What I most remember about Muhammad after his ruby ring and deep laugh was his blue woolen overcoat and white scarf. The others wore slapped together cottons and polyesters which never kept them warm. Muhammad looked ready to stroll down Fifth Avenue in the snow trailed by his whip and dabouka.
©David Melody
Some middays were more chill than others. It helped to have a shade tree and a new pillow, and junior drovers to gather up the camels after they had grazed far and wide. That gave Idris and KhairAllah time for their Jalsah, Seated Gathering, at which they would agree that the Darb al-Arba’een was a marathon, not a sprint.
©David Melody
Adam Hamid was not one of the others, the Kababish. He was of the Hamar tribe, a mostly cattle raising people. But like them, he wore a scabbard above his left elbow for a fast draw with his right hand. So don’t let his comic salute fool you. All the faster to pull his dagger.
©David Melody
Blessed are the Meek for they shall inherit the Earth. This could have been written for Muhammad, whom I called Al-Miskeen, the Humble One. At the end of the drive his clothes had become like rags, which once caught fire when he was not looking. He was always cold and sat too close.
In later years even KhairAllah forgot him. When I asked if he had ever again seen the three drovers of that trip- Masood, Adam, and Muhammad- he drew a blank at the mention of the last. So poor in spirit was Muhammad that his name faded from the memory of a trail boss who remembered every camel in every herd.
©David Melody
Depending on how the wind blows, skeletons might be covered within days. Alive or dead, you eat sand and sand eats you. It salts your food, it fills your mouth, it scours and buries your bones.
©David Melody
©David Melody
She asked me was I going to Araby. I forget if I answered yes or no. It would be a splendid bazaar, she said she would love to go. “And why can’t you?” I asked.
-James Joyce
I don’t know how my name stumbled into the pages of Ulysses or she into the pages of Dubliners. But she did, and she did go to Araby and loved it, even visiting me in the hospital there and watching the cats steal from our dinner plate at the restaurant beside the Nile.
No one dared to disagree with Muhammad al-Aziz when he sized a camel with a single glance and said to the buyer, This will dress at two hundred twenty kilos, at two pounds eighty piasters a kilo…so pay the seller that price less my commission, and shake hands and say, Al-Hamdu Lillah.
©David Melody
In Sudan, peacocks prefer turbans, all the better to display their tails. Meantime, those who do the heavy work, those who bear the young and pound the millet into aseeda flour, they prefer to wrap themselves in a shawl, Shaal in Arabic, not to be confused with Shaa’il, a She-Camel Raising her Tail as a Sign to the He-Camel, as per Lane.
©David Melody
That was Mahdi Bashir in the middle. The men to his left and right were also market VIPs, one a seller and the other a buyer. Mahdi was a seller too but also much more than that, he was my friend, my host at his flat on Rushdi Street during his nightly Jalsahs, Seated Gatherings, and most importantly the son of Haj Bashir Abu Jaib, on whose herds and under whose aegis I rode twice from Kordofan to Binban. For that I owe many thanks to all the Abu Jaib family.
©David Melody
Attention must be paid when the Hakim al-Suq, the Market Judge, spoke. I first met Sudanese camel men at the Imbaba market when I went there on an assignment for school, to interview a man in the street- any man, anywhere- and then report to fellow American students about the real Cairo, as an exercise in colloquial Arabic and cultural communication. I returned to class with my head swimming about what I had seen, what I did not understand, and how it might be possible one day to ride with the drovers on the Darb al-Arba’een.
©David Melody
It was disconcerting to have ridden forty days with Sudanese drovers to the Cairo market and then to find them nowhere about after we had arrived. They stayed mostly out of sight, their work complete, resting in the back rooms until their return journeys home to Kordofan were arranged, the chore of managing camels in the paddocks left to Egyptians such as this one, his galabiyya’s floppy peasant sleeves giving him away as a man unaccustomed even to a camel’s mouth.
©David Melody
It takes a big man to do a big job, to single-handedly make the market for camels on the hoof. This is the man who did it, setting prices between Sudanese exporters and Egyptian butchers and cracking heads when they disagreed. By the end of the day, the paddocks were emptied, the accountant put down his ledger, and Muhammad al-Aziz walked away from another tally of international trade every bit as important as oil and gas.
©David Melody
©David Melody
So much of Egypt in a single glance. Qutn, Cotton and Qutta, a Cat, watching the Bawaab, Doorkeeper, eat his ‘Aish, Life, as they call their Bread.
©David Melody
In the state of Maine they closed schools for the week of the potato harvest. In Illinois they hired teenagers in the summer to detassel the corn. In rural Egypt children picked weevils off the cotton and then picked the cotton itself. In Cairo, the young minded sidewalk stalls outside the movie theaters on Talat Harb Street, selling empty change purses and empty plastic shopping bags. That was about it for them, no money to buy nothing.
©David Melody
When they are coming your way fast, you only have a split second to ask yourself about each, Is this the look of a Pharaoh, or of the Seated Scribe, or of the Lector Priest Kaaper, or of Queen Nefertiti or Princess Nofret, or of the Lady Tiye or Seneb and his Wife Senetites and their two Children? They say the Arabs brought their language to Egypt but little of their blood. You can see this in their faces, or you think you can when you walk on Mu’izz li-Din Street near Bab Zuweila and they are shouting at you, Baalik!, Baalik!, Your Attention, Pay Attention!
©David Melody
They gaze down from high on a wall, higher than the name of God and floating above the junk man and a 25 piaster a plate lunch cart. Sadat, Shah, Carter. It must have been after Camp David and before the Iranian Revolution when Shah was chased out of his own country, dethroned and soon to be dead. Carter too was later chased from office after one term, and Sadat left his parade ground feet first. Look on my works…and despair.
©David Melody