I knew a Sudanese trail boss named Muhammad al-Humri who wore a ruby on his finger. We called him Abu Dibla, Father of the Ring. This Egyptian mother, this Umm, seems to be wearing its twin on her right finger but her Bint, her daughter, is reaching out with her left as if to say, I want one too. Forty years later, I wonder if she is now wearing her mother’s ruby or if she has given it to a Bint of her own.
©David Melody
Muwazzaf- public office clerk, low-salaried functionary, hapless paper pusher- is a word you learned in Egypt circa 1978, when it was still a socialist country and you needed a full day to renew your residence permit in person. They came to work in the Mugamma’ Building, the fourteen story Soviet Brutalist-style Nasserist monstruosity on Midan Tahrir, from all the old quarters of Cairo like al-Gamaliyya as perhaps did this man, where he would have walked past medieval junk and plastic trash before reaching the modern city. But still, he kept his mustache clipped and his shirt pressed so colleagues would never guess where he lived or what he saw on his way to the office.
©David Melody
It may have been in Darb al-Ahmar at ‘Eid al-Fitr, when children are given new clothes for the coming year, bought over size so they will fit twelve months later. Maybe instead of buying ready made clothing, the father bought fabric- upholstery weight is cheaper and more durable for children- by the yard and had the tailor make it. Unaccustomed to dresses (his usual order being mens galabiyyas requiring only three cuts and seams), the tailor made her look like a rolled up curtain. But still, she is proud of how she will look until the next ‘eid comes round.
©David Melody
The coffee house spills onto the street. Two men drinking tea engage the American student in conversation. They ask questions of the Khawaja- Your name? Your country?- in Cleopatra cigarette-filtered Cairene slang while he answers in his first year Arabic, converting with difficulty from Modern Standard to Egyptian Colloquial. Still, they are amazed that he speaks their language and that, as Dr. Johnson said about a dog walking on his hind legs, It is not done well, but they are surprised it is done at all.
©David Melody
…Latimer grinned ashamedly to himself. The fact that one was a writer could be used to explain away the most curious extravagances.
-A Coffin for Dimitrios, Eric Ambler
You can ask, Kayf sahhatak, Kayf al-haal, Kayf al-tijarah al-yom…How is your health, the situation, today’s business. But never ask after the women, al-Hurma. I have done that when entering the house of a perfect stranger but one generous enough to invite me into his home for tea. Kayf al-bahayim, How are the animals, is a question he was happy to answer and went on for an hour doing so. But the women, the wife, the daughters…Never. A sure conversation killer. And it was hard to blame my dictionary. Hurma, Harem, Hirma [as per Lane, Venereal Desire among Cloven-Footed Females, cf. Dhabi’a, Venereal Desire among She-Camels] all come from the same root, with an emphatic H. I should have known, talking about the household’s womenfolk is emphatically Haraam, Forbidden.
After forty odd years of wandering the world and writing about it, I had come to realize that I really seldom knew what I was writing about.
-Hav of the Myrmidons, Epilogue, Jan Morris
/nevertheless I’d like to know/what you are doing and where you are going.
-Letter to N.Y., Elizabeth Bishop
I met KhairAllah almost forty years ago under unusual circumstances and they have only become stranger. In the beginning I thought about him often and he may have thought about me, but each never knew this about the other. No letters, no calls, no mutual friends to pass spoken messages. I made a few visits to Sudan and saw him, once I missed him because he was off in the desert buying sheep.
Now he has sons who know some English and can use email. Sometimes they answer my questions about their father. If I ask them, How is your father these days? Where is he going and what livestock is he buying?, they answer me, My father sends you his greetings and he hopes that you are in good health, Inshaa’Allah. When I write about KhairAllah today, I seldom know anything for certain to be true so I stick to forty year memories of the Darb where one day was much like the previous and much like the next. No danger of falling off that trail.
Well, Abe said, “Where you want this killin’ done?” God said, “Out on Highway 61”
-Captain Arab
If you keep driving south on Egyptian National Highway 75 past Abu Simbel and the Sudanese border you’ll get to the place where KhairAllah commanded that we make a shared offering. Before we sacrificed the kid he said, “In the name of God.”
KhairAllah watches ©David Melody
The places that nineteenth century tourists visited in Nubia no longer exist.
-Up the Nile, Deborah Bull and Donald Lorimer
KhairAllah took me to see Al-Amiri Yaseen in the Dongola souk, who Hajj Bashir had telephoned to ask how Daoud and I looked when we’d reached his halfway point on Day 20, and Bashir later told me that Al-Amiri told him we looked about normal for two khawajas on their first camel drive. And KhairAllah took me to meet the Shaheen family, congenital deafness afflicting all three generations living on the banks of Batan al-Hajar, a cataract known as the Belly of Stones, and they put me up for the night. And KhairAllah steered the herd close by Sulb Temple across the river from Wawa village when I told him that Nedu would like a shot of it on film, and he did. So to say that such places in Nubia no longer exist is an exaggeration. In the twenty first century you just have to keep going farther south.
There is, after Herodotus, little interest by the Western World towards the desert for hundreds of years. From 425 B.C. until the beginning of the twentieth century there is an averting of eyes. Silence…And then in the 1920s there is a sweet postscript history of this pocket of earth…made mostly by privately funded expeditions and followed by modest lectures…by sunburned, exhausted men.
-The English Patient, Michael Odaantje
Ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem apellant
-Tacitus
Now the Sahara belongs to the geologists. Some prospect for uranium and oil and fossil water there. For NASA they model it on the lunar surface and practice moon landings. Some study its soil to see if they can make it bloom. They asphalt its tracks and hope they’re not covered by moving dunes. When this happens, they stop their drill rig trucks and hope to skirt off piste without getting stuck. Greeks called it erēmíā, which gives us hermit, and Romans called it solitudo, solitudinis. Now we build satellite cities, pumping stations and secret airbases. Better that we leave the desert alone, a hermitage, in solitude, and call it pax, pacis.
The desert could not be claimed or owned- it was a piece of cloth carried in the wind, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names…It was a place of faith. We disappeared into landscape. Fire and sand. The places water came to and touched…Ain, Bir, Wadi, Foggara, Khottara, Shaduf. I didn’t want my name against such beautiful names.
-The English Patient, words spoken by Odaantje’s László Almásy
The desert’s hundred shifting names- Badw, Baadiya, Baydaa’, from just a single triliteral root- for sand, for rock, for dune fields and sheets and seas. I didn’t understand many of those words then and now it is too late because one has to be there to see and learn and remember. Back home the desert became a blur again. It’s true, you disappear into the desert when you ride through it for forty days. That’s why Almásy remembered words for water but not for sand. Ain, Bir. Spring, Well. No forgetting those when thirsty.
Imagine yourself jostling a way through those souks, shadowy, dusty, clamorous, argumentative, past charm-hawker and water-seller…
-Last Letters from Hav, Jan Morris
Those souks- the ones I knew in towns like Umdurman, Massawa, Agades and Gao- were less noisy than dusty, except for the mangos and tomatoes sprayed with water to keep fresh. But the grains and dates, the sesame seeds and the groundnuts, they were dusty. I followed KhairAllah through the Dongola souk when we went into town to resupply and he bought dry mint and other sundries for the trail. No need to buy water, Dongola being on the Nile. But drovers always need a charm.
Next day, October 18, we pushed on south-west for a further 25 miles off the sand and on to a rising, rocky country…scored into grooves 10 to 50 feet deep. The grooves and the sand in them ressemble the hollow of the roof of a dog’s mouth.
-A Further Journey Through the Libyan Desert, The Geographical Journal, R.A. Bagnold, 1933
What would KhairAllah have thought if I’d compared a camel track of corrugated sand to the inside of a dog’s mouth? Not that he would have even known what it’s like. Why would he? The dog barks, KhairAllah passes by.
Have you heard of the Camel of Destruction? No? It’s a figure from legend, a kind of Apocalyptic Beast. At the beginning of the world, or soon thereafter, it ran amok…
-The Camel of Destruction: A Mamur Zapt Mystery, Michael Pearce
The Camel of Destruction is an Arabic metaphor similar to a “loose cannon”.
-Doc Peterson
KhairAllah might have called the first camel he gave me to ride Jamal al-Tadmeer, Camel of Destruction, not because of it, but because of me. I tried to ride it like a quarter horse, spurring and neck reining forward and aft of the herd in homage to Rowdy Yates. Better if I’d ridden like Wishbone and Mushy in their kitchen wagon, slow and steady. KhairAllah finally put me on a gelding, big and strong and lumbering like an ox. Try getting him into a trot, he might have said to me.
“Take them to Missouri, Mathew”, and Dunson turned his broad back on the herd that must travel one thousand miles to market. A thousand miles! And a thousand deaths. Coyotes and wolves..badlands, dry wells, stampedes- ten miles a day, fifteen with luck…Mathew motioned to Teeler: “Move ‘em out…!”…“Hi…!,” called the rider, “Hi-yaaa! We’re off to Missoura-hi-yaaaa!”…Dust lifted in a sullen cloud. The great beasts stirred.
-Blazing Guns on the Chisholm Trail, Borden Chase, whose characters Dunson, Mathew, and Teeler were played in the film Red River by John Wayne, Montgomery Clift, and Paul Fix
KhairAllah hoped to make better time with his herd than fifteen miles a day on the thousand mile Kordofan-to-Cairo trail. If not, he’d get to Misr, Egypt, about a month late off the Way of the Forty and Hajj Bashir would not be happy. And I’d be a bit late myself getting to Missouri, if I still lived there.
French Foreign Legion Commandant: Men come here to accept the hardships of the desert and the wasteland. To be without food, without water, and to laugh at it all. Ha, ha, ha…
-Beau Hunks (1931), starring Laurel and Hardy, made seven years before Beau Geste with Gary Cooper and Ray Milland from the same novel
What would KhairAllah have made of Ollie and Stanley in the desert? What did he make of Luwees and Daoud? Yes there was plenty of laughter around the night fires, but not because we went without aseeda and shai. The drovers laughed, incredulously, because Luwees and Daoud chose to ride on the Darb not out of necessity like themselves but rather in search of Adventure, Mughaamara, a word I now understand why is related to the meaning that Lane gives for Mughaamir, One Who Throws Himself into Difficulties, Troubles, or Distresses, and Makes Others To Do So.
Ride ‘em out, Cut ‘em out, Cut ‘em in, Let ‘em out, Ride ‘em in…Keep movin’, movin’, movin’, Though they’re disapprovin’, Keep ‘em dawwgies movin’…All the things I’m missin’, Good vittles, love and kissin’, Are waitin’ at the end of my ride…Rawhide! (sound of Cracking Whip)
-sung by Frankie Laine (birth name Francesco Paolo LoVecchio)
Head ‘em up, Move ‘em out!
-Gil Favor, Trail Boss, played by Eric Fleming (1925-1966, drowned in the Huallaga River, Peruvian Amazon)
KhairAllah (counting his camels, speaking to drovers off camera): Kam Ra’s? [How many head?] You said eight are missing? Voice: Ten are missing. KhairAllah: Where are those ten? Another Voice: He doesn’t know how to count. KhairAllah: Tell him they’re all here. (laughter, off camera)
-Voice of the Whip, Day 15
I introduced Voice of the Whip at the Margaret Mead Film Festival at the American Museum of Natural History and said I had been inspired to make it from watching Rawhide on TV when I was young. Someone who later wrote the film review in American Anthropologist must have been in the audience that night because he mentioned, as way of a put down, that I was an amateur romantic for boyish adventure stories, but I think that miscounting of camels scene proves I was much more of a Three Stooges fan.