Camels and chameleons

There is nothing particularly special about camels. Dispersal over huge distances is not at all unusual with land animals…Horses are much the same as camels, and frogs, toads, shrews, deer, cats, weasels, otters, hares, skinks, chameleons, and geckos…

-Where Do Camels Belong?, Ken Thompson

I don’t think KhairAllah would be pleased to hear skinks and toads being called the equal of camels at any level. Chameleons? Maybe yes to that one. Drovers do become somewhat the same color and acquire the same odor of the camels they ride for forty days. The same trail dust and almost the same sustenance, millet flour and acacia thorn being close olfactory cousins once they exit the digestive tract. But KhairAllah would not hesitate in answering the book title’s question. Camels belong in Dar al-Kababish.

The rain in spain and in sudan

Rain, n. Matar, ghayth. Rain shower, Matara. Light rain leaving small, quickly disappearing pools, Nugaa’a. Rain leaving pools but not covering the ground completely, Shabaka. Light rain completely covering the ground, ‘Amma. Heavy rain filling cultivation basins, Malya. Heavy rain causing water courses to run in spate, Seela. Very heavy rain waterlogging the ground, Wakhm. Light rain, Shakshaka. Cessation of rain, Sabna. Interval between rainfalls at the end of the rainy season, Shubaah. Early rain at beginning of rainy season, Rashshaash. Rainbow, Heem. Rain-mite, Bint al-Matar [lit. Daughter of the Rain], or Dood al-Matar, Worm of the Rain.

-Sudan Arabic, Sigmar Hillelson

They say that Arabs have as many words for camel as the Inuit have for ice and snow, necessity being the Mother of Neologism. I was only in Sudan during the dry season so I never saw it rain and never had cause to use the common word for rain, matar. KhairAllah talked often about jamals and naagas, he-camels and she-camels, and hashis and khusys, yearlings and geldings. But he never once mentioned shabakas and seelas, wakhms and malyas. If we had seen a heem on the trail I’m sure he would have said, SubhanAllah, Glory to God, and I never in my life would have forgotten how to say, Rainbow.

Khawajas are Tayeb too

“But what shall I say if anyone speaks to me?” “Just say Tayeb, that will do for an answer to anything. And I shall be there to change the subject.” I already knew that Tayeb was a fundamental word in the Egyptian language. It is a word which means all sorts of things depending on intonation. Yet it cannot be compared to the English “God Damn” unless it is to mark the difference between a nation with polish and one with nothing more than the police.

-The Women of Cairo, 1850, Gerard de Nerval, recounting a conversation between himself and his dragoman in Cairo

Khawaja Nimra Wahid, Tayeb, Tayeb, Tayeb. Khawaja Nimra Itnayn, Tayeb, Tayeb, Tayeb. Foreigner Number One, Good, Good, Good. Foreigner Number Two, Good, Good, Good.

-Masood Abu Dood, Camel Drover, speaking to Luwees and Daoud

On second thought, Masood may have called me and David not tayeb but kuwayyis, a diminutive form of the classical Arabic kayyis, which in Egyptian dialect is the more common word for tayeb’s main meaning of “good” or “okay”. All I remember was his goofy grin and faux American accent when he called us that, as if he were parroting back to us our own botched pronounciation of his language. So Nerval was right, what Masood really might have been saying was, God Damn, you khawajas sure know how to butcher my beloved Arabic.

Sudan’s pony express

5 Quroush, 1956, Jumhuriyyat al-Sudan

-Camel Postman 5 piaster coin, Republic of Sudan

The Sudanese pound was pegged to the US dollar until 1978 at $2.87, with minor devaluations in the following few years, so in 1984 when I had change made and was given this 5 piaster coin, it was worth about a dime. A friend my age used to buy his school lunch with it. In 2020 few young people have even heard of a piaster except as a word in their grandfathers’ proverbs. Today one pound is worth two cents and the 5 piaster coin is offered on ebay for $6.00.

The camel postman engraved on the obverse side meant something special to me because I had been corresponding with Hajj Bashir in El Obeid, which on the map looks to be in the middle of the desert although it is not. I thought, So this is who delivered my letters to him.

Now the Sudanese postal service is a wreck after thirty years of political ruination. Khartoum’s colonial era Central Post Office is gutted and being renovated, perhaps as luxury condos, something else Trump would do. Pony Express, Camel Postmen? We fondly remember them both.

Ana ba'afaddal al-ibl

Nine out of Ten Men who Try Camels Prefer Women

-gag license plate waiting for me when I got home

If I had said to KhairAllah, Ana ba’afaddal al-ibl, I prefer the camels, he would have thought me majnoon, nuts. Mafrood batfaddal al-fulous, You ought to prefer the money, he would have told me. Don’t be the crazy one out of ten. Take the cash. Go home to your wife in Amreeka.

KhairAllah schools the father of sociology

Bare necessities are, in a way, basic, and luxuries secondary. Bedouins thus are the basis of and prior to cities and sedentary living. The toughness of desert life precedes the softness of city living. Urbanization is the goal towards which the Bedouin aspires. When he has attained enough for the requirements of luxury, he enters upon a life of ease and submits himself to the yoke of the city.

-Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), called the Father of Sociology

What happens if the desert herdsman leaves behind the desert without leaving behind his desert ways? If he wants to buy young sheep for fattening before selling but neglects to figure in the high urban costs of buying them there and buying fodder and water, and if he can’t attain an economy of scale because his urban compound only can stable a few rather than many head? That was KhairAllah’s problem before this year’s Feast of the Sacrifice. Last time he bought a sheep along a desert roadside directly from a herdsman and had free transport into the city in the rear seat of my jeep, its bound feet kicking my movie projector. The fattest one cost $60.

This year he bought three in central Omdurman’s Suq Libya from a middleman, each one for $150 or more. This made no sense to me but it did to him, because a desert herdsman’s calculus includes a factor that an urban trader’s does not- the psychic value of going to sleep with the sounds and smells of your livestock settling for the night right beside you. Costs and prices and selling margins be damned. For KhairAllah, city living is neither joke nor yoke.

Meat or millet

Cambyses, being greatly enraged, marched against the Aethiopians without making any provision for the subsistence of his army or once considering that he was going to the remotest part of the world…before the army had passed a fifth part of the way, all the provisions were exhausted and the beasts of burden were eaten and likewise failed…The soldiers supported life by eating herbs, but when they reached the sands some of them had recourse to a horrid expedient…

-Herodotus, Book III

If you guess that the “horrid expedient” was to resort to eating millet paste for forty days, you would not be too far off. At our starting point near Nahud, Hajj Bashir’s agent Abd al-Wahab gave us a good supply of flour and sugar and tea and cooking oil. The sugar didn’t go as far as the other staples so after just a few days everybody was in a bitter mood but at least we didn’t kill and eat one another. And KhairAllah carried extra cash so once when our spirits were low he bought a goat from a passing herdsman and we had some meat. We only ate the camel much later because it was badly lame and couldn’t keep up, and we had to slaughter it anyway so it wouldn’t suffer a slow death out there.

Beeves, service, and salamaat

Hamdillah salamtak. Ayyi khidmah, ayyi khidmah. Praise Allah for your safety. Any service, any service.

-Ahmad Abd al-Majid, Hajj Bashir’s camel agent in Banban village near Aswan at the end of the 40 Days Road, greeting KhairAllah

“A royal offering presented to Sati, Khnum, Anket and the gods who are in Ta-kens [Nubia] giving to them service, bread, wine, beeves, fowls and all things that are good and living…”. The precise meaning of many of the formulae continually met with is still more or less uncertain.

-A Season in Egypt, Flinders Petrie, 1887, translating an inscription from an unspecified dynasty on a stela at Aswan near the royal road from Kush to Thebes

I remember being served a glorious meal prepared by Ahmad’s hurma (variant of hareem). Fresh bread and sauced beans. I don’t remember if there was meat, all that mattered at the time was it wasn’t millet. A royal offering? No, for that we had to wait til we booked into the Aswan hotel and went to its breakfast buffet. Crowded around that bowl of fasulya and khubz Ahmad didn’t treat us like Nubian gods, neither Sati nor Khnum nor Anket, no, but only like the trail dust eaters that we were.

The potentate and me

Camel Herders Stable No.46…established in 1954…The purpose of the Camel Herders is to acquaint and enlighten newly created Nobles and to usher, process, guide, and control Novices so that they can successfully negotiate the difficult Hot Sands…The Herd does the bidding of the Potentate and is proud of the two camels under its care. Due to expert herding skills, public displays have proceeded without mishap…The Herd meets the third Tuesday of every month to socialize and conduct business…

-Mission Statement, Kena Shriners, Manassas, Virginia

The Kena camel herders and I are the same age but it took me thirty years to successfully negotiate the hot sands. For that I have the Potentate KhairAllah to thank, or as he prefers to be called in his own language, Khabeer al-Dabouka, Expert of the Herd.

THe sand and the city

The road is desert throughout and in the most part covered with a deep sand and waterless…As often as the south wind blows there it overwhelms the whole country with huge quantities of sand so that all the marks of the former paths are covered and a traveller is as much at a loss whither to direct his course amidst these sands as if he were at sea…

-Arrian’s Anabasis of Alexander, describing his route across the Libyan Desert in the year 332 BCE

We too crossed the Libyan Desert, only toward and not away from the Nile, and we were headed south to north. Alexander crossed the sand sea east to west to the oracle at Siwa in order to learn if he was a god. Cairo’s Imbaba camel market had no oracular pronouncements for us, except maybe to warn that we risked trouble back home if we tarried much longer. But we were all eager to leave Cairo, KhairAllah and Mas’ood and the other drovers for Kordofan, I for the Big Apple.

Cavafy wrote, “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore, find another city better than this one…” What he didn’t say was that cities are alike in every way, not just in his one way. For something really different, to try to erase your old life, you have to go back to the desert. The drovers knew but I didn’t yet. For that I needed to make another trip with them.

Mish Ma'qool, not rational

There is no camel hair in a camel hair brush (the brushes are made from the hair of squirrels). Despite its hump a camel’s spine is straight. Caravans used camel bladders as containers for precious spices and oils to keep them safe in the desert.

-Ripley’s Believe It Or Not

Americans only know camels from zoos. Americans will pay a dollar to pet a camel. Americans tie a camel near a baby’s cradle in the snow once a year. American camel hair coats are made from the wool of two-humped camels, not mine.

-KhairAllah’s Believe It Or Not

Son of the Daughter of the mother

Camel…(poetic) Bint Umm Saaq, Daughter of the Mother of the [Long] Leg

-Sudan Arabic: English-Arabic Vocabulary, Sigmar Hillelson, 1930

Legs are everything when you walk on sand all day. Not arms, not feet, not your head. It’s your legs that get you to the next well, to the next camp. I was lucky, whenever my own legs tired while walking alongside my camel as I always did first thing in the morning to warm myself, I could mount and ride another’s set of legs, in this case four, feeling then like the Ibn, the Son, of the Daughter of the Mother of the [Long] Leg.

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.