We went...

We went forth to the desert land…

-Line 9 from Stela JE59499, Jebel al-Asr (Chephren’s Quarry), 65km NW of Abu Simbel, Reign of Amenemhat III, 18C BCE

I wish I’d known about this Stela, inscribed by a royal stonecutter no doubt angry to have been sent so far from the Nile, when our Dabouka passed close by in our last days on the Darb. We too had gone forth to the desert land and also returned with words worth writing. I read recently that this Pharaonic quarry site, desert no longer, has been bulldozed and levelled for the Toshka Canal’s pivot irrigation scheme.

My magnificent brother

The postman came to me bringing a letter from your paternal magnificence about a camel and I am very grateful for having been deemed worthy after so long of your honored words…To my master the most magnificent comes Peter, from Theodosius

-Letter 1164, circa 6C CE, The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, Vol. viii

I wonder what papyrologists might make of the letter I wrote as KhairAllah’s scribe in mid-journey when we crossed paths with a friend who agreed to carry news of a lost camel back to a third party, KhairAllah having instructed me to take dictation, writing in pen on lined paper from the notebook I used as a trail diary. I opened with the greeting, Yā Akhī ‘Adzīm, as KhairAllah addressed the letter’s recipient, O My Magnificent Brother, which I knew to spell correctly, but everything else I wrote was in first year student of Arabic gibberish.

A general in wartime

The Khabīr had to be fair...During the crossing he had virtually the authority of a general in wartime.

-Khabīr Ali at Home in Kubayh: A Brief Biography of a 19th Century Caravan Leader, Michael La Rue, African Economic History, No.13, 1984

It should not be thought extraordinary that Khabīr Ali bin Ibrahim’s name is remembered still today. Like Ali, caravan leader of the Darb al-Arba’īn, Khabīr KhairAllah also commanded an army of sorts, a camel cavalry on its death march to the slaughterhouses of Cairo.

Crossing the desert, intensively and causatively

Form I, Fāza, To be Successful, To be Victorious, To Triumph. Form II, Fawwaza, To Cross the Desert.

-Wehr

Form II verbs (formed by doubling the middle consonant of the triliteral root) give an Intensive or Causative meaning to Form I verbs, such as, Form I, To Break, Form II, To Smash, or Form I, To Enter, Form II, To Bring Inside. So the fact that the verb Fāza (with its middle consonant W, one of Arabic’s “weak letters”, disappearing in Form I) when Intensified means this says much about KhairAllah’s good fortune crossing the desert, or perhaps Causatively, what made him do it at all.

Dying to sit on a camel

Is there any way he can sit on a camel in Egypt? I’m dying for him to be on a camel.

-A criminally charged US Senator’s wife, writing to an Egyptian spy, New York Times, June 25, 2024

Of course there is a chance for that! replied the spy. Of course, replied Hajj Bashir when I asked if I might join his drovers on the Darb al-’Arba’īn. But let this be known, Sitting on a camel, Being on a camel, is very different from Riding on a camel. Lane gives Rakiba as, To Mount, to Ride an Animal, and in a metaphor with Raml, Sand, as, He Went upon, or Trod, or Travelled the Desert. Wehr further gives Rakiba’s secondary meaning as, To Commit a Crime.

Moving north, tasting death

I forced my legs to move on north…I took my shelter in the bush…Thirst struck, it overwhelmed me, I panted, my throat parched, I said, This is the taste of death…

-Story of Sinuhe, early 12th Dynasty, circa 1950 BCE, Middle Kingdom

Sinuhe, “Servant of the Royal Chambers”, worked for the Pharaoh Amenemhat I. KhairAllah, Khabir al-Darb, worked for Hajj Bashir. For their work they left their families, slept rough, drank little, ate less. And then they returned home, Sinuhe to honors and rest, KhairAllah shortly to leave again to the desert, the same trail again leading north, his throat again parched, the taste of death again in his mouth…or was it only yesterday’s Asīda?

Swallow a camel, drinking sand

You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.

-Matthew 23:24

In the film there is a great shot of Bilal with a camel hobbled behind him, the howling wind stirring up sand all around while he crouches at the breakfast fire covering his tea glass with the flat of his hand and looking at the sky with bloodshot eyes after a short sleep, as if thinking, Better not swallow any more of that shit.

Les Kababiches

Chaque chameau a toujours son chamelier; c’est ce qui n’a pas lieu chez les Kababiches qui font le transit du désert du Kordofan…

-Journal de Voyage de Siout à El-Obéid, 1857-1858, Charles Cluny

On his desert crossing Cluny took his 11 year old son with the goal of teaching him to know his fellow man. Lucky for the boy that the men he travelled with were of the Kababiches.

Al-Khabīr, he who knoweth

Every desert traveller in every caravan is led by a principal camel driver called a Khabīr…This reminds me of the owners of boats on the Rhône. You call them Captain so that they not think badly of you, even though they know little more than an ordinary sailor.

-Journal de Voyage de Siout [Asyut] à El-Obéid, 1857-1858, Charles Cluny

It was good that Cluny did not tell his Khabīr how little he regarded the latter’s knowledge of the desert, knowledge so advanced that Al-Khabīr is one of Islam’s ninety nine names of God, as in the meaning given by Lane, He Who Knoweth What Hath Been and What Is and Will Be.

Slippers

I have made most of my expeditions in an arm chair. I am an explorer in slippers.

-In Quest of Lost Worlds: Adventures in North Africa, 1937, Byron Khun de Prorok

This was said by a sedentary man who declined an invitation to cross the Sahara. If fifty years later he had joined Hajj Bashir’s Dabouka, as did the equally sedentary I, he would have met KhairAllah wearing leather slippers, a Kabbāshī’s usual footwear, who said to me, When you get home, then you may sit in a chair.

A good, easy ride

A bad ride was ahead of them and it was difficult to decide whether to go gently, sparing the animals, in which case they might fail from hunger, or whether to ride hard, in which case they might break down with exhaustion or sore feet in mid-desert.

-Robert Graves, Lawrence and the Arabs, 1927

KhairAllah always said, BiRāh, BiRāh, Go Easy, Go Easy. So we did that for those forty days, and when we arrived in Binban and Hajj Bashir saw that his camels were sound and fat for market, he was happy.

Knowing the country

Nobody was anxious for him because he had a camel and knew the country.

-Robert Graves, Lawrence and the Arabs, 1927

A bit like flying a good airplane or sailing a good boat, knowing the lay of the land or the contour of the coastline. Whenever a lone camel rider crossed paths with us and we sat down with him for a palabra, and then he set off again into the desert, we all knew that he knew he could get to wherever he was going safely, as long as he stayed in the saddle.

All the way to cairo?

Bentley: (incredulous horror) Ghira! Feisal: (smiling) Oh yes. I fear you have a long journey. Have you ever ridden a camel? Bentley: I’ve never tried. Feisal: Take a mule. If I were you, I should try…

-Robert Bolt, Lawrence of Arabia filmscript

Feisal smiled at journalist Jackson Bentley’s incredulity. All the way to Ghira? That was like Hajj Bashir’s amusement at my own surprise when he told me the Dabouka marched until midnight. All the way to Cairo? I asked. Take an airplane, KhairAllah said.

Real food, mortified flesh

Close Shot. Tafas is eating a fist full of rancid mutton fat. Lawrence is eating thin arrowroot biscuits which he extracts from their package and eats as neatly as if he were in a vicarage…Tafas looks at Lawrence with a complex of emotions. He takes up his fat and has a brilliant idea. He hands it over eagerly. He laughs deprecatively at the mutton. Lawrence thrusts out his hand and takes a piece and puts it in his mouth, watched anxiously by Tafas. There is no comedy, and from the steely concentration of his face we see that the flesh is indeed mortified.

-Robert Bolt, Lawrence of Arabia filmscript

Bolt’s shot directions make me wonder how British explorer Leo Tregenza might have acted if his Ma’aza guide Salama Mir’i had done to him what in the opening scene Tafas did to Lawrence, offer to share with him bedouin food instead of the individual rations he ate apart. Salama told me this story fifty years after he’d led Tregenza up the wadis of Egypt’s Red Sea Mountains to the Roman quarry of Mons Porphyrites, Tregenza eating tinned bully beef while Salama and I ate bread baked on coals and slathered with ghee in those same mountains.

Suspension oléopneumatique

The latest news of the widely advertised tourist route to Timbuktu is that M. Citroën was forced to abandon it because of the attitude of the Saharan tribesmen.

-Ancient Trade Routes from Carthage into the Sahara, Count Byron Khun de Prorok, Geographical Review, 1925

I can imagine crossing the Sahara with a Citroën “suspension oléopneumatique”. A camel hump is spongy with fat and its foot pads are gelatinous, but if Monsieur had succeeded, we could have travelled in “self-leveling, driver-variable ride height”, and camel thief Billa Ali would not have needed the comfortable saddle whose name I wrote down as Bāsūr, but now I find that the only word spelled anything close to that in Wehr means Hemorrhoid.

The sand eats ...

Sand always wins in the end- remember that.

-Out of Egypt, André Aciman

Fill in the blank, Al-Ramla Bitākul … . The Sand Eats … . KhairAllah said that about Na’na’, Mint, when I bought fresh leaves in the Dongola souk and he bought dry. The next day, mine were a greasy rotting mess in a plastic bag. We threw his into the teapot until they ran out two weeks later. The Sand Eats … , Na’na’ Tāza, Fresh. So we drank of them Nāshif, Dry.