chanting, professing, and retching

Do camels really spit? Yes, and it’s most unpleasant. They aren’t actually spitting, though—it’s more like throwing up!

-Camel Fact Sheet, San Diego Zoo

In Cairo I’d learned the verb To Vomit as Rajja’a, the intensive Form II of Raja’a, To Return, but Wehr instead gives Rajja’a as, To Sing or Chant in a Vibrant, Quavering Tone, and Lane gives it as, To Repeat the Profession of Faith [There is No God But God…], First in a Faint Voice, Second in a Strong Voice, although neither dictionary does justice to the sounds of our retching after we drank from the sulphurous Kalabsha wells.

The Herb we found

Those vast Wildernesses, where there is neither to be found Bird, nor Wild Beast, nor Herbs, nor so much as a little Fly, and where nothing is to be seen but Mountains of Sand, and the Carcasses and Bones of Camels, Imprint a certain horrour in the Mind.

-A Voyage to Aethiopia in the Years 1698, 1699, and 1700, Charles Jacques Poncet

You would be surprised by the herb we found on the Darb, some in the genus Alhagi (from Arabic’s al-Hajji, Pilgrim, whose roots are the deepest of all plants in proportion to their height), Camelthorn or Manna Tree, used in folk medicine as a purgative, expectorant, diaphoretic, and diuretic to treat piles, warts, and migraine, which none of us had, Al-Hamdu LiLlah.

On the way from Khartoum

Courtesy prevailed however, and as we withdrew I contented myself with saying only, You are on your way to Khartoum, I presume. A long, arduous journey.

-Guardian of the Horizon, Elizabeth Peters

Mahdi Abu Jaib’s friend Ali al-Hajj accompanied me on that first midnight flight from Cairo to Khartoum forty years ago. Mahdi had said to him, Ali, Take care of the Khawaja. The flight took only a couple hours. It was the journey back with KhairAllah, to whom Mahdi’s father Bashir had said the same thing, that was long.

Flies, clouds, or the pits

Dhibāb, Thin Clouds like Smoke. Dhibn, [Camel] Armpit. Dzibāb, [the Common Fly] the Black Thing that is in Houses and Falls into Vessels and Food

-Lane’s Lexicon, Entries for the triliteral roots Dh-B-B, Dh-B-N, and Dz-B-B

In Sudanese Arabic, the consonants Dh and Dz are pronounced as D, so the colloquial word I learned for Fly was Dibāba (sing.), Dibāb, Dibbān (pl.), and thus I heard the name of the village we passed early on the Darb as Um Dibbān, Mother of Flies, but later I saw it spelled as Um Dhibbān, which can be read as Mother of Thin Clouds or, with a bit of linguistic license, Mother of Armpits. If it wasn’t Mother of Flies, I knew how KhairAllah must have heard it, for he didn’t like the smell of Um Dibbān either.

12 feet high

There are highlights to riding…a great view almost twelve feet above the ground, and at night you can close our eyes, hold tight to the saddle, and imagine yourself anywhere.

-Letter from Daoud to Yousef, written mid-journey in March 1984, posted from Cairo some weeks later

It may seem odd for years to imagine yourself in the Sahara, and when finally you are, riding at midnight with drovers pushing the herd north under a starry firework, then to imagine yourself in altogether another place. As Cavafy warned from Egypt, Don’t hope for things elsewhere: there’s no ship for you, there’s no road.

My dromedary for a bakery

I was in the store across from my old house, donuts were on the counter, spongy, warm, and so fresh, but when I reached for my money, Sudanese coins fell from my pocket. I opened my eyes and night poured in…Well, it’s the middle of our 34th Day, is it possible?…Fortunately now the days go by easily, but in the beginning, each day seemed like a year…aware of each step, always awaiting the next.

-Letter from Daoud to Yousef

By days and steps, that is how we measured the Darb. Also by the phases of the moon, and the slackening of the goatskins, and the distemper of the drovers, but for the Khawajas, by the clarity of our dreams…Daoud’s of a donut, mine of a baguette. If we’d told the others, they would have laughed and said, Al-Nāyim Huwa Sultān, The Sleeper is a Sultan…Why waste your wishes on a bakery?

No worse a journey

But this journey had beggared our language; no words could express its horror.

-The Worst Journey in the World, 1922, Apsley Cherry-Garrard

For its title alone I had wanted to read this book, about a near fatal expedition to collect Empire penguin eggs from Antarctic rookeries in mid-winter. Back in London while waiting to hand them to the Director of the Natural History Museum, a secretary told Cherry-Garrard, Sorry, He’s too busy to see you now, Why don’t you leave the eggs with me. I might have felt the same about the petrified wood I’d picked up along the Darb, thinking it was something unique, only to later learn what any fool already knew, that the Sahara had once been green.

Camels asea

Their camels could no more be counted than the sand at the seashore.

-Book of Judges 7:12

Strange that the Hebrew Bible’s most common expression, As Uncountable as [Sea] Sand, should specify the beach, not the desert, just as the whole of the Quran contains no mention of Raml, Sand, so I begin to think that both Israelites and Muslims when at their prayers were happy to forget their natural habitat.

Beguiled in bab al-lūq

Before beasts of burden were banned in the 1990s, the city was more pastoral…Sadly, the herds of camels that once beguiled Cairo traffic while loping across the Giza Bridge have been detoured to a market outside the city.

-Cairo: City of Sand, Maria Golia

It isn’t said that those camels had only a few hours left to live on their way from the Imbaba livestock market to the slaughter house in Masr Qadīma. I saw plenty when I lived in Cairo and later saw where they had come from in Kordofan and how they had gotten to the Giza Bridge. If I’d known in 1979 what I learned in 1984, I’d certainly have been more beguilted than beguiled everytime I ate camel meat kufta in a Bab al-Lūq restaurant, not to be confused with Bab al-Lūk, Gate of Chewing.

Living in the mafāza

Fāza, Form I, He Attained, Acquired, or Won Good Fortune, He Perished, He Died…Fawwaza, Form II, He Went to the Desert…Mafāza, A Place of Safety, A State of Temporary Safety Between the Present Life and That Which is to Come, A Desert in Which is no Water for the Space of a Journey of Two Days or More

-Lane’s Lexicon

This root is just one of Arabic lexicography’s many head scratchers, its meaning containing multitudes, as Lane says, Two Contrary Significations. But the drovers may not have seen the apparent contradiction in what he gives for Mafāza, because I too sensed that the Darb was a State Between Two Other States, the Past Perfect and the Future Conditional.

12 journeys twixt Egit and nubye

And between Egipt and Nubye it hath well a twelve journeys of desert.

-The Travels of John Mandeville

It is amazing that this 14th C pseudonymous plagiarist of others’ Travels should be accurate about the day stages between Nubia and Egypt, let us say Dongola and Binban, for in fact it was twelve days of riding, passing Kerma, Argo, Solb, Abri, Hamīd, Farka, Argīn, Toshka, Abu Simbel, Kalabsha, the High Dam, and Aswan, headed north, not stopping.

Meat in trees

And for that cause men pass that desert with camel. For the camel find alway meat in trees and on bushes, that he feedeth him with.

-The Travels of John Mandeville

The fruit of a desert gum tree is truly a poor man’s meal, a tiny legume in a tiny pod, much smaller than the carob pods and seeds that fed John the Baptist, and it seems near impossible that browsing them our camels could find nourishment of any kind, Bread or Meat, Leaf or Thorn.

Majhal on the darb

It seemed to the nineteenth century admirable, but not remarkable, that Chinese Gordon put on a clean white suit and held Khartoum against the Mahdi.

-Joan Didion

The drovers thought it remarkable but not admirable that I was making my second trip on the Darb. The first could be forgiven as the mistake I had made in ignorance, but to ride a second time, knowing full well…? Jāhil, Ignorant, which gives the concept of Al-Jāhiliyya, Time of Ignorance, and more pertinent to my case, Majhal, as Lane gives, A Desert in Which There are No Signs of the Way, or, A Habit that Induces a Man to Believe Something to be Different from What It Is.

Camels, neither fish nor foul

Rather hear the flatulence of the camel than the prayer of the fish.

-Arabic Proverbs, 1830, J.L. Burckhardt

Burckhardt notes that Egyptians so fear a one day sea voyage that they’d prefer a one month camel caravan. I wonder what message we were sending the drovers when, pointing to a jet passing overhead, they teasingly asked why we had not taken it. Riding in our usual positions at the rear of the herd, we replied, Ahsan Hina, Better Here.

Handsy for the gravy

He descends [his hand into the communal dish] like a crow’s foot and ascends like a camel’s hoof. (Said of an ill-bred person affecting refined manners)

-Arabic Proverbs, 1830, J.L. Burckhardt

Burckhardt must have shared many a bowl with those who daintily dipped in their fingers and pulled out the mutton. And just so ate I at the beginning of each meal, pulling out not mutton, for there was none at our dinner, but rather as much pepper sauce as my fingers could sop, because there is nothing worse than when your side of the aseeda dish has only millet and the man squatting opposite has all the gravy.

Unbelievers still

A camel is a retromingent animal…When a bull camel is sexually aroused, however, its penis moves forward, changing the direction of urination.

-The Daily Wildlife

Do they [Unbelievers] not look at camels, how they were created.

-Quran 88:17

Allah thinks that it takes only one look at a camel to become a Believer, yet we Khawajas kept company with camels for forty days and ended the drive just as we’d set out, Unbelievers still.