Life on trek

Life on trek therefore exerted the mind at least as much as the body; tedium was a greater enemy than terrain, introspection as dangerous as duststorms…

-M.W. Daly, on the life of a British colonial District Commissioner (D.C.) in Dar al-Kababish

Daly’s D.C. apparently didn’t have Rabih to ride beside and joke with on those monotonous stretches in the sands before we reached the Nile. “The day is long,” I’d say to him. “Not as long as your journey back to your own country,” he would reply. “I can arrive home from Cairo in half a day,” I’d answer. “You must either have a very fast camel or a very slow whip,” he’d retort, and with that, crack his and trot a few steps ahead. “Like mine.”

trrriim, trrriim

Thousands of camels, sheep, and cows come down to water every day and the dust rises in clouds and the galumphing young camels canter down the last few hundred yards to water and the herdsmen shout “Ha! Ho! Ha!”. And then as the camels reach the basins of mud, the herdsmen say “Trrriim-Trrriim” and the camels snuffle the water.

-Diary, April 2, 1931, C.E.A. Lea

Cyril Lea was right, our drovers did say “Trrriim, Trrriim” to calm the camels and urge them to drink after they’d cantered into the Mirkh well flats raising dust and galumphing. We had left behind us the craggy silhouette of Jebel al-Atshan, Mountain of Thirst- not far from Jebel al-Nahud, Mountain of the [Nursing] Breasts- that morning on our way in so we too were ready to snuffle at the troughs, Ha! Ho! Hamdu!

Fancy, no locks!

The impression left after a stay at the [Grand] Khartoum Hotel varies according to the direction from which it is approached. The visitors from the north were dissatisfied and full of complaints: “There ought to be more bathrooms”; “Fancy, I have no locks on my door!”; “Did you ever see such a suite of furniture?”…

-A Woman’s Trek from the Cape to Cairo, 1907, Mary Hall

My tour group stayed at the Grand more than a century after Mary Hall and the complaints were just a bit less pointed: “The wifi is slow”; “My room’s air conditioner is noisy”; “The breakfast sausage is from last night’s dinner”…and I had no answer for any of them. Just wait, I might have thought, until we get to Nubia and our glamp tent camp blows over in the high wind and we have to stay in the house of the Umda, the village big man, the ladies sleeping in the hareem and the gents in the mafraj, sharing a single squat toilet and brushing our teeth with Nile water drawn straight from the river.

Kayf do you do, ya walad

We passed through two herds of Kabbashi camels grazing. A small urchin who was walking was so surprised when I said, “How do you do?” that he was still staring at me when I had gone on 200 yards. Why does an old she-camel always remind one of a maiden aunt?…

-Diary entry, July 3, 1931, C.A.E. Lea

I had many occasion to ask villagers standing next to their tukuls, Kayf al-hal?, How is the condition? I usually got an immediate answer, Al-hamdu lillah, Praise to Allah, no matter how surprised they may have been to see a khawaja saddled up or how miserable they truthfully were. But one thing is certain, if I had asked, Why is a she-camel like ‘Ammtak, your paternal aunt, as opposed to, say, Khaltak, your maternal aunt, a little boy- Ya Walad!, O Boy! I might have called to him- standing beside that grass hut would have thought me crazy, not just a passing stranger, and continued to stare at me after I’d ridden by for miles.

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