Keep on going south

…the bright desert lay ahead.

-”A Distant Episode”, Paul Bowles

This story was published two years before The Sheltering Sky, with similar plots…a Westerner is captured by nomads at the desert’s edge and taken deeper and deeper into the Sahara, abused physically- rape, tongue cutting- and mentally along the way, and finally released. Said Bowles, “the desert is the protagonist”, a thing itself that never speaks, despite what the soon-to-be glossectomized Westerner is told, “Keep on going south…you’ll find some languages you never heard of before.”

Where wagons do not trample

This, too, I order from you: tread the way that wagons do not trample. Do not drive in the same tracks as others or on a wide road but on an untrodden path, even if yours is more narrow.

-from the Aetia, Callimachus of Alexandria (310-250 BCE), lines spoken to him by Apollo

One might say that the Darb today is quite well trampled, by asphalt and refugees from civil war, yet in those days there were no wagons, no lorries, not even army patrols. With KhairAllah in the lead, a Khawaja may be forgiven for assuming he was following the route home taken by Old Kingdom Pharaoh Pepi II’s trail boss Harkouf, that no one since the 3rd millennium BCE had seen these same stones, these mountains and dunes in the Wadi al-Milk.

A tedious motion

For ladies it will be well to take asses, as they are a relief to the tedious motion of a camel.

-Sir J.G.Wilkinson, Topography of Thebes, 1835

Ladies will regret choosing a donkey’s jangly, four-beat walk over a camel’s two-beat pacing gait, one so smooth that it lulls you to sleep. They add up, a donkey’s four individual foot falls for a camel’s every two, whose right legs swing in unison as then do its left. And after a while, say in forty days, the rat-a-tat-tat of a donkey’s double-time march might well drive a lady crazy.

Proof of ignorance

The traveller coming by the desert who cannot forego comfort must be provided with…tents for himself and servants, a camp bed with curtains, mosquito nets, blankets, wax candles, pack thread and needles, lined or double umbrellas, a small carpet, and a supply of bottled water for his own use- for the water of the Desert may not suit the taste or expectations of everyone.

-Sir J.Gardner Wilkinson, Topography of Thebes and General View of Egypt, 1835

Sir Gardner also suggested buying gifts- the smaller, the better- for shaikhs and other notables one might meet in the middle of nowhere, for “they would only consider greater presents as proofs of greater ignorance in the person who made them.” But that was not my experience at all. The proof of my greater ignorance was merely an inability to remount my camel after dismounting in order to greet them face to face.

Cambyses takes the hard way

…Cambyses himself went on towards Æthiopia. But before his army had accomplished the fifth part of their journey…they ate the beasts of burden until there was none left…they kept themselves alive by eating grass; but when they came to the sandy desert, some did a terrible thing, taking by lot a man and eating him.

-Herodotus 3:26

Cambyses sent half his army west from Thebes to Siwa and the other half he led deeper south, probably not far off the Nile-side tracks we made coming north 2,500 years later. Why he left the river’s edge to push through a sandy desert is a mystery. Herodotus thought him insane. If he had been with us, we would have thought that too, for him to prefer dry grass and human flesh over the fresh peas and beans of Mahas, giving us a brief respite from our hated asīda.

Khairallah, sealbearer of Hajj bashīr

The expedition leader Iri…

-Hieroglyphic Graffito found in Wadi Isa, published in The Eastern Desert of Egypt: Routes and Inscriptions, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, January 1984, Lanny Bell et al.

Iri’s Old Kingdom title- literally, God’s Sealbearer (meaning, a man who enriched the royal treasury through expeditions to foreign lands)- was what we call today a Khabīr. The titles preceding other names in nearby graffiti were translated as Captain of the Ships and Master of the Oarsmen, bringing to mind these two Arabic metaphors for common Camelmen, Sailors of the Sands and Pasturers of the Dungmakers.

Odor camelorum

Evangelizers thus take on the “smell of the sheep”…

-Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis

…we collected and analyzed the VOCs of camels from four of its different odour sources: breath, body (skin), urine, and dung.

-Shared Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) Between Camel Metabolic Products…, Merid Getahun et al., ICIPE, Scientific Reports, December 8, 2020

I note that Merid Getahun and his team did not study the fifth and most pungent source of camel odor, the Fuswa (Lane has it as “a noiseless puff of wind”), or the Dzarta (“a single emission, making a sound”), depending on how gassy their browsing of acacia leaves had made them.

What was it?

Well, you walk into the room like a camel, and then you frown/You put your eyes in your pocket and your nose on the ground/…/’Cause something is happening and you don't know what it is/Do you, Mr. Jones

-Dylan

Better to ask Mr. Jones than Mr. Magoo, who couldn’t see anything anyway. The room we rode into was forty days long and we didn’t even know whether to dress for its hot days or its cold nights. But the worst came later in 1984, that famine year, when the harvest failed completely and those abandoned Tukuls we passed in February by December had become grave markers.

Æthiopian stars

Bartsch interpreted it as the camel on which Rebecca rode into Canaan for her marriage to Isaac, as told in Chapter 24 of the book of Genesis. But Camelopardalis is a giraffe not a camel…

-Ian Ridpath, Star Tales

German astronomer Jakob Bartsch (1600-1633) drew a star map with this constellation in which he imagined the Bible story unfolding. But the fact it is found beside the mythological Æthiopian King Cepheus and his Queen Cassiopeia puts these stars back where they rightly belong, not in the Fertile Crescent but rather in Africa, perhaps along the Darb, the night sky full of them.

Gold on trees

He remembers that day and when I mentioned this to him, he said that he thought those stones were gold stones.

-email from Soliman KhairAllah, April 15, 2025

I asked Soliman to ask his father if he remembered the day I gathered chunks of petrified wood in the Wadi al-Milk and packed them onto my camel. At the time he said to me, Ma Yinfāsh, They are useless, and I told him they would be my souvenir of the trip. Forty years later, those stones lie in my drawer and KhairAllah now thinks they were valuable, that I had been ahead of my time, because Sudan exports so much gold mined along the same Wadi.

Meteorites and tombstones

Camel herder Mohamed Bagouma reckons it was about a decade ago that he started looking for meteorites. “To me it was strange,” said Bagouma…“We had thought the rocks were useless.”

-Washington Post, April 15, 2025, On the hunt for meteorites in the far reaches of the Sahara

We found much of terrestrial geological note in the Western Desert. Petrified wood. Oyster banks. Iron oolites. Yardangs and drumlins. But extraplanetary, never, and a good thing, too. Rujum, Meteorites. Rujam, Tombstones. From the verb Rajama, To Stone, or To Curse, Damn, Revile.

Good luck to camel herders

I wish the best of luck to these nomads.

-Reader Comment, Washington Post article on camel herders hunting meteorites in the Sahara

The odds of being struck by a meteorite, 1:1,600,000. The odds of you finding one? Much better than that if you are a camel herder in Mauritania, the population density of its desert north subceeded only by Greenland and Pitcairn Island. And the odds of winning a powerball lottery? 1:292,000,000. So wish your best of luck to where it’s needed most, to those not herding camels in the Sahara.

Al-Dabba where camels drink

Dabba. Hill, Heap, or Place Abounding in Sand. Hence the proverb, Such a One Fell into a Place Abounding in Sand, Meaning, a Camel in Such a Place Suffers Fatigue.

-Lane’s Lexicon, entry for the root D-B-B

KhairAllah is now living in al-Dabba. I sent his son a link to the Library of Congress holding of a digitized British colonial map in 1:250000 scale, 4 miles per inch, of that Nile-side town and its environs. On it I see the village of Khuleiwa, 3 inches north of Dabba, where we watered the Dabouka after coming in from the Wadi al-Milk. KhairAllah told Soliman to remind me of Khuleiwa’s biggest camel merchants from those days, Muhammad Salih al-Dawayd and Muhammad Wad al-Nūr, two more names for someone else’s memory hole.

Whoa, ikh, and shh

Whoa camel. Whoa! When I say whoa, Camel, I mean WHOA!

-Yosemite Sam

Whoa is Ikh, unless you ride a Darfuri camel, in which case it is Shh. I looked at Wehr and Lane under the root ‘A-Kh-W, Brother or Friend, thinking I might find a meaning there for Ikh, but found only Khuwei, ‘Akh’s Diminutive, Little Brother, Little Friend.

bed fit for a king

Surūr. Happiness, Joy, Gladness. Sarīr. Bedstead, Couch, Throne, Said to be Derived from Surūr, because it Belongs to Persons of Ease and Affluence, and to Kings. Sarrā’. Freedom from Straitness, of the Means, or Circumstances, of Life

-Lane’s Lexicon, entries for the root S-R-R

KhairAllah moved into his new house before the roof was on, so eager was he to be king of his own castle. His son Soliman sent this photo, writing there had been a “heavy dusting” that morning and part of the wall had fallen. No matter, for even so it demonstrated KhairAllah’s Sarrā’.

Discipline in drinking

The subject of man and water in the desert has generated considerable interest and confusion since the early days…At one time the U.S. Army thought it could condition men to do with less water by progressively reducing their supplies during training. They called it water discipline…

-U.S. Army Survival Manual FM 21-76, Chapter 13, Desert Survival

At times, going without water required less discipline than did going with it. When drawn from a sulphurous well, or poured from a new skin that made water smell like goat urine, it almost felt better to let a sip pass from these parched lips.