isadora dictates a letter

Isadora to her Lord and Master…, Greetings. First of all, I hope you are as well as I am. As I begged you before, please do not forget me. Receive from Primus [the waggoner?] this salted fish. I would like you to send me the earthenware bottle and ink so that I may be able to write to you…So and so wrote this because she [Isadora] does not know how to write.

-Ostracon, 1st C CE, found along the Via Porphyrites at El Heita way station in Wadi Qena, translated from the Greek and published in The Red Sea Mountains of Egypt, Leo Tregenza

Once I served as scribe to KhairAllah, who dictated a letter I put down on paper much like this pottery shard inked by a scribe of the similarly illiterate Isadora not far north along the Nile River from where I wrote mine. KhairAllah was worried about losing his camel. Isadora was worried about losing her lover. What remains the same between then and now is this need to speak and be heard across vast desert spaces. Isadora did in the 1st Century, KhairAllah did in 1984, and today I do the same with him, via the email account of his son, who reads to his father.

nilotic mixology

The waters of the two rivers are very different in taste and appearance. Neither is considered first class drinking water by residents of Khartoom; but after their waters are mingled well together, the mixture is deemed excellent.

-A Walk Across Africa, James A. Grant, 1864, Description of Mugran al-Nilayn, Meeting of the Two Niles, after arriving downriver from the source of the White Nile with John Hanning Speke

I guess that if you live at the confluence of the Blue and the White Niles you consider yourself a connoisseur of their individual tastes, tannins from Lake Tana and vegetals from Lake Victoria. Each on its own, not so good. But mixed just right at the Mugran, it is pure Janna, Heaven, and you can drink a fine cuppa in the Mugran’s public Janayna, Garden, heaven in its diminutive form.

Final salute to trail mates

Muhammad, Masood, and I take a bus to Kitkat, Imbaba, from where we take a taxi into Ataba, over 6 October Bridge past 26 July Street, through Ezbekiya to the bottom of al-Muski. Muhammad turns orange, his voice croaks, expectorating through the car window greenly. I ask what’s wrong and he dramatically lowers his head and points with both hands, Traffic Headache. We set off on foot for the Muski proper and immediately they dicker over woolen scarves. My treat. We turn back into Midan al-Azhar to take the busy city view, they enter Sayyidna Hussein and Masood comes out smiling, amazed. Muhammad says his headache has cleared and is suddenly eager to return to the camel market, but first to buy a rosary and enter Al-Azhar, Masood handles a Quran and asks the price, he leaves it and they take off their shoes, I notice his yellow socks when they return. We jump into a taxi, I get the price down to 3 pounds 25 piasters, pay then jump out. I salute my friends, a final salute, shake hands again through the open window, and watch the two of them crawl down Sharia al-Azhar in traffic back eventually to Dar al-Kabābīsh.

-Diary, March 12, 1984, Cairo

That was my last glimpse of Muhammad and Masood. I’ve stayed in touch with KhairAllah over the years, in fact I just heard from him- indirectly, through his son- last week, and I often ask him if he has seen our mates from my first trip with him, and he says no. But he laughs at the mention of Masood, Abu Dūd, Father of the Lion, for he always made us laugh back in those days too.

licking sand

…we halted to go through a superstitious ceremony…Our guide received from the boy two handfuls of sand, some of which he strewed over his person, some he put into his pockets, some he licked, some he put on the camels, and he finished off by putting the last grains carefully into the bag slung from his riding camel.

-A Walk Across Africa, James A. Grant, 1864, Upon setting off across the Nubian Desert

At our goodbye ceremony, all we did was slaughter a sheep and cook it over a fire, eat our fill then stamp our hand prints dipped in its blood onto the necks of the lead camels.

Used up in from the desert

Never was this party so completely used up as when we came in from the desert. We were so wore out from fatigue and from want of sleep that like many of the old cows it might have been said of us that we were give out.

-Cyrus C. Loveland, from his 1850 Missouri-to-California Cattle Drive Journal

I thought I’d learn about camel drives by reading about cattle drives and watching movies. The Chisholm Trail and Red River. But cattle drives out of Texas were long gone. That movie theater scene in The Last Picture Show of drovers up on the screen moving out the herd and shouting Yip-Yip-Yahoo ran a chill down my back. Jeff Bridges and Timothy Bottoms just laughed at it, one telling the other, I’ve seen that movie musta been a hundred times.

So this quote about cattle coming in from the desert caught my eye. Which desert? The Sonora, the Mojave? The Bayuda, the Libyan? No, it must have been the Great Sahara. What else could make a drover so completely used up and give out?

An ass in the saddle

…an easy pace, not very fatiguing…yet even this was sometimes alleviated by our sometimes being able to dismount from our camels and get upon our asses…

-Letters from Egypt, Ethiopia, and the Penninsula of Sinai, Karl Richard Lepsius, 1853, on crossing the Nubian Desert

I think Lepsius was more than happy to alternate rubbing his bottom in opposite directions, forward/backward and up/down, depending on his mount’s natural gait. We were stuck with only the fore and aft because we had no up and down trotting donkeys in our herd and forward/backward is the way camels walk, despite the fact that I rode on a Bardha’a, Ass Saddle, which Lane gives a secondary meaning to as Land Neither Hard Nor Soft.

a shout and a whisper

A shouter in the desert

-Arabic proverb

Better than to shout in the desert is to Whisper, Washwash, and engage in what the Egyptian Colloquial Dictionary calls ‘ilm al-Washwāsh, the Science of Whispering, A Form of Psychomancy Based on Whispering to Spirits, or to camels, as tribesmen from Darfur do in order to couch them, saying Sh-Sh-Sh-Sh.

it fell to earth i know not where

You scrabble up rock hills and feel hot sand underneath your feet, take a look over your shoulder at a giant sun suspended in a dead and motionless sky like an unblinking eye that probes at the back of your head in a prolonged accusation…Small human drama played out in a desert ninety seven miles from….the Twilight Zone.

-I Shot an Arrow into the Air, Episode 15, The Twilight Zone, 1960

Egyptian planetary scientist Farouk El-Baz helped Apollo astronauts choose lunar landing sites by taking them to the Western Desert, the closest looking landscape to the moon on Earth. Rod Serling wrote about his astronauts crashing in the Nevada desert just over a sand dune from the road to Reno, and going crazy, thinking they had landed on an unknown waterless planet, arguing, plotting, and one murdering the other. I wonder what Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong would have made of KhairAllah if he had driven his herd past their simulator when they were out there alone somewhere near Wadi al-Kalabsha, what they would have done. Argue, steal his goatskin, or ask him, Wayn al-Funduk, Where is the Hotel?

natural wants on the darb

On the twentieth day precisely of Dhu al-Hijja I went out of Mecca in the company of the commander of the caravan…Anyone who left the caravan for a natural want and had no mark by which to guide himself to his place could not find it again…

-Travels, Ibn Batutta (1304-1368)

I was always impressed when one of the drovers heard and answered the call of nature while the Dabouka was underway at a fast clip. It is not easy to force a camel, even a well ridden camel, to a dead stop and couch when the others are rushing past. So the drover would have to jump off on the move, run to the side to answer his call, then run doubly fast to catch up, pacing himself beside his long striding mount, then swing back into the saddle up from its neck. Smooth and Easy, like a tree climber on a smooth branch, so unlike a branch of the Vechellia seyal, gum arabic tree, whose eight inch thorns can ruin your day.

a man and his (third) camel

A camel lives between twenty and thirty years according to the food it has and the work it is given to do. A poor man in his lifetime has three, if he looks after them well, and he and the third grow old together.

-words spoken by Suliman Auda, Ma’aza camel guide, as recorded in The Red Sea Mountains of Egypt by Leo Tregenza

I traveled in the Red Sea Mountains in 1998 with a camel guide of the same tribe named Salaama Mir’i and his 18 year old son Suliman. As a boy Salaama remembered Leo being called Genza. He said Genza ate bully beef while he and the other guides ate bread. If Suliman Auda’s adage is believed, Suliman Salaama, presently age forty or thereabouts, would be just now acquiring his third camel. I still remember his words when awaiting resupply by a man named Salih. O Salih! Where is Salih? Salih came to us driving a truck, not a camel.

John wayne, hajj bashir’s favorite cowboy

I called Bashir early and found him in the souk, glad to see me- whoever I was, for he didn’t remember me from when we’d last met in Cairo, and after so many years I wasn’t sure of his face either, whether we’d ever met at all, until he opened his mouth and started in again about John Wayne, and then no doubt about it, this was the Bashir Abu Jaib I remember, talking about his favorite Hollywood cowboy.

-Diary, El Obeid, January 12, 1984

That first trip on the Darb started with a shot in the dark. I’d met Hajj Bashir in 1978 at the Cairo camel market. After discussing the recent death of the Duke which he’d heard about on Voice of America, I asked him if one day I might ride with one of his herds up from Sudan. He assented, and no doubt thought that was the end of that. So blame it on the well functioning Egyptian postal service, which delivered my letter to his Cairo apartment five years later saying I was ready to ride. His son Mahdi, whom I’d never met, answered, Welcome Anytime. Daoud and I showed up at his door a week later and he put us on a plane to Khartoum. There we were met by another son Sayyid who put us on the El Obeid bus to their father. Hajj Bashir didn’t seem to remember me, nor I his face, but nonetheless he sent us on to Nahud where his agent Sadiq abd al-Wahab and his trail boss KhairAllah Khair al-Sayyid were mustering drovers and camels. And so we mounted up.

The Darb from 30,000 feet up

From Adam Ibrahim, a trail boss we met through Mahdi Abu Jaib, we heard our first story of the Darb. Riding sixty kilometer days, taking only catnaps, eating only burnt millet. Is he trying to scare us, to give up before we even begin? He says he’d arrived from the trail with four men driving eighty camels, they wander off every night and must be found again each dawn, maybe 10 of every 100 will die, you must alternate walking and riding every two hours. He gives a silent prayer, palms turned upward, for our safe delivery.

-Diary, January 15, 1984, on the Cairo-to-Khartoum flight

I didn’t think it odd at all, until much later, when from the ground seeing the condensation trail of a Khartoum-to-Cairo bound jet flying overhead and hearing for what seemed like the hundredth time KhairAllah say, Luwees, You should have taken a Tayyara, Airplane, to have had my first conversation about the rigors of the Darb while seated on another jet on that very same route at 30,000 feet.

First impressions on Day -1

Went out to Wadi Hiliyyu where Abu Jaib’s camels are gathered and met his men. KhairAllah with gap teeth and an orange Tagiyya, Skull Cap, Muhammad with a white skull cap and straight teeth, Adam with a sweater vest, Masood with a white skull cap and gap teeth. I’m sure these guys will save our lives more than once in the next forty days. Hand shakes all round and many Salamāts.

-Trail Diary, Day -1, January 24, 1984

Odd what I took to be meaningful first impressions about our drovers, for after we got underway the next day they wore turbans to insulate their bare heads against the heat and cold and kept their mouths mostly shut against the blowing sand. You hardly ever saw their teeth and skulls, so we had to go by other things. KhairAllah by his regal bearing, Muhammad by his miserable bearing, Adam by his youthful bearing, and Masood by his goofy bearing.

First taste of aseeda

Our first look and taste of Aseeda, Camel Drivers’ Porridge, today at Hajj Bashir’s, surprised by how bad a staple food can be, from the very first bite it is disgusting, a dirty lower intestine brown colored jello mold of boiled millet flour surrounded by a poured over slimy gravy reconstituted from a dead dry camel.

-Diary, El Obeid, January 17, 1984

No, it wasn’t as bad as that. We got used to it fast enough after accepting there would be only that and nothing else to eat for the next forty days. And no, the Milāh, Gravy, wasn’t made from dry camel meat, but rather with fried onion, chili pepper, and powdered okra (that’s how it got its slime) and tomato. In fact, not bad, not bad at all.

Scholars on the darb

To Whom It May Concern: Louis Werner and his associates propose to travel from the Sudan to Egypt with a group of camels and their herders. I know Mr. Werner personally and have seen his earlier presentation on this subject. As a consequence I can attest to the high quality and scholarly objectivity of his approach…Sincerely, Richard Bulliet, Professor of History, Columbia University, January 6, 1988

If only the good professor had seen our scholarly approach out on the Darb. A typical interview with our Kabbāshi informant…Me-What is that sound the camel just made? Informant-A fart. Me-What kind of fart? Informant-A Fuswa (A long hissing sound). Me-How do you spell Fuswa? Informant-I don’t know, I can't write. (speaking aside to the other drovers) Hey guys, What's wrong with this crazy Khawaja?

Clean Laundry on the darb

Night gown, slip, petticoat, vest, stockings, handkerchief, dress, blouse, skirt- Nil. Shirt-1. Pyjamas, collar, suit, jacket, short- Nil. Socks-1.

-Laundry List, Metro Hotel, Room 29, Khartoum, February 6, 1988

So it was with one clean shirt and one clean pair of socks that I set out on the Darb al-’Arba’īn. No petticoat, no vest, no starched collar for my suit. I guess that a light cotton Sirwāl, Riding Breeches, might have counted as Pyjama bottoms and an ‘Arāgi, knee length Riding Tunic, as a Night Gown, but I had only blue jeans and a rugby shirt for those forty days.