Sitting in Ezbekiyya, then

This is not a guidebook or at least not one that will help the reader get from A to B. It sets out rather to help him get from now to then, or vice versa…

-A Field Guide to the Street Names of Central Cairo, Davies and Lababidi

Cairo’s largest park for the common people…where natives and globetrotters, be they Franks or Arabs or Turks or of any other nation, meet.

-A 19th Century visitor describing Ezbekiyya Garden, quoted in Davies and Lababidi

In 1978 there were many used book stalls surrounding Ezbekiyya Garden where I found a copy of George Steiner’s After Babel, about translation and misunderstanding between languages and the various decipherments and deceptions at one’s linguistic disposal when sitting in such a place and practicing one’s first tentative utterances in Colloquial Egyptian Arabic with fellow idlers on its broken park benches.

Molly says yes, khairallah says Na'am

…and the Arabs and the devil knows who else…said yes I will Yes.

-James Joyce

Na’am. Yes!, Yes indeed!, Certainly!, Surely!, Grazing animals [camels, etc.]. Na’am?(colloq.) I beg your pardon, What did you say?

-Hans Wehr, Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic

I wonder how best to translate Molly Bloom’s last word into Arabic…as an affirmative, as an interrogative, or as KhairAllah might prefer. What did you say? I said camels I will Camels.

Namūs, irhal!

Sometimes on the tour you may encounter insects as well as mosquitoes, thus you need to take your precautions.

-Sudan tour brochure

Insects, Hasharāt, Mosquitoes, Namūs, Ticks, Qurād- they’re not the half of it in Sudan lately. Think instead of road blocks, bank closures, and police round-ups. That’s what a coup d’état gives the tourist on his way to the Meroë pyramids. Good luck getting through curfew in Khartoum. Bring plenty of Off! Irhal! Go! (Said by Arab street protesters to their respective dictators.)

Left hand or left cheek

Tafas (offering a dish)- Bedu food. Lawrence (reluctantly, taking a bite with his left hand)- Good. Tafas- More? Lawrence (even more reluctantly takes a second bite)

-screenplay by Robert Bolt

Almost all movement goes from left to right. David Lean said he did this in order to emphasize the film as a journey…The master interpositive produced by Technicolor in 1966 had Reel 2A flipped so left and right were reversed on screen for about ten minutes…it was nearly impossible to spot this error.

-IMDB Trivia page

If David Lean had wanted to film a journey, he could have followed KhairAllah on the Darb up from Nahud. He’d have seen no left hands eating reluctantly from the asīda bowl, only us keeping the north wind on our left cheek, heading NNE to Cairo, the same direction as Aqaba to Damascus but three times the distance.

Noises in the imperative mood

Noises Made to Animals…To Camels…Drive, Hotj, Hadj, Hatt…Kneel, Ikhkh, Khrr…To Dogs…Drive Away, Garr…Call, Clk, Clk…To Donkeys…Drive, Nchkk, Nchkk…Stop, Hau, Hush…Call, Ho Ho…

-English-Arabic Vocabulary for the Use of Officials in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Compiled in the Intelligence Dept., Capt. H.F.S. Amery, 1905

So this is what British spies thought their priority in Sudan twenty years after General Gordon was beheaded…how to drive a camel, how to drive off a dog, how to halt a driven donkey. They could have more easily asked KhairAllah and he would have added, Noises Made to Khawajas on the Darb…Eat, Kūl…Drink, Ishrab…Mount, Irkab…Dismount, Inzil…Sleep, Nūm.

An unemphatic vagabond

Hāmil. Porter, Carrier, Bearer. Pregnant.

hāmil. Roving, Roaming. Vagabond, Tramp.

-Wehr

Beware the difference between Arabic’s emphatic and non-emphatic Hs, its alphabet’s 6th (ح ) and 26th ( ه ) letters. One makes you a beast of burden or with child, the other makes you go nowhere or with nothing. On the Darb, my camel was a Hāmil in the first sense but I felt like a hāmil in the second. If I’d ever expelled my breath when instead I should have held it in, or vice versa, no doubt I’d have caused KhairAllah no end of mirth and nonsense, with his always emphatic Ha Ha.

From where we first drank the nile

When you finally arrive at the Nile after crossing Dar al-Kababish’s grasslands and sand sheets, you don’t ask where exactly you are before taking your first drink. KhairAllah told us, Khuleiwa, which from his mouth sounded suspiciously like the well flats near Nahud from where we’d set out, Hileiwi, and made me think that maybe he’d taken the herd in a big twenty day circle, as a joke on the Khawajas.

GET DOWN AND WALK

And Goha said, “O Mussulmans, do you know why Allah did not put wings on the camel?” “No we do not, O Goha, but surely you will tell us,” they answered. “If camels had been given wings,” Goha said, “they would perch on flowers in your garden, and being very heavy, crush them to the earth.”

-One Thousand and One Nights, ed. J.C. Mardrus

It might be tempting to think of Mas’ūd abu Dūd as Goha, if Goha were a Sudani camel herder rather than the archetypal wise Egyptian peasant fool. Mas’ūd once asked me, in the middle of a long day’s ride when spotting the contrail of a jet flying high overhead, why I did not travel by airplane. I answered, Because my camel has no Wing, Janāh, but I must have mispronounced the word as Junāh, Sin, for Mas’ūd then replied, In that case your camel is worthy only of the Prophet, so you must now get down and walk.

The right person, the right drink

Catherine (played by Carrol Baker, a mysterious blonde whose car crashes into an oil pumping station staffed by five engineers in the Sahara Desert)- Could you get me a drink? What kind of place is this anyway? Are you the right person to ask for a drink? Peter, the station’s Chief Engineer and the first to sleep with her- I am the right person.

-Station Six Sahara (1963), partially filmed in the Libyan Desert

This most unlikely plot, which could just as easily have been lifted from a sci-fi movie about a Baby Doll-like alien beaming herself aboard a space ship full of sex-starved astronauts, plays as a cross between Tennessee Williams and Paul Bowles, but this bit of dialogue reminds me of that first day on the Darb when KhairAllah made lemonade for the Khawajas from goatskin-tainted water, half-rotted limūn, and insufficient sugar. Ishrab, Drink, he said. And we did, Sharibnā.

'Ankabūts and 'aqrabs

The Nileside pace of life is nonchalant, the small pastel-painted villages ramshackle, and the weather dry- until Friday.

-New York Times, November 15, 2021, reporting on an infestation of scorpions in Nubia following heavy rains

I was confused. I knew the word for Spider, ‘Ankabūt, and for Scorpion, ‘Aqrab, but when I sat on the wooden bed frame laced tight with rope, what they called an ‘Angrayb, the same as they called the constellation Orion, I thought they were teasing me, that I was about to be bitten. Now I know that ‘Angrayb derives from the word ‘Angray in the Nubian language, so that explains why I couldn’t find it in Wehr or Lane.

Mountain of the Father of the axe

Jebel Abu Fas was one of the many named landmarks in Wadi al-Milk that KhairAllah pointed out to me and I vainly searched for on my National Geographical Society map, its scale 1:8,250,000, or 1 inch to 130 miles. It was not to be found and KhairAllah laughed, saying that we were lost.

Man cannot live by millet alone

…the camels died en masse. Sometimes they did so with grace, sinking to their knees mid-journey and refusing to budge, peering hopefully after the caravan until it became just a dark blot on the horizon.

-Off the Map: Tales of Endurance and Exploration, Fergus Fleming

One reason they say that Amundsen beat Scott to the Pole was that the unsentimental Norwegian fed his weaker sled dogs to the stronger. Hajj Bashir would not have liked to learn when our mounts were too weak to walk that we sometimes ate them ourselves, his slender profit margin, but at least he would have understood why we did. Camel meat is very tasty after days of millet paste alone.

billa ali's mother

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.