Admiring nature's skeleton

Nature scalped, flayed, discovered all her skeleton to the gazers eye. The horizon was a sea of mirage…

-Richard Burton, 1855

Maybe it was like taking an x-ray of nature, those days mid-trail where we saw nothing at all but sand and rock. No soft tissue, nothing vascular or digestive or pulmonary. Nature thrown up on the autopsy table, what was once living tissue peeled away to camel bone and petrified wood, the air so dry no need of formaldehyde. What we were inside is what we saw outside, mirror and mirage sharing the same Latin root, To See.

Mirror in Arabic is Miraa’a from the same Semitic root (Ra’aa,To See with the Eye) as Muryin, “a she-camel whose udder shows her to be pregnant”, as per Lane, who gives two words for Mirage, one seen early morning when a man in the distance seems to quiver and one seen at midday which appears as water. Burton saw the latter, the sea. We saw the former, the quivering man, as in a Miraa’a held to our own faces.

Shut your eyes, sniff the nile

The thoughts of seeing the Niger in the morning, and the troublesome buzzing of mosquitoes, prevented me from shutting my eyes during the night.

-Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, Mungo Park, 1799

Hard to get a grip on my impatience once I’ve sniffed the Nile.

-Trail Diary, Day 21, 1984

Mungo Park had never before seen the river and didn’t know which way it flowed, but I had and I did. Even so it was a big deal for me, for all of us, to arrive at Khileiyu upstream from Dongola. Half way there, we thought, from here forward, Kullu shai sukar, Everything is sugar, to ride beside the river and its fields and farmers and flocks of cattle egrets, Friends of the Farmer they are called there, so different from the vultures that shadowed our dabouka back in the sands.

unnatural calls, natural occasions

This desert is the abode of many evil spirits which amuse travellers to their destruction with most extraordinary illusions. If during the daytime any persons remain behind on the road either when overtaken by sleep or detained by their natural occasions, they unexpectedly hear themselves called to by their names. Supposing the call to proceed from their companions, they are led away by it from the direct road and, not knowing in what direction to advance, are left to perish.

-Travels, Marco Polo

We khawajas planned our natural occasions with precision. We weren’t sufficiently fleet of foot to run back from the moving herd for decent cover, then to run forward on the double as did the drovers. So we waited until camp and then went out beyond our couched camels. The fire’s glow guided us at night, the angle of the sun at midday. From our chosen spot we never glanced outwards and other than the call of nature we heard no voices. No Jinns, no Genies in the Gents.

He, or nothing

It was a desert peopled only with echoes- a place of death for what little there is to die in it- a wilderness where, to use my companion’s phrase, there is nothing but He.

-Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah, Richard Burton, 1855

For most of those forty days out there it really seemed like it was all or nothing, either everything I’d ever need…or nada. Not a world in a grain of sand, but a long laugh at a half understood camel joke. Sometimes it was a tasty bit of fried onion stuck on my aseeda finger, sometimes a sip of dark water from a newly tanned goatskin. It didn’t make me any more religious, I wasn’t looking for and I didn’t find He out there. Plenty of them though, drovers and camels. And they were enough for me. Yalla binaa, O Allah, Be with us!, they would say every morning before dawn.

Cats and camels

Qutta milk wa laa jamal shirk. A cat to own, not a camel to share.

-Egyptian proverb

Egyptians are famously argumentative compared to Sudanese, with their heavy tongues and heavy blood, the world’s first city people with cats keeping down the urban vermin. So let them purr. And let Sudanese keep camels even if they be in shares. Ishtiraakiyya, Socialism, with the root of Sharika, to share. For the Kababish, that means common risk, common reward, a long way between wells and one camel to carry the goatskins of many. For a Cairene, it means a long wait at the Mugamma’ Building making petty bribes for petty papers.

Edible cemeteries in the sand

In the heart of the desert, amid a vast, desolate area, travelers might find traces of something quite different…Now and then one finds bones, bleached white by the relentless sun, a grisly reminder…transient cemeteries that bear witness to the past.

-Egypt: Civilization in the Sands, Pauline and Philippe de Flers

Camels like salt and they like calcium. Dead bones, their bones, have both. It was always strange whenever we passed through what looked like a desert boneyard, a place mid-trail where several camels had been butchered and their skeletons left to lie, scattered by vultures and jackals, and our own camels lowered their heads to the ground to pick up a half-buried bone in their flappy lips, maybe to suck, maybe to chew, maybe to imagine what awaited them in the abattoirs of Cairo.

Dawlati, al-Dabouka

I come from no country, no city, no tribe. I am the son of the road, my country is the caravan, my life the most unexpected of voyages…And you will carry the memory of me with you.

-Leo Africanus, Amin Maalouf

My Country, the Dabouka. On the trail no one felt that way because each man’s tribe still claimed its jurisdiction. KhairAllah, Kababish. Adam Hamid, Hamar. Ahmad, Kawahla. Bilal, Shanabla. Luwees, Daoud, et al., Khawaja. But for those forty days I did feel I was Son of the Sikka, the Road. And still now I carry the memory of them with me. Leo Tregenza said to me of the Ma’aza men with whom he travelled in Egypt’s Red Sea Mountains sixty years earlier (I travelled with one of them sixty years later), When you see them next, say that I think of them every day. I laughed to myself then, thinking that was so long ago. No longer.

The hours of dalliance

The scholarly Dr. Wood [the antiquarian Robert Wood in The Ruins of Balbec,1757]… noted that the Arab inhabitants took pleasure in speaking of the “hours of dalliance…a subject on which the warm imagination of the Arabs is apt to be too particular.”

-The Pleasure of Ruins, Rose Macaulay

The drovers did not speak of women until we passed a white tent far off the trail, and then they erupted in hoots and hollers. Shahr al-’Asal, Month of Honey, and they explained how a newlywed couple would stay inside, never coming out, for a full lunar month while their relatives would leave sweet meats for them every day outside the tent flap. Hours, no, a month of dalliance. KhairAllah’s men meanwhile had to hurry for forty days, he would not let them linger or loaf. Dally when you get to Cairo, he would say.

A waterskin contingency, explained

…life hangs on the contingency of a skin of water, more or less.

-Emerson

It happened in the first days of the trip when we were still passing scattered villages in the grasslands. KhairAllah had left us for the night to visit a friend and told us to carry on. We ran out of water, the goatskins were dry when we camped, the drovers were grumpy. No tea water, but plenty of tea, plenty of sugar. Adam Hamid was sent out in the dark to fill them at some well and I waited until I finally went to bed. He was a Hamari far out of his tribe’s range so he might not have known where to find it. About midnight I guess he returned with the skins full amid a lot of chatter and the tea fire was stoked. The drovers drank while I slept. If it had been a cold beer I might have roused myself, but it was only tea. Plenty more where that came from in the next forty days.

Luwees at 66, after 41

Can it be forty? I sometimes wonder. And after forty years in Egypt, who am I?

-Photographing Egypt, John Feeney

I met Hajj Bashir at the Cairo camel market in 1979, the year John Wayne died which he wanted to ask me about, forty one years ago. Since then I’ve come and gone. I didn’t ever ask myself Feeney’s question about himself. I always knew, I never forgot. Even on the trail I kept my name and my own clothes. I slept in my sleeping bag, not under a saddle blanket, and tuned my radio to the BBC in English. When I returned for the second time, KhairAllah said, Here comes the khawaja. Maybe he’d forgotten my name in those four years between trips with him. But now I know that he knows, Here comes Luwees.

A name hidden in plain sight

The poor camel, renowned beast of burden, is not even accorded its proper name.

-Egypt: Civilization in the Sands, Pauline and Philippe de Flers

Why call it dromedary and not the English equivalent of the Arabic? The OED cites a usage example from a 15th Century version of the European folktale of Melusine, the mystical water spirit and close cousin of Debussy’s Mélisande, Thenne came a trucheman mounted vpon a dromadary, giving Trucheman for Tarjuman, from the Arabic for Translator, a European tourist’s generic word for an Arab factotum, fixer, and procurer in Cairene fleshpots. So yes, call a camel by its name, Jamal, or by its collective noun, Ibl, never to be confused with Iblees, or Luwees, very different kinds of spirit.

Dush then and now

If indeed Africans were to visit a small village in one of our wild and unvisited regions, and should take up their abode there for a few days, for what might seem to the people if not an inadequate, at all events a mysterious, reason, the probability is that they would have too much rather than too little of the company of the natives.

-Visit to the Great Oasis of the Libyan Desert, G.A. Hoskins, 1837

Hoskins was dismayed during his visit to Dush at the bottom end of Egypt’s Kharga Oasis, site of a village and the southermost Saharan Roman fort, that the inhabitants displayed little interest in his presence, saying that on the contrary, if an African had visited some remote English shire, its farmers would undoubtedly have invited him in for a cup of tea.

But it all changed suddenly in his next chapter, with the subtitle “Quarrel with the Natives”, a ”slight affair which might have ended seriously” he called it, with guns drawn and a hasty departure by camel, over the price of a chicken, a matter of tuppence. When my cousin and I went to Dush we found it a forlorn place, the ruined fort on a hill looking across the sand to Sudan and no sign of a village. I remember thinking at the time, If this had been the post of some Roman legionnaire, then God have pity on him.

Mafeesh fulous, mafeesh, mafeesh, mafeesh

Comrade Razinin (played by Bela Lugosi): (reading from a secret informer’s report sent from Istanbul) How can the Bolshevik cause gain respect among the Moslems if your representatives Buljanoff, Iranoff, and Kopalski get so drunk they throw a carpet out their hotel window and complain to the management that it does not fly? Garbo: (trying to suppress a smile) Oh, they shouldn’t do such things.

-Ninotchka, screenplay by Billy Wilder et al.

I took an Economics of Egypt course at American University in Cairo in the late 1970s that covered the Infitah, the so-called Opening, of Nasser’s socialist system to Western capitalism that was then just getting started. Whenever you bought anything or ate in a restaurant I remember there were always elaborate receipts in quadruplicate. To be filed with Central Planning, no doubt.

As more Americans came to Cairo, it took a lot for the Egyptians to get used to. A friend and I went to Alexandria for a long weekend and stayed at a hotel on the Corniche with a rude and officious desk man. I guess he didn’t get the memo from Central Planning to lighten up. I didn’t like him especially when he said he wouldn’t break a five pound note for me, worth about seven dollars. Most things in those days cost piasters, not guineas, so a bank note on the street didn’t easily get changed.

When it was time to check out I went to the room by myself and threw our two bags from the window facing the Corniche and passed by the desk man saying I’d be back later. We ran to catch the afternoon train to Cairo. I always wondered what people might have said who saw the bags come flying out. I wonder how he worded the unpaid receipt for what was left of Central Planning. Mafeesh fulous, There is no money, written four times.

Getting to hello

As their salutations are curious and will give the reader a good idea of Arab courtesies, it may not be uninteresting to mention some of their salaams. The Arabs have an infinity of compliments but there are few if any that are omitted.

G.A. Hoskins, 1837, on the protocols of saying hello in Upper Egypt

Egyptians didn’t get the Sudanese soul shake down and neither did I. KhairAllah and his men when greeting fellow tribesmen mid-trail would let loose their usual gusher of salutations and queries all the while they alternated shaking their interlocutor’s hand with gliding their right palm over the other’s left shoulder downward to his heart. And never did they seem to blink their eyes. Knowing when to break it off stymied me. It often got to the point that the things I had to say to the one I was greeting- Sabah al-Jibna, Sabah al-’Ishta (Morning of Cheese, Morning of Cream!), Allah huwa kareem ilaa al-awlaad (God is generous to the Children), Kayf haalak wa ahwaalak? (How is your Condition and your Conditions?)- stopped making sense. But following KhairAllah in this makeshift desert receiving line, with the stranger eyeing sideways my appearance and dress, he must have thought it okay to just leave it at, Salaam alaykum.

Adventure on the northern steppe

It was from the northern steppe that their fortune would come, their adventure, the miraculous hour which once in a life falls to each man’s lot. Because of this remote possibility which became more and more uncertain as time went on, grown men lived out their lives pointlessly here…

-The Tartar Steppe, Dino Buzzati

Three hundred Sudanese guineas for forty days work, plus whatever Muhammad the Miskeen could clear for selling his hashi in Binban, assuming it would live to the end. Call that a fortune? He did, and so did Masood and Adam Hamid. It was also for the adventure of it all, of arriving in Africa’s largest city, its population almost equal to their entire country’s, straight from the desert, of trading the camel trail for the Nile corniche, their bed rolls for the sheets of the Semiramis (if only just the thought of them), their aseeda bowl for a platter of lamb chops- and yes, these were within reach, for I invited them all out to my favorite kebab joint in Bab al-Luk.

And no, it was not pointless if fortune did not strike on that northern steppe. At the dawning of every day out there, they were witness to the miraculous hour, when black turned to pink, then red, then orange, then white under the sun’s glare- “And by the dawn when it breathes”, says the Quran- and the long ride to Cairo began again.

chapstick and corpse disposal

It is not advisable for anyone to travel in the East without a medicine chest, and sufficient confidence in his knowledge of its contents, to attempt the cure of himself and servants in ordinary circumstances…The superiority of his judgement over that of the uncultivated peasants alone gives him the ability to do much good.

-G.A. Hoskins, Visit to the Great Oasis of the Libyan Desert, 1837

Daoud thought he might be dying that night, of a chest cold. The next morning at first light I found his Field Guide to Emergency Medicine next to his sleeping bag opened to the last chapter, Disposal of the Corpse. But he said he was feeling better after he’d rubbed chapstick on his chest thinking it would work the same way he remembered Vick’s VapoRub working from his childhood. But he didn’t understand the raw marks. Yikes, said he, That wasn’t chapstick, it was a Double A battery, in the dark I couldn’t tell, and I rubbed it and rubbed it. I told him, If you’d waited for KhairAllah to finish cauterizing that lame camel’s foot, he could have used the branding iron on you next.