hands in the asīda

Wear gloves at all times in the desert. Do not place your hands anywhere without first looking to see what is there.

-U.S. Army Survival Manual FM 21-76

At many moonless dinners we shared the asīda bowl with our mates, not knowing where the others’ hands had been on that night’s ride, nor what the boy cook Ibrahim had poured into the boil pot from the bottom of the flour bag. And not one of us was wearing Quffāz, Gloves, from the verb Qafaza, meaning, He Leapt Up, Jumped Up, Sprang Up, or Bounded, as if surprised by the taste.

The way to mother

There is no visible road, only sand blown hither and thither by the wind. You see hills of sand in one place, and after you see them moved to quite another place.

-The Travels, Ibn Battuta, on Crossing the Sahara, ed. H.A.R. Gibb

Our Darb, our Road, was quite visible, as thousands of camel prints converging into a single track, like a watershed converging into a river, maybe visible from a passing airplane, maybe even from an orbiting moon. The wind tried to erase our Way but could not, our destination…Um al-Dunya, Egypt, Mother of the World.

Gold, fruit, and asīda

In this desert there are mountains of sand, and when the wind rises, it covers the caravans and many die from suffocation. Those that escape bring back with them copper, wheat, fruit, all manner of lentils, and salt. And from thence they bring gold and all kinds of jewels.

-The Itinerary, Benjamin of Tudela (1130-1173)

This does not sound like anything the drovers carried, except for the salt, and the lentils if by that was meant millet. No gold, copper, fruit or jewels, although after forty days of eating asīda I would have taken the fruit, especially if it were fresh, over the gold and jewels.

attractions other than sand

I travelled in a caravan whose leader was [ ]…After twenty five days we reached [ ]…It is a village with no attractions…There are no trees, only sand…

-Travels of Ibn Battuta, AD 1325-1354, Vol. IV, edited by H.A.R.Gibb

I felt differently about the village, although Ibn Battuta by the time he wrote these lines about crossing the Sahara had already travelled 75,000 miles over thirty years. This was my first trip up the Darb with KhairAllah, and when we reached the ‘Idd Ahmad well flats in about the same number of days, I found the water we drew and the mutton we ate to be very attractive, in fact, Worthy of a Detour

For want of a Recovery Mechanic

You and your mates have driven down to the coast for a BBQ on the beach. It's been fun, you're full of burger, a bit sunburnt and it's time to go home. But your friend's only gone and got the car stuck in sand. Here are our top tips to get your car free from the sand, and to avoid this happening again. Get digging…Add traction…Give it some gas…

-Blog, British Army Recruitment website for a Job Opening: Recovery Mechanic

Just what we needed on the Darb, a Recovery Mechanic. As KhairAllah said after I dropped a pencil from my saddle in mid-march and he told a drover to dismount and go back and pick it up for me, Ghayr Mushkila, No Biggie.

Old Khabīrs go astray too

The oldest caravan conductors go first, to lead the way…though without a compass, or any instrument of observation, they possess so completely the habit of noticing the most minute things, that they never go astray…

-Réné Caillié, Travels through Central Africa to Timbuctoo, 1830

When it was Old Bilal’s turn to lead the three Daboukas for the day, he had a sharp eye for finding the one Tukul selling Merissa in a village of many that we passed, and after he ducked in for a long draught, we all ended up going astray.

Desert under glass

It was impossible to keep the desert out of the glass.

-The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga, Mohamedou Ould Slahi

Those Saharan dust clouds that blow over the Atlantic Ocean and drop their loads onto the Americas contain large amounts of surface phosphates which fertilize our beverage making crops, including oranges, coffee, hops, even dairy cattle silage and almonds, so yes, one can say that there is a little bit of whatever the Dabouka kicked up along the Way of the Forty in every sip of juice, java, brew, and- ptewh!- nut milk.

Mabrūk, now die

Running is fatal, and life in the desert is a marathon, not a sprint.

-The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga, Mohamedou Ould Slahi

The Marathon de Sables is a seven day, 160 mile race in the Moroccan desert, its aim to finish faster, not fitter, than the others. The Way of the Forty, 1,000 miles from al-Nahud to Binban, is different- its aim to finish fattest, not fastest, for a fat camel fetches a better price than a lean. And all win the same prize…a one way ticket to the slaughter house.

Sand on hand

In this part of the desert it is hard to find a sip without some clean sand in it.

-The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga, Mohamedou Ould Slahi

The drovers had a neat trick for keeping their sips sand-free, by covering the tea glass with the flat of their hand and lifting it hinge-like whenever they took a drink. But that couldn’t be done over the asīda bowl, so every bite of millet we took into the wind, its flour already plenty rough from its country milling, was even grittier than when we’d eat to leeward

Sandstorms, or a pain in the ass

Although stories of whole caravans being swallowed up and buried in sandstorms belong to the realm of fable, it is true that one such storm did destroy 1,500 goats and 2,000 sheep in 1947.

-Lloyd Cabot Briggs, Tribes of the Sahara, 1960

Cambysean myths about lost armies and lost caravans die hard in the Sahara. When it blew fiercely one day on us, Mas’ūd pointed into the wind and said what I heard as Um Duhayr, which the dictionary I was carrying had as, Mother of the Little Eternity, from the word Dahr in the Diminutive form, and I thought to myself, Poetic. But later I asked a Sudanese folklorist if the Kababish always called a headwind by such a name and he said No, so I checked Lane for other variants of the component letter D, and found this for Dthahīr, A Complaint of the Body, or in plain English, Mother of Pains in the Ass, and I thought, Mas’ūd was right.

A Camel left behind

A camel doesn’t have four feet, as most lay people think; it has more than a hundred, and the more, the better.

-The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga, Mohamedou Ould Slahi

It seems paradoxical that this most potent symbol of the desert should be a herd animal, if not exactly gregarious when in a group, at least more willing to join than to be left alone. Several times we passed a single grazer and a drover would then have to whip it back from the Dabouka. Otherwise it would have fallen in with our forty day death march to the Cairo slaughter houses or, if ill-suited to a fast pace, perhaps to an even earlier demise on the trail.

A lone bottle

If a lone vehicle breaks or bogs down in the desert, the crew must stay with it. A vehicle is easier to find than a lone man.

-Desert Operations, Field Manual 90-3, Department of the Army, August 1993

And a man is easier to find than a bottle, which is why that person riding atop the Bedford shouted for the driver to stop and ran back to pick up the empty fifth that had just been thrown out along the sand track to El Obeid in 1962. My cousin told his bottle story to Hajj Bashir’s son-in-law, who had been born there. Surprised by having almost crossed paths fifty years earlier in Kordofan, they looked from where they sat on the terrace towards the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, and I said, Muqran al-Nilayn, Meeting of the Two Niles.

City dweller in a hurry

The following anecdote from the thirteenth century has the value of a parable: “My uncle,” a merchant says, “undertook a voyage to the south to trade gold. He bought a camel to get there. While traveling, he found himself in the company of a city-dweller…Both of them took the caravan back home. My uncle felt comfortable and free from worry: if the caravan left, he mounted his camel; if the caravan halted, he rested. But our city-dweller was exhausted and overwhelmed with worries.”

-The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages, François-Xavier Fauvelle

Mustapha was a tight planner and he assumed the Way of the Forty would get him to Egypt in forty days, not forty-one or forty-five, in time for his trip to the French Alps. It wasn’t likely KhairAllah would have understood if I’d asked him to drive the herd faster on sand so Mustapha could ski on snow, so I said nothing about it.

He [a camel] went not

The key to success in desert operations is mobility.

-Desert Operations, Field Manual 90-3, Department of the Army, August 1993

Speaking of Mobility, a large dune belt in Egypt’s Western Desert is Abu Muharrik, Father of the Mover, but Lane has an odd meaning for the causative Form II verb Harraka, He Urged him [a Camel] to Go, But He Went Not.

An exploratory performance

I was lifted up and placed on a camel where I sat and though dreadfully shaken I was too glad to be relieved of the labour of walking to complain of my beast.

-Travels through Central Africa to Timbuctoo and Across the Great Sahara, Performed in the Years 1824-1828, Vol.1, Réné Caillié, 1830 edition

Caillié was the first Westerner to reach Timbuktu and return alive to tell the tale, a big deal in British and French explorers’ societies at the time, which all had bets riding on who it would be and how well he would play the role. The English translation of his Memoir’s title put it best, “Performed”.

Highwaymen of the way

First of all, you will have to deal with the desert mafia. For if they are not your guides and your guards, they will rob you.

-The Golden Rhinoceros, from the chapter “The Customs of Mali”, François-Xavier Fauvelle

There were rumors of Harāmiyya, Thieves, lying in wait for us along the Way of the Forty. That’s why KhairAllah wanted Nedu to hoist the Aaton on his shoulder when an unknown rider approached, so it looked like a rocket launcher. On the previous trip we’d crossed paths only with Billa Ali, who carried an Enfield, and even though it looked like it hadn’t been fired since WW2, we didn’t want to test our luck.