…asida, the Bedouin national dish…an utterly simple meal, but with what keen appetite one attacks it!
-The Lost Oases, Ahmed Mohammed Hassanein, 1925
Lane has the Form I verb of the root ‘-S-D to mean, He Made ‘sīda [Asīda], but also gives, He [a Camel] Bent his Neck towards his Withers in Dying, or simply, He Died. So when the boy cook Ibrahim called out to the drovers, Ta’āla Kul Asīda, Come Eat Asīda, there was good reason perhaps they did not all rush to the common bowl.
In like manner, the footprints of a Sudanese, whatever their differences may be, agree in exhibiting peculiarities which it is vain to seek in the tracks of a fellah or a bedouin. The Sudanese is flat-footed, shows no instep, and has square toes.
-Trackers and Smugglers in the Deserts of Egypt, André von Dumreicher, 1931
The sand was so soft when I went on foot myself, and so exhausting if taking more than five steps, that I never could tell if another’s tracks were made by a camel or a drover. In any case, by the time our herd’s one hundred fifty head- 600 individual feet!- had passed, there was nothing left to see. That is why I think that Dumreicher, a German in the service of the Egyptian Camel Corps, couldn’t tell a fennec fox’s mincing from a dung beetle’s scuttling.
…sand in everything…we chewed rice and sand, bread and sand, and drank foul water and sand…my pencil scraped as I attempted to use it…
-The Great Sahara, H.B. Tristram, 1860
Rereading my trail journal from 1984, written with a stubby pencil that I pulled from my valise at every camp stop, I find grains of sand stuck between its spiral bound pages. Day 1, just outside Al-Nahud, the sand is fine and dusty. Day 15, in the Wadi al-Milk, the sand is reddish and clean. Day 23, beside the Nubian Nile, the sand is silty. Day 40, approaching Binban Bahri, the sand is dirty, Egyptian.
…the confusion of camel loading…caracolling in every direction, except where wanted.
-The Great Sahara, H.B. Tristram, 1860
On our early mornings of the Darb, loading our camels was a placid affair. A bit of growling and shifting their couched legs, a tight cinching of rope girths, and then words of encouragement to take to their feet. Ht! Eg! Hy! And off we went for another eighteen hour day.
I have come to the desert not to indulge in last year’s dolce far niente…
-Diary, Isabelle Eberhardt
Ask the drovers about their idle hours back home in Kordofan between drives up the Darb. Nothing Dolce about them…just eating asīda, still sleeping rough, and drinking half-sweetened tea. Sugar costs money, and theirs was already spent in Cairo.
If you give blood in the desert you won’t/Get it back…
-from “After” by Fady Joudah
This doctor poet has volunteered his time in field hospitals in Sudan. I was thinking it looked like a makeshift surgical suite, the hide opened and laid neatly flat on each side of the carcass like a sterile drape when they butchered that camel with daggers as sharp as scalpels. Adam Hamid was beaming, his hands as blood red as a boiled lobster claw, when he said, Lahma, Meat.
These stars Calypso the beautiful Nymph had bidden him to keep on the left hand as he sailed over the sea.
-The Odyssey, Book V
I wonder if it was the Nymph of Kit Kat, Cairo’s erstwhile red light district, who told KhairAllah to keep al-Jady, the North Star, always on his left cheek. Lane gives the Form II verb of the root J-D-Y as, To Saddle a Camel, almost as in, He Saddled Polaris. And he did, but stopped short of Kit Kat, at the Imbaba camel market, from where he made his way home to Um Badr, his own Ithaca, crossing the wine dark sand sea by rail and lorry.
We passed a few mud and straw cottages and came to the village of Dal where we sent for the Shaikh, who in answer to our demand for lodging showed us to a tree surrounded by camel dung.
-Journal of a Visit to Some Parts of Ethiopia, Waddington and Hanbury, 1822
In 1988 we were received much more warmly by Ahmad Shahīn, the Shaikh of Dāl village deep in its unnumbered cataract where basement basalt erupts from the sand for a five mile run along the Nile’s bed, a place known as the Belly of Stone, a better name for such topography than any geologist might offer, and from there we crossed by rowboat over to Farka and then to Halfa, Aswan, and finally Binban, where we waited for the Dabouka to come in from the West.
Dhzarf, pl. Dhzurūf. Envelope, Circumstance
-Wehr
Hasab al-Dhzurūf fīl-Tarīq, Depending on the Envelopments of the Trail
-KhairAllah, in answer to the question, When do we get there?
KhairAllah was right to have answered with the Arabic word for Envelope, although he may also have intended the word’s secondary meaning, Enveloping Circumstances that made him responsible for us greenhorns for forty days. Minding a Dabouka was nothing compared to minding a Khawaja, we who knew nothing of camels, nor that we had already crossed Egypt’s border yet continued to ask, Imta? When?
Our Ababde camel drivers remarked very simply that we took great pains for little profit, because, go where we might, we would see nothing but earth and stone.
-Journal of a Visit to Some Parts of Ethiopia, George Waddington and Rev. Barnard Hanbury, 1822
The drovers laughed and said something of the like when we first met them at the departure point and explained our purpose of travelling with them. And later, around about Day 25 when the wind was blowing sand into our tea and asīda, they said it again, but this time without humor.
The sound produced by the camel is the same for every sensation and always expressive of discontent, as if every change of situation was painful to him; the same when he is unloaded and fed as when he is beaten.
-Journal of a Visit to Some Parts of Ethiopia, Waddington and Hanbury, 1822
I understand why, under the root R-Gh-W, Lane gives the noun Raghwa to mean, The Single Grumbling of a Camel, and, The Froth of Milk, and also why he gives the adjective Muragh to mean, as a modifer for Kalām [Speech], Language that Does Not Clearly Express its Meaning, and, as an epithet, A She-Camel Whose Milk has Much Froth. Because there were no she-camels in the Dabouka, we had no need of those second meanings, despite the fact that my Kalām was quite Muragh.
I am skeptical of desert views.
-New York Times, December 13, 2024
Lane gives two words for Mirage: Āl, that which raises figures as though they float above the ground, in the early morning, and, Sarāb, that which lowers figures as though they cleave to the ground, at midday. I do not remember seeing a Mirage even once on the trail and KhairAllah never exclaimed that he saw one either, but by night on our late rides many times we saw the unexplained. Shooting stars when our eyes opened, or were they phosphenes when closed? It was hard to know the difference, half asleep under that darkened dome.
It took effort to cultivate our enthusiasms in a desert, but it’s clear now that we took the desert’s role for granted.
-On Browsing, Jason Guriel
Guriel here means that it is difficult to have opinions, to care about something, anything, in a sensory vaccuum, because an opinion needs a point of comparison, a thing against which to react, to compare what we are experiencing with another thing that we might instead experience. Not a real desert, a Sahrā’ or a Baydā’, like the ground we trod in those last ten days. Because after thirty days on the trail, enthusiasm for what lay at its end was growing. A soft bed. A green vegetable. A night without camels.
Here, comprising the overall shape of a camel, are found images of demons, dervishes, embracing couples, rabbits, dragons, and even a Buddhist monk...The meaning of such images is open to interpretation…
-Metropolitan Museum, New York, Accession 25.83.6
Most striking to me in this Persian miniature is the look of wonder on the face of the Attendant, perhaps a Khabīr like KhairAllah who sees the jumble of everything and everybody the camel is packing and asks himself, Forty Days of this?
Composite Camel with Attendant, 16th C, Iran
The caravan has now entered the Kingdom of Nothing…the Madugu [Tamashek word for Khabīr] is the only one who knows the way. Only he can read the markings in the dunes. Only he can read the shadows thrown by the camels ears.
-Tuareg: Warriors of the Dunes, 2013, documentary film, about crossing the Ténéré Desert
The Salt Route between Agadez and Bilma Oasis may be emptier than the Darb al-’Arba’īn, but you should not call it a Kingdom of Nothing. Its dunes are no more unmarked nor its shadows more unreadable. What appears most daunting to the Khawaja is to the Khabīr, the Madugu, just another step forward on his trail.
After the terrible accounts of some travellers I was surprised by the ease of the camel’s motion, and the facility afforded by his size for a change of position and even repose.
-Journal of a Visit to Some Parts of Ethiopia, Waddington and Hanbury, 1822
It is true that, unlike a horse saddle, a camel hump offers an ample surface upon which to rest your buttocks, with crossed legs resting on the animal’s neck, but at the same time it is more difficult to move about in the seat, as you cannot stand up in stirrups to rearrange things down below.
Lisbon Tile Museum