On the banha local

I remember that day well. We had left Bab al-Hadid, Ramsees Station, on a local train into the Delta towards Banha. The plan was to wait until we had passed a few of Cairo’s outer stops and then climb up on the rail carriage’s roof to ride. I don’t know, maybe it was a Wild West kind of thing, maybe it was seeing so many Egyptian kids doing it and having so much fun that I wanted to do it too. Or maybe Daoud thought he could get some great pictures. But this is the only image from that day that has stuck with me, the woman alone and looking inward, letting the man seated behind her to look out at Banha.

©David Melody

Cairo as the mamluks saw it

No cars, no carts, few people. You only saw old Cairo like that early in the morning, perhaps on a feast day or during times of political unrest during the Mamluk era. The buildings themselves are from that period, the 13th Century and following, which you can see by their large limestone blocks and arched windows sealed with iron bars. It was less common to see Cairo like this in the last years of Sadat, when the city was bursting at the seams at all hours. So yes, it must have been early morning, and perhaps Daoud had been out all night.

©David Melody

Waiting for the opening

Many Cairo store counters were like that, empty, in the years before the country’s economic Infitaah, its Opening to global trade and import. You would enter because something curious in the window caught your eye and find inside…nothing. No food, no goods, no money. Sometimes children tending shop, sometimes only their pictures on the back wall. That was all Egypt had for sale in those days, the promise of youth, and even that quickly grew old.

©David Melody

The bawaab dreams of bed

Every respectable apartment building in Cairo had a Bawaab, a doorkeeper who sat on a chair and bided his time. Some doors had wrought iron gates, as did his, even if they shared the sidewalk with machine shops and piles of refuse metal for sale to junk men. Every pile had its price. The mechanic stood watch at his while the Bawaab napped by his, the door unkept, the iron gate unguarded.

©David Melody

Umm dibla and her bint

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

A muwazzaf going to the mugamma'

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

'Eid in Darb al-ahmar

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 khawaja as talking dog

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

Kayf al-hurma?

…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.

I don't know

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.

God say, "no", Khairallah say, "what?"

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

Places that still exist

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.

The desert after herodotus

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.

Ain, bir

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.

Pushing through the souk

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.

camels in a dog's mouth

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.