Kicking up dust on the darb

Triliteral root D-R-B. Noun, Darb is not a word of Arabic origin. The Arab word for the ancient Derbe, near the Caspian Gates, which were the chief mountain pass from the direction of the countries occupied by the Arabs into the territory of the Greek Empire [of Rum]. Hence, Any place of entrance. Darboob, A she-camel that will follow a person if he takes hold of her lip or eyelash. Mudarrab, A camel well trained or accustomed to be ridden through narrow mountain passes.

-Lane’s Lexicon

…Daraw, a village on the Nile’s east bank, where if you are lucky you will see camels kicking up the dust…the end of the Darb al-Arba’een, the Forty Days Road.

-Insight Guides: The Nile

It is not strange to me that the Forty Days Road from Kordofan to Cairo that I followed twice was not the true Darb al-Arba’in, which more properly bypassed the Nile altogether following a string of oases until it reached Assiut, but rather that the Arabic word Darb comes from Persian [a shortening of the compound noun Darband, from Dar for Gate and Band for Bar, making Barred Gate, as in Derbent, the Caspian port city at the eastern edge of the Caucasus Mountains]. I would have thought that a quintessential Arab desert route would claim a quintessential Arabic language etymology.

But leave it to the medieval Arab grammarians, who never saw a useful foreign loan word they could not fit into their own Semitic language’s triliteral root system, to generate such rarefied camel-related cognates as Darboob and Mudarrab. I never heard those two words spoken on the darb, although we never saw the need to grab a she-camel by the eyelash while passing between two mountains.

You won't find them on any map

…a thorough knowledge of the language eliminates a not infrequent error made by travelers whose acquaintance with Arabic is imperfect- that of indicating as place names words which in reality are merely generic…

-John Kirtland Wright, Geographical Review, April 1927

Jebel al-Jamal, Mountain of the He-Camel. Nuqtat al-Naaqa, Point of the She-Camel. ‘Idd al-Ibl, Wells of the Collective Camels. Hillat al-Hashi, Hamlet of the Young Camel…etc, etc…These are not real places. You won’t find any of them among the 20,000 entries of the Gazetteer of Sudanese Geographical Names published by the US Defense Mapping Agency for God knows what reason. They are just places that I remember from the trail.

KhairAllah remembers them differently. The Sand Dune Where Luwees Couldn’t Couch His Camel. The Resting Place Where Luwees Didn’t Recognize His Camel. The Watering Site Where Luwees Drank His Tea Before the Others Had Hobbled Their Camels. The Camp Where Luwees Kept the Camels Awake with His Snoring. It makes for more interesting story telling.

about camels, more is more

It were to be wished that he spoke more of his mistress and less of his camel.

-William Jones, 18th C. British Orientalist, on the pre-Islamic poet Tarafa ibn al-Abd’s Ode to his Beloved, Khaula

To be candid, many will share his regrets, for the anatomical dissection of the camel is not everyone’s favorite reading.

-A.J. Arberry, 20th C. British Orientalist, on Jones’ opinion of Tarafa’s Ode

…straight away I ride off on my swift, lean-flanked camel, night and day racing, sure footed…her dry udders withered like an old water skin. Perfectly firm is the flesh of her two thighs, they are the gates of a lofty, smooth-walled castle…Reddish the bristles under her chin…her legs are twined like rope uptwisted…Her long neck is very erect when she lifts it up…Her cheek is smooth as Syrian parchment…her eyes are a pair of mirrors sheltering in the caves of her brow…Her ears are true…her trepid heart pulses strongly…Such is the beast I ride…Come to me when you will, I’ll pour you a flowing cup, and if you don’t need it, well, do without, and good luck to you!

-Ode, Tarafa ibn al-Abd, translated by A.J. Arberry

But what could Tarafa possibly say about his beloved Khaula that would be more interesting than this? That her name means female gazelle? That its triliteral root generates the words for maternal uncle, maternal aunt, slave, gift, pimple, cross-dressing male dancer, and naturally, camel? As KhairAllah might say, Let us not talk of niswan (womens, the plural form of the plural noun) but of ibl, and I’ll pour you another. Luwees, Koob (Cup!, the imperative of the verb) shai!

Forty million years and this is how it ends? In Zoos and beauty pageants?

40 Million BCE. Camelids first appear in North America. 2.5 Million BCE. Camelids reach Asia by the Bering Sea land bridge. 4000 BCE. Dromedaries first domesticated in Arabia. 656 CE. The Battle of the Camel. 2002 CE. The first camel beauty contest in UAE.

-Timeline of the Camel, in Camel, Robert Irwin

I don’t know which fact KhairAllah would find more incredible, that camels originated in Amreeka, or that rich Emiratis give big bucks to the most beautiful. For someone who laughed out loud when I told him Americans put camels in zoos, for someone accustomed to appraising their value by how much meat they carry, I guess he’d call one an example of nomadic cognitive dissonance and the other an example of Arab cultural decadence. After 6,000 years of him and his forefathers herding camels, has it only come to this?

Which the camel and which the driver?

How true again the proverb, ‘The camel has his schemes, and the camel driver has his schemes’, the interests of the driven and the driver being ordinarily very different…

-Proverb Lore: Many Sayings, Wise or Otherwise…, F. Edward Hulme

Hulme’s Arabic proverbs were pulled from Burckhardt’s collection, in which he notes he was “greatly assisted by native helpers” whose “quaint and delightful humor” leads to another, “When the monkey reigns, dance before him”. One wonders if the native helpers were making a monkey of him, Burckhardt having a poor grasp of colloquial Cairene Arabic from which he put the proverbs into a written form of Classical.

I once was very interested in the Sudanese grazing pattern called the Jizu in the country’s northwest corner. Mas’ood told me that herdsmen took camels there for months at a time and had no water to drink. “We drink camel urine,” he told me, “Wallahi al-’adtheem”, By God the Great. I believed him until KhairAllah told me, Nonsense, Mas’ood won’t even drink unsweetened tea.

Tell pococke to post

The long step of the camel causes a very great motion in the riders, which for some is very disagreeable.

-Richard Pococke, Bishop in the Church of Ireland, Description of the East and Some Other Countries, 1743

Richard Pococke sent forty eight letters home to his mother while he was travelling for three years to Alexandria, Cairo, Aswan, and beyond. As he wrote as a kind of rationale for going after he had already left, “if seeing those places [in the East]…may touch my heart with a greater sense of duty and make greater impressions for what he did for us, I hope this journey on that account alone shall not be thought a fruitless one.”

I am not surprised that the “he” to whom Bishop Pococke referred in camel country was the Maseeh, the Messiah, and not the Taajir, the Trader, or the Khabeer, the Trail Boss, or one of the Raa’i’een, the Herdsmen, but only that the postal service from Upper Egypt in that era functioned so well. Two hundred and fifty years later I sent a telegram home from Dongola saying, Do not worry, Day 25 and I’m midway on the Forty Days Trail. That cable never arrived, and I’d paid a few piasters extra for it to be hand delivered. So in my case she had to wait until I got back in person to hear my greater impressions of Hajj Bashir, KhairAllah, Mas’ood, Rabih, and the others.

More than dust, dung

Huge Saharan dust cloud knocking on America’s door.

-Accuweather, June 25, 2020

Studies have found microbial life can hitch a ride on the (SAL) Saharan Air Layer and land on the shores of Florida after a turbulent journey across the sea.

-Washington Post

The Saharan dust cloud is made of much more than silicates and quartzites. Mostly those, but also motes of dried mud from when the desert had monsoon, micron-sized calcites formed from paleo-sea shells, and cellulose crystals from when the desert grew trees. And yes, also the gut biota- microbial life!- of the Sahara’s ten million camels, that which lives, dies, and returns from the dead when forage passes through their three stomachs on its fifty hour voyage from stem to stern.

Once KhairAllah at a farmer’s invitation steered our dabouka to graze in the fresh stubble of his bean field. We regretted it later when they were couched and hobbled around our fire. Normally hard pellets passed as unformed pies. They stank and made a racket all night as they flopped to the ground. But they too by now are sere as sand, eroded to the micrometer, blown north by khamaseen winds, spun round and round by the simoom, uplifted to 20,000 feet by the haboob, and pushed west by the trades to rain down on Mar-a-Lago.

Trump, eat tarh. Barr, eat ba’ar. Jared, eat ja’r. (see Varisco, D., Zibl and Zara’a: Coming to Terms with Manure in Arab Agriculture, Table 9.1 Terms for animal dung in Classical Arabic)

Inspect his tent lest he drown

Thou hast said in this thy letter that thou hast brought all great and beautiful gifts…a dancing dwarf of the god from the land of spirits…Thou hast said to my majesty, Never before has one like him been brought by any other who has visited Yam…Come northward to the court immediately, thou shalt bring this dwarf with thee living, prosperous, and healthy from the land of spirits…take care lest he fall into the water. When he sleeps at night appoint excellent people who shall sleep beside him in his tent, inspect ten times a night. My majesty desires to see this dwarf more than the gifts of Sinai and of Punt.

-Letter from Pharaoh Pepi II to his caravan conductor Harkhuf who was returning from Yam [Sudan] on the Forty Days Road, inscribed on the Tomb of Harkhuf in the Valley of the Nobles, Aswan, translated by James Henry Breasted

O Ye Living, who shall pass by this tomb whether going upstream or downstream…a thousand jars of beer for the owner of this tomb…

-inscription, Tomb of Harkhuf, Royal Caravan Conductor, Old Kingdom

No one was dancing in our group, we were all so dead tired that none of us could even shimmy when we followed Harkhuf’s footsteps up from Sudan more than four thousand years later. He led 300 laden asses, we were driving 150 camels. He brought incense, ebony, ivory, and “every good product”, we brought meat on the hoof. Both Harkhuf and KhairAllah were widely esteemed Trail Bosses “because”, as his tomb inscription boasted, “I was more excellent, vigilant, and — than any count, companion, or caravan conductor who had been sent to Yam before.” Likewise, KhairAllah boasts in the film, “Everyone knows me as a khabeer in Kutum.” Let it be known that Kutum is a small village famous for its excellent and vigilant khubaraa’. But among the khubaraa’ I knew, only Bilal was a beer drinker, millet beer, and a thousand bottles was too much for him whether going upstream, downstream, or even sideways.

The Ship of the Desert (Don't Laugh)

Madame de Stael has somewhere said that travelling is the saddest of all pleasures. But we all have the longing of Rasselas in our hearts. We are ready to leave the Happy Valley of home and eager to see something of the world beyond the streets and steeples of our native town.

-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Preface to Poems of Places

Onward, my camel- on though slow; Halt not upon these fatal sands. Onward, my constant camel, go,—, The fierce simoom has ceased to blow…Droop not, my faithful camel, Now the hospitable well is near!…I grieve the most to think that thou and I may part, dear comrade, here!

-from The Ship of the Desert, William Motherwell, Scottish Poet, via Longfellow

Where did Longfellow come up with some of these howlers? In his anthology Poems of Places you can read topographical verse by mostly forgotten poets under the rubrics Mecca, Medina, Petra, Babylon, and beyond. This one by Motherwell was from Arabia: Desert. For Nubia he found poems about Meroe (“Ethiop’s city”), Aswan (“Ultima Thule of Egyptus”), and Abu Simbel (“Ipsamboul!”), and in the Sahara he found Mirage (“…Timbuctoo’s caravan…”), The Spectre-Caravan (“my Beddaweens…”), and The Simoom (“the desert is their grave, the sand their shroud…”).

The best of this bunch was Keats’ To the Nile- “Nurse of swart [!] nations since the world began”. Pity those who learn their geography by reading musty verses of dead British poets, not being teased by Kababish drovers for confusing the village of Mahtoul with the well flat of Maraheek.

Veni, vidi, incidi

As to the cutting of inscriptions on the statue, it is said that it is probable that they thought they could not do a greater honor to the statue than to cut on it the testimonies of so many persons that heard the sound…The common people have the weakness to imagine that inscriptions discover treasures.

-Richard Pococke, Bishop in the Church of Ireland, Description of the East and Some Other Countries, 1743

I, Tiberius Julius Lupus, Prefect of Egypt, heard Memnon at the 1st Hour. I, Sextus Licinius Pudens, Centurion of the 22nd Legion, on the 11th Day before the Kalends of January, in the 3rd Year of the Emperor Domitian, heard Memnon. I, Sabinius Fuscus, Prefect of the 1st Mounted Spanish Cohort, heard Memnon twice on the 7th Day before the Ides of March, in the 3rd Year of the Emperor Domitian Augustus, at the 2nd Hour.

-Graffiti carved on the legs and torso of the Colossus of Memnon, Thebes

Richard Pococke, “a pioneer of Homeric topography” his biographer called him, mapped and transcribed some of the 107 graffiti tags incised by Greek and Roman tourists on the legs of the northern-most Colossus of Memnon in Thebes, which was said to sing when the heat of the dawn sun warmed the stone and expanded its fissures to make a high pitched humming sound “like the breaking of a string of a harp when it is wound”, in a moment of what some might call harmonic convergence.

His book has an illustration plate showing the Colossus lettered like a comic book. Some scholars speculate that the many texts’ recurring grammatical errors indicate there were Egyptian carvers on site with poor Greek and Latin who for a fee would chisel the inscriptions so the foreign visitors (or maybe it was they who gave ungrammatical dictation) would not have to climb the statue.

I wonder what that rare literate camel drover would have made of the letter I wrote on KhairAllah’s behalf and left with a passing herdsman midway on the trail, explaining that a lost camel of a certain color with a certain brand belonged to so-and-so and should be returned to his friend so-and-so, terribly spelled except for my well practised Bismillah, Al-Hamdulillah, InshaAllah, and Al-Mukhlis Luwees (Sincerely, Louis). In this case I could not blame the quality of KhairAllah’s dictation- when on the subject of camels he always spoke impeccably.

Bercy basha, Boundless and bare

a traveller…in the desert…on the sand…lifeless…lone and level…far away.

-words from a sonnet…

Strange that the greatest English language Orientalist sonnet was written by someone who had never been to the Middle East, about a portrait statue containing the cartouche of the subject’s throne name User-Ma At-Re, Sun of Princes- better known in Diodorus Siculus’ Greek rendition- that he had never seen, misidentified by Belzoni as Amenhotep III, whose Upper Nubian temple at Soleb KhairAllah had detoured the dabouka towards on the Nile’s west bank to show me. He knew the American might like the Athaar, the Ruins, but he didn’t know the name Amenhotep or the name of the sonnet’s author. Hint, Arabs pronounce their Ps as Bs.

In Urdu, to ‘Urdi

Qaafile mein subah ke ik shor hai,/Yaani ghaafil hum chale, sota hai kya!

The shout of the morning caravan gives its call,/”Out of your bed, O Sleeper, we are off!”

-Mir Taqi Mir (1723-1810), Urdu Poet

22nd of Safa. Quitted the land at an early hour and proceeded up the river, in hourly expectation of coming into view of Dongola, which we had been given to understand was a considerable town.

-G. B. English

Urdu comes from the Turkish word, Ordu, for army, the language having been born as a synthetic lingua franca suited for the military life of the Mughal Empire’s multi-lingual soldiers speaking Persian, Hindi, Arabic, and many Central Asian others. And so the Mamluk-founded town of ‘Urdi, Military Camp, built by Turkish slave soldiers exiled from Egypt following Muhammad Ali Pasha’s usurpation of power there in 1811, which the drovers still called as such, a word also known to Bactrian camel drivers in the Gobi Desert. Not Dongola, in the Mahas dialect of Nubian, as the Nile-bound farmers of beans and peas there call it.

The Kababish knew nothing of this town’s history, nor of the American fortune seeker George Bethune English’s Narrative of an Expedition to Dongola… from 1822 telling of the punitive campaign led by Muhammad Ali’s son Ismail Pasha to attack these renegade Turks, only that ‘Urdi was the halfway point on their journey. Mir’s couplet would have fallen on their deaf ears, for in their dreams they had already awakened from their long trail’s short sleep and arrived in Egypt. No need to hurry them past Dongola, they could already taste Cairo’s sweet promises.

Gordon's head, Churchill’s bust, trump's ass

It is always interesting to know what kind of book the devil would have written- but the theologians never gave him a chance…All who have had a hand in the Sudan must read it…A strange and sinister figure who threw a distant shadow across my generation in the ‘eighties. The Mahdi!…The life of the Mahdi is a romance in miniature…built entirely on slavery and slaughter…When the Mahdi’s successor met Kitchener, he met a weapon of undreamed power, the machine gun!…an unequal clash between East and West. Wonderful are the ways of England!

-Winston Churchill, Preface to The Mahdi of Allah by Richard Bermann

If the battle of Lafayette Park turns- as seems possible- into Donald Trump’s most telling misadventure, part of the credit should go to Winston Churchill. Churchill seems to have been on the President’s mind since he entered the Oval Office, where he returned a bust of the former British Prime Minister…But it was this week’s trek across the street, past a plaza tear-gassed free of protesters, that really allowed Trump’s Churchill fantasies full play.

-Bill McKibben

Winston Churchill’s The River War written in 1899 shows none of the raw jingoism that drips from his preface to The Mahdi of Allah in 1932. What happened between those years was his need to respond to the politics of the moment, to wave the bloody British shirt. The Empire was slipping, Albion was weakening, Germany was rumbling. He would be defiant.

Trump knows well his own bloody shirts, they helped get him elected. “American carnage”…”a complete disaster”…”the worst ever”…”she’s a loser”. So Trump tosses his political footballs- xenophobia, sexism, racism- onto the field in every play. He returns the Churchill bust, with that fierce bulldog grimace he practices in the morning mirror, to the Oval Office.

Who else’s head might carry a MAGA message? General Gordon’s, cut off by the Mahdi’s Helpers in an act of imperial defiance that Churchill had come to Sudan to avenge? Or the Mahdi’s own- his grave desecrated by British soldiers, his body disinterred, his skull stolen to serve as Kitchener’s inkwell? But ink to write what? That he had taken over their country, or that its people weren’t going away?

Al-, Chosen to be Perfect

When God wanted to make the people of the thirteenth century [19th C CE] blissful…he caused the manifestation of al-Mahdi [The Rightly Guided One] in spirit and in body. God singled out the people of Sudan for this manifestation so as to strengthen its people…the people of perfection.

-The Life of the Mahdi, Ismail Abd al-Qader, written in 1888, 3 years after the deaths of both the Sudanese Mahdi and General Gordon

I am the Chosen One [Al-Mustapha]…The call was perfect [ihsan, in the theological sense], the letter was perfect, the China ban was perfect, the coronavirus tests were perfect, the transcript was perfect, control of Lafayette Park was perfect…

-Trump

A man walks down the street/He asks “Why am I soft in the middle now?”/…I need a photo opportunity/ I want a shot at redemption./Don’t want to end up a cartoon/…He says, “Why am I short of attention?”/ Got a short little span of attention/And whoa, my nights are so long/ Where’s my wife and family?/What if I die here?/…when you call me, you can call me Al/Call me Al.

-Paul Simon

As his nom de voyage, Steve called himself just plain Mustapha, Chosen One, in tribute to the Prophet Muhammad, who was al-Mustapha, The Chosen One, chosen by God to be his last and most perfect messenger. Enter Trump, America’s “I Alone” President, who emphatically puts the Arabic definite article, Al-, before his every first person reference. You can call him “Al-”, in scare quotes.

On the road to egypt, hast thou seen aup?

Didst thou not then go to the country of Kheta? Hast thou not seen the land of Aup? Knowest thou not Khatuma, Iktai, likewise? How is it? The Tsor of Sesortis, the city of Khaleb in its vicinity? Hast thou not made an expedition to Qodesh and Tubakkhi? Hast thou not gone to the Shasous? Hast thou not tramped the road to Pamakar?

-The Journeying of the Master of Egypt, from a 14th Century BCE papyrus in the British Museum

On the road to Egypt we stretch the starry spaces. Why save for poverty and wretchedness must we cross the desert of Atmour night upon night?

-Poem recited by Bilal Bakheet midway on Darb al-Arba’een, 1988

We were passing Sodiri, aiming for Khileiwa on the Nile and then another twenty days farther north to Binban. The country of Mahtoul? The land of Maraheek? The village of Iyal Bakheet? The road to Iktai, to al-’Urdi, to Atmour, to home? I was as lost on the Way of the Forty as was the Master of Egypt journeying on the Road to Pamakar thirty five centuries before me. Tubakkhi? Shasous? Khaleb? Maybe we passed them, maybe we didn’t. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention, maybe I didn’t ask the right question. Or maybe I just hadn’t caught the last line of Bilal’s poem…Allah, You are generous, End our hardship…that is, Wake us from all this.

No need be Saved by bell

We’re off. And now I must tell you the course of the negotiations, which preceded the journey. First as you know I went to the sons of — and they called up — and asked him to help me. He said it was too early, the desert camels had not yet come in to —, there was not a riding camel to be had. Next day, — and a friend went to the suq and came back with the news that he and — had found an owner of camels…All the arrangements were made and I dispatched the camels on the — Road. Then followed misfortune…the desert post did not come for three weeks and till it came we were without a guide. Then — invented another scheme. The old skeikh of — near — was in — and wanted to return home. He would journey with us and guide us. So all was settled again.

-Gertrude Bell, Letter dated February 9, 1911

Bell had her troubles with camel logistics seventy three years to the month before the day that David and I trucked into Nahud and then rode out. For us it was a breeze, all arranged in letters sent by post. Al-Hajj Bashir had greeted us in Cairo and sent us on to Khartoum with his friend Ali al-Hajj. From there we took the military bus out of Suq Libya to El Obeid where Sayyid Bashir picked us up. From there he put us on the red-haired Gabi the Syrian’s Bedord lorry to Nahud where Hussein al-Hamadabi and his son Nazar took us in and introduced us to Abu Jaib’s agent Sadiq Abdul Wahab. Sadiq drove us out to the Khileeyu well flats where he introduced us to KhairAllah who told us to Irkab, Mount. And so we did, and arrived in Egypt forty three days later, delayed three days by violent stomach troubles brought on by bad water at the Kalabsha wells and many other less important things.