Whence the nile?

…the Nile is settled.

-John Hanning Speke, Telegram sent April 1863 from Khartoum to the Foreign Office, London

Speke and Grant, Burton and Baker, Petherick and his wife Katherine, they were all Answering Parties to the Question posed by the Royal Geographical Society, Whence the Nile? When we were watering the herd upstream from Dongola on Day 21, with Abdullah shampooing his hair, Rabih soaping himself through his Sirwal, Ibrahim filling the Qirbas and Hamid scrubbing the Aseeda pot, I didn’t think to ask KhairAllah, Min Wayn al-Bahr?, Whence the Sea?, as he called the Nile, for the answer was obvious. Allah Huwa Karīm Lil-‘Atshānīn wal-Mutarrabīn, God is Generous to the Thirsty and the Dust-Covered.

No power, no phones...blame mustapha

This is a new trick! Why is there no electricity? I have been to that electrical house, Lawrence. There are three big machines. He means generators. So! One of them is burning. They are of an incredible size, but helpless. It is so of all machines. Let them burn. What need of telephones?

-Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Inter-tribal squabbling in the Damascus City Hall after having been taken from the Turks by the Arabs, October 1, 1918

Last Sunday, the insurgents siezed control of Kunduz, which was in shambles after weeks of fighting. Power lines were down. The civil servants who could fix those problems were hiding at home, terrified of the Taliban.

-New York Times, August 15, 2021

We approached the Nile off the Wadi al-Milk under an old power line which spooked the camels and Mustapha’s was caught in a half-downed wire and took off on the run dragging a long length behind him. His saddle girth slipped and he rolled off, safely. I doubt that Dongola’s lights or telephones relied on that line. But if either did, I wonder if the people of Damascus and one hundred years later the people of Kunduz also lost their power and phones because some Khawaja’s camel got tripped on the outskirts of town.

A mobile lip, a twitching curl

…his thick mobile upper lip, split in two and always twitching, with a half-cynical and half-deprecating curl; a fringe of long lashes shading eyes which even the most critical must admit are large and soft and beautiful- a beauty which forms an appealing figure to an otherwise uncouth appearance…

-The Camel, 1894, Major Arthur Glyn Leonard (1855-1939)

A First Edition of this book, offered at Bonhams New York in October 2019, described in the catalogue as “an obscure work…rubbed, slightly shaken”, must have made quite a stir in the sales room that day. Did it sell over its high estimate of $1,500? Sadly, no, it failed to sell at all, much to the chagrin of its subject, “undoubtedly liable to periodical outbursts of passion or fits of temporary insanity”, as the Major put it.

Wives and camels

…neither the first nor the last romance, I suspect, with which a camel has been connected..

-The Camel: Its Uses and Management, Major A.G. Leonard

Major Leonard was here writing of Isaac and Rebecca, how he fell in love when she agreed to water his ten camels. Seeing how a thirsty camel can drink 200 liters at a pop, that comes to more than 525 gallons to draw, more than 2 tons in water weight to carry. Depending on how deep that well was, I’d say that Isaac had it easy around his tent, watching his wife do all the heavy lifting.

Khawajas on kabbāshis

The Kabbāshi- Bred in the tens of thousands by the Kababīsh, who are the finest and most powerful tribe in Kordofan. The camels are large and hairy, chiefly baggagers, and particularly good for desert work.

-The Camel, Major Leonard

KhairAllah would agree that his tribe is the finest, but not that its camels are large and chiefly baggagers. He rode a Kabbāshi and also mounted me on one- small, lithe, pure white, and too proud to carry baggage. He said it was an honor to ride a Kabbāshi, the color of the Prophet’s camel, and that I must remember this whenever I said Hut! Hut! or Kh! Kh! But on Day 20 he took me off my Kabbāshi, saying I was a poor rider, and put me instead on a lumbering gelded baggager, a bit like riding an ox while the others rode highbred Arabian horses.

Sūq, he said

Try and coax him to do something out of the beaten track, and you might as well attempt to stem the torrent of the mighty Nile. To gain your object you must drive him, teach him you never will.

-The Camel, Major Leonard

We urged the camels forward when they were tired by saying Sūq, Sūq, Drive, Drive. A drover was called a Sawāq, the vocational form of the noun. We didn’t bother to teach them, for we were taking them to slaughter, not to school. Mu’allim, Teacher, was what we called a coffeehouse attendant who put a fresh piece of charcoal onto our water pipe. Ya Mu’allim!, O Teacher!, we would call to him, looking into the hookah’s bubbling glass base, seeing in it the smoky torrent of the mighty Nile and nothing of the Darb.

Not the drivers i knew

…hired drivers, who in all our expeditions were composed of the scum and scourings of the population- lazy, ignorant scoundrels who have only been attracted to the high rate of pay.

-The Camel, Major Arthur Glyn Leonard

Something must have happened to make Major Leonard lash out so at the drovers. Whatever it was, it likely was not their fault. Saddle sores after a fifteen hour day, a loose stomach after drinking bad well water, sunstroke after forgetting your pith helmet…a good carpenter shouldn’t blame his tools, nor his apprentice carpenters, nor what he had for lunch. Up on a camel’s back, it’s just you and you alone.

Feeling Welcome up country

As to Europeans, so few of them go up country and so great is their average ignorance of the camel that it is simple enough to deceive them…

-The Camel, Major Leonard, On the Egyptian proclivity to defraud Khawajas wishing to ride camels

Kordofan is about as far up country as a tourist can go and my ignorance of camels was great. Lucky for me, Hajj Bashir and KhairAllah were kind, generous…and both Sudanese. Hajj Bashir said, If you can eat Aseeda three times a day, you are welcome to join KhairAllah. KhairAllah said, If you can ride for fifteen hours every day for the next 40, you are welcome to join me. So I felt myself welcome, twice.

Looking for love in all the wrong places

He steadily declines your advances. He refuses to become your friend. He will not identify himself with his rider or driver in the smallest way whatever. His eye never lights up with love or even interest at the approach or approval of his master- in fact it never lights up at all with any feeling of affection.

-The Camel, Major Leonard

Hobbling a camel, snuffling through your lips to make it obediently bend a knee so you can couch it for the night, is not as romantic as Major Leonard might think. What worked for him in the barracks mattered little to the drovers on the Darb.

Too damn hot

Hot drinking water, hot soles to your boots, hot animals to warm your bed, and your very clothes too great a burden to bear, rendered the place intolerable.

-Letters from Khartoum, Frank Power, August 2, 1883, To his Mother

Power was the journalist for the Times of London who narrowly escaped being killed by the Mahdist army alongside Hicks Pasha at the Battle of El Obeid in November 1883, having been invalided behind the lines due to a bad case of diarrhea. I fully understand how hot he found it there, but for God’s sake Man!, Why are you going to bed with animals?

Puggarees and 'immas

I wear a pair of long boots, riding breeches, a white tunic and necktie, a solar helmet with a crimson silk puggaree, and a crimson cummberbund under my belt. We are very natty and tidy here, and the fellows turn out as if they were going to an “at home”.

-Frank Power, September 1, 1883, Letter to his Brother from Khartoum

Two months after writing this letter, all the British officers and most of the 12,000 Egyptian troops whom Power had come to Sudan to accompany into battle against the Mahdi were either dead, captured, or in flight across the desert. But at least he was dressed for their funerals.

On my first trip on the Darb I wore blue jeans, a Brooks Brothers crew neck sweater my uncle and aunt had given me for Christmas, and much of the time a woolen ski hat. I would have looked ridiculous in a pith helmet and puggaree, especially standing beside Muhammad in his Taqiyya [Skullcap, from the verb Taqā, He feared God] or Mas’ood in his ‘Imma [Turban, from the verb ‘Amma, It became Universal, All-Embracing].

Bilal liked his brew

The Merissa drunkard, unlike the ‘Aragi, sherry, or beer drunkard, is a clown-hero.

-The Art and Science of Merissa Fermentation, Hamid Ahmed Dirar, Sudan Notes and Record, 1976

If Dirar had ever met Bilal Bakhīt, he would have known a hero and not a clown, for Bilal at his ripe old age was still riding the 40 Day Road, still taking his turns as Trail Boss and still leading one hundred camels eight hundred miles across the Sahara Desert to Africa’s largest city. Yes he took a nip or two when offered and yes I saw him fall off his camel once when well lit, but nothing broke and he climbed right back up. The gravitas of his poetry- Listen to it in the film!- at the campfire one night silenced all of us, even the ever voluble drover Hamid.

E.E. In the desert

My happiest days have been in deserts with a couple of Arabs, our camels, and no footsteps but our own.

-E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Some Recollections on Fieldwork in the Twenties, 1973

Evans-Pritchard spent much of Twenties, when he was in his twenties, in the Sudd and grasslands of the Upper White Nile and its western tributaries among the Azande and Nuer, where he did his most acclaimed work, but seems to have had his life’s fondest memories of the deserts of Cyrenaica, in the Forties when he too was in his forties. So which was it E.E., Sand or Swamp? Camels or Zebu Cattle? He died the same year he wrote this, so maybe an old man should be allowed a change of mind.

If the dog barks...

If he comes back from the north and his dog recognizes him, don’t converse with him.

-Nyabuoth Nguany Thoan, quoted in Nuer Dilemmas, Sharon Hutchinson

Sharon was my Arabic classmate in Cairo and spent the 1978 Christmas break in Nuerland dancing with them at their cattle camp fires. Naturally she told our class’s best What I Did On Vacation story. This dictum she quotes from a Nuer girl of marriageable age refers to her expectation that a Nuer man returning from a job in Khartoum should be decked out in so much finery that even his dog doesn’t know him, and if not, then he is not suitable as a husband. I don’t know if the same was expected of drovers returning to Dar al-Kababish from Cairo, but I do know their wages were paid in Sudanese pounds and if they had bought finery in overvalued Egyptian pounds, they would have come home even poorer than as they had left.

A lorry, a camel, a snail

Perhaps they were also engaged in a routine debate. Will it- or won’t it- get here? For travelling in these corners of the Sahara is a risky adventure, an unending lottery, perpetual uncertainty. Along these roadless expanses filled with crevices, depressions, sinkholes, protruding boulders, sand dunes and rocky mounds, loose stones and fields of slippery gravel, a vehicle advances at a snail’s pace…

-The Shadow of the Sun, Ryszard Kapuscinski

Kapuscinski rode a train across Mauritania and a bus across Eritrea and lorries across many countries in between, but to the best of my knowledge he never rode a camel anywhere. If he had, he’d have known that there is never a debate, Will it or Won’t it? Of course it will get here, and of course it will get you there. You are not riding a four wheeler but rather a four footer. Irkab, Mount, Itla’, Rise, and Imshi, Walk.

Wadi al-milk, then and now

The route moreover was said to be unsafe due to the predatory habits of the Arab tribes living along parts of its length.

-Incidents on a Journey through Nubia to Darfoor, 1881, F.S. Ensor, Describing a proposed railroad along the Wadi al-Milk

Other than Billa Ali, we had no trouble from other tribesmen along its length. In fact the well workers at the Mahtūl Flats were very polite and didn’t try to gouge us on the price for filling our troughs. But then again, if the railroad had been built in the 1880s, there would have been no need in the 1980s for any camels or well workers at all in the Wadi al-Milk.