“That’s him all right.” Faraj confirms. “But he’s on vacation,” he answers my question before I ask it. “Camels need at least three months off every year, or they go crazy.” He takes another look at his vacationing camel, then squeals back onto the blacktop.
I had arranged with Faraj the night before to set Sarah and I up with a desert safari. As usual, the Mohammad had not needed to go to the mountain: Faraj had appeared at my side unbidden, no doubt tipped off by the grapevine go-ahead. “I hear you want to take a desert trek. Where do you want to go? Here, come show me on the map.” As I traced vague trajectories, he set me straight: “Look, I have twenty-five years of experience in this desert. You can go by what you have in your book there, but they don’t know everything. Just leave it up to me, I will make sure you see the most beautiful parts of this desert.” Faraj was not the first local to try to take our plans in hand. But he had a presence that demanded respect. Rather than the slight, often reclining frame possessed by his fellow Bedouins, Faraj had the build of a northern woodsman. He stood half a foot taller and had chest and arms twice the circumference of the mean, and the bristling black beard and sideburns that wreathed his jaw gave his face a more rugged air than the traditional Bedouin moustache. In place of the usual periwinkle headscarf, he wore a black-and-white checked scarf slung around his neck, revealing a curly black mullet. To my amusement and comfort, I found both mullet and scarf reminiscent of my own rural countrymen. Faraj, Cowboy of the Wild Wild East. Best of all, Faraj spoke clear, easy-going Arabic, his Bedouin accent closer to fusshah than the Cairene dialect. And to my delight, he addressed me as an equal, never doubting that I understood. This was a welcome anomaly in the tourism industry, where adherence to the lingua franca of broken but persistent English overrides most attempts to speak the local tongue. Faraj was chill. Faraj was cool. I liked Faraj. So I agreed. But the next morning brought to light that in fact all of Faraj’s Jeeps were either in use or out of order, so he offered to place us in the care of a friend (a network that ten minutes’ stop-driving through St. Catherine proved to include the majority of Sinai’s population). We were to connect with this friend at a meeting point of undisclosed nature about fifty kilometers away. After a quick grocery trip in town in which Faraj selected and bagged our every need with expert nonchalance, we hit the desert highway.
***
Faraj settles back into his regular cruising speed at 160 kph and expounds upon his knowledge of camel psychology. “It’s true you know,” he continues with mounting emotion. “Camels need three months of vacation per year. I know. I’ve had a camel go crazy on me before. It happens quickly, from one day to the next. The camel snaps, then he’s ruined forever. Khalaas. It’s a sad thing, a crazy camel.”I did not doubt Faraj’s sincerity on this point, but I also gathered after a few moments’ conversation that he took great pleasure in deeming things and people “crazy.” Perhaps he just likes to say crazy: “Majnoooooon!” “Majnooneeeeen, kullUhum!” (Crazy! Crazy, all of them!) He soon extended his three-month break requirement to all things that work, even cars: “If we gave our cars three months of vacation a year, they wouldn’t break so easily! They would last for years, like people!” We didn’t say so at the time, but the way Faraj drove his might well drive it majnoon in the near future. Faraj moved on to claim that all people living in cities were also majnooneen, since they never took any vacation. By his estimation, living in a city was tantamount to loss of human nature. He declared himself incapable of bearing more than three days of oppressive city life at one time.
“Here in Sinai, we don’t need any of that. We need the desert, the wind, the sun, each other, that’s it. I grew up in a village you can only climb to by camel, there’s no road. I used to come down only when I had to. But now they’re trying to control our land too . . .” I began to recognize the tirade as Faraj’s speech genre of choice. He moved the eye of his verbal storm from topic to topic, each villain some threat to the freedom of the Bedouin people. He held the Egyptian police in particular contempt.
“It’s majnoon, all of these checkpoints fencing off our land, all of these majnooneen who treat us like criminals as if they had some greater right to be here. Idiots, all of them! They have no respect for this land or for the Bedouins. I hate talking to them. Before I say anything they already act like I’ve done something wrong.”
By this point I have discovered the rewarding practice of one-upping each of Faraj’s outbursts, which never failed to draw his booming repetition and agreement. I throw out a goodie:
“They’re the criminals! But they’re official criminals, paid off to carry out the government’s crimes.”
“Exactly! Official criminals spreading the government’s corruption! Suddenly their word is law, the majnooneen!”
“Corruption always comes from the top! What can we do about it?”
“Exactly! From the top! Bizzzubt, we can do nothing.” And so on. Between the two of us we could have led a good anarchy rally.
Faraj manages to contain his rank hatred when conversing with the majnooneen at the three checkpoints deemed necessary for the tiny village of St. Catherine. He rolls down the window dutifully to the posse of white-uniformed goons staffing each one and answers their numerous questions with terse self-assurance. His condemnations resume seconds after each exchange.
Once on the highway, Faraj began to alternate between demagogy and pedagogy, pointing out features of the Sinai desert. After a few minutes I could distinguish the two principal plants of the Sinai: the siyyal (acacia tree) raatam (a bush with fern-like upward thrust branches. I asked if the washes of shining black rock came from extinct volcanoes.
“No, from water,” he informs me. “All of this used to be covered with water. You know, back in Noah’s time. You know the Prophet Noah, right? Just kidding. No but really, it was covered with water.” I sense that his long experience giving desert tours has precipitated a wealth of half-true myths with which to entertain his charges. Noah? Why not. I did see definite remains of rivers and rivulets in the now hard and broiling rock. Our guide that afternoon would also make constant reference to the Sinai desert’s watery past, to which it owed its rich plant life. I jot everything down in my travel journal, and try not to feel self-conscious about the likelihood that Faraj’s former students engaged in the same activity. I wonder if he has constant déjà-vu. I wonder if all travelers, no matter how engaged and inquisitive they try to be, now appear the same to him: rich, self-indulgent seekers of the Other, no doubt brought on by city-life-induced craziness. Unsatisfied with our own lives, we rely on foreign, ostensibly more “authentic” experiences elsewhere in order to accomplish such vague and self-centered goals as “broadening our horizons” or “seeing how the other half lives.” For one so committed to the preservation of the elements and simplicity in one’s life, such an endeavor must appear pretentious at best, prying at worst.
If the monotony of my company bothered Faraj, he seemed to have his method of dealing with it. He begins to rant about the evils of introducing foreign plant life to the Sinai. I relax back into my conversational role, I too resigned to revert to method rather than attempt to make full sense of my relation to Faraj in that moment. Our mutually supportive call-and-response harangue had begun to gather steam when he took an abrupt turn down a sand path and ground to a halt in front of a small assemblage of tents and cinder-block houses. I felt a pang of consternation at the imminent change of society. I had grown used to Faraj. Faraj was my teacher and my friend. I buck up and face our greeting squad, a herd of children already peering in the car window, the bolder ones saying “haylo, haylo.” Faraj sweeps us past them into a half-tent, half-hut where an older Bedouin man stokes a fire. He rises and greets us, then shows Sarah and me to a mattress against the wall where we were to sit and consume tea as fast as they served it to us. Beyond this development, no further move is apparent. We sip and try to make out the information that Faraj and the man are exchanging. They speak in low and hurried tones, and I can only discern the words “Jeep,” “sahara” and “farah,” the word for wedding party. Faraj must be passing on news of the farah the next day. He had told us about it too, and said he would make sure we got to go to part of it. The party apparently started that night, and would continue all the next day. What else passed between the two men I could not decipher. I try to stay alert in case anyone addresses me.
Soon our role in the social gathering becomes clear. A little girl appears and begins laying out an assortment of scarves and jewelry. Her mother hovers near the doorway, presiding over the transaction from afar. The girl turns to her when we ask to lower the inflated prices. When she refuses, Faraj sticks up for us. “They aren’t tourists,” he murmurs. “They live here. They study Arabic.” I smile at the woman, attempting to assess her reaction to this disclosure. This is difficult to do beneath the black veil covering all but her eyes, which are sizing me up a second time. It occurs to me that contrary to what I might like to believe, my cultural engagement represents no good news to her. She would no doubt prefer a million times an indifferent foreigner, fresh off the plane and ready to spend money, over a kid wearing a Bedouin scarf the wrong way and eking out “salaam ‘aleykum.” Gag me, she must be saying behind her curtain. Just buy something and go away. We do buy something, although at close to half the original asking price, and think we have fulfilled our duty when two new families arrive with identical wares and begin hurriedly spreading them around us. It is disgusting of me to say, but the whole encounter resembles a kind of feeding frenzy: we are the carcass thrown among hungry animals, with only enough meat on us to feed the fastest and cleverest. The latecomers must have received a silent dismissal from Faraj or the man at the fire, because they slink off without a word. The few lingering children receive a harsh reprimand from the fire-stoker and scatter. I hope we have not sown seeds of bitterness among the village families. Perhaps they can share the forty-two Egyptian pounds we contributed to their cause? I have no idea whether Bedouin villages operate on a communal system or not.
The women and children’s role in the “welcome” concluded, men of all ages begin to gather around the fire. All wear identical white ankle-length tunics and periwinkle headscarves (one of which Sarah had just purchased). Each sneaks looks at us and returns our salaams, some showing more entertainment than others at our command of Arabic. We lean against our wall and wait, feeling conspicuously white and female. Eventually a platter of rice with a small pile of salad (tomatoes and cucumbers) in the center appears and the men flock around it.
“Come, come eat,” they urge us, leaving at least half the circle open for us to occupy. They dig in, balling up the sticky rice with their fingers. We follow suit, which incites a low ripple of laughter. A boy appears with two spoons, but we refuse.
“We can eat as you do,” I insisted. But we must not have been doing it right, or the sight of foreign girls eating with their hands cracked them up because the chuckles continue throughout the eating occasion. The rice is delicious. We say so many times.
Then, yella, says Faraj. This is ‘Aid. He introduces us, we think at random, to a young man crouched by the fire. Um, ahlen, we say. He nods, barely looking at us. Okay. Faraj loads our belongings and all other desert-trekking equipment into the back of a pickup truck and then gestures to the front seat. ‘Aid reappears and slides behind the wheel. Ah. Somehow I had thought that Faraj was to be our right-hand man and guardian throughout the expedition. I guess I don’t understand Arabic as well as I thought I did. Sarah and I look a bit dubiously at the cramped front seat, but of course have no choice. We cram in. My years of yoga come in handy as I eke out a way not to straddle the gearshift or sit in anyone’s lap.
***
‘Aid is a whole different animal from the garrulous Faraj. He speaks only when spoken to, and gives brief, simple answers. I make scattered attempts to engage him in these halting conversations, but focus the majority of my attention on devouring our surroundings with my eyes. The Sinai desert changes colors every few minutes; other-worldly rock formations surge from the sand, acacia trees twist upward at their feet. We had left ‘Aid’s village, Arda, around noon and shadows were scarce. About three minutes off the blacktop, our truck gets stuck in the sand. ‘Aid spins the wheels furiously and refuses our offers to get out and push. His solo efforts finally succeed after a few uncomfortable minutes of rocking back and forth in our rut. We praise his technique and brace ourselves against future employments of it.After a twenty or thirty-minute drive through sandy passes and spiky mountains, ‘Aid grinds to a halt in the shade of a large rock and announces a break. A break already? Well, I guess we kind of are already in the thick of it. He pulls out mattresses from the back of the truck and proposes tea, which we decline. He shrugs, then plops down and lights a cigarette. Unsure of what should be done on such a break, we wander around the rock a couple of times, then follow his example and sit in the shade. Silence roars. Sarah, as is her default, hunkers down for a little shuteye. She stretches out with her new Bedouin scarf over her face to protect it from the flies. I take out my notebook and draw. As I sketch the rock formations in front of us, I wonder as I had with Faraj if we are typical or anomalous charges for ‘Aid. Was he used to tourists who ignored him and talked to each other? Or who made more efforts to talk to him? Clearly, he barely spoke English, so if he had had friendly experiences with tourists they would have to have been Arabic-speaking, maybe other students like us. I wanted to be a unique person for ‘Aid. I did not want him to look at me as yet another installment in his monotonous professional life. Although, all things being equal, taking forays into the desert he loves does not seem like a job that one should complain about. Not that ‘Aid was complaining; if anything, he looked pretty content stretched out on his mattress with a cigarette. But he seemed much more interested in playing with his fancy cellphone than in talking to us. After a quarter hour’s pause at least (all of these time estimations suffer from the utter impossibility of quantifying time’s passage in the desert), he speaks for the first time, and reveals the actual purpose of the stop: for us to climb the dune in front of us and take pictures. At our leisure, he stressed. The sun is still high in the sky, so you may want to wait. I wonder how long he reckons we would have to wait before any real change in the position of the sun took place. I decide not to find out and announce that we will go right away. We wave to him from the top as planned and he drives around to the other side to meet us. The sun burns my feet so badly on the way down that I start screaming. I stop abruptly as my arrival at the bottom of the dune reassures my (if altered) survival, but my heart continues to beat at irregular speed as we drive away. I try in vain to shake the scalding sand out of the holes in my sandals.
Our next stop is a well, consisting in a plank-covered hole in a stone with a bucket next to it.
“Come, we are going to clean off,” ‘Aid explains. We follow him and stand on the rock as he sends the bucket down on its rope. As he pulls it back up, he beckons to us to come closer. He dumps the first bucketfull over our scorched feet. Heaven. We sigh with relief and exclaim over and over again how beautiful water is. It works out, actually: the primal nature of our experiences suits our primitive capacity of expression. He draws up bucket after bucket and empties them over our sandy legs and hands, and at last gestures for us to bow our heads and douses the sweaty napes of our necks. We gasp with pleasure and surprise at the cold, and ‘Aid smiles perhaps for the first time. Our wet faces glisten in the sun, our laughter tinkles in the silence and for a moment I can imagine that we are a band of naughty preteens escaped down to a nearby lake for some aquatic flirting. I offer to do him the same favor, but he declines; we stand by while he rinses the same body parts in the same order, then fills up a few empty bottles to use for cooking later. He refuses all help.
As the day continues, I grow more and more determined to reach ‘Aid in some way. He only addresses us by suggesting that we stop to take a picture whenever we declare something beautiful (about every forty-five seconds). “Tsawwarou? Tswawwar?” At first I always decline, in hopes of refuting his apparent belief that our kind regard the world as one big, personalized photo-op. But eventually I give up and agree to let him stop, thus precipitating the play-by-play photo coverage Sarah and I now possess of our day in the desert. Let him think we’re like everyone else, I admonish my smarting pride. And be honest with yourself: you did not come to the Sinai to convince the Bedouin people that not all tourists are the same. You came to take pictures, if in a somewhat figurative sense. Let it go. ‘Aid does not care if you are a typical tourist; ‘Aid is glad you are a typical tourist. So you should not care either.
'Aid
***
That said, I daresay ‘Aid started to warm up to us after awhile. As the sun droops lower and the temperature cools, the desert appears to catch fire, glowing red and orange. This evidence of passing time grants our outing an unspoken resemblance to a roadtrip between friends, and Sarah and I begin to take turns singing our favorite tunes. The guarded distance preserved between us by his silence paradoxically stanched any bashfulness that might otherwise have prevented our adhoc performance in front of a strange man. If he intended to treat us as anonymous picture-taking weirdos from another planet, we may as well seize the opportunity to act as goofy as we pleased. After belting a few selections from Ani DiFranco and co., I turn to ‘Aid and ask him to sing something for us. He hesitates, our freedom from bashfulness apparently not having reached him yet.
“Come on,” I encourage him. “Sing. Anything. Do you know how to sing?”That does the trick. “Of course,” he scoffs, and clears his throat to prove it. He reflects for a moment, and then begins to croon in a low, wavering voice. I repeat “Allaaah, allah,” at what I hope are appropriate cadences as I have heard done in other Arab musical performances. Encouraged, ‘Aid begins to warm up and settles into a more driving melody. Sarah and I clap our hands and he joins us when the terrain allows. Once I capture the melody I oodle along in a mixture of nonsense syllables. We trundle along, our voices bouncing and rattling to the rhythm of the road. The next time we get stuck, ‘Aid lets us get out to push. I guess that privilege only comes with the extension of trust (or with the relinquishing of pride).
This surrender to team spirit does not extend much further however; ‘Aid remains loath to allow our participation in the remainder of the night’s preparations. We thus dawdle about as ‘Aid collects dry wood for the fire, and later as he sets up camp, which in fact consisted of little more than the fire, surrounded with our mattresses and boxes of food supplies. ‘Aid squats and busies himself first with the fire-building, then with the making of yet another round of tea, then with vegetable slicing, then with cooking them. Feeling useless, I insist upon making the accompanying salad. Unfortunately, by this time the sun has gone down and I discover that I possess little talent for slicing tomatoes without a cutting board in the dark. ‘Aid watches my progress, his face expressionless. Wow, I could not possibly be a more annoying charge. I take as long to cut the tomatoes as he took to prepare the entire main dish, and manage to squash most of them in the process. He makes no comment, but I imagine that he secretly feels that he has taught me a lesson about imposing my involvement in the domain of his expertise. We eat in silence, but for our repeated compliments and his occasional encouragements for us to prove our appreciation by eating more.The fire dwindles and the stars emerge in dizzying force, more than I have ever seen at once.
“Look, look at the stars,” ‘Aid urges us, the intensity of his voice suggesting that in the desert “looking at the stars” becomes an activity requiring greater concentration than we cityfolk were used to expending. We stare into the depths and silence creeps closer. Before I let it cover us for sleep however, I press ‘Aid with more questions. By this time, he has a sense of my linguistic appetite and has started offering bits of Bedouin vocabulary unbidden. But I have some deeper inquiries.
“Is it strange for you spending so much of your time with foreigners?”
‘Aid does not understand the question. After a few more attempts, he answers with his usual vague nonchalance,
“No, of course not. This is my work, I have done this for years. Sometimes I take tourists on long trips, a few weeks. It is normal for us.”
“But doesn’t it get boring for you, spending time with people who can’t speak Arabic very well?”
“Many tourists here speak Arabic, many of them are Arabs.”
“And you, if you could travel, where would you want to go?”
“I can’t travel, I don’t have the money. I would go to Saudi Arabia . . . Jordan . . . But I don’t have the money, I’ll never have it.” As usual, I am sorry I asked but am still interested by the answer. You can see Saudi Arabia from the coast of the Sinai, and ‘Aid can’t imagine having enough money to go there. I explain hurriedly that we would never have the money to travel either if the government did not give scholarships to people who study Arabic. Yeah right, he’s probably thinking, and he is right. Who am I to claim that we aren’t rich, as Sarah lies there with her iPod and I trill along about how much I love traveling. We are rich. We are paying ‘Aid enough for trucking us around and taking pictures of us for him to feed his entire village, an amount we might just as soon have spent on a night out in East Village, New York. I decide to shift the focus of our discussion from my implied riches.
“How is the tourist industry these days? Do you have a lot of work?”
“Enough, but not as much as we used to have . . . It comes and goes. But the best time for us was when the Jews were here.”
I hope that ‘Aid does not notice the thought-bubble full of question marks and various other keyboard symbols that pops up over my head. I try to suppress the astonishment from my voice.
“You mean . . . during the Israeli occupation of Sinai? You mean, that was actually a better time for you?”
“Of course, much better. There were many more tourists, from Israel and from everywhere. We always had work. And we were freer. The Jews just left us alone, and left the desert alone.”
After two months of putting up with Cairene Jew bashing, I wished Aaron could be there to hear this glowing report of his people. Perhaps I read into his words too much, but it sounded to me as if 'Aid regarded the Jews simply as another tribe, not a malevolent world power. After all, the Bedouins in theory recognize no nation-states, be they on contested territory or no. I do not press ‘Aid further on the subject however, by now understanding that ‘Aid really only has a couple of sentences worth to say about anything, at least to us. I lie back and follow the original instructions of our tour guide. Brighter stars twinkle in and around the gauzy white scarf of the Milky Way, the occasional meteor blinking on and off. I begin to hum, and when I stop ‘Aid takes over, his thin voice wavering above the crackling embers. I hum along with him until I tapers off and offers to show me the original version of the song on his cell phone. Sarah and I take turns admiring the handheld video of a Saudi singer, surrounded by female dancers in full “khaliji (“Gulfie”)” step, which as far as I can tell involves a lot of swinging one’s hair from shoulder to shoulder. I keep forgetting that although technically we are still in Egypt, these people have much more in common with the Arabs of the Gulf: their dialect, their tribal traditions, their dress. And in direct contrast to the insistent nationalism trumpeted by Cairo taxi drivers, the Bedouins rarely mentioned Egypt at all. When they did, they often seemed to equate “Egypt” with “Cairo,” as indeed many Egyptians do, which from the Bedouin point of view was in no way a compliment.
We drifted off to sleep to the sound of ‘Aid playing with the different ring tones on his phone. At least that is one pastime in which both Bedouins and Egyptians seem to take equal pleasure.
***
On the way back the next morning I run the topic of Israeli occupation past Faraj. What was the period of Israeli control like for you and your family? Better or worse?“Far better,” he replies without hesitation. “With the Israelis in charge, we didn’t have any of these checkpoints. They left us alone. They let us rule ourselves. We didn’t even have paved roads like this then. See this road we’re on? It wasn’t there. We traveled by camel.” I empathized with Faraj, but thought to myself that he seemed to take a certain degree of pleasure in the speeds at which Sinai’s new highways allowed him to travel. I asked whether and how the Israelis had stationed governors or other officials throughout Sinai.
“Oh, almost none,” he furrowed his brow. “A few. Maybe five hundred policemen per thousand villagers instead of five thousand. Ha ha! Five thousand per thousand! Ha ha ha!” Faraj had really cracked himself up. I laugh with him, enjoying the light moment. Faraj, despite his laid-back character, did not laugh often. I can only think of two other times when he really let loose. First, when he at last attempted to include Sarah in the conversation. Unsure whether she too understood Arabic, he started her out with a freebie: he announced to her that the world was small and demanded her concurrence. She replied, in her first demonstration of spoken Arabic, “Maybe, but the plane is expensive.” This unexpected display of irony delighted Faraj. He repeated Sarah’s pessimistic innovation of the maxim many times over, chuckling. The other time occurred when I showed him the sketch I had done of ‘Aid in my little book. He squinted and leaned closer, then burst out in guffaws of recognition: “That’s . . . that’s ‘Aid! Ha ha ho ho ho!” The simple but faithful likeness of his colleague captured in the notebook of a young American tickled him mightily. He glanced back at the drawing a few times, still snickering, until I closed the book to return his attention to the road.
“We have secret roads now to get around the police,” Faraj confesses, pointing to an example on our right. “We have to. We just can’t tolerate crossing them every time. It’s better this way.” I should get some pointers from these guys on building secret roads; I could sure use one from my apartment to school that avoids all loitering men.
My experiences with ‘Aid and Faraj made me think about the possible levels of engagement for the Bedouins in the tourist industry. Somehow, Faraj had come to inhabit a kind of middle ground between tourist and Bedouin, possessing enough chat n’ charm to make our experience comfortable and enough gruff n’ grit to make our experience exotic. I wondered how long it had taken him to reach this level of mastery of this admittedly tricky industry (especially when dealing with snoopy tourists like me). Furthermore, I wondered how he felt about it. Clearly Faraj was a man of strongly held opinions, and I did not doubt for a second that he had one regarding livelihood based on the repeated enactment of pseudo-cultural experiences for foreigners. But is it even fair for me to project my own misgivings about the tourist experience onto the tour-givers? Might they not enjoy it, or at least not hate it? And since our money is providing them with a subsistence permitting for cell phones like ‘Aid’s, they can’t hate us too much either, right? Just because I insist upon torturing myself over the ethical and epistemological issues that tourism raises for me does not mean that they do. ‘Aid and Faraj have probably both forgotten me by now. Well, welcome to the most poetic advantage of affluence: the time and scope to get one’s panties in a knot. I suppose I should take to heart the message of these eastern cowboys: just listen to the silence, look at the stars, breathe the clean air of the sahara and forget the city. Otherwise you might end up as majnoon as an overworked camel.
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