Unknown from the south

First there came the land of the Kau tribes. And then, farther to the south, the Wawat and the Sethu. Still farther south lived the warlike Mazoi. The land of the Arthat lived to the south again, and lastly, not much below the Second Cataract, there lived the almost unknown people of Aam. Who dwelt to the south of this, the Ancient Egyptians did not know…a distance that sufficed to twist the thoughts of the market-gossiper from the mortal to the immortal.

-Travels in the Upper Egyptian Deserts, Arthur Weigall, 1909

Weigall is speaking here as a souk seller looking upriver, measuring his life not in coffee spoons but rather in kilogram weights. I met such market traders in Dongola when the Khabīrs came to town to resupply, and I heard them whispering the tribal names of these camel men from the south…not Kau, Wawat, Aam, Mazoi, but rather Kawahla, Hamari, Shenabla, Kababish.

Unknown in the water

I could taste camel urine in the water…it was the attraction of the unknown rather than any love of deserts which was luring me...

-Arabian Sands, Wilfred Thesiger

That was all in the mystery of drinking water from a goatskin filled from a well whose name I hadn’t heard when KhairAllah said it. Mahtūl? ‘Idd Ahmad? Kalābsha?…How sweet would it taste? How dirty would it look? How sick would I get? It did seem odd that the risk of desert travel would be in the drinking and not in the traveling.

A Mythic khabīr

The old Darb al-Arbain caravan route…now enshrined in the mythology of the Western Desert…

-Alan Roe, The Darb al-Arbain and Kharga Oasis in Antiquity, Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt, Vol.42

As John Ford said about Liberty Valance, When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. The Darb in fact is just one damned day after another, forty if you’re fast and forty five if you’re slow, but that would make one hell of a boring movie, so we made KhairAllah on the screen what he already was on the trail, mythic.

Meandering a dune maze

…the course of the Nile describes a huge “S” curve- one of the largest meanders in the world. Here the name Nubia is imprinted on the map.

-Nubia: Corridor to Africa, William Adams

KhairAllah’s route was usually dead straight and he only meandered once, in the Nubian Nile’s Delgo Notch. Here the river’s northern course inexplicably turns 90° due east for ten miles, then due north for thirty miles, then back 90° to the west before bending again sharply north, leaving in the void a tangle of paths criss-crossing amongst the dunes like a mixed-up corn maze. When lost and if cloudy with no sun to steer by, one can go in near circles, as did we for much of the day.

Grass and meat

Ibrahim appeared at one o’clock as if nothing were ready. “You are laughing at me,” he said, “but I tell you the camels are ready.” “Very well then, so am I; let us start tomorrow at dawn.” “Impossible,” he replied, “there are yet many preparations to be made.” “Well then Ibrahim,” I said, “you see I am ready; when the camels are ready, then tell me.”

-St John Philby, The Heart of Arabia: A Record of Exploration and Travel, 1922

Philby was adept at Arabic word play. Ready or not? Today or tomorrow? KhairAllah said he would slaughter a goat when we passed the wells at ‘Iyāl Bakhīt, but on the promised day, when we had not yet arrived and instead paused to pasture the herd, I asked him when, and he answered, “Did you not see that we passed the wells last night? I did not to stop because grass is better than meat.” To graze or to grill?, that is the question.

A desert like a sea upon them

This was a long and painful and in two respects a dangerous journey; first, if they were to lose their provision of water, as for several days none could be obtained; secondly, if a violent south wind should rise against them while they were travelling through the wide extent of deep sands, blowing the sand together in heaps and raising, as it were, the whole desert like a sea upon them…

-Plutarch, Life of Alexander, On His Crossing the Western Desert to Siwa Oasis

We ran out of water once and it led only to grumbling, nothing dangerous, and when the wind rose it only blew sand in our tea, nothing dangerous, so no, either Plutarch exaggerated the perils of the Western Desert or crossing from East to West as did Alexander is longer and more painful than it is from South to North, as did we.

The Etymological truth

Jamalaka Allah (Meaning, May Allah Melt Thee, Just as Fat is Melted) is an Imprecation mentioned in a Tradition of the Prophet used by a Woman.

-Lane’s Lexicon

When browsing Lane’s entries for the triliteral root J-M-L, which I knew gave the meanings Camel and Beauty, I found three usage examples for the Form I verb Jamala…He became Beautiful, and, He Melted Fat, and the phrase, Jamala al-Jamal, He Put the He-camel Apart from the She-camel that was Fit to be Covered. So here is the Arabic etymological truth…Camels, Beauty, Sex, and Fat are all of one family.

As you see him, so you see me

I am the son of my father, as you see my father, so you see me, he is honest and has fidelity, and I am so proud of him.

-Email from KhairAllah’s son, June 2, 2024

KhairAllah moved his family north during a pause in the fighting in December 2023. His son followed a week later after he’d secured their house from armed marauders as best he could. Soliman was born of a camel man but not of the camel life, so for that he’ll have to listen to his father’s stories of the Darb, or to mine, that I tell of his father.

A lit fuse burning north

The greatest tragedy is that none of it was necessary.

-Samawal Ahmed, Khartoum resident, quoted in New York Times, June 5, 2024

KhairAllah and his family escaped war-torn Omdurman at the end of last year for Al-Dabbah, a river town in Northern Province. The news photos of death and destruction in the capital’s tri-city, which I knew well, punch the gut, more Gaza than Darfur. KhairAllah’s son Soliman tells me that Al-Dabbah is quiet, but the fighting might at anytime run down the Nile from Khartoum like a lit fuse.

Abode of peace

Hi louis, how do you do, I hope you are fine and your family too, We thank God we are alive and safe too…I returned home to Dar el-Salam four days ago looking for the internet…regards Soliman

-Email from KhairAllah’s son, October 23, 2023

It had been two months since I’d last heard from Soliman. The family had moved away from home in search of safety and Soliman returned to his Omdurman neighborhood Dar al-Salām, Abode of Peace, now all shot to hell, looking for a connection. Forty years after first meeting his father, I want to tell Soliman, We have never lost it.

No word, then word

Hi louis, how are you doing, we are fine, but we are not far from the line of fire, we have nothing to do about it, no internet, no network all the day but for a few hours, most markets are closed these days, no bank is working, Greetings Soliman 

-Email from KhairAllah’s son, August 23, 2023

I was worried, their mobile phones had not answered for three months, maybe the cell towers were down, maybe they had fled to Um Badr and left behind their phones, worthless in unserved Dar al-Kababish, but then this came through.

The Sahara suggests

I know a young man who declares after reading a certain explorer’s account of his journey across the burning Sahara, he found to his amazement that his nose was covered with freckles.

-Travels in the Upper Egyptian Deserts, Arthur Weigall, 1909

Thus the desert works on the mind. If merely talking about taking a drink conjures a vision of an oasis pool, or if merely by reading about the noonday sun, your face erupts in red, then equally sure, a rocking saddle when crossing a dune field causes you to dream of a rolling ship in a rough sea. But maybe I was too tired to dream at all. When once in the night our herd’s yearling bit me in the ass, mistaking my sleeping bag for his feed sack, I awoke thinking, My God, A camel just took a bite from my backside.

Echoing red river

After some travel until the middle of the day, we arrived at a new landscape. Here was a brackish tarn, or moor, or heath- a desolate land, most resembling a desert, yet not sandy and dry, but damp and soggy…The Northmen call this place the desert of dread.

-Eaters of the Dead: The Manuscript of Ibn Fadlan, Relating His Experiences with the Northmen in A.D. 922 , Michael Crichton

Crichton’s fiction mashes up Ibn Fadlan’s travelogue to the Russian North and the horror of Beowulf, with a bit of Borgesian metacommentary. I on the other hand couldn’t keep echoes of the Chisholm Trail’s cowpuncher diaries, Howard Hawks’ Red River, and the tall trans-Saharan tales of Leo Africanus from creeping into Voice of the Whip.

Voicing names

I met a traveller from an antique land/Who said…/The lone and level sands stretch far away.

-Mad Shelley

Much is missing between those two verse thoughts, filling forty generations, far more than the Darb’s forty. Permit their names be heard…Bilāl Bakhīt, Yusuf, Muhammad al-Himri, KhairAllah Khair al-Sayyid. And these were just those, Khabīrs all with cold command, who Voiced the Whip, Sawwata al-Sawt, on a trail stretching far away.

Worthless Scattered dust

Wind is the Alpha and Omega of the Western Desert. It creates and destroys…blasting…carving…sometimes a breeze, more often a blast.

-A Guide to the Oases and Western Desert of Egypt, Cassandra Vivian

I can hear Mas’ūd still today, saying something about the Sāfiyā’, on a day when the north wind blew hard, a word I didn’t know until just now when I found it in the dictionary next to Saqat, a word I also heard said that day, thinking it then a synonym for Wind. But no, Wehr gives Saqat as, Any Worthless Thing, and Sāfiyā’ as, from its verb, To Raise and Scatter (Said of Dust in the Wind).

Names on shards

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, I, Gôlthě, write to David the Camel Driver, saying, I direct thee, and here is the Word of God, to see to the Camel of Apa Philotheos…and again, here is the Word of God, thou mayest go North and thou mayest go South, for I demand no other but this...

-Ostrakon No.5894, Coptic and Greek Texts of the Christian Period from Ostraka in the British Museum, 1905

David, Joseph, Zaël, Mathias, and Hôr are camel drivers from antiquity known to us from their names written on Ostraka, Pot Shards. Yusuf, Bilal, Rabih, Ibrahim, and Abdullah might be so lucky if history remembers their names after driving camels on the Darb, Inshā’Allah.