Unforgettable riders

Narrated Abdullah bin Umar…I heard the Prophet say, People are just like camels, out of one hundred, one can hardly find a single camel suitable to ride.

-Sahih al-Bukhari, Traditions of the Prophet, Book 76, Hadith 505

There were three hundred camels and eight camelmen in our two Daboukas- KhairAllah and Bilal Bakhīt Muhammad as Khabīrs, and Ahmad Muhammad Hāmid, Muhammad Hāmid Bakhīt, Rābih Muhammad Na’īm, Hāmid Ahmad Humeida, Abdullah Mansour Ali, and Ibrahim Gum’a Sa’at as Drovers. All eight were far more than Munāsib, Suitable. As Riders they each one were Mumtāz, Excellent. As Companions they are Unforgettable thirty five years later.

Deflowering a thorn tree

Narrated Aisha…I said, O Messenger of Allah, Suppose you came to a valley with a tree that had already been grazed by camels and a tree that had been not. Of which tree would you let your camel graze? He said, Of the tree that has not been already grazed. (The second narrator added, Aisha meant to say that the Prophet had married her because she was a virgin.)

-Sahih al-Bukhari, Traditions of the Prophet, Book 62, Hadith 14

Strange to say, but when our camels came upon a stand of acacia trees that had not yet been grazed by preceding Daboukas, their leaves, twigs, and thorns being dry, dust-covered, and brittle, the last thing I thought about was sex.

Fast car, slow camel

Narrated Jabir bin Abdullah…I was accompanying the Prophet on a journey riding a slow camel lagging behind the others. The Prophet passed me and asked, What is the matter with you? I answered, I am riding a slow camel. He asked, Do you have a stick? I answered, Yes. He said, Give it to me. When I gave it to him, he beat the camel and rebuked it.

-Sahih al-Bukhari, Traditions of the Prophet, Book 38, Hadith 504

There were better ways on the Darb to get your camel moving than to beat it with a stick. I found that clucking worked best, or tapping hard on the shoulder, or riding side by side with a faster camel so that the slower mount knew how quick a pace it had to match. In any case, we all knew it was a forty day marathon, not a hundred yard dash. For that, take a Hilux.

Water by appointment

He said, This is a she camel, for her is a drink and for you is a drink each on the appointed day.

-Quran 26:155

But not on the same day. We drank when we were thirsty, everyday. She drank, or rather they all drank only when their bellies were full. Camels are funny that way. You can lead them to water only if you’ve first led them to tuft grass, field stubble, and acacia leaf. Appointments preferred.

The sleeper is sultān

It was impossible to sleep on the desert routes. One lived, one died, forever peering out with a steady gaze…

-Désert, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio

No, we slept fine on the Darb. The camels chewed and rechewed cuds, growled and passed gas, settled and resettled into their sand nests but not so noisily as to keep me awake through the night, a Sultān ruling his Sultanate of Sleep.

A little eternity

The men knew perfectly well that the desert wanted nothing to do with them, so they walked on without stopping, following the path that other feet had already traveled…

-Désert, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio

That path, the Way of the Forty, was trod by men with five toes per foot and camels with two, and both their prints would be wind scoured and gone by morning, so yes, what KhairAllah called the desert when the wind blew, Um Duhayr, Mother of the Little Eternity, made sense…it wanted nothing to do with us, so we did not stop until Egypt.

Souls shaken, not stirred

Sometimes a man from another tribe came up and greeted them, extending his two open hands. They exchanged but a few brief words, a few names. But they were words and names that vanished immediately, simply vague traces that the wind and the sand would cover over.

-Désert, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio

This happened often with our group, only the greeting was different, what I thought as a Kabbāshi soul shake, a right hand grasp followed by the same hand touching the other man’s left shoulder then sliding down to his elbow, then repeated from the beginning, all the while loosening a flow of greetings, invocations, and queries. Peace be with you. May God give you rest. How is your condition and your conditions? And briefly after that, their ways parted.

Straight paths north

Your safety and penance I do not know.

-Suleiman KhairAllah

I doubt that after telling his father what I had written to him about my hip surgery that Suleiman meant to invoke the Arabic concept of Tawba, Penance, in the sense of Repentance for Straying from Islam’s Straight Path. KhairAllah knew full well that as a Khawaja I was unable to steer a straight path whether astride or afoot.

Songs for ears polite

The songs of the Arab of the desert are about the camel, as one of the most beautiful created beings; the remarks of the British soldier about his camel are not suited to ears polite! Who is right and who is wrong?

-A Manual of the Diseases of the Camel and of his Management and Uses, John Henry Steel, 1890

Once when particularly peeved at my camel, I shouted at him, Ya Humār, O Donkey, and I got the strangest look from Idris, who had just finished singing a love song to his camel, O Rocket of Sudan, Like a fish sleek and tasty.

Remembered when you're gone

“Well,” said Mercer…“my personal favorite was when Rimbaud publically slapped the camel man.” “There it is,” intoned Bardey, nodding soberly, ever the apologist for his unfortunate protegé. “He was too mentally…aesthetic.”

-Disaster Was My God, Bruce Duffy

This is how Rimbaud’s colleagues in Harar remembered their friend of ten years on the day he set off, ill and dying, for the Red Sea coast. I sometimes wonder how the drovers remembered us after forty days. I had wanted to interview them at the end of the trail, sitting them down in a circle and asking the prompt question, How do you rate the Khawajas’ camel skills? I am sure they would have laughed and said something like, Da’īf, Weak, or Ka’ab, Dispirited, Sad, but unlikely would they have said, Jamāli, Aesthetic…a word not to be confused with Jammāli, Pertaining to a Camel Drover.

First mounts

When- with a heave- he is launched. The porters hoist him skyward, up like a flag, sixty two kilos of meat such that he is camel high, eye to eye in fact.

-Disaster Was My God, Bruce Duffy

Our departure from Nahud riding on newly bought saddles, there having been no time to refit them individually to our over-sized dimensions, was nothing like the cancer-stricken Rimbaud’s departure from Harar in a camel-borne stretcher. Except that both our camels and his knew they were carrying on their backs something they should not and never should have been asked to carry, too much Khawaja meat.

Unwriting a life

Which again raises the disquieting question of language and style. Namely, how a poet prodigy of almost unfathomable abilities could forget how to write. How could such a man disable a style and unlearn ancient rhythms- stubbornly resist, as one might water and food…How in short could a poet of genius systematically erase his own life- unwrite it?

-Disaster Was My God, Bruce Duffy

Rimbaud in Duffy’s biographical novel descends from Harar’s uplands on a stretcher, his knee swollen like a watermelon not because of varicose veins- how pathetically he had written to his mother from there, asking her to send him the compression hosiery he thought she could buy in Vouziers- but rather from the bone cancer that was to kill him. Duffy compared the banalities of Rimbaud’s letters home from Africa- published by his brother-in-law, who it was said took many liberties with the texts- to the wildness of his poetry, “the rivers let me go where I wanted…And washed me of spots of blue wine and vomit…”

the things i carried

Every morning at dawn they emerge from the desert, black women with earthen red jugs, tall thirsty jugs…

-Disaster Was My God, Bruce Duffy

In Dar al-Kababish they carry water not in jugs but in skins, goatskins they can mend with twigs that swell when wet to plug holes pierced in the leather by acacia thorns. Clay always cracks and leaks, water lost drip by unstoppable drip. Everything fragile in the desert becomes useless…tea glasses, ink pens, camera gear. But not a tin cup, not notebook paper nor pencils with resharpable lead. So these were what I carried, unbreakable.

Pandemonium at the petting zoo

Two men were killed by a rampaging camel that had escaped from a petting zoo in Tennessee…

-New York Post, March 12, 2022

Petting Zoo. Janaynat al-Hayawānāt li-Mulāmasa is my best guess for how to say it in Arabic, literally Garden of Animals for Petting, with Petting from the triliteral root L-M-S as a Form III verbal noun, which Wehr gives in a seconday meaning as Sexual Intercourse. Lane too translates in that sense, giving the cognate word Lāmis as Adulterer, one allowing herself to be Petted by men other than her husband. Both dictionaries vindicate KhairAllah’s incredulity that camels would be in zoos alongside lions and bears. Camels, he thought, should be kept in the Bādiyya, Desert (and cognate word of Bedouin), not a bordello.

A rutter's Waterfall

[ه]Haddāra, Waterfall…[ح]Hadāra, Civilization

-Wehr

I remember circling a camel with KhairAllah and asking him to name its various body parts that I would unlikely learn anywhere else, certainly not in a classroom or a dictionary. Qujja, Hump Hair. Zurr, Chest Callous. Sharam, Cleft Lip. Arqūb, Rear Leg Callous. Rashrash, Eye Lash. Nakhāra, Nostril Closure Flap. Watayyi’, Foot Pad. Mufthār, Toe Nail.

But because I didn’t hear differences in his pronunciation of the emphatic and non-emphatic H and D consonants, nor his doubled letters, I transcribed phonetically as best I could in English. So when I recently reviewed this list and found that I had written the word Hadāra for Dulla, the foot long pink inflated membrane that a rutting male expells and retracts from his foaming throat with a great gurgling sound, I was at a loss. Spelled with which letter H, the emphatic (ح) or the non-emphatic (ه)? In Wehr I could find it neither way, so I guess that Waterfall will have to do.

Merissa for president

Primary balloting is begun in Sudan. Five week long voting process is first step toward self-rule. Voters get free beer.

-Kennett Love, New York Times, November 3, 1953

My cousin Kennett knew better than to bury the lede when covering Sudan’s first staggering steps toward independence. Here he was talking about merissa, millet beer, a word whose triliteral root M-R-S Lane gives as meaning To Macerate, Steep, or Soak, and its cognate Mutamarras as Scratching Post, the manner in which Bilal Bakhīt liked best to relieve his itch when on the Darb with KhairAllah and me thirty five years later. Kennett told me his own favorite Sudanese scratching post was duty free.