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About 10 years ago, I had the pleasure of spending a few nights in a Bedouin camp. It's difficult to describe how different the world looks from the desert. Not just the immediate surroundings but how the desert shapes their entire world view. It feels like a completely different timeline. Like a parallel world looking through a spyglass to the modern world passing on the horizon.
One night, a sand storm kicked up and started rumbling the tents. We were in temporary tents for guests and not traditional Bedouin tents. I remember looking up at the tent poles, watching them shake. Then in an instant, the tent just disappeared, going from the blackness of the tent to the most intense canvas of stars in the night sky. The wind had plucked the entire tent and threw it across camp.
The next day, I had tea with one of the Bedouin guides. Her eyes were bright blue like the Fremen in Dune. When she found out I grew up in Colorado, she said it's been a childhood dream of her's to visit. I thought at first it was because of the mountains, but then she pulled out a picture she kept with her. It was a large reservoir in the foothills outside of Denver. She dreamed of one day being able to swim in so much fresh water.
Much of Western Civilization is culturally rooted in the mythology of the desert. Its impact is often forgotten but runs surprisingly deep.
This reminds of of what Prince Feisal said in Lawrence of Arabia:
> I think you are another of these desert-loving English: Doughty, Stanhope, Gordon of Khartoum. No Arab loves the desert. We love water and green trees, there is nothing in the desert. No man needs nothing.
At some point in the movie, Lawrence tells someone he likes the desert "because it's clean."
I remember that! He was so fastidious. God, what an incredible portrayal. I remember this coming through clearly in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, too.
Awesome tale of your adventure, and well-told.
> Her eyes were bright blue like the Fremen in Dune.
Fremen eyes were entirely blue. Even their sclera, the "whites" of their eyes, were blue.
While it is still possible your Bedouin guide had blue sclera, it is vanishingly unlikely to impossible that this was due to melange addiction. But there are plenty of reasons why someone can have blue sclera.
Anything that causes a thinning of the sclera could cause it. Some medications, like steroids, can produce blue sclera. Aging and anemia will also give a blue tint to the whites of the eye.
While it is usually benign, there are a number of rare but serious disorders that can cause blue sclera, such as Marfan Syndrom, Russell Silver Syndrome, Hallermann-Schermann-Streiff Syndrome, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, and others. Thus, if the cause is unknown, anyone with blue sclera should see an ophthalmologist.
In Wind, Sand and Stars (1939), Antoine de Saint-Exupéry describes chaperoning some Arabs around France. They were unimpressed by technological displays like steamships, locomotives, and the Eiffel Tower, but they were overawed at a waterfall.
Wow what a great comment. Please write more.
Thanks noja. I'll try to add more later today.
You might enjoy the book Lords of the Atlas by Gavin Maxwell: https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/fa9b6ea3-f262-4ab1-b297-...
I find it odd they would use tents that disappear into the night
for their honored guests.
I do not say that lightly.
Did they set it up or someone else?
I have had the honor of being on the receiving end of their hospitality twice and it humbled me. I never spent the night with them though.
I have since tried to return the favor
It was a freak event - act of god - sort of thing. It was a temporary encampment for guests. The tent was in the middle of the camp and the only one that got plucked. They were heavy canvas-like material and anchored down. It was a full on sandstorm with winds over 60mph if I had to guess. Strong enough to make it hard to walk straight. Most likely a dirt devil (mini cyclone) swept through the camp since the sky was clear of sand clouds moments after it happened. The wind lasted most of the night. The hosts were deeply apologetic, and I got the feeling it was a rare event.
Beautiful, you have a way with words.
Anyone who resonates with this should read “A Road to Mecca”
During my service in the Israeli army I had the pleasure of working with various Bedouin trackers. It was the closest experience to what working with a wizard would be. They would look at something where you see nothing, and tell whole stories.
Too bad we were all too tired to actually spend more time asking questions and learning from them.
I also heard the legend of a person who installed backward soles on their shoes so it would fool the trackers thinking they’re going the other way, but the weight distribution gave this trick away as the tracks looked odd to them.
Classic legend. I remember staying in Mamshit and getting a fantastic demonstration from a Bedouin on exactly why this doesn't work. He brought out a tape measure, in order to physically show the difference.
It's mind blowing that the attention to detail is so high, that they could notice a 1.5cm indentation difference - and not at eye level!
>>that they could notice a 1.5cm indentation difference - and not at eye level!
Yes, their trained eye can most likely see far more than any of us.
One thing I learned in neuroscience courses about perception is that one of the measures they take is the lower bound sensitivity of the perceptual system. One of the units is the JND = Just Noticeable Difference, which is well self-descriptive; find the smallest difference between two things that can be noticed. E.g., what is the smallest difference in pressure that is noticeable on a fingertip, tone or volume difference between two sounds, or the smallest size difference noticeable between two objects, etc.?
It turns out that top experts in any skill can have a JND that is about 10x finer than the average person. Moreover, they can not even know it!
I weirdly experienced this myself when I was one of the subjects in a test of discrimination of light brightness levels on a field with subtle differences. As they turned down the brightness in each round (and randomly moved the darker/lighter zones), the dark/light areas were completely obvious to me when everyone else swore that it was absolutely flat/even. I could only chalk it up to a decade of alpine ski racing training that had gotten me to top international racing levels — much of it was racing/training in flat light of cloudy days in snowfields — where we need to discern at high speed even the subtlest variations in shades of white to get critical information about snow conditions or contours. Until that test, I literally had no idea that anything was exceptional about my perceptual ability in this regard (my experience was generally that I wanted to see better), but training obviously drove changes down to the level of tuning the nervous system, even without specific intent to do so.
Science is so cool, and so are those Bedouin trackers!
This is an interesting addition to my not-very-well stocked store of information about how tunable a human being is to specific tasks or situations.
The second half of Neal Stephenson's Seveneves focuses on physical attributes, but I think it's the internal stuff like this that would be the real evolution paths.
The human eye can detect a single photon.
Our other senses aren't so exquisite (it might be interesting to have the "nose of a dog" for awhile, say). But I am so often surprised at what I see.
A tape measure isn't necessary depending on the substrate. :-)
This was one of my favorite tricky things to do for students, because I'd see their entire face light up with the realization once they got it.
All mammals, as far as I know, scatter a bit of material at the front of their step. The foot lands in the substrate, rolls forward, and then gets picked up, and that naturally causes a little bit of material to fall away from the front of the foot and end up at the front of the track. In advanced tracking, you learn to use the material at the front of tracks to determine direction of travel. Most people duck-walk a bit, or have one foot pitched out more than the other, or might make a sudden change of direction, but the material at the front of the track is a pretty reliable indicator for direction of travel.
So one exercise we'll set up is in a sandy or soft substrate, a volunteer will hop into a boxed area, change direction of travel with each step and cover each print with a plastic cone. They jump out, and then a bunch of other plastic cones get scattered into the boxed area. Students start with the first cone, and from that track -- without being able to see any other prints -- they have to determine where the next track is (which cone contains the next print).
So you drill on this a lot until looking for that toe drag becomes reflexive, and then you take them to a set of backwards-walking tracks and see how long it takes them to realize there's no toe drag in the prints -- because the foot is rolling backward from the toes.
There are a few other giveaway clues for backwards walking too that get into the finer details of pressure points and the mechanics of movement, but toe drag is the easy one.
They see that they just laugh. Dude, oh this is going to be easy, I'm going to have to charge extra, too boring.
Like think of all that you do with a computer, all that magic. Dude Stanford CS department in CS106A Mehran Sahami says it's the closest thing to magic. And witchcraft also...eh. Like typing on Dvorak is magic, like the raw speed, the comfort, the freedom of thought stedda the sad fad qwerty.
Did you have a stroke or are you gpt3?
Those accusations contradict each other.
it is odd to me that QWERTY was designed specifically to slow speedy typers down because of the mechanical devices could not keep up. even after the physical limitations were no longer an issue, we decided to keep something intentinonally designed to slow people down.
that's having full 1Gbps fiber connectivity, but instead choosing a 56kbps dial-up modem instead.
Yes that is exactly what it is. Qwerty threads your thought with pain. Like fucking obvious the vowels should be on the home row, right? Well no because then people's typed words wouldn't be filtered through pain. Coercion and pain.
I actually owned the domain name qwertqwert.com pointing at a qwerty to dvorak translator, so any dvorak user could use dvorak on any computer without painful typing. I wanted it for myself. Got it to work, in fact...I think. So many successful projects not sure how high a fraction of them were successful.
IIRC that story is apocryphal and has been debunked.
Long ago, I had the pleasure of being in a two car convoy in the Syrian desert looking for a particular castle deep and isolated in the desert (we were Foreign Service). We had the galley draft for Monuments of Syria as a guide. We were somewhat lost.
Over the horizon, we could see dust, then as the dust got closer, we could see a huge herd of camel headed straight for us. So we stayed put, ought to be interesting.
Probably about 300 camels. With two Bedu kids driving them. The oldest maybe 15 or 16 or so. The other probably about 14 years old. They stopped to gawk at us, just as we were gawking at them.
"How many camels do you have," we asked. They shrugged. "Where are you coming from?" we asked. They pointed behind them. "Where are you going?" They pointed in front of them. Then the oldest urged his mount forward, and we watched them disappear over the desert horizon.
Syria was one of the most interesting places in the world to visit before it came to its present heartbreaking condition.
In case you're wondering what that pink thing sticking out of the camel's mouth in the picture is, it's called a "dulla", and it's normal. It's also pretty gross but feel free to google it and indulge yourself in camel obnoxity.
I had not expected to spend 5 minutes learning about this today, but thank you nonetheless for the tip off.
The Israelis took advantage of native Bedouin tracking skills in the same way that the US Army employed Native American scouts during the Indian Wars. The skills that one picks up from a lifetime of living outdoors in a natural environment can't be taught from a book. They are skills that you get from hands-on experience.
I spent nearly 6 years sleeping in a tent in the US, homeless. I've lived the last 5 years in little apartments in 100 year old buildings.
I relate differently to the built environment than most modern Americans who go from house to car to office to car to home again. My habits are different. My understanding is different.
It's hard to explain to people whose experience is so different from mine.
Architecture used to be by default passive solar design. It was vernacular architecture typically. And we've mostly list that context of building buildings oriented to their physical context.
It's a problem, one most modern people seem blind to.
I've never been homeless though I have spent plenty of time in a tent or in other unconventional accommodations that were suited for the occasion.
I grew up spending most of my time outside and as a result I can appreciate the difference between a night spent under the stars and a night spent in your own comfortable home. I tend to linger outside and to gravitate outside if I visit someone else. There's a lot going on and it keeps me connected to things that are important to me.
Modernity does make you blind to many things simply because there is no opportunity for exposure to them and there are too many distractions, many of which you can carry in a pocket or wear on a wrist. Stepping away from can keep you grounded though.
I'm wondering if the bedouin Arabs escaped the expulsion in the 1948 exodus?
I suspect that we both know that the answer to that question is that they have not escaped resettlement as Israeli settlements have pushed further into territories that they (the Israelis) claim. If I remember, there is a large area that is traditional Bedouin land and where they formerly had a fair degree of autonomy for years (after 1948) but as settlements expand in the last couple decades especially, they are being moved to make way for new Israeli settlers.
I have followed maps over the years showing the expansion of Israeli claims and for that reason, it is unlikely to me that Bedouin people living on land where their people lived for generations, will not be affected by the expansion of Israel's territorial claims.
I am not an authority on the subject by any measure and welcome any corrections.
In general, the history of mankind doesn't favor indigenous people, regardless of how well they know their home environment. This is why so much historical knowledge is lost to later generations.
Back in the day, Arabs would send their children to the desert so that they would learn proper Arabic, as it was the most pure form, not mixed with other tongues or dialects. Not to mention learning other skills like survivability and patience and so on.
Fortunately, the Muslims went to great length to preserve the history and culture, even as globalization etches away at it. There's a reason we take great pride in how our religion and traditions have been preserved (all by the Grace of God of course).
Tracking is a fascinating subject. In Search and Rescue, it is one of the pillars of our skillset.
I just came off three days of participation in this search†.
Depending on the area, terrain, environment, and situation, tracking to either directly locate the subject or narrow the search area can be a crucial task leading to the resolution of an incident.
† https://www.noozhawk.com/article/search_for_hiker_missing_on...
https://keyt.com/news/santa-barbara-s-county/2022/09/07/sear...
https://www.noozhawk.com/article/body_of_missing_hiker_found...
https://keyt.com/news/santa-barbara-s-county/2022/09/08/tim-...
There is a similar phenomenon with the indigenous people up in the Arctic. Where most people would just see a bunch of snow and get lost immediately, they can tell exactly where they are and how to get home. The clues are there if you can read them.
There's some story I read, can't remember where, where a visitor asks an old man "who knows more - the wolf or the old man?"
The guy thought a long time and finally said, "The same. They both know the same."
This seems like a good idea:
> "Walidie sees himself as an envoy of Bedouin traditions, including tracking. He aspires to educate new generations of “desert children,” to “wean them off iPhones, acquaint them with the natural environment of the desert, and teach them how to preserve it.”"
I recommend the travelogue Arabian Sands, by William Thesiger.
Reminds me of how the Comanche were complete masters of their environment in the American southwest.
I've been interested in this tribe ever since watching Lawrence of Arabia, maybe also being from the desert myself. They're amazingly adapted to a hostile environment.
Marvelous, these people are so connected to the land they see and feel things that very few do.
You can get some of this feeling from spending a large amount of time in a given area.
I grew up in a house on about five acres in the country, and spent a lot of time outdoors reading. I grew to know the area, the types of animals that lived there, where they tended to move and where they stopped, and learned to recognize the individual animals. Animal behavior alone can tell you quite a bit - have you ever been in the woods and suddenly felt a little uneasy? That's probably because you unconsciously noticed that the background noise changed. Birds and small animals got quiet around you because of the presence of a predator.
Indeed. I've been backpacking in the wilderness about every month for a few years and, although I rarely encounter anybody when out there, I usually know when a large predator (including human) is getting near because the sounds of the wilderness change.
I can't even really describe what changes about it, but it changes. It's nothing obvious like suddenly everything gets quiet or loud. It's subtle, but unmistakable.
In Tristan Gooley's The Walker’s Guide to Outdoor Clues and Signs, he recounts how he traveled to (IIRC) Papua New Guinea to learn more about...outdoor clues and signs... from native people there. Suffice to say, a lot of it is actually just bullshit, but then the parts that aren't BS give some people seeming superpowers in the jungle.
Deliverance taught me that you can't outrun someone who has never left an area.
I love that article!
Thanks so much for sharing it!