Grease, don't gird

In camel riding you ought to tie a sash around your waist and another across your chest up close under the armpits, otherwise all the internal machinery gets disturbed.

-General Gordon, Letter written from Meroë, November 1, 1877

Motorcyclists wear kidney belts to protect against the jiggles, sized Small to 5XLarge. Gordon was a small man- 5’ 5”- so he didn’t need a long sash to reach around a big jelly belly I never knew anyone to want such a belt, what bullfighters would call a Faja to hold their intestines in place if gutted, because drovers mostly walk their camels, rarely trot them. For that you need lubrication, not binding.

my camel in the palace

I was whisked off to the Palace…I am now writing from the place and you may imagine my feelings at the splendour. My people are all dazed! and so am I, and wish for my camel.

-Gordon, Letter Home from Cairo, After 3 years in Sudan, March 7, 1878

We made a quick stop at a hotel in Aswan when we got off the Wadi Halfa ferry, with little time to shower and shave and still get to Binban before the herd pulled into Ahmad Abd al-Majid’s straw barn there from the last miles of the Darb. I remember hot water and shampoo, clean towels and soap. We went to the restaurant buffet, all-you-can-eat, package tour style. I forget how much we ate, maybe very little, maybe a salad, maybe a strip of bacon or two. We knew that in Binban there would be much more Aseeda.

El khobar and al-khabīr

It is written in the burning sands of the Sahara: ‘When there is wrong, there will always be an El Khobar, the Avenger…’

-The Desert Song (1953), Musical starring Gordon MacRae as El Khobar

Hollywood evidently got both the spelling and the meaning wrong, El Khobar should be Al-Kubbār, The Big One. Spelling it with the consonant Kh, خ , gets into a different triliteral root with a different set of meanings, beginning with Khabīr, Expert, or in the Sudanese sense, Trail Boss, Expert of Camels, as was KhairAllah, albeit a less expert singer of schmaltz than Gordon MacRae.

Moon in the night, drovers' delight

The bright moonlight is also the travellers’ glory. By its light and the freshness of the atmosphere both man and beast pursue their journey without weariness until it sets, or the brighter light of dawning day gives the signal of repose. We were now in the heart of Kordofan.

-Egypt, Soudan, and Central Africa, 1861, John Petherick

On February 17, 1984, there was a full moon on the Darb al-’Arba’īn. It was rising as the sun set on what had been for us already a twelve hour day in the saddle. Nimshī, Let’s Go, said KhairAllah after we’d made the short Maghrib prayer stop. The moon did not lessen our weariness but it did give enough light to read a book, or to thread a needle, or to notice that one of Adam Hāmid’s eyes was half closed with sleep.

Our boots, their places

You have all seen since three, four, five years, nay longer, upon our dear soil of Afghanistan, from Kunduz to Khost to Herat to Badakhshan to Faryab, to the environs of Kabul, that two graves lie side by side…upon one lies a flag of Black and Green and Red, on the other the White flag of the Taliban…dwa kabira tsang peh tsang prot dee….both entrusted to the soil…

-Hamid Karzai, quoted in The American War in Afghanistan, Carter Malkasian

If asked why I thought those wars were a bad idea, I’d answer…I started studying Arabic in 1974, before those wars. I spent a year in Egypt and got pretty good, to the point some Egyptians asked if I were Lebanese. I learned the words they called me, some nice and accurate enough…Khawaja, Ajnabi, Masīhi (meaning Christian, literally, Messiahian), Nasrāni (Nazarene, meaning the same, from al-Nāsira, Jesus’ hometown), Amrīki, Amrikāni, Rūmi (from Roman, but meaning Byzantine or Greek)…and some not so nice…Musta’mir, colonialist…Sahyūni, Zionist…Mustawtin, settler…Ra’smāli, capitalist. And I learned a lot of words for nationalism and nationality…Qawmiyya, Wataniyya, Jinsiyya…and the words Bilād and Buldān, both broken plurals for Balad, country, but also meaning village, town, community, or even simply…place. All words with subtle, site- and situation-specific meanings that go over the heads of most Westerners, including mine. Given all that, I knew something would come up once we- being the Khawaja, the Masīhi, but soon enough perceived as the Musta’mir or the Sahyūni- put our boots on their ground- their Qawm, their Watan, or simply their Balad…their place.

On the darb, qurūsh mā fīsh

…it has often struck me that if a native of Kordofan were to undertake a journey through England, neglecting to provide himself with the common necessaries there- which, much to his surprise, he would discover to consist of a store of sovereigns- he might write a book wherein the many privations he had suffered would also be a conspicuous and amusing part of it.

-Egypt, Soudan, and Central Africa: Being Sketches of Sixteen Years’ Travel, 1845-1861, John Petherick, British Consul to Sudan

In 1984 when I first rode on the Darb, an Egyptian qirsh [pl. qurūsh] coin was worth about 1 1/2 cents. I remember Muhammad telling me forlornly, Qurūsh Mā Fīsh, There Are No Pennies, turning his empty Sirwal pocket inside out. I kept my wallet with Dollars packed in my duffle bag, Cash in any Currency being of no use out there. I guess it would have been amusing if I’d tried to buy a goat from a passing herdsman and asked if he could break a Benjamin. We could have always used it to start a campfire of green Siyāl wood.

He'd rather lie on a couch than walk to egypt

Lawrence at that time…had no love for a camel, preferring to walk.

-A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T.E. Lawrence, A Psycho-Biography by John Mack, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry

To get him on the couch, you’d need a big one, and a big glass of water near that big box of tissues, for camels can weigh more than half a ton and drink up to 200 liters, but they are not known to cry even when their drovers sing love songs to them and patch their foot pads and salve their skin sores, and feed them dry acacia thorns and withold water on their Forty Day march to slaughter.

Raise it and weep

‘Look, a camel,’ someone shouted, and they all crowded to the window to see their first camel of Egypt lifting its proud, world-weary head…

-Olivia Manning, Fortunes of War: The Levant Trilogy

Irfa’ Ra’sik, Inta Masri, Lift Your Head, You Are Egyptian, they shouted during Arab Spring in Midan Tahrir, Freedom Square, but that was just the problem. Tahrir had been renamed Midan Sadat after their President-for-Life, until with a bullet he reached the end of his thirty years earlier. There you would raise your head only to see the government’s looming Mugamma’ Building, the nation’s horror film set for bureaucratic nightmares, where every Egyptian’s self-pride went to die in triplicate.

A Different river, a different darb

Months passed before he was reconciled with the desert but now he said, ‘The desert’s all right once you get to know it.’

-Olivia Manning, Fortunes of War: The Levant Trilogy

You cannot set foot in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and you are not the same person. But what of the Darb? Different dunes, different drovers, different dromedaries. Adam and Mas’ood made Aseeda and sang Dubayts one way, and four years later, Ibrahim and Idris, another. The same number of days, following the same route but different, for I was four years older.

Who's to know?

‘Mutton? Camel?’ Angela cried out indignantly, attracting the attention of the other diners.

-Olivia Manning, Fortunes of War: The Levant Trilogy

Add shatta to both, let them fall on the sand, and as Julia Child used to warble, If you’re alone in the kitchen and drop the lamb [or the camel], Whooo’s to know?

May allah give you courage...

(Opening Scene: Cairo Station, on the platform of a departing train) Jamil, a Dragoman (played by Ramon Novarro)- You are going back to the land where you belong. Attractive Woman, an American Tourist (passionately, drawing out her vowels)- To Iowa. Jamil- May Allah give you courage… (taking off his ring, made of tin)- An heirloom, from the sepulcher of my fathers. American Tourist- No, I couldn’t take it. Jamil- Please, a simple souvenir, from a poor Dragoman who showed you the secrets of the desert. (American Tourist reciprocates, giving him her gold ring and leaning in for a kiss.)

-The Barbarian (1933), aka A Night in Cairo

I suppose that Cairo has its share of foreign tourist scammers, but in Marrakesh they have perfected the fine art of the duplicitous rip-off. Nonetheless I turned the tables on an oleaginous guy I couldn’t shake off, a complete phony it turned out later but what I’d suspected all along, who claimed to be the good friend of someone I knew back home, hoping to wring some unearned cash out of me. I told him to come by my hotel before I left the next day, To settle our accounts, I said, but I was on that night’s train to Fez, undetected.

The feather tickled, the light failed

‘It’s in the Soudan, as usual.’ ‘You lucky dogs…’

-Rudyard Kipling, The Light That Failed, 1891

What was it about Sudan that made it the favoured setting for Victorian novels about Englishwoman-troubled Englishmen setting out to prove themselves as Real Men who end up going blind by so trying? The Four Feathers and The Light That Failed were both written within 15 years of Gordon, himself only ever troubled by his sister, biting the Sudanese dust without having proved anything other than he shouldn’t have gone there in the first place.

Lytton Strachey answered that question in Eminent Victorians, about why Gordon chose Sudan for his last stand. Its ’dim tracts’, he wrote, ‘were the source of his honor.’ And also, the testbed of his British manhood, the unmade bed of his Victorian mind, and the deathbed of his ability to clearly see the world.

Holes, lefties, and zucchinis

The Kubbabish are hospitable, and strangers, of whom they have no cause to be afraid, are frankly received among them. They talk loudly and appear always to be quarreling, and use very strong expressions for the smallest difference…Every other word of their conversation is an oath.

-Mansfield Parkyns, The Kubbabish Arabs between Dongola and Kordofan, 1851

Why don’t you fall in a hole!, said the drover Idris to his trail boss Yusuf when scolded for saddling the camels too late after dawn. Or at least that is how the BBC’s Arabic Service translated the subtitle for whatever in fact he did say. Maybe it was an oath- Let Allah be pleased!- or maybe it was a curse- Let all your children be born left handed!- or maybe it was an expletive- Your Mother’s Zucchini!- but I will never know. The original audio tapes have been misplaced long ago, and anyway I like the idea of Yusuf falling in a hole on the Way of the Forty.

A Weird desert

How do you like the Libyan Desert? Weird, what?

-Cairo (1942)

In Egypt’s Libyan Desert we saw yardangs, mud lions, inselbergs, oyster banks, hematite crystals, seif and star dunes, some parabolic, more barchan, and gravel playas and sheets and the Great Sand Sea. Farafra, Abu Minqar, Bahariyya, and Kharga- oases we drove past, some without stopping. I was eager to return to Gharghūr, in Dakhla, to find the man who had hosted me there twenty years earlier, whose name I had forgotten, whose repainted front door I did not recognize, but whose old fig tree in his home’s inner courtyard I would have known anywhere.

The Quran answers Ogden nash

The camel has a single hump;/The domedary, two;/Or else the other way around./I’m never sure. Are you?

-Ogden Nash

Ogden Nash, Rudyard Kipling, Aesop- they all had something clever to say about camels…one hump or two, how it got its hump, what it said when it shat in the river. But read Sura 88, Al-Ghashiyah, The Overwhelming, on the Day of Judgement, when the Righteous will sit on raised couches, the cushions will be plumped, the carpets will be spread, the drinks will be served in cups, and they will look upon the Camels and ask, Kayf Khuliqat?, How were they Created?

You call this khartoum?

I could no longer refrain from asking, ‘How much farther is Khartoum?’ ‘Khartoum?’ said my guide in accents of horror at my want of appreciation of the magnificence around me. ‘Why, this is Khartoum!’

-Mansfield Parkyns, Life in Abyssinia, 1853

I suppose it is better to be surprised by day that you have arrived at the place you didn’t really care to see, than to be surprised that you have passed by night the place you really wanted to be, as did I, past the Mahtūl Well Flats, where KhairAllah promised we’d find cold water and fresh bread. For several days, after riding deep into the night, I’d asked him, When will we arrive?, and he’d said, Maybe tomorrow, If God Wills, until the day I asked again and he answered, We passed Mahtūl last night and did not stop, Didn’t you know? Luckily, the Nile and its bakeries and water were just two more days on.