I have made a heap of all that I have found.
-Nennius, c. 800
So wrote the Welsh monk Nennius when he assembled his Historia Brittonum from the magpie gleanings of his predecessors. And so I do when recounting my time on the Darb, how we unloaded our pack animals and dropped the saddle bags and water skins, fire wood and film gear into heaps at the windward edge of camp, piling up memories to be pulled out later like we did the tea kettle and aseeda pot to lighten our Mazāj, our Mood.
‘Don Diego knows Arabic’, Chapuys offers. He is alert. ‘Does it take years to learn?’ ‘Yes,’ Don Diego says. ‘Years and years.’
-The Mirror and the Light, Hilary Mantel
My three years of classroom Arabic followed by a year on Cairo’s streets didn’t help me much in Dar al-Kababish. Shaynu, Waynu, Minu…What, Where, Who…these were new words to me, neither Classical, Modern Standard, nor Egyptian Colloquial, so I was unable to answer KhairAllah’s questions when he rejoined the herd one day at dawn after being away for the night and found a number of our camels missing in the morning count. What happened to them? Where did they go? Who is their thief? I had been asleep so I could only say, Al-Nayyim Huwa Sultān, The Sleeper is a Sultan.
Camels everywhere get hot and rut in winter. In summer, mostly, they are placid, remembering the past, laying up stores for the future.
-With regard to the oiling of camels and the injecting of oil into their nostrils, The Trotter-Nama, I. Allan Sealy
Some camels in the herd rutted in the two winters when KhairAllah and I rode the Darb and yes I thought their days were plenty warm. Sudanese summers I never saw, I’d left Kordofan by then, but I knew their days were insufferably hot, making it impossible to think of past or future, only that interminable present when oily sweat drips off the nose faster than a second ticks by.
From Kordofan came red pepper, gum, “allob” nuts (from the “heglig” tree, eaten as a dainty and considered a remedy for flatulency), blue cambric, leather ropes, leather sacks of ox hide, seamless water buckets, wooden bowls and ostrich feathers.
-The Tribes of Northern and Central Kordofan, Harold MacMichael
That is quite a shopping list, but KhairAllah carried none of that. David and I sold the donkey saddles we’d bought in Nahud to the Egyptians, they didn’t want the broken bits of petrified wood and ostrich eggs we’d picked up along the Wadi al-Milk but they did buy all our Ibl, which after forty days I never once thought of as Dainties.
There were no attractions for Miss Tinné in Khartoom.
-The Heroine of the White Nile; or, What a Woman Dared and Did: A Sketch of the Remarkable Travels of Miss Alexandrine Tinné, 1871
Poor Miss Tinné, whose mother, aunt, and lady’s maid all died of fever after she’d left them behind in Khartoum to run off in search of adventure for herself. Never leave a fallen comrade, so she had tin coffins made and brought them home to the Netherlands before being murdered by desert tribesmen on yet another Saharan fling. No more attractions for her, to be sure.
“I suppose we might as well go on to Egypt. It doesn’t make any difference.” “It’s certainly not a matter of life or death”…
-Death on the Nile
Except for the camels, for whom it was very much about death, which they met in Old Cairo’s slaughter house after being force marched through the streets, all gaily marked in red paint with their wholesale butcher buyers’ purchase numbers. The drovers were not called for that final duty, much to their relief no doubt, because none would have wanted to see how low their ships of the desert had sunk upon running aground in the city.
…whereas all the others were knocked up before we got half way over that confounded Desert, but I stood it as well as any Arabian in the caravan…My wife insists on taking the pen out of my hand, so I can only say God bless you all.
-Letter from Mr. F. to Mr. C., written On Boardship in the Red Sea near Suez, September 1, 1779, included in Original Letters from India, 1779-1815, Mrs. Eliza Fay
Needless to say, ours wasn’t that kind of trip. We only had one or two Nāqas in our Dabouka and they were already spoken for in Egypt.
Sing to me of the man, O Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course…many cities of men he saw and learned their minds…while he fought only to save his life, to bring his shipmates home…
-The Odyssey
What Odysseus and KhairAllah held most in common was concern for their shipmates, getting them safely home, but only if you first buy into that old saw about camels being ships of the desert, and the drovers their crew.
I heard talk of the arrival of Sultan Musa on his pilgrimage and found the Cairenes eager to recount what they had seen…This man flooded Cairo with his benefactions. The Cairenes made incalculable profits out of him and his entourage, buying and selling, giving and taking. They exchanged gold until they depressed its value and caused its price to fall.
-The Paths of Insight into the Kingdoms of Egypt, Ibn Fadlallah al-Umari (1300-1349)
Al-Umari interviewed Cairenes shortly after the Malian King Mansa Musa passed through the city in the year 1324 en route to Mecca, flooding the gold market with his largesse and suppressing its price…not unlike what happened in the Imbaba Camel Market when several Daboukas arrived in the same week and sent the city’s wholesale butchers into a buying frenzy, dropping prices for live camels and wiping out the profits of any merchants speculating on a tight supply. KhairAllah's benefactions were not on the same level as Mansa Musa’s, but his arrival could move the market in the same direction.
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They load their camels very early in the morning and journey until the sun is well up, when both air and sand become impossibly hot. Then they stop, unload and hobble the camels, unpack the baggage and erect their tents for shade. In the afternoon when the sun begins to drop they depart and travel deep into the night when they camp until early morning, then begin the day again. Thus is the habit of travellers from Sudan, to whom the sun’s rays can be deadly if falling vertically upon them.
-Muhammad al-Idrisi, The Pleasure of Him Who Longs to Cross the Horizons
This is a good summary of our habits too on the Darb, written seven hundred years before our own time. Although we had no tents we did seek shade under trees, fearing the same deadly rays of the sun that shine from directly overhead.
The length of Nubia following the Nile is a two month march. Nubians live well and are well fed…Dongola is its capital, there they make a drink from Dhurra, Millet, their meat is camel, either fresh or sun-dried, and they do their cooking in camel milk.
-The Pleasure of Him Who Longs to Cross the Horizons, Muhammad al-Idrisi (1100-1165), A Companion Text to his Tabula Rogeriana, the world map engraved on a six foot diameter silver disc by Roger II of Sicily
After twenty days in the sands we looked forward to our resupply stop in Dongola but we knew already that the trip would be different from there forward to Egypt. The long stretch of Nile-side villages and farmers, their fields of beans and peas, the fresh dates and Dhurra…it would no longer be just us and the drovers and their Dabouka. This was the known world, the mapped world, and we were no longer on the horizon’s far side
Tabula Rogeriana, redrawn and relettered in Latin alphabet by Konrad Miller, 1928
Animal theft is and probably always has been an exciting sport and a profitable business in the Sudan.
-On Camel Brands, L.G.Hill, Sudan Notes and Records, Vol. 53, 1972
Notorious camel thief of the Wadi al-Milk Billa Ali al-Qrayn would also call it a free meal, as in the time he hustled KhairAllah into handing him a finder’s fee for the lost camel that he himself had stolen the previous night, then sat down to a roasted kid dinner with us letting bygones be bygones.
A camel has no real price. The buying and selling of camels merely represent a rough equivalent of their value…One can drink camel milk, use its hair, make it carry things- even eat it. And with the blessing of God it multiplies under your hand. But what do you do with the bits of paper that the merchant gives you? You put them in your pocket.
-A Kabbāshi tribesman quoted by Talal Asad, Seasonal Movements of the Kababish Arabs of Northern Sudan, Sudan Notes and Records, Vol. 45, 1964
KhairAllah told me when describing the responsibilities of his job as Khabīr, I am driving before me millions in the form of camels. Millions of what? I should have asked him. But I already had the answer in the name of his employer, the export merchant Hajj Bashir Abu Jaib, Father of the Pocket.
The climactic moment of the Queen’s visit was a huge tribal gathering in El Obeid where a hundred thousand people and thirty thousand camels assembled to greet her as a seemingly endless parade of Kababish, Hawawir, and other nomadic tribesmen filed past. The worst moment came on the way into town where three thousand schoolboys lined the road shouting “Down, Down, Down with British Colonialism”…and one hurled a tomato at the Queen.
-Letters from Khartoum, Russell McDougall
I never asked KhairAllah if he had been in that welcoming committee for Queen Elizabeth back in 1965, a scant twenty years before he welcomed me in Nahud with tea and millet paste. But I know it could not have been he who threw the tomato. He never wasted food, even last night’s Aseeda pot was always licked clean at breakfast.
Were one discussing the racial identity of the child of a naturalized Englishman who was the son of an Italian father and a Spanish mother, and who had married a Portuguese wife, it would be unwise to dogmatize overmuch as to the child’s nationality, but the Arabs of Kordofan, whose antecedents are of an equally chequered order, are entirely unabashed in glibly arrogating to themselves pedigrees which if correct would mark them as a race unrivalled in the history of the world for nobility and purity of descent…
-Harold MacMichael, The Kababish- Some Remarks on the Ethnology of a Sudan Arab Tribe, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, January 1910
It took a bit of explaining my lineage in light of my full name, Louis and Werner coming from my father, one of my middle names coming from my maternal grandfather and the other from my paternal grandmother. Add to that my mixed (as the Arabs perceived them) ethnicities- French, English and German via the American heartland- and they were totally confused. Jinsiyyatak Eh? What is your Nationality? If they were looking for the short answer, they should have just asked, Inta Mīn? Who are you?
If it were not for this railroad one would be compelled to make the journey by camel or not make it at all. And so, by comparison, the slowness of speed or lack of conveniences are unnoticed, or if noticed they are minimized. This is the philosophy of a desert journey and it is the only way to get satisfaction out of it.
-The Egyptian Sudan, J. Kelly Giffen, 1905
The 1984 equivalent of riding Lord Kitchener’s railroad was taking a plane, two and a half hours Khartoum to Cairo. But that would have negated the philosophy of desert travel, not caring about its lack of convenience or speed. Forty days of eating Aseeda and sleeping rough, Mā’alīsh, Who Cares?