On the dromos, on the darb

δρομάς, Running, Dromedary, an ellipsis of δρομάς κάμηλος, Running Camel, from δρόμος, Race, Running, Race Course, Track, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *drem-, To Run

-Oxford Dictionaries

What is with these Dromedaries all running and racing on a Dromos, a course or a track? To be sure, we rode them, Riding not Pack Camels to be technical, mostly of the white Kabbāshi breed, but they mostly walked over a trackless unmarked route, unless you call their occasional skeleton, dropped from exhaustion and cross-gorged by a drover’s dagger, a milestone on the Darb.

Mafēsh mazāg

Abdou would have called this a real Mazāg, accompanying the word as all Egyptians do, with a gesture of the hand- a flattened palm brought to the side of the head- signifying blissful plenitude and the prolonged, cultivated consumption of everyday pleasures.

-Out of Egypt, André Aciman

How many times did I answer KhairAllah’s dawn call to Irkab!, Mount Up!, with that universal Egyptian retort I’d learned early in my First Year Colloquial class, Mafēsh Mazāg, I’m Not in the Mood, and how many times did he respond with, In the Desert There are No Moods, Only Obligations.

Diocletian, camel trader

6. Bactrian Camel, 25,000 Denarii [sing. Denarius] Communis (DC) 7. Camel with two humps, 60,000 DC 8. Female Camel with two humps, 30,000 DC 9. Best Arabian Camel, 12,000 DC 10. Best Dromedary, 20,000 DC 11. Riding Donkey, 15,000 DC 12. Pack Donkey, 7,000 DC…18. Best Sheep, 400 DC…

-Edict of Diocletian, XXXII, 301 CE

A cap on animal prices would never have worked at the Cairo camel market where traders like Hajj Bashir risked many a dinar, an Arabic word from the Roman Denarius coin, assembling Daboukas in Kordofan and sending them up the Way of the Forty to Egypt. Price controls be damned. He sold at the far end of what the market could bear and was then driven home to his flat near Midān al-Opera sitting in his Mercedes-Benz feeling far wealthier than the Emperor Diocletian.

The rumen is a finely tuned machine

The camel, that intricate, prodigious piece of nature…

-T.E. Lawrence

Ba’īr, pl. Ab’ira, Bu’rān, Abā’ir, Ba’ārīn, Dung Dropper, Camel

-H. Wehr

I always marvelled how much dropped dung over night came after such poor grazing the day before, knowing that still more was left in the threeway gut to chew and rechew and chew again. A prodigious amount from the rumen’s intricate machine.

Jauz in the Desert

There were no footmarks on the ground, for each wind swept like a great brush over the sand surface…Only the dried camel droppings, which were lighter than the sand and rounded like walnuts, escaped over its ripples.

-T.E. Lawrence

Strange that Lawrence should think of camel turds as rounded, like walnuts, for they are more plug-shaped, like pecans. Wehr has Walnut as Jauz, from the hollow verb Jāza, to Travel (through), a noun whose meaning he also gives as Center (of a Desert, etc.), so in the sense of its Arabic translation, Lawrence may have been closer to the mark. Go to the center of the Sahrā’ and you will travel through much camel shit.

At the scene of the crime

Sheikh Musa was rather amusing about the Seligmans’ [husband and wife Harvard anthropologists] visit to the Kababish some years ago…Musa had stuffed them with a lot of nonsense as a joke. “I was only a boy, how should I remember accurately the customs of the Arabs?” Hmm! He had got over the habit of them sitting down and asking things like “What are your customs on the wedding night?” and other such intimate questions, and then pronto writing down the answers like a policeman in a notebook at the scene of an accident.

-April 28, 1931, Trek Journal, C.A.E. Lea, A.D.C. in Dar al-Kababish

I can only hope that the drovers did not later take it badly when I got them talking about their customs of the Shahr al-’Asl, Month of Honey, and we all had a big bawdy laugh, and then they saw me write it down in my diary. Or maybe that made them laugh even more.

Lucky us

Talked to Nimr and Adam about superstitions…it is unlucky to see a poor man or an ugly one before starting on a journey- you want to see a pretty woman or a rich man…

-January 15, 1932, Trek Journal, C.A.E. Lea, A.D.C. in Dar al-Kababish

The ceremonial sheep slaughter, the Karāma, before leaving Nahud must have been what blessed us later on the trail. The last person I saw before mounting up that day, Hajj Bashir’s agent Sadiq abd al-Wahāb, was not particularly rich or handsome as far as I could tell by looking at his beat up truck and face behind the dusty sunglasses. Nothing bad happened in the next forty days, so I guess that God was on our side, in addition to KhairAllah as our trail boss.

Laughing, purring, and cooing

At first, herds of camels moving through the bush slowly, then herdsmen alternating short songs with shouts of “HeeHee-Prrr” to drive the herd.

-October 3, 1932, Trek Journal, C.A.E. Lea, A.D.C. in Dar al-Kababish

Qarqara. To rumble (stomach), to bray (camel), to coo (pigeon), to purr (cat)

-Hans Wehr, An Arabic-English Dictionary

I never heard the drovers purr or laugh at the Dabouka when keeping it in high gear after a fifteen hour day. It was always more like barking at a dog or clucking to a horse. But Lexographer Wehr and District Commissioner Lea might be in agreement on this verb, Qarqara, which takes in a whole host of relevant meanings, except perhaps for the cooing of pigeons.

5 cents for a camel, God knows

They lamented the price of camels (1 £E for a full grown) and asked where all the money had gone. I said, God knows. The Hajj then talked about Mecca and the government of Ibn Saud and especially his short way with thieves (decapitation) which the Arabs much admired…

-October 7, 1931, Trek Journal, C.A.E. Lea, A.D.C. in Dar al-Kababish

KhairAllah should have told Billa Ali that it wasn’t worth the risk to steal a camel. Not because today 1 Egyptian Pound is worth just a nickel, but because the Dabouka’s owner Hajj Bashir punished camel thieves not with one big slice but rather with a thousand small cuts, that is, words of personal condemnation and insult that would forever blacken the name of a rustling miscreant, even to the ends of the Wadi al-Milk where Billa Ali roamed fifty years after Assistant District Commissioner Lea had cleaned up the place.

Pulling on clothes and moving on out

As I was getting up at 5 am after a rather poor night, I saw a woman approaching through the half light- pulled on my shorts and shooed her away, telling her to come a little later. It is astonishing how someone always turns up with a complaint just as one is moving out….Rode until 6 pm when we arrived at Abu Zaima wells. No Arabs came to me, but I could hear dogs barking.

-November 3, 1931, from the Trek Journals of a District Officer in Sudan, C.A.E. Lea, Assistant D.C. in Dar al-Kababish

I guess that on some nights District Commissioner Lea paid no heed to the old Sudanese proverb, The Dog Barks and the Caravan Moves On. Especially when women were involved. Luckily for us on the Darb, women were never a problem, because we never saw any, except for the time we were camped outside a village and I walked over to the school teacher’s hostel hoping to ask for some bread, and when I returned found Mustapha getting his hair shampooed and all his clothes but the riding tunic he was wearing washed by an old lady in a deal arranged by KhairAllah.

Dar al-Kababish, "The western corner of heaven"

Harkhuf’s way to Yam [Upper Nubia] lay over what in later days was the infamous Darb al-Arba’in. First came seventy five miles of easy going…then followed a desert march of 160 miles over sand to Sheb on the present Egypt-Sudan border. Probably it was at Sheb that Harkhuf “found the Chieftan of Yam gone to the land of Temeh [Southern Libyan Desert] as far as the western corner of heaven. I went forth in pursuit of him.”

-G.W. Murray, Harkhuf’s Third Journey, The Geographical Journal, March 1965

Harkhuf was the Old Kingdom Pharaoh Pepy II’s trail boss sent to Yam, as his tomb inscription records, on the reverse route that the camel trader Hajj Bashir sent his trail boss KhairAllah to Cairo 4,250 years later. But things apparently went off course for Harkhuf, who had to chase after the Chieftan of Yam far and wide into the Libyan Desert towards the wilds of Dar al-Kababish. Would that KhairAllah had been along on that trip too, to show the Khawaja his homeland as he did to me.

Indian Khichari, Egyptian Kushary, Kabbāshi Mashwy

In Hindustan, the staple food of the rural peasants was khichari, a simple dish of two grains, usually rice and lentils, boiled together in a little water…Tavernier [Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (1605-1689), a French traveller to India] noticed that Indian soldiers made the meal more luxurious by dipping their fingers in a bowl of melted ghee when they ate.

-Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, Lizzie Collingham

When I invited KhairAllah and the other drovers into central Cairo for a celebratory meal of Kufta and Kebab, we passed a Kushary restaurant with its big piles of rice, lentils, and vermacelli in the front window and its servers clacking metal plates together like castanets in order to grab the attention of passers-by. But no such luck with the Kababish. They hadn’t ridden forty days on the Darb and braved thick Cairo traffic only to eat a bowl of starch salad. They wanted lamb Mashwy, grilled just right.

Disordered by aseeda

Habit seems to be able to render any type of grain sufficiently wholesome; but the stomach is unable, without inconvenience, to bear a change…hence the laborer becomes disordered when first compelled or induced to try another food.

-A Journey from Madras, Frances Buchanan, 1807

My introduction to aseeda was in Hajj Bashir’s market stall in El Obeid. Ha, Ha, Luwīs, he said, This is the only food you will eat for the next forty days. Do you like it? Hajj Bashir’s recipe, suited for an old man with a delicate stomach, was with boiled milk and bleached wheat flour, and it made me almost gag on my slimy first bite. Once on the trail it got better, for the cook Adam Hāmid made it as it is always made on the Darb, with water, millet flour, and a peppery Milāh sauce poured on top. In fact I learned to like it, fuel served at our desert fire.

Fussing with camels

To reach it was a job, entailing a great fuss of camels, dromedaries, tents, and escorts- all the expensive paraphernalia of desert expeditions…Yet they all found many pleasures on the way…

-The Pleasure of Ruins, Rose Macaulay

Macaulay was writing about Europeans visiting Palmyra on the Strata Diocletiana, a Roman Road from Damascus running due east to the Euphrates, and yes it was an expensive, and dangerous, undertaking in the early days. Brigands, kidnappers, and bedouin extortionists were everywhere in the desert.

Lucky for us on the Darb al-’Arba’īn, we were the only ones of our sort whom passing tribesmen had ever seen, so the words that they exclaimed- Ya Salām, MāShā’Allah, Al-Khawāja huwa Majnūn…Ô Peace, What God has Willed, The Foreigner is Nuts- when KhairAllah explained who we were made us feel that we were among his friends.

The pleasure of soleb

…those fallen capitals for seats, those broken shafts for tethering, this enigmatic but familiar suggestion of a mansion in the desert spaces, may be all the ruin-pleasure the oblivious herdsman gets; unless some travelling enthusiast chances by…

-The Pleasure of Ruins, Rose Macaulay

We passed the temple of Soleb from a distance and at a fast pace, lucky to get the camels and its columns in the same shot. We didn’t get near enough to see its fallen capitals and shafts, nor to see goats sheltering in its shade, nor to see the graffiti that Western enthusiasts visiting Upper Nubia- Frédéric Cailliaud, John Lewis Burckhardt, Karl Richard Lepsius, Francis Frith- left in the 19th Century CE after the days of its 14th Century BCE builder Amenhotep the Great, father of King Tut. And as with all photography, the full pleasure was delayed until after the visit when the images were finally printed.

GHARĪB, 'AJĪB, AND QARĪB

…and then, widening the hole a little, I inserted the candle and peered in…I was struck dumb with amazement, and when Lord Carnarvon, unable to stand the suspense any longer, inquired anxiously, “Can you see anything?”, it was all I could do to get out the words, “Yes, wonderful things.”

-The Tomb of Tut-ankh-Amen, Howard Carter

I imagine that is what KhairAllah might have thought as he peered into the viewfinder’s telephoto lens, foreshortening the length of the Forty Day Road. Gharīb, Strange. ‘Ajīb, Wonderful. Masr Qarīb, Egypt is Near.