by Paul Theroux
It was the whooping and hollering that I associated with a revivalist prayer meeting, the same goofy smiles, the same hysteria. It was a prayer meeting in every respect. They were chanting ‘God is great’ now, faster and faster, and with this speeded up chanting, the men were walking more quickly in the great circle, raising dust.
Now I noticed the crippled Sufis, men with all sorts of twisted and gimpy legs, spinal curvatures, crutches and canes, and two men scrabbled on all fours. They too approximated dance steps, and fumbled and stumbled in the sacred circle, to the tattoo of the drums and the smashing of the tin cymbals that had the sound of pot lids.
There was at once a slower beat and I thought the dance was ending, but still the thirty or so priests and dervishes made their eccentric way in the circle, now uttering a new chant.
‘Allah al haiyu! Allah al haiyu!’ – God is alive!
The dervishes with matted locked hair and pointed cloth caps and wild patched clothes looked like court jesters or fools – and they even had that self-mocking conceit in their movements. They continued circling, spinning, as a man passed the perimeter of the crowd wafting incense with a thurible, directing the thin smoke into the gleaming faces of the chanting mob.
And now with the red sun lower, and the smell of dust and incense, and the heavy stamping that reminded me of the stamping in some village exorcism, the spinning cripples, the marching priests, the ratatat of the drums and ululations that grew to a shrill yodeling – the pace quickened again – accelerated to a frenzy.
It was, I could see, essentially a sing-song, but when one of the dervishes snaked out a leather coach whip and began cracking it and spinning as the mob clapped and chanted – the sunset on the mosque making a long shadow of the cemetery – the drums had never been louder, nor the cymbals so insistent. I was both worried and energized, for the mob had become frenzied in its ecstatic chanting, ‘God is alive.’ There is a point at which hysteria is indistinguishable from belief.
As an unbeliever, the only one among those thousands, I had reason to be alarmed.
‘But they are not political,’ Khalifa said. ‘They are Sufis. They bother no one. They dance. They are mystical. They are good people.’
Perhaps so, but in any case this was the lovely weird essence that I looked for in travel – both baffling and familiar, in the sunset and the rising dust beaten into the air by all those feet, dervishes and spectators alike. Everyone was part of it. And this was not some spectacle put on for photographers and tourists but rather a weekly rite, done for the pure joy of it.
In the gold and gore of the desert sunset the whole thing ended in exhaustion, the men embracing, the women peeping out of their veils, and then they got to their knees and prayed in the gathering darkness, in this odd spot, between the river and the desert.
5 The Osama Road to Nubia
On my first night sleeping in the desert, a traveler in an antique land, stifling in my tent, thirsting for a drink, lying naked because of the heat, I looked through the mosquito net ceiling and saw flies gathering on the seams, their fussing twitching bodies lit by the moon and the crumbs of starlight. Yet I was happy, in spite of the dire warnings: Travel in all parts of Sudan, particularly outside Khartoum, is potentially hazardous.
‘The mere animal pleasure of traveling in a wild unexplored country is very great,’ David Livingstone wrote in similar circumstances. Then the flies were gone and so was the moon, as the sky was darkened by a raveled skein of clouds that grew woollier and blacker until the whole night was black, starless, and thick with hot motionless air. I breathed with difficulty, feeling that odd sense of levitation that comes from being naked, flat on one’s back on a hot summer night. But I was just a white worm in the vastness of a dark desert.
There came a trotting sound, not one animal but lots of tiny hooves, like a multitude of gazelle fawns, so soft in their approach they were less like hoofbeats than the sounds of expelled breaths, pah-pah-pah. They advanced on me, then up and over my tent, tapping at the loose fabric.
It was rain. Rain? I sat up sweating. Yes, and now it came down hard, pelting into the netting and dropping on to me. In seconds I was sluiced and soaked. I had dragged my bag into the tent so as not to attract the snakes that were numerous here. My bag was wet, and so were my folded clothes, and it was still raining.
I zipped myself out of the tent and saw Ramadan crouching with his hands on his head. He yelled when he saw me. He was a dim vision. No stars, no moon, just straight down rain clattering in the blackness.
I stood in the downpour like a monkey, licking the raindrops from my lips, wondering whether to make for the truck. And as I considered this, the rain stopped and a chewed pie of moon appeared.
‘What was that?’
‘It never rains here,’ Ramadan said.
‘That was rain.’
‘Just sometimes,’ Ramadan said.
The night was so hot, even with this cloudburst that after I wiped out my tent and stuck my bag in the sand, I was dry in minutes and so was my tent. It was midnight. I went back to sleep. A few hours later I heard the approaching footfalls, the pattering, the lisping, then the pelted tent and there was another downpour, as fierce as the first. I lay and let the rain hit me and when it stopped I was so tired I turned over and went back to sleep in the evaporating puddle inside my tent.
Dawn was cool. I woke sneezing and dragged on my clothes, but the sun stoked the heat again. We made coffee, ate some grapefruit we had bought at a market the previous day, and kept going up the road north.
‘You know who made this road?’
‘Tell me.’
‘Osama.’
‘He used to live in Khartoum, right?’
‘The Sudan government tell him to go away.’
In spite of his hasty exit Osama bin Laden was not reviled in the Sudan. ‘He is a good man, a holy man, we think he is not wrong,’ a group of Sudanese told me in Khartoum, challenging me to disagree with them. And I did, saying, ‘Osama decreed that all Americans are legitimate targets and can be killed by mujahideen. Therefore – as a target – I disagree with you.’
As is well known now, Osama had gone to Afghanistan in the early 1980s, a multi-millionaire of twenty-two, and had used his fortune to buy arms to oppose the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He had come to the Sudan in 1992 after the Saudis withdrew his passport and cancelled his citizenship. He lived with his multiple wives and children in Riyadh, an upscale suburb of Khartoum, in a compound of three-story houses behind a high wall, started his construction business, building the road to Shendi as well as the Port Sudan Airport on the Red Sea. He had also, people said, carried out good works – dispensed money, charity, advice – as well as continuing to recruit Muslim zealots for Al Quaeda, the organization he had started in the 1980s.
In the Sudan, Osama had financed Somali opposition to the Americans in Mogadishu and was as successful, and as destructive, as he had been in Afghanistan. Finding him an irritant, the Sudanese government expelled him in May 1996 and he returned with his entourage to Afghanistan, where he went on hatching plots, including the US Embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam as well as mayhem worldwide.
Officially he had been banished from the Sudan, yet he was still in the thoughts of the Sudanese, a gangling figure – noticeably tall, even in a country of very tall people – pious and austere, full of maxims, giving alms, defending the faith, his skinny six-five frame trembling with belief, the living embodiment of the Sword of Islam. The Muslim Brotherhood was strong in the Sudan, if passive on the subject of jihad, and so was the much more militant Al-Gama’ah el-Islamiya, which carried out multiple murders in Egypt, including the killing of tourists.
The Khartoum papers printed reminiscences of Osama. Even his old household chef, an Egyptian named Mohammed el-Faki, gushingly recalled for a Khartoum newspaper how his boss had liked fruit juice, and preferred boiled black cumin to tea, and kabsa, lamb, on a huge platter of rice. He was abstemious, and respectful,
and always carried a religious chaplet in his right hand, and a cane in his left hand, sometimes using it to clout his children.
‘This is a good road.’
‘Osama road,’ Ramadan said. And he laughed. He also said that he had a mind to go to Afghanistan, kill Osama and collect the multimillion-dollar reward. ‘But then I cannot come back to the Sudan. Sudan people will be angry with me for killing this man. Ha!’
We kept driving, and every so often Ramadan without slowing down would spin the wheel and drive off the Osama road, lurching over the roadside berms and up and down the ditches, and heading fifty miles into the desert, off road, in search of a temple or some noseless, armless statuary, the remnants of yet another hubristic Ozymandias.
I liked the look of the Sudanese desert – vast, browny-bright, unpeopled, lots of off-road tracks – reputedly full of beautiful ruins and rocky ridges and extensive wadis full of herons, and oases with deep wells. ‘Not as hot as Khartoum,’ someone at the Acropole said. George found me a truck and a driver. The driver had a tent for me. What about his tent? This my country! These my dunes! This my sand! I sleep in the sand dunes.’ He actually did, on the gritty sand, in his clothes, like a cat on a mat. He was named for Ramadan, the period of fasting, and his home was in the west, Kordofan, in the Nub Mountains.
Meeting him and his vehicle on a back street in Khartoum I had been reassured by the sight of plastic chairs roped to the truck. They were just cheap molded things but usable. A man with the foresight to bring chairs on a camping trip in the desert could be counted on to have brought the rest of the necessaries – and this assessment proved true, for even though I didn’t taste them he also brought a jar of jam, some cans of tuna fish, and a haunch of goat.
We set off through Khartoum, crossed the bridge to North Khartoum and he showed me the pharmaceutical factory in the industrial area that had been blown up in 1998: still derelict, because the owner had a lawsuit pending. Then we swung back on to the main road, the Osama road to the north, and were soon in the desert, but peculiarly Sudanese desert - gravelly and flat but also strewn with hills formed like enormous rockpiles. About thirty miles north we came upon a squatter settlement in the middle of nowhere – people camped in mean shacks and lean-tos, fighting the heat and the wind – no trees or bush, just a few skinny goats. Ramadan called them Jaaliyeh, a clan that had come here and squatted in the hope that they would be seen as a nuisance and an obstruction and told to move.
‘Because when the government wants them to move they will ask for money.’
The Sudanese government in an expansion mode had become well-known for compensating people whom they were compelled to resettle.
Farther up the road, the boulder piles were even higher and some could have passed for mountains, or stone skeletons of mountains, while others were perfectly pyramidal. Here and there a mirage-like strip of green, low in the west, indicated the north-flowing Nile. I assumed that all the settlements would be near the Nile, but I was wrong. Some villages were a whole day’s donkey ride from the Nile, so that it was two days there and back; and the same distances from some villages to the nearest town – longer on foot than by donkey. It was true that there were Sudanese here who enjoyed the congeniality of living on a grid of streets in a good-sized town with a market by the river, but there seemed to me even more people who chose to live in the middle of nowhere, huddled in huts by a few boulders, a longish walk from a water source.
A little way off the road we stopped at Wadi ben Naggar, just a tiny village of goat herds and farmers but also the birthplace of Omer al Bashir, the current president of the Sudan, who had come to power in a coup.
A toothless man in a ragged turban howled at me and to neutralize his hostility I gave him the conventional greeting, ‘Salaam aleikum’ – Peace be upon you.
‘You are American?’
I caught the word, Ameriki, though Ramadan was translating, and Ramadan answered for me. The man had a grubby gown and a falling-apart turban and five days’ growth of beard.
I even understood this man’s next howl.
‘Bush ma kwais!’ Bush is no good.
‘How do I say, “I don’t know”?’
‘Ana ma’arif.’
I smiled at the man and said, ‘Ana ma’ arif.’
The man laughed and clutched at his turban, disentangling it some more.
‘Clinton Shaytaan.’
That was pretty clear: Clinton is Satan.
‘A lot of Americans would agree with you,’ I said.
He shook his head and smiled goofily, and gabbled a little: What was I saying? Then he said, ‘Bush blah-di-blah.’
‘He is saying you look like Bush.’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said to Ramadan and to the man, still practicing my new phrase, ‘Ana ma’ arif.’
‘Not big Bush but small Bush,’ Ramadan translated.
‘Ask him if he wants a Stim.’ It was the local version of 7-Up.
The man said, Yes, indeed, he wanted one.
Giving it to him, I said, ‘Please stop talking about Bush.’
He smiled at me – still no clue – and toasted, clinking Stim bottles, ‘Clinton is Satan.’
We left his boisterous abuse and his unfriendly smile, looked around the village, and then drove a little way up the road and off it, straight across the soft sand and deep ditches for about forty miles. There was no road to speak of, only hard-packed desert gravel and now and then powder-soft dunes. Up ahead I would see greenery and think there was a wooded glade but this would be ridiculous misapprehension as the glade turned out to be a hot patch of desert with a few stands of thornbushes and the wriggly marks of snakes.
‘There was a school here once,’ Ramadan said.
‘I want to see it.’
The place was ruined and deserted, just a cluster of empty buildings in the desert – perhaps an aid donor’s idea in the first place, one of those good-hearted misguided efforts to elevate Africans in a western way.
‘What happened?’
‘No water, no food, no teachers – nothing.’
Sand blew through the roofless classroom and the place looked as useless and broken as a Kushitic ruin, but without any of the art or grace. Some hobbled tortured-looking camels tottered near the school, their forelegs tied together so that they would not stray.
Then I saw the forgotten scholars and potential school kiddies: they were at the well, helping their elders, watering their goats, and the smallest of the children – no more than eight or nine – was running next to a roped donkey, hitting his hindquarters with a sharp stick and running beside him. The donkey was pulling a rope, and watching him I was surprised to see how far he pulled it, more than half the length of a football field down a well-worn path, zipping an immense length of frayed rope out of the well.
The well was ancient, the place was ancient: a Meroitic temple complex dating from the first century AD still stood near here, and such temples, so far from the Nile, could be sustained only by deep and reliable wells. This one was 175 feet deep. The opening at the top was about four feet in diameter. I was spooked contemplating its deepness. Men threw the goatskin hide pails into the depths of the well and then jerked the rope, bobbing it and filling it; and then they hoisted it a few feet and satisfied that it was full, they knotted the rope to a donkey and a little boy would chase the donkey into the desert, belaboring it with a stick. There was not a shred of clothing or any item of apparatus here that was any more modern than the first-century temple of Al Naggar (‘Carpenter’) on the other side of the dune. The school must have seemed a nice idea, but nothing here could have seemed more superfluous than those classrooms.
‘So you’re American?’ one of the men said to me in Arabic, because Ramadan had tipped him off.
‘Peace be upon you.’
‘And peace be upon you,’ he replied.
‘Bush is no good,’ another man said: the Arabic was simple enough.
‘I don’t know.’
&nbs
p; ‘Why is he saying he doesn’t know?’ one of the men at the well said.
Ramadan said, ‘Does everyone in the Sudan love President Omer?’
Yes, yes, they understood this, and laughed angrily and stamped on their little hillock for emphasis. And I thought of the lovely lines of Joyce, The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant’s heart on the hillside. For them the earth is not exploitable ground but the living mother. They loved their well. They explained the well to me, how deep it was. It had been dug many years ago. Sometimes they had to rope up and descend into its darkness to retrieve a lost pail, not a happy task.
‘There are snakes in the well,’ one man explained. To my next obvious questions they said, ‘Yes, the snakes are a meter long and they bite with poison.’
I walked around, looked at the goats, the camels, the toiling men and women, the children who were standing in the sun, performing this necessary and never-ending task. Then I said goodbye.
‘Tell Bush we want a pump!’ one man screamed in Arabic, Ramadan helpfully translating.
No, I don’t think so: a pump would need gasoline, spare parts, regular maintenance. Ultimately the contraption would fail them. They were better off hauling water the ancient way, with donkeys, goatskin pails, and goatskin water containers which when filled looked like little fat goat corpses.
But I said, ‘The next time I see President Bush I will mention it,’ which when translated brought forth a howl of derision.
Two thousand years ago, Al Naggar, this dune-haunted ruin in the desert, was a city, with cisterns and tanks, roads and houses, sophisticated agriculture and a high degree of prosperity, artisans everywhere, and priests and devotees. It was the center of a cult of the lion god Apademak, chief god of the Meroites, probably with good reason. There must have been many lions roaming in the central Sudan then – there were plenty in the south even now – and it is human nature to worship what we fear.
