Herding [a camel] for a day makes you a goat for a year.
-Arab proverb on the backward nature of herdsmen, collected by J R Jewitt, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 1893
KhairAllah told me he had made hundreds of trips up the Darb, so it’s lucky that Muslims don’t believe in reincarnation. That would be too long avoiding the butcher knife. Karma…why not come back as a camel tick and get to Cairo the easy way?
It was to achieve bureaucratic tidiness that in 1933 Ali al-Tum [nazir, or paramount chief] was told his tribe “should be more under control”. It was “useless”, a new young District Commissioner reported, “to suppose that the Kababish could lead an isolated existence.”…It was decided as a matter of utmost importance that the Kababish be “brought within the fold”.
-Imperial Sudan:The Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, 1934-1956, M.W. Daly
A lot had happened to Dar al-Kababish in the fifty years between first being brought into the fold and my own two trips up the Darb. No longer so isolated…some of the drovers carried passports and they were heading to Africa’s largest city, paid for their work in the export trade in Sudanese pounds which although not tendered on foreign currency exchanges could buy whatever they wanted in Khan al-Khalili. And when they were finished with us on the trail they knew enough English to repeat what they often had heard us saying, things like More Water, or Bad Food, or No Sleep, words understood in the best hotels in London and Paris.
[No Date] I have forgot to mention that before lunch that fat and pursy Kahli, Abdallah Ali Abu Sheikha of the Awlad Gadein (the man whose camp was accused of murdering several Hamar in 1931), came to see me and I sat under a tree with him.
[No Date] I spent part of the morning trying to sketch camels’ heads with poor success. I must have another shot at the full face pose which gives the maiden aunt effect.
March 1, 1932. Rode 6:17 to 9:06 when we reached Wadi al-Masirin. 169 minutes trotting, 275 minutes walking. Felt tired and slack and headachey. Read Hawawir files. After lunch tried drawing- a failure.
-On Trek in Kordofan: The Diaries of a British District Officer in Sudan, 1931-1933, C. A. E. Lea
Cyril Lea lived to be over ninety. I guess his twenty five years working outdoors in the Sudan Service proved to be good for his health, but trotting on a camel for 169 minutes a day must have been hell on his back. He didn’t seem to like Abdallah Ali of the Kawahla tribe and I didn’t like the Kahli drover Ahmad either, but he was in Bilal’s dabouka so we didn’t talk much. When we did, I saw he was the only one with teeth capped in silver and those that were not looked to be rotten. Durham University’s Sudan Archive has two boxes of Lea’s personal papers including 165 photographs. The file record doesn’t say if he left it any of his camel drawings.
…the dreary void,/The leafless desert of the mind…
-Byron, The Giaour, A Fragment of a Turkish Tale
Giaour, a variant spelling of Gavur, is a Turkish word for infidel derived from the same root that generates the Arabic word Kafir, Denier of God, its metaphorical sense apparent in the verb Kafara, to Conceal, to Cover. Byron had just been to the Middle East before writing the poem and he presumably encountered Muslims who had never met a Christian. Maybe some of the drovers had never met or even seen a Christian or a Jew before saddling up with us, but if they had not they soon learned that in the desert when dawn fills night’s void, and just as in foxholes, there are no Kafirs.
Dustin Hoffman: Stupid ass camel! He’d rather sit there and die. Warren Beatty: You know, I kind of admire that.
-Ishtar, Hollywood’s biggest critical and box office flop, lost $40 million on a $71 million budget
We didn’t let the lame camel in our dabouka just sit there and die. We slaughtered it before its last breath so we could butcher and eat it halal style. I knew about the gauchos on the pampa, that for lunch they would kill a beef and cut out its heart for an anticucho a la parrilla and leave the rest for the vultures. On the trail we were hungry for the meat we were driving and riding, but in a dabouka of 100 head, each camel was worth one percent of a life’s fortune, not quite $71 million but near the Sudanese equivalent, and you don’t eat a meal worth a fortune just because you’re hungry. So first it had to be near death, and when it was we ate it raw.
Photo ©David Melody
Aga Ben Dragore: Now I will show you how to make coffee in the desert…by the native stars. Miss Kaney: You don’t make it yourself, do you? Aga: No, of course not. A Circassian slave, lovely as sin, cooks it for us, kneeling. And if it is not to our liking… Kaney: She is stripped to the waist and lashed for miles across the Sahara. Aga: Where she is finally eaten by locusts. Kaney: That’s the last time I’ll ever try to make coffee in a strange house.
-The Ghoul, 1933, starring Boris Karloff as Professor Morlant, in whose haunted mansion a group of thieves attempt to steal an ancient Egyptian jewel
Hajj Bashir asked if we’d need anything special for our trip. How about bunn, coffee beans? we said. We must have mixed up our deserts because no one drinks coffee in the Sahara. They don’t even know how to make it there. Our first night on the trail the drovers wouldn’t let us use the tea pot, and rightly so, to make our qahwa, because we wanted it qawwi, strong, and they said they’d never get the taste out again. So we made it in the aseeda pot and they grumbled we wasted too much water and sugar. The grounds didn’t settle after it had boiled so we spit them and that night’s aseeda crumbs from our teeth at every sip. We joined the drovers for tea soon after and gave up the bunn.
It will not spoil him. It will feed his family. Or it might pay for another wife.
-Mahdi abu Jaib, asked how KhairAllah would react when paid his film earnings
That was thirty years ago. KhairAllah now was eight children, from how many wives I do not know. I do know his current wife, who showed me her mod cons when I visited the house last time. Electric refrigerator, electric hot plate, electric air conditioner. Only now Umdurman has so many power cuts they don’t run often. Goatskins and clay pots keep water cool by sweating and evaporating. Fire wood sellers go house to house. Every compound in Dar al-Salam has thatch roof verandas for outside sleeping and sitting. I asked a wealthy Sudanese if he thought KhairAllah would benefit from an electric generator. How will he pay for the petrol? he asked. No, he answered, It would ruin him.
…in the case of the Kababish, the government moved to improve on its traditional ways…no other tribe had so completely and with such success administered its own affairs, presenting few difficulties precisely because it was so primitive…
-Empire on the Nile: The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1898-1934, M.W. Daly
Maybe not quite as primitive as the British Empire thought. Talal Asad wrote an almost impenetrable post-independence ethnography of the political pathways of Kababish power, authority, and consent, with organization charts so complex as to make the most ivory towered structural anthropologist’s head to swim. Nevertheless I didn’t find KhairAllah’s place within the Kababish confederation so hard to deconstruct. But then I never got more further details than his full name, KhairAllah Khair al-Sayyid KhairAllah, The Goodness of God Son of the Goodness of the Prophet Son of the Goodness of God.
It was in the Teatro del Lago in 1963 that I saw the film Lawrence of Arabia for the first time…According to my mother, I couldn’t stop talking about it for weeks. The harder I tried to make the story clear to her, the more I realized that a simple retelling was beside the point…she said, Who wants to see a movie with a lot of sand and sun anyway?
-Lawrence of Arabia: A Film’s Anthropology, Steven Caton
I will tell you who…KhairAllah, Bilal, Hamid, the other drovers gathered that night in the Cairo camel market for an outdoor projection in 1990 (see blog entry January 10, 2019), and all the villagers in Dar al-Kababish who saw the movie on my screening tour with KhairAllah in 2006. Not too much sand and sun for any of them, but a lot of familiar faces on screen and a lot of up country dialect they understood perfectly well that had gone right past the big city audiences in Cairo and Khartoum.
In the scene when Yusuf says what the BBC translated as, Why don’t you fall in a hole?, they laughed their heads off in Dar al-Kababish but sat in silence at the University of Khartoum. Yusuf himself might not have wanted to see it, because his behavior at the end of the film did not reflect well on him, but he was killed in a car crash not long after, whether returning from another camel drive to Egypt I do not know.
Feisal (played by Alec Guinness in blackface): There’s nothing in the desert.
-Lawrence of Arabia, screenplay by Robert Bolt
You hear that a lot in Cairo, Wa laa haaga, And not a thing. Nothing. As in the answer to the question, What do you want, or What are you looking at? Wa laa haaga. As in, Mind your own business!, and you say, Okay. But that is city talk. On the trail, anyone’s business is everyone’s business. Feisal was wrong, there’s everything in the desert, where men discuss all of it.
After a long lonely wandering you meet a caravan and listen in the evening to the talk of the grave sunburned men around the campfire: they talk of the simple, great things of life and death…and you never hear idle babbling, for one cannot babble in the desert.
-The Road to Mecca, Muhammad Asad
Abdullah: Why don’t you saddle your camel? Yusuf: You’re the one who wants to saddle. Abdullah: Go saddle. Yusuf: Why don’t you fall in a hole?
-Voice of the Whip, Day 25, testy dialogue between drover and trail boss, with an expurgated translation of the last line
Muhammad Asad was the father of anthropologist Talal Asad who wrote an ethnography of the Kababish. If Talal had briefed his father about campfire conversation in the Sahara, as opposed to the Nafud, he would have known just how much they babbled in that desert at night. Perhaps I was at fault, but I acted in the spirit of linguistic curiosity.
I wanted to know the difference between a dhurta and a fuswa which the drovers discussed at length fireside. If I had my Lane handy I would have read, Dharata, v., Dhurta, n., [a course word signifying] He broke wind from his anus with a sound [when it is without sound you say fuswa], Hence the proverb, The ass had no power except breaking wind from his anus with a sound. But the drovers did not enlighten me about the verb in Form IV, Adhrata. As per Lane, He made him break wind from his anus with a sound, or its useful secondary meaning, He imitated to him with his mouth the action of breaking wind from his anus with a sound. Babbling, indeed.
Tafas: Here, you may drink. One cup. Lawrence: You do not drink? Tafas: No. Lawrence: I’ll drink when you do. Tafas: I am Bedu…Tafas: Bedu food. Lawrence: Good. Tafas: More…Bedu!
-screenplay by Robert Bolt
Tafas drank Bedu water from a Harith well and died. Lawrence ate Bedu food with his left hand and lived. Among the Kababish, we khawajas didn’t worry about Bedu etiquette, nor they about ours. They hadn’t read our dinner table rule books by Emily Post or Tish Baldridge, which they, being illiterate, could not have read even if they had wanted. But they applauded us at their aseeda pot, eating with our fingers and drinking from the same pot after they’d wiped it half clean of millet crumbs and cooking oil. De Gustibus, no doubt.
Travellers who intend to cross the desert usually halt at this place to make the necessary preparations for their onward journey. The stock of provisions should be laid in for a month, that time being required for crossing the desert in the narrowest part.
-Travels, Marco Polo
To make tea you need leaf and sugar, water and wood, and on the trail you need to carry them all. Sugar and leaf in cloth sacks, water in skins, fire wood tied to a pack camel. The skins sloshed along the riding camels’ ribs, the leaf and sugar sacks weighed almost nothing, the cedar logs were heavy to load as hell. Personally I could have lived without tea and sugar, I might have died without water, but the fire wood…that was for us together, sitting beside the dying flame at night, waiting up before sleep with stories and jokes, insults and laughter, some staying quiet but all awake until late.
Jackson Bentley: What is it, Major Lawrence, that attracts you personally to the desert? Lawrence: It’s clean. Bentley: Well now, that’s a very illuminating answer.
-screenplay by Robert Bolt
I wished it had been cleaner. Sometimes the dirt, Nile River Valley dirt, dry and airborne, blew straight into our faces for days at a time. The sand swirled down at our feet but we were mounted up where the dust blew. It’s clean, said Lawrence, but he still rinsed his feet at the Howaytat wells before taking tea, and his face after crossing the Anvil of the Sun was a sight. I remember splashing myself from time to time before we reached Khileiyu but never really getting it all off. When KhairAllah said, Sleep when you get to Cairo, he didn’t have to say what was obvious, But first take a bath.
Al-walad shamm sunaahu, The boy smelt his own armpit odor.
-Sudanese proverb about reaching puberty
He raised his whip [sawT] so that his armpit shone [baraqa, a verb meaning To Gleam from the Flash of a Lightning Bolt]
-Example of a pure Arabic bedouin phrase, cited by Lane from the Kufan grammarian Al-Farraa’ (died 822)
Sawt al-sawT, Voice of the Whip, A documentary film
-Homophones swapping emphatic (S, T) and non-emphatic (s, t) Arabic consonants
So it all comes down to that, not how it sounds but rather how it smells. No cracking whips, but rather stinking armpits. The drovers and we had all come of age after those forty days, yes we could and did sniff ourselves if we couldn’t help it. Even the teenager Ibrahim, the youngest drover in Bilal’s dabouka, who because of his age had to do all the cooking, whom I called long distance when I was visiting his father’s house in Um Badr in 2010 and he was working in a Saudi camel stable, even Ibrahim back then could smell himself.
I hope he later had a chance to see the film. He was in a shot, calling out, Ta’aala Ya ‘Aam Bilal, Come O Uncle Bilal, when it was time for them to gather at the aseeda bowl. I left a DVD with his father, and I knew there were laptop computers in Um Badr by then. He must have seen it by now and noticed how young he looked thirty two years ago.
She is the crossroads of travellers, the sojourn of the weak and the powerful…the learned and the ignorant, the grave and the gay, the mild and the choleric, the noble and the base, the obscure and the illustrious. Like the waves of the sea she surges…
-Ibn Battuta, describing Cairo during his visit in 1325
Ibn Battuta might say that the drovers I rode to Cairo with 650 years later, if he were to describe them by choosing between the two extremes, were all weak, ignorant, grave, mild, and obscure. None of that is to cast aspersions because they would probably agree. When at the Imbaba camel market, visiting them from my downtown hotel and they holed up in a smoky stable, mixing their aseeda over a wood fire and pouring water from a skin almost within sight of the Nile Hilton and its gaudy casino, they left being powerful, learned, gay, choleric, and illustrious to the Cairenes. That, in their estimation, was no compliment, for the Sudanese were noble and the Egyptians were extremely base.