Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant Read online

  * * *

  —

  At breakfast a man tells me he used to live in London, for several years, although can’t remember where. “Somewhere west,” he says. I ask him if it was Shepherd’s Bush. It wasn’t. I am out of ideas. It’s hard to elegantly move away from someone in a bedouin tent—you are both seated on the floor, so you have to creak up into a standing position, then move all the way over to the other side of what is the same tent, so I just don’t—so we sit in silence for a while, both looking in opposite directions, quietly eating fruit. Later—hours later, as I am standing on the sand photographing hundreds of camels—he stalks up behind me and yells “EALING!” at my shoulder, and now we are friends forever. Here’s what my mate says about camels:

  A GOOD CAMEL, AS PER A LAD WHO USED TO LIVE IN EALING FOR A BIT BUT NOW LIVES BACK IN SAUDI ARABIA, WHERE CAMELS ARE

  Small ears (ideally ones that point sort of up, though pointing back has been suggested as beautiful as well)

  Shapely neck w/ low dip

  Hump is a smooth shape but goes sort of “back”????—not sure, very hard to describe

  Big lips

  Docile demeanor

  Do you have a camel, I ask. Yes, he says, one. He keeps it in the desert, at some stables. He hasn’t seen it for a few weeks since he’s been working here. He pauses. “Being around a camel…” And he grapples in the air for a bit, searching for the word. “It’s just nice.”

  * * *

  —

  Things you will see discarded in the desert on the drive from Riyadh to the camel festival, a list: single gray-black tires, warped and worn in the heat of the sun; pairs of shoes, quite often, for some reason; an entire pushed-over barrel of oil, a small slick puddle of purest jet-black against the sizzling orange of the desert sand; that’s it.

  * * *

  —

  “What kind of camels do you like?”

  “I don’t understand the question.”

  “What camels do you like. What kind of camels do you like.”

  “Like black ones? White ones?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I kind of prefer the black ones. They are handsome and shiny like a good horse is.”

  [Laughing, for some reason] “Maybe that means you are an angry person. The black camel is the angry camel.”

  I have just had my fortune read by my camel preference.

  “The white camel is the lovely camel.”

  “Okay.”

  * * *

  —

  I’m sharing the drive with a journalist from Dubai who has covered camels and camel festivals every conceivable way in the past ten years and speaks fluent Arabic and is speaking it, very rapidly for two straight hours, in the car ride over there, and who is completely bored of camels by now, oh my god. “Ugh,” she says. “Camels, camels, camels. My boss wants an angle beyond ‘This Camel Sold For $1 Million!’ but…” She gestures at a camel. “You know.” What is this whole camel thing about, then, I ask her. “Money,” she purrs.

  * * *

  —

  This spot in the middle of the desert was chosen for its historical significance: it’s a sort of perfect meeting point between the north, west, east, and south of the country (the south, known by the quietly horrifying nickname “the Empty Quarter,” which just really sounds like there are lots of haunted skeletons, half eroded into the sand, that live there, guarding crowns and lavish old jewels), so was traditionally a useful point of trade. That doesn’t quite explain why there is nothing here, nothing surrounding here, no trace of life before this, just desert, in every direction, newly crisscrossed with slivers of tarmac and this camel village, but I’m rolling with it. Here is where new tradition crashes into the old: save for a few baby camels who were whizzed in folded in the back of a Toyota pickup, most of the thirty thousand animals on display here walked to the venue over a period of a few weeks. There were fears, years ago, that camels would start to die out in the Gulf, replaced in terms of practicality by SUVs and cars—that, without the need for the Ships of the Desert, camels would fade away, and with them an irretrievable facet of the country’s tradition—but instead camels sort of boomed in a hobbyist way nobody could have predicted, and now, if nothing else, the festival proves animal and machine can still live together, out here, in the sand.

  * * *

  —

  I’m hanging out in the media tent trying to find Wi-Fi (there is no Wi-Fi) (obviously there is no Wi-Fi; I am in a fucking desert) when a softly spoken man comes over to me to quietly tell me that sorry, he doesn’t speak English. “That’s okay,” I say, loudly. “Thank you.” He offers me Arabian coffee from the Arabian coffee table. “No,” I say. “Thank you, though.” The man who cannot speak English says, slowly:

  “You smile. Like…a British footballer.”

  Thanks!

  * * *

  —

  The first camel I see is an extremely sick small three-day-old baby that seems an awful lot—an awful lot—as if it is dying, lying weak and prone under a small flap of cardboard while its owner lifts and rubs his head, makes little kth-kth-kth noises into its ear, flopping it back down again, its neck lolling sickeningly in the heat. The journalist who knows how to speak Arabic bends and talks to him: “My friend is a vet,” she says, calling on speakerphone. “He can help.” She yells into the phone for what seems like ages before a harsh, digital voice rings back. “Acupuncture,” she says, to the camel owner. “He needs acupuncture.” Everyone seems chill about the dying camel. The camel guy picks it up and flops it down again. I am telling you this camel is fucked. Acupuncture cannot help it.

  * * *

  —

  Now we’re in a tent drinking camel milk. Camel milk, in review: it is just milk, but it’s warm because it just came out of a titty and also it froths up like crazy. I didn’t not like it. It was milk. Whatever. Drink the milk, enjoy the milk. There is always something holy about milk. It is the liquid of life. A body can produce a nourishing meal. It makes babies thrive. Milk is magical. Later, in the bedouin tent, a man who understands more English than he can speak asks me if I drank the milk. Yes, I say. Very nice. He erupts with laughter, as do all the other tent lads, filed around the edges of the rug, the room shaking. I am lost in a sea of foreign giggles. Ali, the translator, helps:

  “Because it—it makes you have a reaction.” He gestures his stomach. “Some people.” It makes you shit? “Yes.” But I didn’t shit, I tell them. I am wearing tan-colored trousers. If I had a very urgent camel shit, you would know about it. I didn’t shit myself! Ali does not translate this. “Eh, it’s only some people.” Tell them I didn’t shit! “It’s, like, ten percent of people.” I turn to them, shake my head, and gesture to my stomach, scissoring my palms in front of it. I didn’t shit! I didn’t shit! There is no explaining this. They definitely think I did shit.

  I just do not understand why you would give someone shit-yourself juice in welcoming them to your country. That’s all.

  * * *

  —

  Here is a camel-parade fact that I cannot fit in anywhere else: sometimes, in amongst the parade camels, replete in festive decorative dress and being ridden by a guy with a neon cane yelling ya-ya-ya-yai!, there is a Toyota with a baby camel folded up in the back of the pickup section, driving past. “Why,” I ask. “Why.” And it is because the baby camel’s mother, who is on parade, cannot bear to be more than a few yards away from her child, so they have to drive the baby near her, sort of like dangling a treat to a cat. And that is my camel fact.

  ALLEGED PROPERTIES OF CAMEL MILK: A LIST

  Good for calming the stomach

  Good for the immune system

  Also good for diarrhea

  Makes foreigners shit themselves near instantly

 
Anecdotal evidence suggests a sort of half-Viagra dick effect as well

  Low sugar

  MORAL QUANDARY

  Say you have a camel and it’s really fucking pretty—good hump, small ears, big eyes, beautiful coat—but its lips suck ass. That is its one flaw. Like: this is a really, really pretty camel. But it’s got those thin little “I’d like to speak to the manager” lips. Got nothing going on in the lip department. It is, for all intents and purposes, lipless. Just lip skin and nothing in between. The lips are AWOL. You know you are entering a camel contest where lip size is a measurement of beauty. But what you got here is just this entirely lipless beast. You cannot win without lips. What do.

  SOLUTION

  You are Kris Jenner and the camel is your beautiful daughter and you inject it in the lips with silicone. I am serious about this: the King Abdulaziz festival is forced to take a hard line on doping, which includes lip fillers for camels. In future festivals they have plans for a purely antidoping judging committee. Says Dr. Fahd Abdulla Al-Semari, festival organizer, all-round go-to camel don: “The point is this, like a sport, you have people who mess up the camels. They use silicone, they cheat. We spotted three cases, so they were removed. It’s very delicate: we now have a special committee to formulate a system on how to prevent these things. Like what happens in some sports where men use drugs, like in the Tour de France, or swimming. So we are serious about this now, it’s a concern for us. So we created a special team.” Your lipless camel is Lance Armstrong. Your lipless camel is Yulia Efimova. Nothing Is Pure in This World, Not Even Camels.

  * * *

  —

  Nobody can get my name right, a rare novelty, so I’m asked what my surname is in case it’s easier for them to pronounce. “Golby,” I say, and the group lights up. “Gol-bee, gol-bee,” a young guy who works for the festival says, pointing to his chest. “It means ‘my heart’ in Arabic,” someone whispers. So that is what they call me for the next two days: my heart.

  * * *

  —

  Like Dubai, Saudi has no scent, and is entirely under construction but studded with great wealth, the way you imagine New York would be one year to the day after an Avengers-style alien attack. In Arabia they drive how you want to drive, if you weren’t curtailed by pesky traffic laws: they overlap and weave like a closely contested Mario Kart race; they straddle lanes and drift aimlessly between them. Wing mirrors are a notion. Right: you know that chase scene in Matrix Reloaded that goes for like fifteen minutes and was, for a time, the most expensive car chase ever filmed? That. That is how everyone drives in Saudi Arabia.

  * * *

  —

  Bedouin culture is something I can get behind. Basically, at the end of every day—or, actually, quite often during the day, when it gets too hot or you straight can’t be bothered with it—you sit with a flask of sweet chai and a golden urn of dates and work your way methodically through both of them; everyone gathers in these tents, extravagantly rugged arrangements in a simple boxy shape, small low cushions lining the walls with an open space in the center, the low cushions studded by larger, squarer ones that work like tables, and you just sit and eat and the TV is going and you talk shit. I don’t talk shit, obviously; whenever someone enters the tent, kicking their shoes off at the door, they hold up a solemn hand and say, “Salaam alaikum”—“What up, dudes” essentially—and everyone parrots it back apart from me because no matter how slowly and how many times I am taught how to say it, I just cannot seem to contort my mouth and prime my brain to say “sa-laam a-lai-koom.” But everyone else seems to be having a very fun time, talking shit, telling long, winding dad jokes, everyone laughing. Someone does an impression of an engine that for me goes on far too long but everyone seems to love. Bedouin.

  The guy half slumped next to me leans over and explains that he is sorry, he doesn’t speak English, he wishes he could. It is fine, I say, please don’t apologize, it’s not like I speak Arabic, come on. But then he takes his phone out and shows me an app on it: if we both speak, slowly, into the microphone, the app will take our words and translate them, and we can have a rough conversation. Big up the future, because this app rules:

  how old are you

  twenty-nine

  what is your country

  england

  are you married

  you sound like my girlfriend

  And the Saudi lads are loving it, loving it, banter is the universal language, there is no doubt about that—

  And he asks me how I like Saudi Arabia so far, and yes, good, but also I am still annoyed about being held at the airport that one time, so I explain through the translator about the visa, the two-hour wait, the fact that the same guy who just stamped my visa went and very slowly checked my passport at airport security some ten yards away, like my dude have you not seen enough of my passport yet, and they are all rolling their eyes and groaning sympathetically as if to say “Right?,” as if to say, “Visas.”

  I am assured, though, that I am actually relatively lucky, and I am one of the recipients of the new, cuddly faced vision of the border—up until only a year ago, things were tighter around here, with the religious police, or Hayaa, in full force: they were able to break up same-sex pairings if they didn’t like the look of them, publicly shave men’s heads if they deemed their haircut too inappropriate. In 2012, Hayaa members were accused of causing death by dangerous driving after chasing a vehicle that was playing loud music; their powers were finally stripped after a viral incident last February where a woman was assaulted outside a Riyadh mall. Even here at the camel festival, you’re aware of the quiet, watching hands of law enforcement: to enter the festival proper you need to drive through various armed checkpoints; we later cruise past an endless run of barracks that, I’m told, are home to the 1,000 security, police, and firemen here to keep the festival in order. There are 30,000 camels here, 1,300 owners. An audience of 400,000 visitors spread over forty-two festival days. About one armed guard per 9.5 visitors per day. It feels a bit much.

  “Ah, it’s for the king,” I’m told, a wave of the hand. King Salman bin Abdulaziz is scheduled to close the ceremony, waving to a plethora of assembled dignitaries: behind me, as the camels parade in the morning, a team of builders furiously saw and drill his VIP stand together, raising with sheer force of will a camel festival out of the sand. When the $30 million collective prizes are handed out at the close of the ceremony, the big wins will go to Prince Sultan Bin Saud bin Mohammed and HRH Prince Abdul Al-Rahman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud. I’m back in the tent with the man and the app:

  “We love the system,” he tells me.

  Pause.

  “Sometimes,” he adds. And the whole tent shakes again with laughter.

  * * *

  —

  Before I leave here, it is my destiny to get on a camel. Camels, I am warned, get up from a sitting position in the most insane way imaginable: back legs stand first, tipping you all the way forward, then the front legs unfold, swinging you back to some form of equilibrium. I am anticipating some sort of waltzy rollercoaster experience, but it’s smoother than that: the camel beneath me is placid, calm despite the great weight above it, walks around the designated camel-walking area with a peaceful trot, a kind of louche gallop. There is something very all-seeing about being on a camel, the same way standing up on a bike makes you that bit taller and more omniscient than humans are meant to be: you look down and survey your surroundings, you take in the details, you gaze to the horizon. I have drunk of the milk and seen of the parade and I have not understood camels. I have seen them stand up and I have seen them lie down, I have seen them spit and I have seen them dying. I have seen black camels and I have seen white camels. I have had a thousand identical conversations about camels, and what makes camels good, and why everyone is so extremely into camels. I know of camel ears and eyes and lips and humps. I
have toured around a camel museum. I have stared at the stars from the camel observatory. I have flown seven hours and driven two into the dry heat of the desert to see as many camels as it is possible to see. I have not understood camels. And now up here, soaring, I get it: camels are just chill, weird, useful little monsters, statuesque ships passing in the desert night, absolutely mad fuckers who love to give milk and meat and life and a form of transport; they love to gently rock up and down, lips flapping, hump steering backwards. I get it now. Camels are sound as fuck. I mean, they’re no dogs, are they. But they’re still quite good.