Billa Ali al-Qurein sweet-talked KhairAllah out of a fistful of Guineahāt one morning in Wadi al-Milk by claiming a finder’s fee for a lost camel that he himself had stolen from us the previous night just before we made camp at ‘Idd Ahmad wells. I could not find ‘Idd Ahmad on the 1934 Khartoum Survey Office map’s Jebel El-’Ein sheet, but I did find Billa Ali’s eponymous toponym, Umm Qurein, Mother of the Little Horned One. Maybe Ahmad was Billa Ali’s alias and where two No Tracks crossed, there lived his mother.
Civilized Garb or messy mufti?
Hitherto all expeditions had been bedevilled by a very British question of propriety. Which clothes should one wear? One faction supported the adoption of regional fashion. Others said this was an insult to the flag and that one should wear the garb of civilized men.
-Off the Map, Fergus Fleming
You’ve all heard that expression of highest praise, He died with his boots on. Well, I intended to die, if that was what the Darb had in store, with my jeans on. But little did I know in the early days of the trail that my trousers were what would almost do me in. Dusty with trail dirt, grimy with camel sweat, smelly with my own odors, clammy and unbreathing, before midway I wished I’d ordered a full set of light weight cotton Kordofani riding clothes as Mustapha had…Sirwal, ‘Aragi, ‘Imma. Only his Keds gave him away as a Khawaja.
Wadi al-Hileiwi, From where we started
Nahd, pl. Nahūd, A High or Elevated Thing, A Girl’s or Woman’s Breast
-Lane’s Lexicon
In my notebook at the time I must have misspelled the name of the well flats outside the small town of Nahud from where we first set off, because ever after I could not find it on any map…until today, when I opened the Library of Congress website and saw Wadi al-Hileiwi just west of town on a map from the British colonial Khartoum Survey Office. But more interesting are the topographic lines of Jebel Nahud just east of town clearly showing a double summit, albeit one higher than the other, so my question remains, If there are two of them, why is the town’s name not in the Dual form, Nahdān?
Most moments were minor
Most of the journeys of much moment we have already described, and the minor ones would be tedious to rehearse. One march through the Sahara is extremely like another.
-The Story of Africa and Its Explorers, Robert Brown, 1894
Robert Brown was right, and all the greats of Saharan travel- Ibn Battuta, Leo Africanus, Mansa Musa, KhairAllah Khair al-Sayyid- would agree that the much moments- arriving at a long anticipated sweet water well, a daybreak unlike any daybreak ever before seen- were far fewer than the minor- yet another fifteen hours in the saddle, yet another breakfast of the previous night’s cold millet pudding. But extremely like another? No, Shuwayya, Just a Bit, because at each step bringing us closer to Cairo, the city grew more fantastic in our imagination.
Borgesian maps
Solitudinem faciunt, mappam apellant
-With apologies to Tacitus
Only Borges would have understood why the British made hundreds of mostly empty maps of Sudan, from the Sand in the far north to the Sudd in the far south. The northernmost maps were drawn at the scale of 1:250,000, or 1 inch to 4 miles, and show no topography, no habitation, no vegetation, no physical relief, as if they are not maps at all but rather depictions of what is visible in a blinding sand storm. They may as well have been on a scale of 1:1, or nothing. They made a desert and call it a map, that only the blind Borges would have been able to read.
A sudanese film debut
The Major (mumbling deliriously to an English girl in a sailboat on the Nile)- Khartoum…Khartoum.
-East of Sudan (1964), with 12 yr Jenny Agutter
Girl (lost and thirsty in the desert)- Water. To drink. You must understand, I can’t make it any simpler.
-Walkabout (1971), with 17 yr old Agutter
While still young, Jenny Agutter was an old pro in the same scenes as KhairAllah’s film debut, short of water and trying to make sense of my own garbled words. But unlike her, he rode a camel.
Dar of the donkey
I had been to Dar al-Hamar, Home of the Hamar people, but never to Dar al-Humār, Home of the Donkey, much less to its Jebel, and because its location lay far to the west of our route to Egypt, KhairAllah did not take me there. After searching through maps and geographical gazetteers of Sudan, neither was I ever able to locate the village of ‘Idhān al-Humār, Ear of the Donkey, whose name was changed because it reportedly embarrassed its townsmen. Oh well, at least now I know where to find its Mountain, by its long topo lines in the shape of a donkey ear, just to the north of Umm Badr where KhairAllah was born.
Khairallah, you take the right point
“Dish, you take the right point,” Call said. “Soupy can take the left and Bert and Needle will back you up.”
-Lonesome Dove, Chapter 25
Finally, a quarter of the way into the book, the cattle drive sets out, with Dish riding in KhairAllah’s spot, right point, and Adam Hamid up front to his left where Soupy rode, and Mas’ūd and Muhammad pushing the herd from behind as Bert and Needle, who felt “unhappy and aggrieved” because no one in their right mind wants to eat trail dust for forty days. Except for Da’ūd and me, backing up the back-ups and thrilled to do so. Lonesome Dove wasn’t published until a year later, so it wasn’t as if we knew what roles we were re-enacting. More like Rawhide, but even Clint Eastwood didn’t ride drag, because all that dust would have dirtied his pretty cowboy costume, just like it dirtied my jeans and rugby shirt to the point that I had to throw them away when we reached Cairo.
Colorful camel stories
The dromedary in question escaped a Nativity scene, marking the latest colorful and often chaotic chapter in the history of camels in the United States.
-Washington Post, December 17, 2021
Not to bore with more colorful American camel stories- of city boy Philip Tedro aka Hadji Ali aka Hi Jolly’s impersonation of a bedouin camel driver for the US Army in Arizona, of poor little rich girl Doris Duke giving her pet camels Princess and Baby the run of her Newport mansion, of novelist Téa Obreht’s Old West character’s love letter to a camel he rode from Texas to Montana and back again- but a few stories still untold are worth hearing. Says KhairAllah, in Amrīka camels are rare and dogs are common…in Amrīka, camels are fed hay and in Sudan they eat thorns…in Amrīka, camels live in zoos with giraffes and elephants…Gharīb Jiddan, Very Colorful.
You say Nebrasky, I say Kalābish
“It’s a long way to Nebrasky,” Augustus said.
-Lonesome Dove, Chapter 35
Beware of trying to learn place names from long distance trail drovers who aren’t from around them there parts. I asked KhairAllah the name of the last Egyptian well we drew from before getting to Binban. Kalābish, he said, and I pronounced it that way for years until I finally learned to say it correctly as Kalabsha, famous for a Pharaonic temple that was moved away from Lake Nasser’s rising waters when they closed the High Dam. So i guessed that KhairAllah’s pronouncing it as Kalābish is something like Augustus saying Nebrasky. Or was it because it reminded him of home, Dar al-Kababish?
After the sahara was green
For the wretched slaves who were harried along the infamous Darb al-Arba’in, the journey would have seemed endless. To this day the skeletons of camels and men lying half hidden in the sand attest to the severity of this long walk from northwest Sudan to Egypt and the Nile.
-When the Sahara Was Green, Martin Williams
Funny. Da’ūd, Mustapha, Nedu, and I never felt wretched or harried on the Darb. We were there because we chose to be and considered ourselves lucky to have been invited by Hajj Bashir and accompanied by KhairAllah, long walking in the footsteps of Khawajas who had made the trip before us, following Pepi II’s scout Harkuf in the Third Milennium BCE and only a few others after. Nor did we see any men buried in the sand. Plenty of broken ostrich eggs, too thin to be bits of human skull. No half sunk Ozymandias, no Cambysian soldiers from the lost army. Just camel bones and bird shells.
Good sense on the darb
When Denham heard Clapperton’s news he immediately proposed an expedition across the desert to Egypt. But good sense prevailed…
-Off the Map, Fergus Fleming
I am glad that good sense did not prevail when I asked Hajj Bashir if I might cross the desert with one of his herds, that good sense did not prevail upon Da’ūd when I asked him to come along, nor that ‘Ihsās Ma’qūl, Good Sense, did not deter KhairAllah from setting out on the Darb with two greenhorn Khawajas who barely spoke Arabic and had never before ridden a camel.
New-comers and two-timers
A little less than three weeks on camels suffices for the journey, which is dull and uninteresting except for the first time it is made, when the novelty is calculated to interest the new-comer.
-On the Western Frontier of the Sudan, P.K. Boulnois, The Geographical Journal, June 1924
Bulnois is here describing the well travelled 370 mile route from El Obeid west to El Fasher. If instead he had travelled north from El Obeid and doubled the days of his journey, following the Darb al-Arba’īn to Egypt, he would have found the route anything but dull even for a two-timer like me or a hundred-timer like KhairAllah, who no doubt was amused every day by my complete ignorance of camels, camel saddling, and aseeda eating, for which you dip two fingers into the shared pot, not one as I usually did.
I've always wanted to go there
Jessel (A Saudi Arabia-based American oilman on vacation, played by Tony Randall)- I understand they have professional storytellers in the market. You’d be a riot…Where does this road go? Kyra (A sultry femme fatale)- Over the Atlas Mountains to Ouarzazate. Jessel (his voice dripping with sarcasm)- Oh great, I’ve always wanted to go there.
-Our Man in Marrakesh (1966), A Comedy
Why isn’t this spy caper better known? Made on location in Marrakesh with a young Klaus Kinski, its opening credits with Gnawa musicians in the Jamā’ al-Fna, a sex scene evoking a nude Scheherazade wrapped in a Berber blanket, and a cavalcaded fantasia delivering the fugitive lovers to the palace of the El Caïd, played by Terry-Thomas (“At Eton they called me The Oily Can”), who drives his Rolls Royce like a campy Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence in Arab robe and headdress. The Mamounia Hotel never looked better, not twenty five years later when I saw it from the outside, nor ten years after that when they comped me a room.
A Raiment of camels
…the Kababish, a friendly tribe…Real children of the desert these natives looked…reminding me of a beau-ideal John the Baptist…
-With the Camel Corps Up the Nile, 1889, Lord Edward Gleichen
And John had a raiment of camel hair…
-Matthew 3:4
The drovers’ clothing was of Sudanese cotton and sheep wool, not camel hair, a Jazz Age fabric made from the underbellies of Bactrians, not dromedaries. So no, they looked nothing like John the Baptist, who carried a cross and a lamb while they carried hippo-hide whips and goatskin water bags.
Majnūn for our mazāj
For Allah created the English mad- the maddest of all mankind!
-Rudyard Kipling, Kitchener’s School, A poem about Gordon Memorial College, now the University of Khartoum
Majnūn, Insane, from the triliteral root J-N-N. Literally, Genied. Possessed by Jinns. Mad Dogs, Red Faced, Unbuttoned. I don’t know what some of the drovers thought about us, the Khawajas who rode with them. Most knew we were Amrīkān but some no doubt thought we were Ingilīz, because we spoke Ingilīzi. But they all must have thought us Majnūn because we told them we were riding the Darb to improve our Mazāj, our Mood.