An incident of murmur

The character of the camel has formed the subject of writers of various levels of experience…He is essentially a traveller, rest for him is an unnatural condition. As long as he is moving, whether fairly loaded or not, he will go on unmurmuring without food, rest, or water until the day he dies.

-F.S. Ensor, Incidents on a Journey through Nubia to Darfoor, 1881

I once heard a camel murmuring, from distress, in the days before he died. On his last day he screamed from deep in his throat when we cut it from ear to ear, for he was badly lame and there was no place to humanely abandon him, so we slaughtered and ate him. This incident occured on our journey through Kordofan and Nubia to Egypt in 1984.

The camel, un diable boiteux

…the swift dromedary, with thy sublime of humps…thy form is natural, ‘twas only nature’s mistaken largess to bestow the gifts which are of others upon man.

-The Deformed Transformed, Lord Byron

Byron had a clubbed right foot which gave him a limp, a deformity he tried to hide from others, especially lovers, until writing this unfinished play, his last. Odd that he should compare his handicap, in the guise of his character Arnold’s hunchback, to a camel’s hump. Elsewhere he called himself Un Diable Boiteux and quoted a line in Greek, the words of the Queen of the Amazons, with its rough translation given as, A cripple makes the best fuck. I wonder what the Jamal says about his Sanām at that same moment.

Etymologies of the Camel

Camels are given their name because when loaded they are made to be low and humble [breviores et humiles] in their laying down.

-Etymologies, Isidore of Seville (560-636 CE)

KhairAllah would say Wāti’ wa Miskīn for Breviores et Humiles, Wāti’, Low, coming from the verb Wati’a, meaning, He Trod or He Trampled with his feet, which Lane gives in an example of a variant adjectival form with a variant meaning, Dābba Wati’a, A Riding Animal Easy to Ride…that is, a Camel. And Miskīn was a word we used frequently to describe the drover Muhammad in his tattered clothes and all-accepting manner whose meaning made most sense in its Biblical formula, Poor in Spirit.

The beast with sixteen knees

The camel curses its parents when it goes up a hill and its Maker when it goes down.

-Egyptian Proverb

Maybe this camel believed Herodotus who wrote that each of its legs had four knees and four femurs, so no wonder it wasn’t easy for him to change the grade. Deserts are meant to be dead flat and sand dunes are meant to be walked around, not over- like most of the Darb al-’Arba’īn where we cursed many things other than its hills.

Water, clear or camelly

The camel greatly dislikes clear, pure water for drinking and regards muddy, dirty water as the pleasantest. Indeed, if it comes to a stream or a lake, it does not bend down to drink until it has stirred up the slime with its feet and destroyed the beauty of the water.

-Claudius Aelianus (175-235 CE), De Natura Animalium

I found this to be true, that camels are messy, easily distracted drinkers, that they seem in no hurry to have their fill even when having been driven dry for more than a week. They look up from the water, shake their heads and flap their lips, stomp and stir their feet when at a Nile bank, or stumble into mud troughs and knock them down at well flats. Water is not necessarily beautiful when you are thirsty, but it is certainly at its pleasantest.

Ayyiz yaneeq

Camels however would never couple in the open, nor if there were witnesses, so to say, looking on. But whether we are to call this modesty or a mysterious gift of nature, let us leave it to Democritus and others to decide…

-Claudius Aelianus, On the Nature of Animals

The Food and Agriculture Organization’s camel consultant Professor R. Yagil has provided this update on Aelian, “There are many reports regarding the copulation of camels. These vary from being rarely observed to the act being screened from humans by other members in the herd. The author has not only watched a single male servicing several females in the herd but also has assisted him in the act.” Hearing this, I wish Professor Yagil had left it to Democritus to answer Aelian’s question, or at least asked KhairAllah when two went at it in full view on the Darb. Ayyiz Yaneeq, he would say, He Wants to F…

Shakwas and shawkas

Perhaps the most ubiquitous and enduring theme in Egyptian folk poetry is the Shakwa, literally “complaint”, specifically complaints about the vicissitudes and injustices of fate and destiny…in poetic form these must be expressed in the world of folk symbols: the camel (jamal) is a stalwart man…the camel’s burdens (ahmāl) and wounds (ajrāh) are human troubles and woes…

-Dwight Reynolds, in his essay in The Ballad and Oral Literature

The Jamal and all his Ahmāl and Ajrāh were an enduring theme on the Darb, not as a Shakwa but rather a Shawka, a Thorn in our side. Our Shakwa, Shakawāt in its countable plural form, was something else, for we were not the stalwart men our camels thought us to be and on each of our days on the Darb- from Day 2 to Day 40- they heard us complain about this Shawka or that.

Sweet black water

And now what hast thou to do in the way of Egypt, to drink the waters of Sihor?

-Jeremiah 2:18

In some Bible dictionaries the word Shi’hor is given to mean Dark, Black, Turbid and refer metaphorically to the Nile. Sweet desert water poured from a newly tanned goatskin is that and more. But all things considered, I’d rather quench thirst from a Sudanese Qirba than a Cairene spigot (Hanafīyya, which Wehr gives, strangely, as Paganism, Heathendom, Faucet, Hydrant- as if you run the risk of non-belief and amebic dysentery both if you drink from the tap). Yes, Cairo draws its water from the Nile, but because of the pipes through which it flows, black and turbid are not the half of it. Keep reading from Chapter 2, …How canst thou say I am not polluted…?

Al-Hawa hilwa, the breeze is sweet

It blew all day; I must own that the desert would be nicer if it were not plagued with wind.

-Letters of Gertrude Bell, February 22, 1911

But if not for the desert wind, always steady, always true, how else would KhairAllah know where to head his herd, straight into the breeze, due north. Al-Hawa Hilwa, the Breeze is Sweet, Ahmad the Bawwāb would say on sweltering Cairo summer nights, from whatever direction it blew.

Drinking for the next forty days

The camel can endure thirst for four days, and when it has the opportunity for obtaining water, it drinks, as it were, for its past and future thirst.

-Historia Naturalis, Pliny the Elder

Before we watered the camels we had to let them graze on the driest grasses and acacia leaves we could find because not one of them would drink on an empty stomach. Just like an alcoholic who throws one back after another to celebrate what has past, al-Maadi, and what has yet to come, al-Mustaqbal, but not for what still is, al-Hadir, whether it be Day 1 or Day 40, because that would be a burden too heavy to bear.

Kippers and camels

Gsell refers to the wealth of Amsterdam built on barrels of herrings and claims in the same way that the wealth of Leptis, attributable before this time to olives, henceforth rested on the carcasses of camels.

-The Camel in Roman Tripolitania, Olwen Brogan, Papers of the British School at Rome, 1954

I visited Leptis Magna when Qaddafi was still in power and I don’t recall seeing any olive pits or camel bones scattered about. But I know that Palmyra’s equally grand ruins were the backdrop to ISIS mass executions, and that the hunt for their deposed Leader led Libyans to all kinds of similar excess, so it is possible that Professor Gsell was right, that Leptis rests on the carcasses of one sort or another.

Water at great depth

Now in earlier times the camel merchants travelled only by night, looking to the stars for guidance, and like the mariners carried their water with them, but now they have constructed watering places, having dug down to a great depth…

-Strabo’s Geography, Book XVII

That old saw about Arab seamen still rubs raw. But I do find it ironic that mariners dropped only a single-rope bucket in order to draw their water while KhairAllah needed triple that in order to draw his, just as mariners threw their chains fifty fathoms down to hold their ships while KhairAllah anchored his and his camels’ toes into what once had been the sandy bottoms of the Sahara’s paleo-sea.

A crocodile, a hippo, a camel

Another traveling scholar died on the Nile under similar circumstances. His last words, complete with case-endings, were, “God is Most Great! I am eaten by a cro-!”

-Landfalls, Tim Mackintosh-Smith, On the African Travels of Ibn Battuta

KhairAllah warned us against swimming in the Nile when we’d finally arrived on Day 21 and were watering the herd. He was no doubt thinking about the Crocodile, its Arabic word of Coptic origin as is the legend of the Crocodile’s Tears, said to eat a man feet first and when it gets to the head to lament what it has done, giving the man only enough time to inflect the ending, Timsāh, pl. Tamāsīh. But carrying a Hippopotamus hide Camel whip, KhairAllah himself had nothing to fear.

The market for the market place

See the market place in Old Algiers, Send me photographs and souvenirs.

-Patsy Cline

Most French souvenirs of Old Algiers, not to mention all those nude harem photographs, are fraught images these days, post-Pontecorvo and following Fanon, of critiques of the male gaze, commodifications of exoticism, and the colonial prerogative writ large. But Picasso apparently hadn’t gotten that message back in 1954 when he painted his series Women of Algiers. And certain Gulf Arabs still haven’t gotten it. Version O set the most expensive painting auction record in 2015, sold to a Qatari shaikh for almost $200 million, only to be eclipsed by twice that two years later when a straw buyer fronted for the Saudi crown prince to purchase a questionable Leonardo, Christ as Salvator Mundi. Both are pigs in a poke of sorts, for neither dare be shown publically in their home countries. Which one, we might ask, is more offensive to local tastes, a breast and bum-baring Odalisque or a triumphant Jesus? Let Patsy decide for us in her next verse, But remember when a dream appears, You belong to me.

Version O

Down the escarpment, slowly

You got a fast car, I got a plan to get us out of here…

-Tracy Chapman

Angesom and I were in a jeep we’d borrowed in Asmara that morning in 1995, inching down the Filfil’s muddy switchbacks, some hairpins so tight, with so much play in the steering we made three point turns to get around the corners. A screwdriver jammed in the ignition, plastic jugs with extra fuel, a bald spare tire, and a crescent for a lug wrench. But Tracy Chapman played all day, all the way down to the Red Sea 8,000 feet below, and she got us to Massawa before the cassette gave out. I hear the Filfil road has since been paved.

Not On a crocodile

See the pyramids along the Nile, Watch the sunrise on a tropic isle.

-Patsy Cline

I listened to this song many times hearing the lyric as, …on a crocodile. I was corrected and still didn’t believe it so I put my ear to the speaker and played the volume up and down in order to hear it better. I was wrong, Patsy had in fact jumped around a bit in that line, from Um al-Dunya to O’ahu, from Giza to Guam, from Meroë to Maui.