The haa and the waw of it

Ma ya’rif el-haa min el-waw. He doesn’t know H [as in himaarhu, his Donkey] from W [as in waladhu, his Son], or…right from wrong, or…bad from good, or…day from night, or…up from down, or…cold from hot, or…whipping his camel forward from reining it back.

-Sudanese proverb, collected by Shaikh Abdullahi El-Amin, Tuti Island, with variant translations to reflect regional humor. The last is of Dar al-Kababish.

After he saw how badly we rode on that first day, kicking our camels like they were horses and pulling the reins (in fact there was only one lead off a single rope-tied halter) as if they had steel bits in their mouths, I know which of those translations KhairAllah would have intended for us.

Bi Raah, bi Raah

And man is ever hasty.

-Surah 17, Verse 11

Be patient, for you have no patience but from Allah.

-Surah 16, Verse 127

Bi Raah, Easy does it, Hold your horses. KhairAllah could say that without opening his mouth, merely by dropping his nearside hand from high to low. That’s when and where we would make camp that night. Our own schedules? Maalish, What’s it to me?, he seemed to say with that lazy whip hand.

Mustapha had a ski house in France he was trying to get to. I was due home- I’d promised to be gone only forty days. Nedu wanted to get the film rolls in a refrigerator before they cooked out there. When Yusuf went ahead of us in the last ten days, KhairAllah was angrier than I’d ever seen him. Not because he saw it as a violation of trail etiquette. Rather because the camels were happier, Hajj Bashir was happier, and the buyers were happier if you took it easy. With patience, they’d arrive in Egypt fat and sound and rested, as they were in Sudan when he set out with them.

Impertinent camels

Neither my she-camel nor my he-camel is pertinent to this matter.

-Sudanese proverb, originating in an incident involving a dead camel belonging to a woman named Basus, which brought the Bakr and Taghlib clans to war, and Harith, a man of the Bakr who declined to join the hostilities.

KhairAllah would agree, Keep your own camels out of women’s affairs. I knew two American women who rode with drovers and their dabouka to Egypt from Omdurman. They were arrested at the border for making an unauthorized entry and the dabouka was impounded. The women were able to bribe their way out of jail. I don’t know if they also paid to free the camels. But I am certain that the story spread quickly among trail bosses. Stay away from the shes, from all the shes.

From the mouths of sand dwellers

Great was the terror in the mouth of the Sand Dwellers. They closed their gates because of it. They did not come forth outside because of fear.

-Inscription at Jebel Barkal, from a granite stela erected by Thutmose III (1481-1425 BCE), translated by George Reisner

Since long before the time of Thutmose, Nile dwellers have been afraid of sand dwellers. Some were called then Barbaroi, some are called now Janjaweed, both considered terrorists by most. KhairAllah knows nothing of either. He just wants to be left alone with his camels and to water them along the Great Nile when driving them to Egypt or to sell them in Omdurman where the Blue Nile enters the White.

His name was lilis

Remember this…A child of six, small and young, his name was Lilis. To whom I raise this stone, as it should not have had to be, I the father Bassianus with my wife Januaria, she of the too many shed tears, mourning together our child’s painless birth. I salute you, O Passerby, and wish good health to all the others.

-Greek funerary inscription, Tomis, 4th C CE

Be not severe, Lover, as you pass by. Say, Easy may the bones of Ovid lie.

-Ovid’s imagined epitaph, Tristia 3.3.76, inscribed on his statue in Constanţa

We passed these outside the Greco-Roman Museum on our way to dinner in the marina’s restaurant row after a long day. We had been to Dr. Lilis’ hometown Mangalia with the 16th C. Ottoman mosque and minaret, Romania’s oldest. I had been reading the Black Sea Letters and Tristia, the Argonautica’s Book IV and Malouf’s An Imaginary Life. They all had Tomis as a place to get away from or to pass by in winter when the sea froze. I liked it there. It was early in the summer but the season was already in full swing. We were headed next to the Danube Delta, from the Greek as are many things in Constanţa.

Washing with sand in the wind

If you are ill or on a journey or if you come from a place where you have relieved yourself or have contacted women, and find no water, then seek clean earth and wipe with it over your hands and face. Indeed, Allah is ever Pardoning and Forgiving.

-Surah 4:43

Have you ever prayed into the wind? Even if in the lee of a couched camel? KhairAllah was filmed doing this. He seemed to be in a hurry, the other drovers had already set off with the dabouka and his own camel was growling and restless. I saw him wipe himself down with sand, do a few rak’ahs, say the bismillah as he mounted, then trot off to catch up. The wind was gusting high and I remember Mustapha having trouble with the sound level. It seemed to spike when KhairAllah said, In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.

At 'idd ahmed, She was the one

If she says, “Yes, have a drink, and I will water your camel too” - let her be the one…Rebekah was very beautiful and old enough to be married…Then she quickly emptied her jug into the trough and ran back to the well to draw water for all his camels. The servant watched her in silence…Then at last, when all the camels had finished drinking, he took out a gold ring for her nose…

-Genesis 24

Such is the way of choosing a bride in the desert. If she agrees to water your camel, put a ring on it. At ‘Idd Ahmed, an old lady well worker repaired the mud troughs and drew water for our camels and then shampooed Mustapha’s hair. I was talking to the school teachers and so missed my chance to maybe rid my head of lice. Rukaab, riders, they call them. The lady earned a silver coin, not a gold ring because she was probably already married. And she was definitely not named Rebekah. Probably Umm or Hajja Something. But in the desert, water is water, and we were very grateful for hers.

An unclean body upon an unclean body

And Rebekah lifted up her eyes, and when she saw Isaac she lighted off the camel.

-Genesis 24:64

Only begotten bridegroom, thy Gentile bride, loving thee, leapt down from the height of an unclean body.

-from The Greek Anthology, Book I, 69, On Rebecca

So this is what an anonymous Greek epigrammatist who knew the Gentile Old Testament had to say about Rebecca. After watering Abraham’s servant’s herd and putting him up for the night and agreeing to marry Abraham’s son Isaac sight unseen and travelling rough to his far off land to live among his people, when she finally lays eyes upon her husband-to-be and jumps off her camel to greet him…the Greek says only that she has been riding upon an unclean body. But what about, and I ask this question as one who himself has travelled rough and far by camel, her own unclean body?

ass-wise in the sahara

Among other things Don Quixote told him he should dispose himself to go with him willingly…With these and the like promises Sancho Panza left his wife…Above all he charged him not to forget a wallet, and Sancho said he would be sure to carry one and also that he intended to take with him an ass…As to the ass, Don Quixote paused a little, endeavoring to recollect if any knight-errant had ever carried a squire mounted ass-wise, but no instance of the kind occured to his memory.

-Miguel de Cervantes

No, it did not happen quite like that. Yes, Daoud and I put leather donkey pads across our camel saddles, and at the midway point KhairAllah had me ride a khusi, a gelding, which in the drovers’ minds was the equivalent of riding an ass. But I paid not a dime, Hajj Bashir simply told KhairAllah to take us with him. I never learned if he was expecting us to help him on the trail, or to give him extra work to do. One thing for sure, we gave him something to laugh about later, starting when he watched as we mounted for the first time ever.

al-jidi on your left cheek

…when I gaze upon the thousandfold circling gyre of the stars, no longer do I walk on earth, but rise…

-Claudius Ptolemaeus, 2nd C. Alexandrian astronomer whose star chart and 1,025 star catalog The Great Treatise descended to the West through its Arabic translation, The Almagest

On the trail we were probably too far south to have seen the four Alawaid, from al-’Awa’idh, the Nursing She-Camels, for they are in the northern polar constellation Draco. Same with Altais, the Wether Sheep, although we butchered and ate one once, and also with Alya, from al-Alya, the Tail of a Fat Tailed Sheep and with Alhena, from al-Han’ah, the Brand [on the Camel’s Neck]. And these are just the stars beginning with Al-. Also unrecognized went Arrakis, from al-Raaqis, the Dancer, said by the Arabs to look like a trotting camel.

KhairAllah was not a sailor so he wasn’t expected to know the entire Arabic star map. Algedi, from al-Jidi, the Yearling Goat, what he called the North Star- mistakenly, because the true Algedi is in the constellation Capricorn- was all he needed to find his way on the Way of the Forty. Keep it on your left cheek, he said, and it will take you to Cairo.

Bau going home

“Your tea, mah-dam,” the Dinka said with a mock bow. “I was one time a waiter in the hotel in Wau.” “Wow?”

-Acts of Faith, Philip Caputo, 2006

I beat Caputo by twenty years to this juvenile word play. I am not proud of my mockery. In January 1984 I was on a high and heavy leaf suspension bus from Umdurman to El Obeid following a sand track the whole way to Kordofan. I met a guy named Bau sharing my seat. It was a long day’s journey and we were really tossed when we arrived near dark.

On to Wau, home, he said. How far? I asked. It depends, he answered. On the track, on the engine, on the mazaaj, the mood, of the driver, maybe days, maybe a week. I just checked the internet. Fourteen hours, 535 miles on south. That seems short even today.

Wau is now in another country, Republic of South Sudan. At the time I laughed at the alliteration of his name and his hometown. Knowing now what I know, I should have felt sorry for him. But at the time, just as the civil war was restarting, with an attack on a Chevron oil rig not far from Wau that I heard about on the BBC while riding north a few weeks later, being a young American in Sudan was still a lark. Caputo’s American should have known not to make the same joke. There have been two million deaths since then and they continue.

The desert and the idea

Many converts to asceticism were educated men who found in the desert- or in the idea of the desert- a simplicity on the other side of great sophistication.

-The Challenge of the Desert, Peter Brown

You might say we were all educated men, if you think that Harvard or Princeton has anything to teach about the desert. A Psychology major, a Chinese major, a History major, and a Visual Studies major. Nothing there to know how to hobble your riding camel so he doesn’t run off at night and leave you on foot in the morning, or how to season a millet cake with hot pepper flakes so you can choke it down forty days straight. It was the idea of desert that attracted us, not its actuality, because we were graduates of school not sand.

The Psych major said, I’ve found that riding a camel is an effective aversion therapy for treating OCD. The Chinese major said, quoting Confucius, It is Man who is capable of broadening the Way, not the Way that is capable of broadening Man. The History major said, midway on his second trip up the Way, He who forgets the past is condemned to repeat it. The Visual Studies major said, I should have learned from Las Vegas. Yusuf said to KhairAllah while pointing at Bilal, Lucky is he who learns from the misfortune of others. We all had finally earned our diplomas.

for the first time in our lives

On the day they left Timbuktu you could see grown men with beards anxious to mount a camel but trembling in fear before it. When they mounted the camel they were thrown off when the beast rose, for the righteous forefathers kept their children indoors until they grew up. Hence they had no understanding of practical matters…

-Tarikh al-Sudan, Abd al-Sa’di, mid-17th C.

Abd al-Sa’di writes of the departure in the year 1324 of the haj caravan of Mansa Musa, ruler of the Malian Empire and said to have been the richest man in the world. His pack string included eighty camels each carrying hundreds of pounds of gold dust. When he passed through Cairo en route to Mecca they say he flooded the souks with such extravagent coinage that prices went wild for a decade.

Our departure from al-Nahud was a bit more modest. We slaughtered a ewe and marked the camels’ necks with our sheep blooded hand prints. Neither Daoud nor Mustapha nor Nedu nor I had ridden camels before, but we neither trembled nor feared. We were practical Americans.

We watched KhairAllah mount as he reached back with his left hand to grip the rear saddle pommel and ahead with his right to hold the fore. That way when the camel jerked up off his knees like an unfolding jack knife KhairAllah was ready for each direction of tilt. A tight girth helped too. We didn’t yet have beards- those would grow later- but we just like Mansa Musa’s 60,000 man entourage were eager to see Cairo.

A chaos of kneeling beasts

I again saw tribes…prostrating themselves in the open desert in a chaos of women and packs and kneeling beasts. But this time the sand took the place of snow.

-Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Youcenar

Lose the women and the snow and that image captures the scene at the ‘Idd Ahmed well flat when KhairAllah’s dabouka pulled in right behind Yusuf’s and Bilal’s. That made 500 camels, some limping, most growling, all dry and thirsty. We quickly unsaddled and unloaded so our riding and pack animals wouldn’t have to wait for the last buckets hauled up. At a desert well, none want the hind teat. Water, lifeblood and front seat in Dar al-Kababish. Pray for it.

A thrust against time

A fancy seized me which I had not known since childhood days…to carve my name…one more thrust against time…

-Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Youcenar

And Memnon, trembling at the power of Hadrian, suddenly spoke.

-from an epigram by court poet Julia Balbilla, a member of Hadrian’s royal entourage on his visit to Thebes in 130 CE, carved on the legs of the Colossus of Memnon

I had never kept a diary before my first trip in the Darb al-Arba’een in 1984. It opens on Day 3, pre-dawn, with 100 camels kneeling and rechewing their cuds, the previous day having driven them hard, eaten their trail dust and smelt their tail wind. I wrote in pencil in a lined notebook and on its last page working forward I kept lists- vocabulary words (rasad, rein; hizaam, girth; sanaam, hump; zurr, chest callous), geneologies of the drovers (Adam, Son of Hamid, Son of Adam, Son of Hamid), and foodstuffs from home that I missed most, bacon and baguettes the topmost. I doubt this is what Youcenar meant by Hadrian’s thrust against time carved in stone, but it helped pass those forty days, which in fact came to forty three. We were slow. I needed more pages.

She is like a camel

Armla bhal gemel- ghaliha z-zwieg mimli hemel. A widow is like a camel- marriage for her is a full burden. I am doubtful about the origin of this proverb as my informant for many years lived in Tripoli.

-A Comparative Dictionary of Maltese Proverbs, Joseph Aquilina

Whoever said that a second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience has never ridden a camel for forty days. You give up all hope after a mere twenty days, and every one thereafter becomes just another saddle sore. So the Maltese widow, the Armla, and the Libyan widow, the Armala, are both right…Don’t mount up unless you’re sure you can ride the full arba’een.