It's a camel thing

Shaay Gamali, Camel tea, meaning, Tea late in being served, as if arriving by camel.

-Dictionary of Egyptian Arabic, Badawi and Hinds

We drank a lot of Shaay gamali, Camel tea, because our tea really did arrive by camel. There was no other way on the Darb. And we never confused it with Sheay gamali, a Camel thing, which is what the drovers answered me when I asked, Why do you hobble the camel’s left leg and not his right?, or, Why do you have to unload the camels if we are only stopping for five minutes?, or, Why must a thirsty camel be grazed before he is taken to water? It’s a Sheay gamali, they would say, You wouldn’t understand.

O my camel!

Gamal /n camel. Ma shuftish il-gamal wala il-gammaal, I saw neither the camel nor the cameleer, meaning, I didn’t see anything. Ma gaash fi-gamal, He didn’t come on a camel, meaning, He isn’t asking for everything [to pack a camel with it]. Ya gamali, O My camel!, meaning [when said by a widow], O My husband!

-Dictionary of Egyptian Arabic, Badawi and Hinds

I never asked KhairAllah if he used any of these expressions, but I doubt that an Egyptian peasant’s world and his own ever overlapped, either idiomatically or otherwise. Besides pronouncing the word with a hard g rather than a soft j as do the Sudanese, Egyptians had no proper understanding of camels. If his wife were to say, O My camel!, even from the grave he would have thought her crazy.

He was there and he just got back

Beyond its course in Egypt the Nile is known to extend as far as a four month journey…about the region beyond this, no one can say anything with certainty, for that land is uninhabited due to the scorching heat of the sun…but this much further I did learn by the most extensive investigation I could make, going as far as the city of Elephantine to see for myself...

-Herodotus, Book II

Scorching? A four month journey? Not likely. It only took KhairAllah and his men forty days, and it was often cold at night. Herodotus went as far upriver as Aswan, KhairAllah arrived just downstream from there, at Binban Bahri, and the two told very different stories about what they had seen. Herodotus spoke of Egyptians moving their bowels indoors, carrying burdens on their heads, and weaving the woof downward, while KhairAllah said the Kababish moved their bowels outdoors, carried burdens on camels, and, about those woofs, knew only that Nabah al-kalb wa mishit al-dabouka, The dog barked and the dabouka passed by.

Raml, rimaal, araamil

This desert is apparently the only land route leading into Egypt.

-Herodotus, Book III

That’s certainly what it looks like from the air when you fly into Cairo. Nothing but sand on all sides, even the Delta looks sandy, from all the poorly mixed concrete buildings. On the Darb al-’Arba’een we had a most practical introduction to this fact…forty days crossing nothing but raml, ramla, rimaal, armul, and araamil- as Lane gives their meaning…sand, a sandy place, sandy places (if many), sandy places (if few), and sandy placeses (the plural of a plural).

You say camelho, i say camello

Camelho (pt.), camell (ct.), y camello (cs., con la variante antigua gamello). Camelus dromedarius, del lt. camēlus< gr. kámēlos, de una lengua semítica difícil de precisar…Derivado de intrarromance. cs.: camella, camellej/ro, y camellería; ct.: cameller, camellí, camella y camellot; pt.: camelão, camelaria, cameleiro, camelete y camelino.

-Diccionario de Arabismos, Federico Corriente

Too bad we had no Castilian (cs.) or Portuguese (pt.) or Catalan (ct.) speakers along with us on the Darb. I bet the drovers would have loved to play the name-a-camel game with them. But why does Corriente find it so difficult to determine which semitic language gives us that word? As in Lane’s usage example for the Form I verb of the root J-M-L, Jamal al-Jamal, He put the he-camel apart from the she-camel that was fit to be covered. Hamid once said, ‘Ayzeen yaneeq, They want to f…, I presume in order to make many more words where that one came from.

Water and words

Warada wa hadda wa sadara wa hauwasha, He [the camel] came to the watering place and took a first drink and raised his head and took a second drink. Warrada, v., He drove [a camel] to water. Sharraba, v., He made [a camel] drink. Rawaa, v., He satisfied himself with drinking [water], He bore in his memory, knowing by heart, and transmitted orally, recited, or narrated a story or poem. Raawwi, activ. part., One who draws water, One who recites poetry.

-various entries, Lane’s Classical Lexicon and Hillelson’s Sudanese Vocabulary

Hillelson’s entry for Drink is almost as long as it is for Camel, if that is proof enough of the importance of Water on the trail. I remember the way KhairAllah would decline an offered drink in the midday heat, even when he must have been thirsty yet wanted to appear stoic in the eyes of others. Lissa shiribt, I already drank, he would say, even when he had not. I just learned that the root R-W-Y and its cognates have second meanings about sating oneself with water, in addition to sating others with words. I wish I’d known that back then, that you could do both at the same time.

Bilal was mabsout

Drunk, adj., Sakraan. Mabsout, slightly drunk. Mastoul, very drunk. Marraasi, n., a marisa [millet beer] drunkard.

-Sudanese Arabic: A Vocabulary, Sigmar Hillelson

Why save for poverty and wretchedness must we cross the desert of Atmour night after night?

-Bilal Bagheet, Khabeer, poetry recitation, Day 28 on the trail

Bilal was old and nearing his last ride up the Darb in 1988. KhairAllah had not seen him often since then but some twenty years later we tried to find either him, if he were by some miracle still alive, or his family when we went to the village where he was last known to live. No one in the souk knew anything about him, but because it was known for producing pure sesame oil, we bought some and I told KhairAllah to praise Bilal whenever his wife cooked with it.

Bilal had once gotten so drunk on marisa that he fell off his camel but at the time I did not laugh with the others and call him a marraasi, because I did not know that word then. I am glad that I did not because several days later he recited a very sad poem at the campfire about men’s hearts broken by girls and the poverty and wretchedness that afflicts all camel drovers. I only learned the words to his poem after reading the BBC translation almost a year later but I knew that it was sad when he recited it.

Looking now at Hillelson’s various words for Drunk, I see that he gives Mabsout to mean Slighty Drunk. In Egypt I learned that word to mean Happy. Lane gives it as, Free and Unconstrained in the Tongue…a better meaning for a poet reciting at the campfire, happy, drunk, neither or both.

Green in the saddle

On the morning of the 21st of December, the unwilling camels received their burdens and I mounted a dromedary for the first time. Thenceforth for many days the only green thing to be seen in all the wilderness was myself.

-A Journey to Central Africa, 1854, Bayard Taylor, readying himself to cross the Nubian Desert

We all know what it means to be green, a greenhorn, fresh in the saddle and raw underneath, a tenderfoot. That is how I felt in my first days on the trail, green and tender, Akhdar, from the root Kh-D-R. For its Form VIII verb- Akhtadara, He cut green herbage- Lane gives two unexpected secondary meanings, He deflowered a girl before she had reached puberty, and He put a nose-rein on an untrained camel and drove him. I wonder if that is what the drovers were thinking as they taught me to ride….that they were deflowering a greenhorn, or pulling a tenderfoot by the nose.

With my cinematograph

Formerly camels were hired if a man wanted to travel into Kordofan, and a leisurely and Biblical journey was made across the sands and wild barren country…But the railway has put an end to that. A cinematograph was exhibited in El Obeid and the Kordofan chiefs who attended gaped at the miracle. The cinema and the railroad marked the beginning of a new era…

-My Sudan Year, 1912, Ethel Stevens Drower

When KhairAllah and I took Voice of the Whip for a 300 mile screening tour on Kordofan’s back tracks, it felt less a government-sponsored goodwill mission than a buddy trip for old times’ sake. Thirty years after we’d first saddled up together it was good to be welcomed again in Kababish villages, whether because we were driving a dabouka of native camels or projecting a film about native sons. Not even little children gaped at KhairAllah’s, Bilal’s, and the other drovers’ moving images cast upon mud walls after dark. Smart phones had long ago replaced the cinematograph out there. But for one night at least outdoor cinema on the big screen had come to that wild and barren country.

The Clashing breasts

To the south we saw the two jebels called the Nahud [Breasts] from their shape. No Arab going westwards will drive his flocks between these hills on his way to the rainy season grazing for fear lest one of his party die. The legend is of giants- that the rocks were like those of the Clashing Rocks that Odysseus so narrowly escaped.

-Diary, March 5, 1931, C.A.E. Lea

I never asked KhairAllah if he shared that fear, that if he were to ride a camel between those two hills he might be crushed by them. We started from the town of Nahud, at the foot of its double jebel, and I didn’t have my dictionary out that first day. If I’d had, no doubt we’d have had something more to laugh about, other than when the two young he-camels got frisky and Hamid said to me, ‘Ayzeen yaneeq- the second verb in that compound phrase, They want to f…, which I didn’t know and asked him to explain its meaning. I wonder how many more words the drovers thought I’d need to be taught.

Euphony in kordofan

Kordofan will always be to me a euphonious word.

-Before the Wind Changed, Ina Beasley, memoir of a colonial administrator in Sudan

Lane collected words far more euphonious than that, especially those called by grammarians onomatopoeic reduplicative quadriliterals. In Kordofan I might have asked KhairAllah for a cup of Um al-Bulbul or to scare off Abu Jamjama, Mother of the Nightingale and Father of the Skull, for the millet beer that makes you sing like a bird and the vulture whose head is bald as a bulb. And you might even say, Iftah Ya Simsim, Open O Sesame, when asking him to tell a camel thief story…but as for words like Hamham and Waswas, Mumble and Whisper, or Zilzil and Ghalghal, Shake and Penetrate, or ‘Ash’ash and Shakshak, Settle and Prickle, or even Silsil and Sarsar, Chain and Creak, I doubt that KhairAllah read the same dictionary as I.

Khali baalak min zouzou

…the enjoyment was only broken when Ibrahim Ahmed, a young soldier who had been given charge of a rutting camel, bent down to prepare its evening feed. To my horror, I saw the camel dart its head down, seize Ibrahim by the neck, lift him up and shake him like a rat while grinding his neck to pieces. He was buried in the Northern Hills.

-The Wind of Morning: An Autobiography, Col. Sir Hugh Broustead, Commander of the Sudan Camel Corps

When I was in Cairo in 1979 a movie with the actress Suad Hosni was playing in reruns, Khali Baalak min Zouzou, Watch Out for Zouzou, a slapstick musical about a free spirited belly dancer named Zouzou whose profession complicates her romance with an up-tight college professor. One of my classmates quoted the movie title whenever she’d answer our professor’s questions, her way of mocking Egypt’s problem with independent smart women.

I must have picked up the habit of saying that too, instead of, for instance, Baalak!, Attention!, or, Bi’Iznak, With your permission, whenever I pushed past people on the sidewalk, which was often. And I took it with me to Dar al-Kababish five years later, and whenever KhairAllah or a drover would inadvertantly spook a couched camel and it would growl and try to rise to its still hobbled feet, I’d say it to him too. Who knows what they thought I meant by it, most of the time I’d swear they couldn’t tell if I was speaking English or Arabic anyway, and if I’d been there to warn Ibrahim Ahmed I doubt it would have saved him either.

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.