Mā abrakahu

A tap with your camel switch on one side of her neck or the other tells her the direction you want her to go, a touch with your heels sends her on, but when you want her to sit down you have to hit her lightly and often on the neck saying at the same time, Kh, kh, kh, kh…that’s as near as I can spell it.

-Letters of Gertrude Bell, February 12, 1911

Gertrude Bell would have been amused to read in Lane’s Lexicon of the IVth Form of the verb Baraka, Abraka, He made him (namely a Camel) Lie Down upon his Breast, and its following epithet, Mā Abrakahu, How Blessed is He!, “an instance of a verb of wonder with a passive meaning and irregularly derived.” We were blessed when we couched our camels after a fifteen hour day on the trail and laid ourselves down for the night. How do you spell Zz, zz, zz, zz in Arabic? Ghatta, He Snored, or as Lane also gives, He made a Sound in his Shiqshiqa [bursa faucium, a he-camel’s faucal bag].

The Nile eats you, you drink the euphrates

Even if you rise in waves, my camel will drink you.

-Arabic proverb, attributed to a Nafud Desert bedouin unimpressed upon first seeing the Euphrates River

KhairAllah warned me against swimming in the Nile upon reaching it at Khuleiwa on Day 21. It will Yakul, Eat you, he said.

Tatterdemalions on camels

Exhausted with fatigue, half starved, unkempt, with ragged clothes and boots worn into holes, we were regular tatterdemalions! So completely had we lost the European aspect that when we arrived the natives remarked that we were the very image of their own people!

-Mongolia, the Tangut Country, and the Solitudes of Northern Tibet (1876), Count Nikolai Przhevalsky

Mustapha, Nedu, and I pulled into Wadi Halfa from the cataract known as Batn al-Hajar, Belly of Stone, with a day to spare before the ferry departed for Aswan. I didn’t want to risk an illegal land crossing with the Egyptian border police. We hadn’t had time to clean up after leaving the herd on Day 34 and the ferry hostel bathroom it turned out was no place for a scrub. A Chinese road building crew was playing cards in the hostel courtyard and Mustapha asked if they’d deal him in. They looked at him as if he’d just fallen out of the sky. One of us? Mongol? Uyghur? Kazakh? No, Měiguó Rén, American, he said. Aces High, One Eyed Jacks, Suicide Kings, that’s us, he told them.

Lost and found in wadi al-milk

I have lost many camels to the nomads.

-Arabic proverb

You do not lose camels to Billa Ali al-Qrayn, the notorious thief of the Wadi al-Milk, but rather you redeem from him those he has stolen from you the previous night, at whatever price that Billa Ali chooses to ask, for he carries a .303 caliber Lee-Enfield rifle and you only a knife.

Drunk on Merissah at meröe

From the fermentation of this grain they extract alcoholic drinks called Merissah, Bil-Bil, and a kind of eau-de-vie of which the people are very fond and on which they frequently get drunk.

-Account of a Desert Journey from Sinnaar to Gurdophan, Giuseppe Ferlini, 1838

Ferlini was the mutinous soldier of fortune who destroyed forty pyramids at Meröe looking for buried treasure, cutting the tops off most of them. His written account neglects to say if he was drunk at the time, but I can say from first hand experience, having seen Bilal well lit on Merissah, that alcohol in the desert makes one do crazy things, including but not limited to falling off your camel.

A day, a mile

The inhabitants of these villages are almost wholly uneducated and have very primitive ideas. One boy asked me how many days there were in one hour.

-Notes on a Journey to Kordofan, Arthur Holroyd, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, 1839

Like that boy, the drovers tried to measure all unfathomable spans of time- if you’ve never seen a clock, an hour is as unknown as a millennium, and if you’ve never been in an airplane, a trip to New York is as unimaginably long as a trip to the moon- in terms of what they did know, days and lunar months, rainy seasons followed by dry seasons, and Ramadan followed by Eid al-Fitr. One asked me how many days was my flight home, for he had a point of comparison right at hand, forty days to Egypt.

Cairo rides the waves

I arrived at length at the city of Cairo…boundless in multitude of buildings, peerless in beauty and splendour, the meeting-place of comer and goer, the stopping-place of feeble and strong…she surges as the waves of the sea with her throngs of folk and can scarce contain them.

-Travels, Book I, Ibn Battuta, trans. H.A.R. Gibb

When Daoud and I arrived in Cairo by air in January 1984 we landed at night in a sprawling city, all lit up. It seemed like every electric light was neon or fluorescent. Nothing natural about it, a lot like the New York we had left behind ten hours earlier. Two months later we arrived again, this time from the South, eight hundred miles stride by camel stride, still blinking from the desert’s noonday glare and starlit dark. Cairo seemed to us a different city on a different planet. If KhairAllah could have spoken to Ibn Battuta, then at the beginning of his journey just as KhairAllah was at the end of his, what might he have said? Go back home, there is nothing more in the world worth seeing.

Al-idrisi over the horizon

Everyone there breeds and trades camels, drinks their milk and burdens their back, and gives them great care. They prize them most highly, steal them from each other, and sell them to merchants who drive them to Egypt.

-A Pleasant Excursion for One Longing to Cross the Horizon, companion text to Tabula Rogeriana, King Roger II of Sicily’s Map of the World, Muhammad al-Idrisi (1110-1165)

Al-Idrisi wrote these lines about the land he called Al-Habash, which we call Ethiopia today, but likely then considered anyplace far enough up the Nile. Kordofan would be close enough for this world geographer who never himself went south, and he certainly was correct about how camels there were treated- with care, like money. KhairAllah could have told al-Idrisi all that eight centuries after his own time, but the excursion on the Darb to Egypt was never pleasant.

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A liver melts

I have just come in from the desert, so my liver is melting [with desire].

-Arabic proverb

On the old cattle drives, they called Ogallala, Nebraska “the Gomorrah of the West” and Dodge City, Kansas “the Devil’s Own”. What did Hajj Bashir’s camel drovers call Dongola, and what did they do in town after twenty hard days on the trail? Al-Urdi, the Military Camp, from the days when Turks and Egyptians sent armies above the Nile’s 3rd Cataract. And when they came into town, they sat in the market stall of Hajj Bashir’s agent al-’Amiri Yaseen, telling tall tales to souk sellers about camel thieves and dry wells. No dancing girls, no gambling, no drinking…except for Bilal, who couldn’t be denied his nip or two of Merissa.

my dilated saharan chest

This desert is luminous, radiant, one’s chest is dilated, one is in good spirits…

-Travels, Book IV, Ibn Battuta

No thank you, I did not want my chest to dilate on the Darb. I told the drovers about my troubles five years earlier in Cairo, about my spontaneous pneumothorax and operation at Agouza Hospital, although at the time I did not know how to say Collapsed Lung, so instead I said Exploded, while I was sleeping. The drovers were relieved I think when each night I’d unroll my kit a bit apart from them.

a camel's third eyelid

A camel sees far, just like a man.

-The Red Sea Mountains of Egypt, Leo Tregenza

I’ve learned that camels see far only when they open their three eyelids. Most of the time, they eat with their eyes closed lest they be filled with blowing sand or scratched by thorns when browsing acacia canopies.

RahmatAllah, blind khabīr

There are many demons in that desert. There is no road to be seen in the desert and no track, only sand blown about by the wind. You see mountains of sand in one place, then you see they have moved to another. A Guide there is someone who has frequented it repeatedly and has a keen intelligence. A strange thing I saw is that our guide was blind in one eye and diseased in the other, but he knew the route better than anybody else.

-Travels, In the Sahara, Book IV, Ibn Battuta (1304-1368)

Before setting off on my second trip on the Darb, KhairAllah was nowhere to be found and Hajj Bashir recommended that I travel with either RahmatAllah or Bilal, both experienced Khabirs but both very old. It was my choice which one, neither of whom I’d met previously. The outcome of the film depended on its principle subject being as strongly telegenic as my friend KhairAllah. They both worried me. RahmatAllah had trachoma-diseased eyes, oozing and half-closed, and Bilal was not only very old, but very, very old.

We were seated cross-legged at the wells. I wrote their names on two pieces of paper, crumpled them into equal-size balls, mixed them back and forth in my hand, and was preparing to choose when just at that moment a gust of wind moved one an inch. I said, This man wants to travel. On it was Bilal’s name…and at the very next moment a lorry trailing a plume of dust arrived that carried KhairAllah. Bilal was assigned to a companion herd with KhairAllah in the lead and we set out together, leaving rheumy-eyed RahmatAllah behind.

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.