither would a Kabbashi, or a Kawahli, or a Hamari. They were the only wanderers I knew in Sudan. Maybe not true bedu, true nomads- see Omar Sharif’s meme from Lawrence of Arabia when, both of them very parched, Peter O’Toole offers him a sip of water and he declines with the words, “I am bedu” (Steve and I always had a big laugh about that, especially when we were three days past the last well and feeling dry)- but certainly more rootless than those Nubian farmers and stallkeepers watching as daboukas from Dar al Kababish passed by.