Intense cold, nil shelter

The Arbain road lies along very high land and anyone traversing it in winter months should march with the wind, i.e. from north to south. The cold is intense and shelter from it nil.

-Anglo-Egyptian Sudan: A Compendium Prepared by Officers of the Sudan Government, 1905

It’s impossible to ride the Darb al-Arba’īn from north to south when you are driving camels from Sudan to Egypt. Shelter from the cold was certainly nil for the drovers, who wrapped themselves at night as best they could in worn out saddle blankets and cotton shawls. But we Khawajas unrolled sleeping bags made of dacron fiber fill and rip stop nylon.

Whimsy on the way

Route 81, Debba to El Obeid [362 Miles] via Wabri, Elai, Safia, and Kagmar. This route is little used. The portion of the route from Debba to Safia is subject to the whim of the guide employed.

-Anglo-Egyptian Sudan: A Compendium…, 1905, Vol.II, Chapter VIII, Routes of Kordofan

We rode this route, in the 1980s greatly used by Sudanese camel exporters, roughly in reverse, departing from Nahud 130 miles WSW of El Obeid and arriving at the Nile just north of Debba, which stretched out the mileage considerably. I did not feel after leaving Al-Safiyya Wells that KhairAllah chose a whimsical route. We made a beeline for the Nile because we knew we’d need water before we got there and the intermediate wells were uncertain.

Roads everywhere

The desert is often a ready-made road.

-Egypt and the English, With Chapters on the Delights of Travel in the Sudan, 1908, Douglas Sladen

Maybe so, but not equally in all directions. We pointed them north, while a few rode east to Omdurman and not one that I saw went west or south. Yes the desert permits a rider to go anywhere, to the Cape or to Cairo, from the Muhīt to the Bahr, the Ocean to the Sea. But the tracks pointed us to Egypt on the Sirāt, the Path, the Way, or as the Quran has it, Sirāt al-Mustaqīm, Path of the Upright, which in a camel saddle is as one must always ride.

An ass in the sahrā'

Lybia, he calleth Sarra, for so the Arabians call a desert.

-Samuel Purchas, His Pilgrimage…,1613, example offered by the OED as the earliest usage of the word Sahara and its variant spellings, incl. Zaara, Zaarra, Zaharah, Saharah, Sahra, etc.

The Oxford English Dictionary has nothing over Lane’s entry for Sahrā’, which he gives as, Imperfectly Declined though not an Epithet, or It is an Epithet in which the Quality of the Substantive Predominates and is Imperfectly Declined because it is of the Feminine Gender. One of its forms is Sahrāwi, which besides the proper name for the people fighting Morocco for their independence, and the sobriquet of a terrorist in Mali with a $5 Million bounty on his head whose death was announced today, is the adjective I used when telling KhairAllah, Tit’ab al-Sikka al-Sahrāwi, The Saharan Road is Tiring, a self-evident statement he never bothered to answer. Lane’s definition for its triliteral root S-H-R in Form I is, He (an Ass) Brayed more Vehemently than the Neighing of Horses, a verb which likely came to KhairAllah’s mind whenever I spoke about the desert.

Saddles, stirrups, and spurs

Their steeds are camels on which they ride without stirrups or saddles and use a goad instead of spurs, and a leather fastened through a hole bored through the gristle of the camel’s nose serves them for a bridle.

-Samuel Purchas, His Pilgrimage…,1613

It makes no sense to use stirrups or spurs on a camel because you cannot comfortably ride astride, they being too big in the belly to spread one’s legs. But a saddle is welcome, to keep off the hump. And rather than reins, a single lead off a halter is sufficient, whether strung through a pierced nose or not, for piercing a camel’s nose and hanging a weight off it commands more attention than a voice command of Hut!, Onk!, Kh!, or Sh!

Drink once, ride twice

If it were not for the drink I would never have come twice to the Sudan…I wonder if you ever were thirsty. Probably not. I never had been till I came to the Sudan and that is why I came again.

-G.W. Steevens, With Kitchener to Khartoum, 1898, from the chapter The Pathology of Thirst

There is a lot of hooey said in Egypt about the Nile. The Mother of, the Gift of, Once you drink you shall always return. I didn’t believe a word of it. But there was something about drinking tea in Sudan, made not from Nile water but rather from deep well water drawn at places like Mahtoul and ‘Idd Ahmad, especially when the sugar had run low and we drank it Murr, Bitter. To look at the drovers’ faces then, you’d think that they’d been forced to drink Būl or Damm or Khall, Piss or Blood or Vinegar.

comforting camels

The camel, when it is a question of either working or leaving off work- so magnificently impartial is his stupidity- can protest in any voice from a wolf’s snarl to the wail of an uncomforted child.

-G.W. Steevens, With Kitchener to Khartoum, 1898

Yes it’s true, camels make unpleasant noises if and when they make noise at all, which is not often except when they tell a Khawaja he is doing something wrong, like placing the girth too forward on the belly or saddling too high on the hump. But KhairAllah was fluent in camel noises of the pleasanter sort, whenever he unloaded a baggager or couched his rider or bent its knee for hobbling. Voiced and unvoiced velar fricatives, alveolar sibilants, laryngeals and coronel consonants- KhairAllah spoke them all. Kh, Kh…Sh, Sh..Tuh, Tuh…[G]Ah, [G]Ah.

Torrid Deserts of Sebum and suet

…the vast, silent, torrid, murderous desert land…On us English, too, the Sudan has played its fatal witchery.

-G.W. Steevens, With Kitchener to Khartoum, 1898

One needn’t have a spell cast by some Sudanese Siren’s Song to be beckoned again to the desert, which by the way does not kill but rather makes one stronger. Vast, silent, and torrid it was; murderous it was not, excepting once or twice, according to Hajj Bashir, when his drovers were killed and his Dabouka rustled by automatic rifle-toting brigands spilled over from Libya’s arming of Chadian rebels. We did not hear about that until later, and until then we expected nothing more injurious on the Darb than raw bottoms and sunburnt noses, and for that we had brought extra Shahm, which Wehr defines variously as Suet, Sebum, and Axle Grease, and in Sudan can be bought in beauty salons.

drink? No, i am bedu

Tafas (an Arab guide)- Here…You may drink…One cup. Lawrence- You do not drink? Tafas- No. Lawrence (pouring the cup back into the canteen)- I’ll drink when you do. Tafas- I am Bedu.

-Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

The triliteral root ‘-T-SH, whose Form I verb ‘Atisha means, He was Thirsty, generates the Form VI verb Ta’ātashā that Lane gives as, They Vied, One with the Other, in Endeavoring to Bear Thirst. This happens a lot on the Darb, and it was a pity I didn’t know that word when KhairAllah offered me water from his Qirba and himself chose not to drink. I would have put it in the Negative, Māta’ātashāsh, which I’d have really meant as, Good, More for me!

Ride, pay or perish

…he informed me that all travellers who cross the Nubian Desert for the first time are here expected to pay a toll to their guide and camel-men. ‘And what if I do not choose to pay?’, I asked. ‘Then you shall immediately perish and be buried here’, he answered.

-Bayard Taylor, A Journey to Central Africa, 1854

A perfect place to shake down the Khawajas, at the well flats of ‘Idd Ahmad, a five day ride from the Nile. But instead, KhairAllah and Muhammad al-Humri, two of the best Khabīrs on the Darb, were themselves both shaken down by Billa Ali al-Qrain, famous camel thief of Wadi al-Milk. No one died, no one was buried that night, but Billa Ali left the next morning several hundred Sudanese pounds heavier. Yes, we paid his toll to cross this part of the desert, but thirty years later it still makes for a good story…The Day Billa Ali Ate Twice.

I dream in rajaz

I found dromedary riding not at all difficult…I rode from eight to ten hours a day, read and even dreamed in the saddle, and at night I was as fresh and unwearied as when I’d mounted in the morning.

-Bayard Taylor (1825-1878), A Journey to Central Africa, Describing his desert crossing from Egypt to Sudan

Because Taylor was a noted American poet, he may be permitted the use of poetic license even when he writes of camels. But dreaming while riding? Hardly. No doubt his poem ‘Kubleh’, beginning with the lines, ‘The black-eyed children of the Desert drove/Their flocks together at the set of sun/The tents were pitched; the weary camels bent/…’, could have used a faster beat, perhaps the Arabic meter called Rajaz named for an animal disease making a she-camel’s haunches shake and tremble- as seen in Voice of the Whip at 21’40”- in the same frequency as its long and short syllables. But then again, Kubleh was about a horse, not a camel, so how was he to know a Rajaz from an Iamb?

7 years for gordon, 40 days for khairallah

I sincerely say that though I prefer to be here than anywhere else, I would sooner be dead than live this life.

-General Gordon, Letter Home from Sudan, Written 7 years before he got his wish at the point of a Mahdist spear on the steps of the Governor’s Palace, Khartoum on January 26, 1885

KhairAllah would have been shocked by Gordon’s death wish. We Belong to Allah, And to Him We are Returning, says the Quran, but even a Trail Boss would not hazard to guess his final ETA, much less his ETA in Egypt off the Darb al-’Arba’īn.

camel-miles per day

In 1879 Gordon rode 2,230 miles through the desert on camels. In three years- 1877, 1878, 1879- he rode 8,490 miles. His average day’s journey was 32 1/2 miles.

-Colonel Gordon in Central Africa, 1874-1879, George Birkbeck Hill, ed.

The distance from Al Nahud to Binban is 1,200 miles which we made in 43 days, albeit some of them more grazing days than driving days, they being a lot more tiring than riding days alone, at a daily average of 28 miles. This lasted only a bit over a month, so when I hear that Gordon out distanced our Dabouka by five miles a day and kept that pace for 3 years, I can only say that he deserves every bronze statue erected in his honor, cum or sans camel, of which there are many.

General gordon fears not

Ninety seven days of camel riding. I need the physical exertion and am not afraid of these vast deserts. I have thirty camels and four elephants are on their way from Cairo.

-General Gordon, Diary, May 18, 1877

General Gordon imagined himself to be another Nazarene as the clock ticked down to his final hours in Khartoum- his favorite reading was The Imitation of Christ- yet at heart he was a Carthaginian fighting in foreign territory, outnumbered and against long odds. But I doubt he had ever ridden an elephant into battle- unlike Hannibal upon one-tusked Surus facing the Roman cavalry- and if he had he’d have quickly remounted to a camel for its smoother seat, faster pace, and greater ease to hobble and to herd.

A saharan fly trap

Imagine a single, dirty, red-faced man on a camel ornamented with flies.

-General Charles Gordon, August 31, 1877, Letter to his Sister, On tour of Kordofan and Darfur

That near exact rendering of Gordon in bronze- cast in England, accidently sunk in the Nile while en route to its plinth in Khartoum, and upon Sudanese independence removed to Gordon’s School in Surrey- only leaves out the flies, as it should because camels are bothered more by ticks. Rukāb, Riders, KhairAllah called them. Just like him, on their forty day way to Egypt.

The rain on the Darb al-Arba'[a]in stays mainly on the plain

The quiet of the desert is something wonderful, you never hear a sound. The camel’s cushioned foot makes no noise and the air is perfectly pure; no dew falls.

-Gordon, Letter written between Berber and Dongola, October 28, 1877

I heard no loud stomping or scuffing in that herd of 150 head when moving fast at night, but yes quite a bit of susurrating through the stretches of soft sand, 600 feet kicking up millions of loose grains that gently fell back to earth like rain.