BIRQASH, EGYPT — The sun is high and it's a slow day for selling and there's not much for a camel trader to do except scatter hay and greens and listen to the big beasts munch. Sounds like shoes walking through gravel.
Essam Ammar lifts a cellphone from his tunic.
"Hi, Ahmed. No, I won't lower the price."
Eyes roll.
Ammar pulls the phone from his ear and looks at it; Ahmed's words crackle in the air.
Click. It's not even noon. The day seems in retreat.
"I've been doing this for 29 years," says Ammar, who wears a white-lace cap and an even snowier pinstriped vest, a risky choice amid blowing dust and rubbish fires. "You have to know your camels, setting price to age. The best come from Sudan. The ones from Somalia don't adapt so well. I can tell if a camel will bite me or just run away. It is essential to know such things."
The traders around him, some with blood splotches on their tunics, nod.
The Birqash camel market about 20 miles northwest of downtown Cairo is an unfortunate place to end up if you have four legs and a long neck. It's not so great these days for camel traders either.
Herdsmen in Sudan and Somalia are pushing up prices but the traders -- the middlemen -- often can't pass the increases on to hard-pressed butchers in Cairo and across the Nile Delta. Egypt's inflation is keeping many families from buying camel, the traditional meat they ate when beef and mutton grew too expensive. It's the cruel global economic ripple that finds even the battered crossroads of places like Birqash.
"I'm making about 5,000 pounds [$915] less each year because camel prices are rising and butchers can't afford to buy and people can't afford the price of meat," says trader Ali Hamed, who hasn't seen his wife in months. "I'm married, with two children. I used to send home 350 pounds [$65] a week but now can only manage 150 pounds [$28]. My wife does the best she can. I'd like to go home more, but for the price of a train ticket I can buy two bags of wheat to feed my family."
Hamed lives in southern Egypt. His father traded camels and Hamed, who never went to school, figured that's what village boys grew up to do. Instead of a book bag, he picked up a herding stick and started learning about camels traveling north from Sudan along the Nile or arriving in freighters from Somalia at the port of Suez. They are white, beige, the color of sand and gray. A camel can be healthy one day and die the next; it is a mystery of the trade.
