The Camel’s Ass

Hassan and my sad, motheaten camel. Photo by Tim Brookes

Recently I went to the Pyramids, an experience that would probably have offered Joseph Campbell or John Ruskin all kinds of brilliant artistic and philosophical insights. I, too, was granted a profound insight, though I think it’s unlikely that either Campbell or Ruskin had their epiphany, as I did, in the toilet of a camel shop.
Let me back up a bit.
I was in Egypt learning about bird flu and teaching writing workshops, and knowing that I had two days of concentrated work ahead, I decided to do my tourism while I could. The hotel concierge offered me a car and driver for 150 Egyptian pounds (say, $30 U.S.) for the day, 8 a.m.-5 p.m. (these details will become significant later), and having learned in India the value of a good driver who was paid by the day, spoke good English and knew his way around, I went for it, despite all the warning in Lonely Planet that this was the most expensive way to go, a rip-off in every direction.
I didn’t care about paying a little extra, and I resented the implicit assumption that an essential part of travel was making sure you got your money’s worth. I have more money than most Egyptians working in the tourist trade. I’m happy to pay $22.50 rather than $18.50 if that lets a little cash seep into the country, and I’m certainly not going to haggle and insult someone just to save a buck. Life’s too short.
At least, that’s what I thought I thought.
My driver, Magdi, was 50, an educated man who, it turned out, worked in a bank in Egypt, then in Saudi Arabia as an accountant, before returning to Egypt and seeing his daughters through college. He’d had a knee operation that left one leg shorter than the other, and he moved stiffly; I sympathized, and we compared knee war stories.
As soon as we crossed the Nile from Cairo into Giza, a suburb that extends from the Nile to the beginning of the Sahara, Magdi offered me a choice: once we got to the Pyramids, I could rent a camel, or a horse, or go on foot.
Hmm, sez I. Never ridden a camel. I’ll give it a try.
All right, sez he. But there were other choices. The typical camel trip was two hours, Pyramids, desert, Sphinx and back. I could pay the government-approved rate and know ahead of time what it would cost, or I could go to an unlicensed shop/stable and pay less, but then the guide might well take me out into the desert and demand more money to lead me back.
I’d read about this scam and chuckled, still taking the whole battle between tourism and peace of mind far too lightly. I’d go with the government option, I said, imagining the money going back into coffers somewhere and being invested in the upkeep of Egypt’s historical remnants. As if.
Magdi drove on. I’d been told that the suburbs have been built all the way out to the Pyramids, but even so I was utterly unprepared to round a corner on the elevated freeway and see, between these boxy buildings, the radical triangular summit of the Great Pyramid. I’m not using the word radical lightly: it seemed not so much ancient as futuristic, a shape forgotten by architects, waiting to be rediscovered. The Transamerica building in San Francisco has nothing on it. Look at me, it seemed to say. I know everything.
Giza is an impoverished suburb. The first donkey-carts I’d seen in Egypt appeared, the first cows on the street, houses and apartment blocks of raw, uneven red brick, many of them unfinished—deliberately, Magdi said, as the homeowner didn’t have to pay taxes until the building was complete. He seemed to be right: some of the boxy little apartments clearly had people living in them, even though the steel filaments of reinforced concrete stuck up from the structural pillars like Marine haircuts as if the building were expecting several more floors.
As we arrived at what seemed to be the Pyramid Tour Embarkation Area, the narrow streets suddenly filled up with horses—or rather young people of both sexes on horses. Magdi pointed at them disparagingly. “These are rich young Arabs,” he said. “They come out here in the evening, they drink all night at the nightclubs and then in the morning they ride horses.”
(This was the first indication, by the way, that Egyptians don’t automatically think of themselves as Arabs. After all, classical Egyptian civilization predated the Ottoman empire by thousands of years, and the first Christians arrived in Egypt before the first Muslims. To Hassan, these were wealthy Gulf State Arabs—and demonstrably not good Muslims, either.)
The true extent of this cavorting became clear a little later, when I saw an extraordinary sight: several young Arabs in a Humvee were standing leaning out of its sunroof, firing canisters of (I think) shaving cream at others in cars or on horses. Battle was joined, and maybe three dozen kids milled around, firing this way and that, taking over the whole road. Someone produced a squirt-cannon. In seconds, the air was full of fragments of foam, a desert snowstorm.
The kids in their expensive vehicles pounded away past the gateway to the sizeable enclosed area that is, in effect, the Pyramids And Sphinx National Park, and up into the raw desert. It was like a scene from Mad Max. Humvees, pickups, ATV’s and Land Cruisers were parked on the skyline or racing each other across the tawny sand. Group of riders raced downhill or up, shrieking, laughing, yelling, the idle rich at play where nobody would complain.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. At the moment, Magdi was pulling over in a cobblestoned area that featured several parked cars, horses, camels and several shop fronts whose windows displayed papyrus paintings and ornate Arabian-nights bottles.
“This is where we get the camel,” Magdi explained, but it turned out that was only part of the truth. This was where Tim was nudged toward the whirlpool of tourism, and this was where he had his moment of illumination.
The owner of the shop, a middle-aged woman with good English and a forthcoming manner, came out and invited me in for coffee while the camel was being readied. “Please to take seat,” she said, and I sat on the familiar upholstered settee behind the familiar low table. The coffee arrived, with its familiar side-order of water, and all seemed to be right with the world. As I sipped, I notice that every wall was lined with shelves, and every shelf was lined with the ornate Arabian-nights perfume bottles. This was no mere decoration, and now I was well inside, sitting on a low settee that made it hard to rise, my back to the door so I couldn’t see whether any camel-readying was, in fact, taking place. Having put me in this vulnerable position, the owner pounced.
Here, she said, sitting beside me and placing a large Chanel No. 5-shaped bottle on the table, was the famous essence of lotus flower. Not oil. No oil. No coloring. No chemicals. Pure essence. She seized my wrist and dabbed me.
I was still unfazed, unflustered. This is part of my education, I told myself. Lotus, eh? Doesn’t mean I have to buy any. I gave a sniff and an appreciative nod. But I’m not really a perfume person, I explained. Without missing a beat she moved onto the second bottle, which she called Businessman. Here, she said, dabbing her palm and wiping it on both my shoulders. You put on your clothes. Smell good all day. Very good for men. Very professional. “You are businessman?” she asked.
A rare tactical error. “No,” I said. She hesitated for a second, and it was clear she had talked herself into a corner on this one. She could hardly say, “What are you, then? Yokel? Hippie? Tramp?” Conceding this perfume, she swiftly moved on to the next, which was called Nefertiti. I was resisting this one quite cheerfully too, until she demonstrated that you could put five drops in a glass of water  and sprinkle the water on a rug, and it would keep the whole room smelling fresh. As it happens, I could imagine my wife Barbara doing exactly that in her office, and said yes.
This was the point when the tide turned, when the moon began to wane, when the hot-air balloon of my peace of mind began to cool and lose altitude. At once she moved into a kind of numerical shell game: everything came in threes, and each of those threes led to another three, and I couldn’t find the way out under any of them.
The perfume came in three sizes of bottle. Well, I’d go for the smallest, as the big one would barely fit in my luggage, break on the plane and drown my clothing in Nefertiti.
Now what about price? The smallest was 200 Egyptian pounds, a price that would pay for just about every single bottle of essential oils at the crystal-and-aromatherapy shop in Burlington, Vermont. All of a sudden I wasn’t so willing to redistribute my wealth to the Egyptian people. I weakly beat her down to 100 pounds, but even that wasn’t the end of it. Here was a lovely little presentation box that held three small bottles. She put my one little bottle in it. If I bought another for the same price, I could have a third one free. I felt as if I were on my hands and knees following a small carrot on a long string that was being twitched away from me. No, thank you, I said. Just the one.
She finally allowed me to make my purchase—or so I thought. This was a small insight, compared to what would come later, but still worth noting: I was on my guard for people who wanted me to buy when I didn’t want to buy. I hadn’t realized that a second line of attack was also waiting, just behind the dunes: even if I wanted to buy something, I was still vulnerable. It had never occurred to me that the joy of buying something is an incentive in itself, a sufficiently strong incentive that once the sucker wants to buy something the seller can actually switch tactics in a brilliant, counterintuitive way and deny the sucker the chance to make the purchase while the stakes are raised—while, in effect, the seller goes through the sucker’s wallet to see just how much is in there.
Pouncing, she added up everything I owed her. “One hundred for perfume, two hundred for camel, fifty for get in to Pyramids—three hundred fifty pounds.” I blanched and handed her my credit card. “You no got cash?” she asked. “Have to pay extra charge for credit card, seven percent.” The truth was that I had only about 500 pounds with me, and paying cash would more or less wipe me out, and as this was the first stop of a three-stop day of tourism, I wanted some cash in hand. No, I insisted, credit card. All right, she shrugged. Three hundred seventy pounds.
Then she made her mistake. At least, I think she made a mistake. She went away. I sipped my coffee, trying to regain my peace of mind. A teenage boy brought me my tiny bottle in a crude cardboard box. She came back: my credit card was no good, she said. She pointed at the slip: ERROR.
Fact is, I’d just used the card just fine, and it would work fine the following day. She deliberately caused the error because she wanted cash. I paid the cash. She had won in the short run, but lost in the long: with a credit card I had (theoretically) unlimited funds to coax out of me, but paying her cash had reduced me to the status of a ten-cent punter in Atlantic City. From now on, anyone in Giza trying to fleece me was out of luck.
That hadn’t occurred to me just yet, though. Instead, she had induced in me a strange mental condition, one that would do nobody any good but one that is so common it’s central to the travel experience: I was on the defensive, clutching my money, worrying about every penny. I was, in fact, a Lonely Planet tourist, and I hated it.
“Camel is ready,” she announced, the readying of the camel having coincidentally taken just as long as the buying of the perfume. Magdi, for all his warnings about touts, must have been perfectly aware he was setting this up. I stood up, and everything might have been different but for the fact that I felt a gurgle in my intestines.
I could have predicted it: a large breakfast eaten perhaps too early and too quickly, and then sitting doubled over in a smallish car…. Luckily, at that instant I spotted a small open door to my right with a washbasin behind it. “One minute,” I called after the owner, and went inside thinking I had discovered one of the great truths of tourism: Have Attack Of Diarrhea BEFORE Getting On Camel.
My breakfast left me by the express route, and as I looked around the tiny toilet I discovered another of the great truths of tourism: Women Who Tell Each Other “Always Carry Toilet Paper” Are Not Just Being Sissies. There was a spray nozzle like a small garden hose, which I tested (gingerly, not wanting to emerge with my shorts dripping) and figured out what needed to be done, remembering how common this was in India, and why Indians eat food only with their right hands, remembering too how many diseases are transmitted by what is called “the fecal-oral route,” a phrase that had never been as vivid to me as it was now.
More than that, though: I realized something about travel.
When we quit work for our one or two weeks a year and travel, one of the most important things we think we’re buying is leisure, and leisure (as in the phrase “the leisured classes”) means that we want to be treated as if we’re rich. We want to do nothing at all if we feel like it—an option we don’t have at any other time of the year. Whatever the time of year, we want to bathe in the sun and swim, both of them luxuries of you come from Buffalo, say, or Burton-on-Trent, and don’t happen to own a backyard pool. We want to dress however we want, and we want people to do our bidding courteously—we want servants, in effect. When we pay for travel, we are buying the right to be aristocracy.
Sitting in that tiny toilet, imagining what I had to do next, I saw the other side of tourism. Yes, I was dressing as I wanted, but equally, like every other Westerner at a tourist site in Egypt, I looked a bit ridiculous, and on a camel, I was pretty sure, I’d look even more ridiculous. My dignity—the cornerstone, surely, of being an aristocrat or being treated like one—was shattered (though not as badly as if I’d had the diarrhea attack on the camel). Broke, camel, diarrhea–all the pieces came together and I saw that although we talk of a “tourist trap,” tourism is in fact a whirlpool. The more we give way to its seductive force and agree to do the usual tourist things at the usual tourist sites, the more we’re submitting to forces increasingly beyond our control or even our comprehension. If we make a laughing pact that we’ll be going home with our wallets empty (a prerogative of the leisured classes) then someone will be on hand to make sure we do just that. The more seductive the destination on the poster, the more we’ll be out of our depth when we get there, and then less we will even want to use our common sense.
And the way we know we’ve fallen into that whirlpool and feel ourselves being sucked down is precisely at that hysterical Lonely Planet moment when we grasp that, far from being world-traveling aristocrats, respected and flattered by everyone around us, we are in fact being taken for suckers, powerless, humiliated.
It’s a sign of the power of that insight that while at the time I grasped only the metaphor, I was prescient enough to know what, therefore, would be bound to happen. Once on the camel, I would be at my most ridiculous and my most vulnerable, and someone would be on hand to take advantage. I didn’t know exactly how or why, but like a desert sandstorm on the horizon, I could see it coming.

Mounting a camel is perhaps the most physically disturbing experience I’ve ever had.
The camel starts out kneeling on all fours, of course, with a thick colorful woven blanket on its back and a long, broad saddle on the blanket. You put your left foot in the left stirrup in the usual equestrian fashion and swing your right foot over, though this takes more lift than usual as the saddle has a second wooden pommel in the rear, presumably in case you’re facing the wrong way. Then you find your right stirrup, and give the signal that you’re ready.
What followed in my case was probably common to most camels, drivers and tourists. Hassan, the camel driver, made an ugly growling noise in his throat. The camel, knowing exactly what was going on, made an equally ugly gargling noise back. Hassan growled more loudly. The camel gargled more loudly, making a noise you’d expect from a 250-pound bricklayer trying to curse the referee while drinking a quart of beer. Foam flew, and the camel, still gargling, decided to abandon the possibility of squatting in the shade all day and get up.
Hassan had probably told me, “Hold on,” but he should really have said, “Check your life insurance, make sure your glasses are on tightly, lean back until the rear pommel is digging into the small of your back, and hold on as you’ve never held onto anything in your life.” In fact, he should have had printed instructions saying exactly those words that tourists are required to read and sign before getting anywhere near the camel.
The camel started out with a feint, rising to its front knees, a movement that threw me back in the saddle a little and also jerked me from side to side, but this was simply to get me thinking the worst was over while at the same time throwing me off balance. Just as I was leaning back, it pushed up with his back legs to a degree that seemed physically impossible without telescopic joints. Alarmed and certain I was about to be pitched forward, I shoved against the pommel and leaned back as far as humanly possible, expecting any moment to flip over the beast’s neck and land on my own, snapping a good half-dozen cervical vertebrae.
At that point the playfulness implicit in Arabic algebra came into play. Unless you actually watch a camel get up before trying in yourself, you have an inherent faith in the number two. Fore and aft. Back legs and forelegs. Two motions.
Wrong. Just as you’re teetering on the edge of falling forward and wishing you had decided to tour the pyramids on the mechanical bull after all, the camel produces a third movement, rising from its front knees to its front hooves. Once again, your weight is entirely in the wrong place: you’re leaning hard back just when you need to be leaning forward. Maybe that’s the reason for the extra pommel: to prevent you, in this third and final eruption of motion, from tipping over backwards, falling to the sand and finding yourself looking at, and like, the camel’s ass.

Riding a horse—in other words, a sensible and level means of transport–Hassan led my camel by a rope rein toward the local Wonders of the Ancient World. Every step the camel took carried me farther away from the kind of person I want to be, doing the things I want to do. Once I was six feet or more off the ground I was entirely at Hassan’s mercy. We went where he went. When he whipped his horse with a cane, he told me, time and again, to whip my camel. “Hit him to stick, sir. Strong.”
My camel, whose skin had the texture of an old armchair and whose head and neck were covered with nicks and scars, was plodding along at a perfectly reasonable pace, but Hassan clearly wanted to be finished and back in two hours so as not to miss the next tourist departure time. Just to get Hassan to shut up, I loudly whipped the camel’s saddle-blanket instead of the beast’s hide.
Hassan himself was an epitome of insincerity. Slipping the Tourism and Antiquities police small bribes, he chuckled, “I take care of you sir, and later you take care of me.”
His goal, he insisted over and over again, was to make me happy, but that involved me doing all the touristy things I detest. If I wanted to take a photo in one place he insisted on going on to a better spot. Like all the other guides, he cajoled me to stand on the lower steps of the third pyramid, already badly pitted by wind, weather and acid rain, so he could take a photo of me. I, too, had been worn down; I’d reached my basest self. All I could do was make futile, petulant gestures, such as refusing to pay an extra fee to enter the enclosure for a close-up photo of the Sphinx, now eroded so badly it is barely more than a head on a stick, and refusing to whip my camel hard enough to enjoy the experience of a gallop.
It was also occurring to me that some of the petty acts of cruelty, greed and selfishness (the Mad Max rally, the small boys in the streets of Giza whipping casually, indiscriminately, at any horse or camel that passed) were expressed on a grand scale in the Pyramids themselves.
“What are these buildings down here?” I asked, pointing not up to the pyramids but down to some excavations at ground level.
“Those are tombs of slaves,” he said, with the offhand air of one who has just been granted tenure at a major university. “Thousands of slaves made pyramids, afterwards all killed. Why? So nobody would know secrets of pyramid. One of the Wonders of Ancient World.”
The pyramids’ very shape was a monument to cruelty. Euclidean geometry—regular solids such as triangles, squares, circles—is not found in nature. It’s a human notion, one that takes enormous force to represent in physical form in any enduring fashion. But it’s a human vanity to want to deal in forms and symbols rather than with people and animals, and for Khufu (in Greek, Cheops), his son and grandson, stone meant more than human life. I began to see every massive block as a corpse. Surely even none of the monoliths of Stalinist architecture were built at such a human price. I made a note to myself to write to the Egyptian government proposing that this area be named the Valley of the Slaves.
Finally, Hassan reached the fulfillment of his role: on our way back down toward the exit, he stopped his horse and my camel and demanded that I now take care of him as he had taken care of me. I guess I could have slid off the camel and walked the mile or so back to the stable, but I was expecting to pay him a tip anyway. I tip pretty much everyone, and I don’t mind it at all. I gave him twenty pounds, more than the customary ten percent. He all but spat at it. “People are giving me one hundred pounds, one hundred fifty,” he scowled.
But he was a victim of his employer’s credit card scam: I simply didn’t have that much cash left. He, in effect, became the sucker, but only because I was all suckered out.
Furious, he took my remaining seventy pounds, converting it mentally to dollars, nagging me about how little that was, how much it meant to him, how easily I could afford it, demanding to see if I had euros or dollars hidden in my wallet.  I reached the center of the whirlpool, and my better self drowned. If I had been a different person, reaching this same low point, I would have perhaps screamed and yelled at him, becoming a different baser self. As it was I became my don’t-make-waves worst self and did everything I could to get the whole thing over.
Back at the shop, the owner demanded to know if I was happy. She and Hassan stood side by side, Hassan knowing that his livelihood through her might suffer if he brought back an unhappy tourist, she knowing that her livelihood through Magdi might do the same.
Yes, I said. I was very happy. I got in the car, and with a newfound sense of purpose instructed Magdi not to go straight to the next set of tombs. “Take me to an ATM,” I said, “where I can get more cash.” I wanted to get away from that sense of having to snarl and bicker over my last dollar as quickly as possible. “Then take me somewhere where I can get a cool drink and do some writing.”
He wrinkled his brow. This was not on the usual itinerary. After driving around Giza for a while he found a coffee shop. It had rather more flies than I’d have liked and none of the waiters spoke English, but I managed to get a bottle of water, an excellent coffee and a little of myself back. I had no idea how much the coffee would cost—the place had no menus—but I guessed three or four Egyptian pounds at most. I gave the waiter two fives. The word largesse occurred to me, and its opposite: at the Pyramids I, like everyone else, was demonstrating smallesse.
He wrinkled his brow and tried to give one of the fives back, but I was having nothing to do with it. I had rediscovered my better self, and even if that self wanted to behave like an aristocrat and be treated like one, for now that was okay. Tomorrow I could give up all this tourist crap and go back to dealing with infectious disease. I couldn’t wait.