A worm in the belly, up shaheen's sleeve

It is a singular country, this Nubia. Varying in breadth from a few miles to as many yards, it extends in a thin, green, palm-fringed strip upon either side of the broad coffee-coloured river. Beyond it there stretches on the Libyan bank a savage and illimitable desert, extending to the whole breadth of Africa…Nubia writhes like a green sand worm…You ask yourself in amazement why any race would build in so uncouth a solitude…

-The Tragedy of the Korosko, Arthur Conan Doyle

There are many ways to describe the Nubian Reach of the Nile. Conan Doyle called it a writhing green worm in a coffee-coloured river. I called it a thin green sleeve over a long, mud-brown arm. The ancient Egyptians called it the Belly of Stones. But it is the opposite of an uncouth solitude.

The Shaheen family lives there, deep in the Dal Cataract’s very belly, and were very hospitable to me, Ned, and Steve when we needed to get across the Nile and grab a truck fast for the Wadi Halfa ferry. They gave us a lovely meal and soft beds and sent us on our way the next morning with a big send-off. I’ve always wanted to go back, to see how they were doing and bring them a house gift from New York or someplace equally noisy, dirty, and uncouth.

The dog that didn't bark and the caravan that didn't pass

“It’s the great caravan route,” said Mansoor…Baedeker says that it has been disused on account of the cessation of all trade which followed the rise of the Dervishes, but that it used to be the main road by which the skins and gums of Darfur found their way down to Lower Egypt…Weary camels and weary riders dragged on together towards their miserable goal.

-The Tragedy of the Korosko, Arthur Conan Doyle

In 1895 Sir Arthur did what a lot of his compatriots were doing in the years between Gordon’s death in 1885 and Lord Kitchener’s 1898 reconquest of the Sudan- embark with his wife on a Thomas Cook steamer in Aswan for Wadi Halfa at the Second Cataract, where he climbed the Abu Sir lookout rock to peer to the south deep into Dervish-held No Man’s Land and give himself a little British frisson. And when he published The Tragedy of the Korosko in 1897, he gave his female readers an even chillier chill. English ladies taken captive by the Mahdi, O my!

When David and I were on the Way in 1984, it took us far to the west of Wadi Halfa, on the opposite bank and far out of sight. We didn’t see them and they didn’t see us. We were weary, the camels were weary, but our goal was certainly not miserable. In Aswan I was looking forward to a hot shower, a shave, and a big box of basbousa. Elementary, KhairAllah, Bilal, Masood, Rabih, and all the others.

Reesha, Reesh, reeshaat- a feather and its collective and countable plurals

He explained in Arabic that he was a man of the Kababish tribe named Abou Fatma, and friendly to the English…”Why did you hide?”, asked Durrance. “It was safer. I knew you were my friends. But, my gentlemen, did you know me for yours?”

-The Four Feathers, A.E.W. Mason, a 1902 novel about an Englishman who redeems himself for an earlier act of cowardice by battling heroically against the Mahdi’s army

(The sand storm has cleared and in its place a harsh desert sun beats down. Willoughby offers Durrance his water flask.) Durrance, pulling a face- It’s bloody whisky. Willoughby, grinning- My camel drinks the water. Trench, jumping off his camel- I don’t know about you lot, but I’m going to grab a drink before Mustapha does. (“Mustapha” the camel whinnies as if he’s heard every word. The men start laughing.) Durrance- The water is probably poisoned. Trench, leading his camel to the well instead- Mustapha, be my guest.

-The Four Feathers, 2002 film, starring Heath Ledger, Kate Hudson as his Victorian high-necked fiancee, and Sudanese-born supermodel Alek Wek as a half-dressed Dinka slave who crushes the skull of her French slave trader after a candle-lit sex scene

You might think that in the one hundred years between the novel and the most recent movie version that the basic facts of the Mahdist Rebellion could be straightened out for the Western audience. But no, things have only gotten worse.

Mason at least had it right that the Kababish were anti-Mahdist, and in the early days some of them even aligned with Gordon, so that the Englishman’s helper Abou Fatma might plausibly be from that tribe, but no Arab man would ever be called Father of Fatima, or by any other daughter’s name. In the movie script Abou Fatma is said to be a Nubian, as if a farmer from Dongola, yet he is costumed as a Nuba, as if a wrestler from Dilling. And the ritual scarification keloids that dot Alek Wek’s forehead look like they were done by Hollywood’s top make-up artist, not over a cattle dung camp fire.

But a whisky-drinking camel named Mustapha is not far off the mark, all things considered. Steve adopted that as his nom de chemin which caused no end to confusion for the drovers. Mustapha is an honorific meaning The Chosen One that originally applied only to the Prophet Muhammad and has since been used as a given name for any muslim male.

Thus the drovers reasonably assumed that Steve was one of them and when he said, No, I am Jewish, he had a lot of explaining to do through my very spotty translation. You can say that we conducted a forty day long multi-faith dialogue all the way to Egypt..and we didn’t even once get into the Moses in the Bulrushes part of his story.

What to drink in the gizu

The gizu is a remarkable form of vegetation complex…according to Newbold (1924) the word is derived from Arabic, the translation being “that which satisfied the camels so that they do not need water”…livestock relish gizu forage more than any other grazing…The first report of a gizu in English was by Newbold…[who said the herders] lived on kisra [aseeda], camel milk [“milk is said to become unpleasant after three days in a skin bag on a trotting camel. Personally I think it is nauseous after one”], ostrich eggs, and the occasional gazelle or rabbit and had no access to water…At the end of October 1975 there were rumors of a gizu [west of Wadi al-Milk]. The Reconnaisance Team sighted herdsmen and a very large number of camels, possibly as many as 50,000, moving towards the gizu. They were recognized to be Kababish.

-Notes on the Occurence of the Gizu, Sudan Notes and Records, 1977

In February 1984 Masood abu al-Dood (in standard Arabic, Father of the Worms; in Kordofani dialect, Father of the Lion, as an example of the Sudanese penchant for linguistic play) told me about his good times spent in the gizu. He said how rich and green its mixed plant cover was and that camels could go months grazing on it without being watered, the very definition of growing “grass fat”. The only trouble with the gizu he said was that there were no wells. If there were no wet naagas in the herd, there would be no milk for the herdsmen. They then must drink camel urine, he told me. He said this with a straight face, immediately after he and the others had complained to KhairAllah that David and I were drinking too much water, depleting the drovers’ supply for making tea. I never knew if he was just teasing. Or maybe it was a warning.

Waiting for chameaux

We have waited in vain since 17th November for the camels, always promised but never appearing…and we still have no more prospect of seeing them than at the beginning. I am sorry to say that what we heard upon our arrival has been confirmed; the Arab tribes who alone manage the transport are discontented.

-Letter XVI, Korusko, 5th January 1844, Karl Richard Lepsius, Letters from Egypt

Lepsius was headed south on the Korusko road across the Bayuda and we were waiting in Binban for our dabouka to arrive off the Darb, down the river north just as the Missouri flows past Florissant. We might have crossed paths in mid-desert had we not been on the west bank and he on the east and a hundred fifty years earlier. We’d left our herd shy of the border and come up by ferry and Lepsius was on his way down to Meroe, Musawwarat, and Naqa. We had seen only one temple, Sulb, and that from the saddle.

Ahmad abd al-Majid drove us out of Binban where he told us to wait, for three days it so happened, on the ridge top from which we would see them coming from afar. When they did arrive, it was chaotic. They had to keep the dabouka moving fast and tight through the village streets on their way to the open ground. No time to greet the drovers before the herd was watered and fed. The men too needed food and water. Abd al-Majid brought them fresh gargeer, tomatim, and ‘aish baladi and poured Egyptian tea. Yes, content…finally to be off the Darb.

O the xenotrope! o the horror!

And some of our men just in from the border say/there are no barbarians any longer.//Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?/Those people were a kind of solution.

-C.P. Cavafy

Xenotrope, def.- a genetically transmitted virus that cannot replicate in the host species but which can infect and only replicate in the cells of a different species.

It was an unwelcome visitor, a zoonotic migrant, a trans-species fence jumper, an uninvited guest. From near or from far, riding or walking, in company or alone. They say such a threat brings us together, makes us forget petty differences, reminds us we are all Americans, reminds foreigners that bad things happen here too. I’ve received expressions of concern from Sudan, Somaliland, Istanbul, and Arequipa. After it is over, will we be back to as we were? What will happen to us without a virus nearing our border, landing on our shores, fully among us? Covid-19 has become a kind of solution to an American problem that even people in Omdurman and Hargeisa can see.

Tits 'n' sand on the darb al-arba'een

The next film I made was Bagdad. They call these “tits and sand” pictures…A scorpion stung me a couple of days into the shoot, but other than that it was uneventful...

-’Tis Herself: An Autobiography, Maureen O’Hara, as Princess Marjan

…take after take was being ruined by the inhuman howls of a lady camel…The camel must have fallen in love with one of the cast…Since there were only three men including myself in the company and lady camels only fall for human men, it must be one of us.

-The Book of Joe, Vincent Price, as Pasha Ali Nadim

Princess Marjan- How do you know so much? Hassan (played by Paul Hubschmid)- Oh, camel drivers usually know everything, sooner or later. Princess Marjan- And do they usually learn to speak English with a French accent? Who are you? Hassan- They call me Hassan, and the accent is Viennese, not French.

-Bagdad, 1949, filmed in Lone Pine, California

It must have been either me, Nedu, or Mustapha, the khawaja that the naaga fell in love with. And the Swiss-born actor Paul Hubschmid was no KhairAllah, who could imitate anyone and channeled the stuttering imbecile perfectly in the camel thief story he recited at the campfire. We saw no princesses on the darb, we were too far into the desert for that, but we can claim a more authentic shooting location than Lone Pine. That had Tarzan’s Desert Mystery, Dudes are Pretty People, The Girl-Shy Cowboy, Adventures of Hajji Baba, and Gunga Din with Shalom (Sam) Jaffe in blackface to its credit, while Kordofan only had Voice of the Whip and a few visits by George Clooney and Mia Farrow, while the catering truck had four legs and one hump and rustled up a pretty mean bowl of aseeda.

Saharan wish lists

“Places where Eberhardt went”- including Annaba, formerly Hippo Regius, where St. Augustine served as Bishop; Algiers, once the seat of the ruling Bey; Tlemcen, with the tomb of 12th Century sufi teacher Sidi Boumediene, a great influence on her own sufi practice; Timgad, site of Roman ruins; and Ain Sefra, where she drowned in a flash flood at age 28 in 1904.

“Places that Eberhardt would have liked to visit”- including Ouargla, Ghardaia, Taghit, El Golea, and Beni Abbes, all deeper in the Sahara than she ever went

-Map showing her Saharan Itineraries, in Writings from the Sand: Collected Works of Isabelle Eberhardt

How did the editor know where in the Sahara Eberhardt would have liked to have gone but never did? Maybe she was like most desert travelers, always wanting to go deeper. The frost-phobic Glenn Gould called the Canadian urge to keep heading farther into the Arctic the “Idea of North”. Maybe there is also an Idea of South that takes hold when you see sand dunes rolling out of sight towards the Niger River.

So I’m not surprised that Eberhardt kept a wish list of places deeper in the desert that she’d like one day to go. I had one of my own, but I gave it up before going.

I turned back from Timbuktu when I was only a few hours away. I’d gotten to Djenne and Mopti and was heading to Gao via Hombori across the Gourma, so Timbuktu was in the wrong direction and we were busy chasing elephants. I’d wanted to go to Wau ever since meeting a guy named Bau who was heading back to his hometown south of El Obeid. Maybe I’d have run into Bau in Wau. And when KhairAllah said to the camera, Everyone in Kutum [a flyspeck village north of El Fasher] knows me, I’ve wanted to go there to see if he had been pulling my leg.

After seeing The English Patient I wouldn’t have minded going to the Cave of the Swimmers, but I’ve since been to Laas Geel and Tassili-n-Ajjer and have seen enough Saharan petroglyphs. There was a full eclipse of the sun whose path crossed over the Waw al-Namus, a cinder cone rising off the desert east of the Fezzan, and I thought that would do Roden Crater one better, but I missed my chance. So now I’ve erased everything on my wish list without having gone to any. Timbuktu, Kutum, Wau and the Waw…they’ll have to wait for somebody else.

He put her in a footnote

Mahtab [“a celebrated lady of pretty name, Moonbeam”]…slowly waving her white arms, she unexpectedly stands close to you, she floats forward so softly, she sinks back, retires, and stands motionless as wax-work…the lady’s sisters are too completely under the spell to feel envious…the pipe is going fast, and extraneous aid is necessary to the drooping form of Nur Jan, Moonbeam’s youngest and prettiest sister. We ought not to have admitted those flasks…say nothing of the scene when you return home…

-Scinde; or, The Unhappy Valley, Richard Burton, describing the nautch dance of Mahtab, sister of his mistress Nur Jan, whom he called the “Venus of Belochistan”

The Indian women Burton lived with during his seven years in the subcontinent furnished him with the material he was to work into his books through introductions, footnotes, commentaries and the elucidations of passages of original texts, where he was trying to make it clear to his European readers…the long sequences of caresses, kisses, scratches, bites, love cries, and various positions…

-Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton: A Biography, Edward Rice

Burton rarely kissed and told. Although he named Nur Jan in his poem Past Loves, he cited many others only by their trysting places, in a kind of breadcrumb trail laid across the British Empire from the Kalahari to Aden, Muscat, Cashmere, Abyssinia, Nubia, Isfahan, Baghdad, Bokhara, and Gandoppa- wherever that is. The poem ended with the lines “I’ve had my day, I’ve lived my life, and now expect my night” but after he died his widow Isabel changed the last to “and given the debris to a wife.”

I have nothing as interesting to say about the camel trail to Egypt, but it has served me well as source material for more footnotes and commentaries than might seem necessary to the average reader. KhairAllah may still want to rewrite some of my last lines.

Surgery in somaliland

In the Somali desert where raiding parties were frequent the nomads murdered even pregnant women in the hope that the unborn child might be a male. Slain enemies suffered castration and phallotomy.

-Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton: A Biography, Edward Rice

The hero carries home the trophy of his prowess and his wife, springing from her tent, utters a long shrill scream of joy.

-First Footsteps in East Africa, Richard Burton

Edna Adan is a born and bred Somalilander, but in her Hargeisa hospital you will not find her ululating after a phallotomy, prostatectomy, or complete bisection of the vas deferens, because you will not find many men in her wards. She runs her own womens hospital and her mostly female doctors and nurses, who she chose and trained herself, have other kinds of cases to attend.

I was there for a few days to write about her work and met many of her staffers. One told me how she had been questioned by Edna when she first applied for training. What would you do if while you were getting her case history, a patient were to vomit on you?, Edna asked. I said, I would clean it up and keep talking as if nothing had happened. Edna liked her answer, and Shukri Mohamed Taher is now the hospital’s top gynecologic surgeon.

Somehow I doubt that Richard Burton would have even bothered to write his book if he’d witnessed such an encounter upon taking his first footsteps in Somaliland. Not the kind of thing that sold African adventure stories back in London, not a cause that the British imperial army would have considered worth dying for in the land of the Mad Mullah, and not a scene that Ridley Scott would have put in his Black Hawk Down. Not enough blood and no severed testicles.

A Dabouka's own inclination

…the Devil drives.

-Richard Francis Burton, letter to Monckton Milnes

The progress of an Arab caravan (where the camels march each after their own inclination, straying to the right and to the left, nipping here a straw, there browsing on a bush) must be rather slow in districts where the stubborn animal finds an abundance of food. This way of proceeding is extremely slow and fatiguing to the rider…

-Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa, 1848-1855, Henry Barth

When the grazing was good and the tree browsing better, yes it was work to regroup the dabouka after a tea break and then to keep them bunched and moving forward to make up that lost time. It was called the Way of the Forty, not the Forty Five, even if sometimes they’d make Binban after closer to fifty. But not if KhairAllah could help it. Tea and sugar might give out before that, and then he’d really have trouble on his hands.

I have never been so sore than that first day in the saddle thinking how much fun it was to cluck and crop my camel into higher gear in order to pick the laggards and lame out of tree cover and catch them up. David and I rode drag those early days, eating dust alongside Muhammad and Adam in the rear. Masood and KhairAllah rode at the two forward points where it was cleaner. No dust in front, no need to push camels that were already walking fast.

After that, my throat dry from calling to the slower ones and my body stiff from whipping up the slowest, I chose a calmer spot off to the right behind the khabeer where KhairAllah and I could talk. Let the drovers do the driving, I told myself, I’m just along for the ride, hoping to make Egypt in one piece and forty days. That first trip took us forty three.

A medical emergency in Harar

Harar had all the fascination of small-town life with the added charm of exoticism and routine atrocity.

-Rimbaud: A Biography, Graham Robb

Harar, le 20 fevrier 1891…Ma chere mere,…je vais mal a present. Du moins, j’ai a la jambe droite de varices qui me font souffrir beaucoup. Voila ce qu’on gagne a peiner dans ces triste pays…J’ai demande a Aden un bas pour les varices mais je doute que cela se trouve. Ces bas pour varices se trouvent peut-etre a Vouziers. Assurez-vous-en et repondez-moi. Rimbaud.

-Rimbaud’s letter to his mother complaining about varicose veins, asking her to buy a pair of support stockings in the town of Vouziers and send to him in Harar on the Ethiopian plateau. “This is what you get for struggling [to make a living] in these sad places.” He lived in Aden and the Horn of Africa for eleven years and died of complications from bone cancer in his right leg while trying to return, nine months after first mentioning his pain in this letter.

“Not a single book, not a single bar…nothing happening in the street”, Rimbaud complained, not about Harar as a grown man but rather about Vouziers when still a teenager. Harar in fact besides qat chews has a lot going on, including the hyenaman who hand feeds his pets everynight on the outskirts of town and asks tourists to join him. (You can read about him in Among the Bone Eaters by anthropologist Marcus Baynes-Rock.) I volunteered to help, kneeling and bending over so a hyena could jump on my back to reach the piece of meat he was dangling from up high. I have the picture to prove it, both my eyes and the hyena’s glowing red from the camera flash.

Our group had a bit of a medical emergency too while there, but unlike Rimbaud no one died. The Norwegian almost fainted, weak from dehydration, stomach troubles, and maybe the sudden change in altitude. We had just come up from the coastal plain. Luckily the Norwegian was attended by Dorothy, who before this some in the group were grumbling about because her bad leg was slowing us down they thought. Dorothy took charge in the hospital and insisted that the doctor give the Norwegian a new glucose bag, needle, and intravenous tube, this being Harar.

When Rimbaud was asked in Africa by a new acquaintance if he was not the famous poet, his Une Saison en Enfer having been published to great acclaim in his absence from Paris, he said no- “I is an other”, somebody else. Dorothy with her limp, the Norwegian in her full length black hijab lying on a hospital gurney, me as the tour leader supposedly with every answer on my first visit to Ethiopia- in Harar we were all somebody else.

Much ado about a jar of Vaseline

Ah me! What hard work it is to start an expedition! What with hurrying through the baking heat of the fierce relentless sun from shop to shop, strengthening myself with far-reaching and enduring patience for the haggling contest…correcting volumes, making up accounts, superintending the delivery of purchased articles, measuring and weighing them…such labors were unremittingly mine for a month.

-How I Found Livingstone, Henry Morton Stanley

It took me only five minutes to buy my supplies. Hajj Bashir’s agent in Nahud had already gotten for us all he thought we’d need on the forty day trail- ground cloth for sleeping, cotton saddle pad for riding, tea glass for drinking. You eat aseeda with your right hand fingers, thus no need for a spoon. But he forgot the one thing I figured I couldn’t live without, so I went to the pharmacy and was directed to the ladies side of the counter. That’s where I was told I’d find my vaseline, sold by weight and scooped out of a tub and smeared into purse-size jars. I wish I’d known then that I’d need a lot more than just one. I wish I’d bought the whole tub. The camel could have carried it no problem, and I could sure have used a refill by Day 2.

Deserts howl, camels...

…there was a Camel, and he lived in the middle of a Howling Desert because he did not want to work, and besides he was a Howler himself.

-Kipling

There was always a steady north wind on our trip. I wouldn’t say it was a howler, it just blew a lot of sand along the ground and if you were mounted up you could stay out of it. Tea breaks were another story because it always got into our glasses. Bilal had a way of putting his other hand over the top like a lid between sips. Sitting with one’s back to the wind made things worse because the sand then would eddy on your leeward side and get into everything you were trying to keep clear.

Once when the wind was strong I asked Masood abu Dood where we were heading, pointing straight ahead into it. He said, UmDuhayr. I asked when we would get there, thinking it was a village or a well flat maybe with a windbreak. He just smiled. I asked KhairAallah, When will we arrive in UmDuhayr? He also smiled.

We never passed UmDuhayr and I forgot all about it until I was home months later and reread my diary. UmDuhayr, I had written. I tried to find the word in the dictionary but it is not easy because there are at least three different near-homophone consonants that might give the spoken “d” sound in Sudanese Arabic, and two different letters that might give an ”h” sound.

The word Duhayr is in the diminutive form. Its base word is Dahr. Dahr in the dictionary spelled with the only “d” consonant beginning the triliteral root d-h-r means Eternity. I wondered if Masood that day had been pointing into the wind and telling me, We are going to the Mother of Little Eternity, wherever he thought that was, wherever he thought I wanted to go.

Khairallah in the abode of peace

…places that have just been invented- you won’t find them on any map. They lie further out, quarters you have never heard of until you arrive…tarmac giving way to sand…There is Dar al-Salaam…even one called Allah Maafy, meaning “Allah is not in”, or maybe “God does not exist”…The western edge of Omdurman is now said to reach almost to Kordofan. Nobody knows what is out there.

-A Line in the River: Khartoum, City of Memory, Jamal Mahjoub

KhairAllah’s dar is in Dar al-Salaam. It is a compound for a big family, much more than a house. It is his abode, with a detached kitchen and sleeping porches and a sheepfold outside the bedroom window so he can hear his small herd rustle and jostle at night, just like back where he was born in Dar al-Kababish.

There is a majlis with an old rumbling AC window unit. I asked Soliman if his father had any relatives living nearby and he said, Yes, a lot more now that we have AC, they always come to visit in summer. I told a Sudanese friend in the US about KhairAllah’s AC and he said admiringly, In Dar al-Salaam that is like having a palace in the desert.

I’ve visited several times and thought the family could use more rooms. We don’t need rooms, KhairAllah said, We prefer to sleep in the open. The courtyard is surrounded by high walls. No one can see over them but everyone can walk in through the open door to the outside. He is that kind of man, that kind of neighbor. His is the abode of peace, not Allah Maafy. He keeps goats and sheep and his wife has an electric refrigerator and gas stove. No, God is not dead in KhairAllah’s dar. His son Soliman sends me emails from there.

Three ways to couch and four ways to mount

The camel doubled up camel-fashion, like a two foot rule, and sat down whimpering.

-Kipling

Kipling lost count. When camels couch, they don’t double but rather triple up, first falling to their elbows, then down to the knees as they fold underneath their rear legs, finally folding their forelegs and stretching out in front, all this pitching their riders in a three-way tilt. Forward. Backward. Forward. Standing up adds a fourth tilt, as they start up to their elbows, then up on the knees, next jerking up on their rear legs, and finally up on the forelegs. Backward. Forward. Farther Forward. Backward.

The camels we rode didn’t like us swinging our right legs over the saddle equestrian-style. They’d rise before we were fully settled which loosened the girth. We soon learned to mount as the drovers did, standing just forward of the saddle horn facing ahead, then hopping back over the horn and quickly crossing our legs and pressing them down over the camel’s neck to brace ourselves from falling forward as it gained its feet.

I liked mounting first because my camel was never in a hurry to rise if he saw the others still couched. Only when I was last was he eager to get up quick, sometimes too quick, to join them. That’s when the worst could happen, my rear impaled on a saddle horn. The drovers would all be watching out of the corner of their eyes. Anything for a laugh on the Darb al-Arba’een. That never happened but they had their laughs anyway. We gave them plenty of others.