we go home to come again

We were going home. Nothing remained for us to do but change our dirty clothes and come again.

-KhairAllah, remembering his thoughts when prompted by a photograph taken in the Cairo camel market thirty six years earlier

That is how fast they put those forty days behind them to start again with the next dabouka. I asked KhairAllah how many times he had made the trip and he answered me variously, Hundreds of times, or, I have not counted them, or, Do you mean before or after I became Khabeer? I did see that in the market the drovers still did their own cooking and tea making but had their clothes washed by Egyptian women. They were soon to set off on their return journey by train, Nile ferry, and desert lorry, from Africa’s largest city to Dar al-Kababish. For that they wanted fresh laundry.

Gall and gold

Judd: That’s the trouble with boys these days. Plenty of gall but no sand. Now you take that race today. Heck (who runs a camel racing scam in an Orientalist-theme travelling carnival): What about that race? Judd: There’s no horse in the world that can beat a camel at that distance. Heck: Are you calling me a cheat? Cowboy (whose horse just lost to the camel): Well, if he don’t, I will. (Fist fight in saloon)

-Ride the High Country, 1962, a film directed by Sam Peckinpah

I wish Hajj Bashir had seen this Western, a genre he dearly loved, even if it wasn’t about a cattle drive. On the day we first met at the Cairo camel market he had asked me about John Wayne, Raa’i al-Baqar, Herder of Cows, he called him. This movie has Peckinpah’s usual rough-and-ready violence, Randolph Scott’s (in his last role) usual rough-and-ready good looks, and all the California gold a Sudanese merchant could ever desire. Plus one camel. Too bad he didn’t see Voice of the Whip. It has hundreds more.

All hobbled up

‘Aql, Intelligence, Understanding. ‘Iqaal, A rope with which a camel’s foreshank is bound to his arm, both being folded together, [a hobble]. ‘Aqoul, A medicine which binds the bowels. ‘Aqeela, A woman who is kept behind a curtain, or the most excellent of camels. Mu’aqqala, as applied to camels, Bound with a rope or hobble, and applied to a she-camel on the occasion of her being covered, and hence the epithet Mu’aqqalaat applied by the poet metonymically to women, in a similar sense.

-Lane’s Lexicon, various entries under the root ‘-Q-L

On the trail the drovers were always working with camel hobbles, the ‘Aqala as they called the singular noun in their dialect, putting them on and taking them off one by one across the entire dabouka each night and morning. I doubt they were aware of the other words generated from the root, except for ‘Aql, which KhairAllah often shouted when he pointed his finger at Adam Hamid, the youngest drover, and said, He doesn’t have any. We could have used some ‘Aqoul the night we all got sick from Kalabsha’s sulphurous well water, and we did not see an ‘Aqeela, human or not, on the Darb, and certainly not any Mu’aqqalaat out there. If we had, we would have needed more than one ‘Aqala to tie Adam Hamid down for the night, maybe even four.

From kabsh to kababish

There is little doubt that Kababish is simply derived from Kabsh, i.e., a male sheep. The tribe was once weak and poor and owned no great herds of camels as they do at present, and may have been given their name as a slight at first.

-The Tribes of Northern and Central Kordofan, Harold MacMichael

KhairAllah did not own much but nonetheless thought himself a kind of millionaire, Khabeer of a Dabouka, Expert of a Herd. When he said in the film, I have millions, milliyeen, he did not have to explain what he meant…that he was driving the Kababish equivalent of Fort Knox- camels, not gold- before him.

The Lords of empty and full

The Kababish (lords of all they Survey, in their own Opinion)

-On Trek in Kordofan, C.E.A. Lea

Lane has the triliteral root R-’-Y generating both the Form I verb To Survey and the noun Opinion, and gives the definition of that root’s Form IV verb as “To become full in the udder”, which leads to my opinion that Lea’s opinion of Kababish opinion, consumate camel breeders of the empty desert, was informed more by IV than I.

The Sikka Sheik

I don’t believe a word about the tribes being restless. Arabs are always moving about, aren’t they? I have an excellent caravan leader whom even the authorities vouch for…

-The Sheik: A Novel, Edith Maude Hull, 1919, words spoken by Diana Mayo, a young English adventuress visiting North Africa, before being captured by the Arab chieftan Ahmed Ben Hassan

The idea of her planning a tour alone in the desert with only native camel drivers and Arabs!

-Lady Conway, a fellow tourist scandalized by Diana’s behavior, intertitle for the 1921 silent film of the same name, featuring Rudolph Valentino as Ahmed the Sheik

The Sheik, both book and film, gave bodice-ripping Orientalism a shot in the arm, playing up to the hilt the romance-cum-rape fantasies that had been lower key in previous outings of the same genre, and it wouldn’t be until thirty years later that The Sheltering Sky upped the ante with the real thing.

But let’s get to what interests me more, her trail boss Mustafa Ali, and that after her first day on the Sikka she changed out of riding clothes into a dress of “clinging jade green silk…the neck cut low revealing the gleaming white of her girlish bosom”, which led her companion to ask, “Are you going to rig yourself out like that every night for the benefit of the camel drivers?”, and she answered, “I do not propose to invite Mustafa Ali to meals.”

So much for swapping friendly camel stories around the aseeda bowl. Diana had much desert etiquette to learn when she was kidnapped by the Sheik, starting with, Eat one, Eat all, and Wash your right hand first. KhairAllah would have approved.

The sheik between the sheets

Lie still, you little fool.

-The Sheik, played by Rudolph Valentino, speaking to his captive Englishwoman, intertitle in the 1921 silent film

Thank you Mr. Sheik, Thank you!

-TV advertisement for condoms, 1995, words spoken by a boy who thinks he has gotten lucky with a girl

Throughout his career he was just as silent as he was dangerous. The Sheik never spoke.

-World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) biography of superstar Ed Farhat aka The Sheik (active 1949-1998)

Lane gives an unexpected secondary meaning- “an old and weak or decrepit man who is of no use”- for Shaikh, whose primary meaning is what you’d expect, as Rudolph Valentino, Ed Farhat, and the Durex Corporation also wanted to believe, and as did KhairAllah when I called him Shaikh al-Sikka, of the Trail, not al-Sireer, of the Bed, after he mounted his camel and nodded in agreement.

The Kababish among many

The inhabitants of Omdurman are a conglomeration of every race and nationality in Sudan: Fellata, Takruris, Wadai…Niam Niam and Mombuttu cannibals, Bazeh, Dinka, Shilluk…Arabs of every tribe- Baggara, Rizeghat, Taisha, Homr, Howazma, Miserieh, Kababish…Habanieh, Degheim, Kenana, Gowameh, Bederieh, Beni Jerrar…Turks, Mecca Arabs, Syrians, Indians, Europeans…

-Ten Years Captivity in the Mahdi’s Camp, 1882-1892, Joseph Orhwalder

Father Ohrwalder was kept in the Mahdi’s Omdurman camp while General Gordon sweated out the siege in Khartoum. One hundred years later I would take a taxi every day from my hotel near the so-called Gordon staircase to cross the White Nile bridge to the Abu Jaib Building beside the Friday Mosque and climb to the third floor to see Sayyid Bashir. I would look out the window at the crowd and try to imagine how many languages were spoken down there. But when KhairAllah walked in the door we needed only one, which he had learned from me and I had learned from him, and the Tower of Babel went quiet.

Arabic's little paradise

…as if Arabic were the only language in the world- the language of Adam and Eve, the language of paradise.

-Ten Years Captivity in the Mahdi’s Camp 1882-1892, Joseph Ohrwalder

Not to put too fine a point on it, but first year Arabic was perfectly adequate if you were an American wishing to send compliments to the aseeda chef. Lughma Kuwayyisa, Grub is Good, you say, even if his dialect was far from what you’d hear at the American University in Cairo where the language spoken in the Garden, al-Janayna, the diminutive form of the word for Paradise, al-Janna, was definitely not the Arabic of Western Sudan, but rather all-girls lycée French. KhairAllah might not say it when at dinner on the Darb, but the co-eds would…le Sorgho est Dégueulas.

Pleasures and lies of the saddle

Dr. Felkin explained to them that the camel was a most patient and docile animal on which they would have to make the rest of their journey to Egypt and that there was no cause for fear…he was assisted into the saddle and, having safely got through the operation of rising, proceeded to make a speech on its pleasures.

-Fire and Sword in the Sudan, Rudolph von Slatin, Prisoner of the Mahdi

Robert Felkin of the Church Mission Society was travelling from Sudan to Cairo and needed a camel but first a lesson in riding it. Slatin didn’t mention what Felkin’s Kababish trail boss said after assisting him into the saddle, but no doubt he thought it premature to expound on its pleasures so quickly. On our first day we too were pleased, after which KhairAllah might have advised us to be careful when saying the Arabic word for Saddle, Saraj, because its homophone Sarraaj means Liar.

Aseeda and bismillah

We fed on assida, a stiff millet porridge, and millah, a vegetable sauce…he would place a large lump of assida in a dish, scoop a hole in it, and fill that with millah; the seven of us fed together, eating with our right hands…I found this diet wholly satisfying.

-The Life of My Choice, Wilfred Thesiger

Thesiger’s accounts of the Empty Quarter, Shatt al-Arab, and Danakil Depression are better known to readers than his earlier years in Western Sudan, but it was there when he learned to eat rough and not complain about the roughage he had to eat. By eating aseeda. If you can eat your share of that you can eat anything. Seated around the Kordofani dinner bowl, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Or as you say in Dar al-Kababish when you first dig in your right hand, Bismillah, In the Name of God, a phrase with nothing to do with vegetable sauce.

dood or dawdaah

There could not have been a better drover on the Darb al-Arba’een than Masood abu Dood, Father of the Lion, the Sudanese dialectical sense of his patronym being quite the contrary to what Lane gives in Classical Arabic as Worm, Grub, Maggot. But Lane gives a most unexpected meaning to a cognate word from the same triliteral root D-W-D, Dawdaah, a Seesaw. Mounting a camel is much like that, Up-Back-Up-Even, and he did have the most light-hearted manner of all, so perhaps for those forty days I misunderstood Masood’s true name.

Photo ©David Melody

Goodbye, If Allah has willed

This guy made forty days feel like forty years.

-KhairAllah Khair al-Sayyid, talking to himself, Cairo Camel Market, February 1984

It had been forty days sharing aseeda and trail dust, but once we got to Cairo it was almost as if it had never happened. Ma’a salaama, sa’ashufak in shaa’ Allah, Goodbye, I’ll see you again if Allah has willed it…all things that shall happen being what God has foreordained, so that phrase of wishing, desiring, hoping for what is God’s will is always spoken in the past tense. So I guess that He did. It’s getting close now to forty years that he, the Goodness of God, shook my hand in Cairo and I have seen him many times since then.

Photo ©David Melody

Your mother, the camel

There is a Homeric quality about the cowboy’s profanity and vulgarity that pleases rather than repulses.

-Introduction, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, John Lomax, 1910

Ummak, Ummak, Ummak! Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother!

-Abdullah, cursing a camel he is saddling, Voice of the Whip

A tribal bard, a teller of tales, a poet at the fire. Homer composed epic verse using the same epithets again and again…wine-dark sea, rosy-fingered dawn, white-armed women, god-like men, and “his mother, beauteous queen of heaven”. And your mother? Ask Abdullah when he’s in a better mood.

sand for the soul

Land of water for the body, Land of sand for the soul

Water is life, Milk is food

-Tuareg proverbs

Perhaps the Tuareg I met in Agadez could live without water if they had milk, but what mattered to us was that which we couldn’t stir but could stir us. Seligman’s lexicon of Sudanese Arabic gives the word for Sand Devil, a Whirlwind, as ‘Usaar, and Lane offers a secondary meaning in Classical Arabic, an Exhalation of Perfume. I will take both as one, a Stirring of the Sand, a Scent for the Soul.

Youpy youpy unhh unhh

Coma ti yi youpy, youpy ya youpy ya/Coma ti yi youpy ya

-Refrain verse in The Old Chisholm Trail, cowboy ballad collected by John Lomax

Unh unh unhh, Unh unh unhh, Unhh unh unh, Unhh unh unh, Unh unhh unh, Unh unhh unh

-Hamid’s ditty sung while rounding up camels, Voice of the Whip

The refrain verses in cowboy songs sound like something a drover might sing pushing cattle up the trail. No words needed. The same goes for camelman songs. The ones with lyrics of the kind Idris sang about a camel “sleek and tasty with an eye like a Seiko watch” are fine when you’re going straight and easy, but when you’re picking up strays or pushing them hard it makes sense to drop words and go with nonsense, punctuated with the voice of the whip.