by Levison Wood
He made as if to leave, hesitating only once. ‘Are we . . . staying?’ he asked.
I could not answer. I told him it would be alright and retreated to the gutted shell that was my own room.
In the darkness, I reached for my phone again. As the reception flickered in and out, I saw that I had several missed calls. I was scrolling through them when the phone began to vibrate again. The name ANDY BELCHER was illuminated on the screen.
‘Belcher,’ I said, picking up the phone.
‘Lev?’ buzzed a voice in my ear.
‘It’s me.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ came the sardonic reply. ‘Are you okay up there?’
‘What’s happening here, Belcher? Are the rebels storming Bor?’
Belcher had been keeping close tabs on the progress of events from the relative safety of Bedouin Lodge back in Juba. ‘It’s not rebels, Lev. It’s Dinka Youth – armed civilians. They’re so pissed off with the UN, they’re ready to attack anyone associated with the organisation.’ He paused. ‘Do you hear me, Lev?’
‘I hear you,’ I said, wearily.
‘Get out of there,’ said Belcher. ‘Look, there’s a Cessna. I can have it with you in three hours. Don’t take any risks.’
I had opened my mouth to reply when fists hammered at the door. Siraje, I thought, come to get me. ‘Belcher,’ I said, ‘I’ve got to go . . .’
When the door was drawn back, it was not Siraje staring at me from the veranda, but the manager of the hotel instead. ‘There you are,’ he breathed. ‘I thought, for a second . . .’
‘We went to the roof,’ I said. ‘Just in case.’
‘They’ll kill you if they find you in here. These Dinka Youth, they’ll think you’re UN and then . . . you have to go.’
‘Go? Now?’
‘First thing in the morning, as soon as you can. However you can. Do you hear me?’
There was not only desperation in this man’s eyes; he was begging me for my sake, not for his. ‘Thank you,’ I said, and watched him hurry back along the veranda.
Sleep wouldn’t come to me that night. For long hours, I prowled up and down the circumference of the tiny room, listening out for voices, half waiting for another knock at the door. When it did not come, I tried to close my eyes. I wanted to think about the north, about the four hundred miles of wilderness I had been hoping to traverse – but all I saw, in vivid splashes across the backs of my eyelids, were memories of the day in Bor: the burial mounds listing in the earth beside the river; the black blood stains where the clergy had been massacred inside the cathedral; the burnt-out tanks and the smell of death.
Before dawn, I returned to the veranda, to watch the soldiers still gathered in the car park. I still couldn’t shake those images from my mind. Compared to what was happening in South Sudan, my own expedition was as insignificant as a single raindrop in the storms that were soon to come. Even if there was a way to go downriver, I knew, now, that it wasn’t worth it. How could I justify putting other people in danger by walking through a warzone where people – real people – were starving and being killed every day? I wasn’t one of the Nile’s first explorers, and this wasn’t the 19th century, when it was acceptable to pay for your own militia and battle your way through spear-wielding tribes and impress your superiority upon them with a Gatling gun. I’d set out on a mission to discover more about the River Nile and its people, not simply to prove a point.
For the first time, I understood: I had no place being here. I thought back to the other conflict areas I’d been in: Afghanistan, Iraq, Kurdistan, Burma, the Caucasus and others. Of them all, this was undoubtedly the worst. Bor was a place without hope – so devastated, so lost and so violent that it sent a shiver of horror down my spine. I thought back to Baker, who had been thwarted by tribal wars in Uganda and took revenge by shooting dozens of ‘natives’ as he cruised upriver on his barge; I thought of the Romans, who had been driven back by the impenetrable Sudd; I thought of how Stanley had sacrificed two hundred men following the flow of the River Congo. In the final moment, I thought of Matt Power, dead on a Ugandan hillside, never to go back home. Africa seems to take lives without regard and with impunity. Somewhere in Bor, it was happening even now. I’d seen enough death in my time to understand that there is just too much to live for, and if there was one place I didn’t want to see my own end, it was South Sudan. The Nile, as far as I was concerned, could wait. She wasn’t going anywhere, and maybe one day I would come back and complete this journey in more peaceful times.
Without fully realising it at first, I had made my decision. A world record simply wasn’t worth getting shot in the back of the head for. In the morning, we would beat the road back south, following the edge of the Sudd, through the empty carcasses of villages decimated by war to the relative safety of Juba. No world record, no expedition, was worth the risk of walking blindly onward.
I lay back in bed, staring at the ceiling, and waited for the dawn’s first light.
A NEW BEGINNING
Sudan, May 2014
The plane banked out of the clear blue skies above Khartoum, coming to a smooth landing on the runway below. Outside, the city rippled in the haze of a fifty-degree heat. I stepped, squinting, onto the asphalt of the runway and sighed. The expedition was now broken – but somehow it had to go on.
On fleeing Bor, we had returned to Juba, where Siraje and I parted ways. Boston, by then, was already back in Kampala, his own expedition cut short – and, for the first time, I understood how he was feeling. The honour of becoming the first man to walk the full length of the Nile had been denied me, and it hurt. The Sudd had beaten me, like it had tormented so many other travellers along the Nile, and the disappointment was difficult to put into words.
Escorted by SPLA security, we had holed up in the airport at Juba until a plane was ready to take us out of South Sudan. The plan, hastily rearranged, was to reach Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, and back-track to as close to the border with South Sudan as we could get. There, the expedition would begin again, north to Khartoum and the Sahara Desert beyond.
The man waiting in the airport, holding up a sign that read simply ‘LEVISON’ was to be my guide from the southern border to the crossing into Egypt, a journey of over a thousand miles. He was also a complete stranger. Tentatively, I shook his hand.
I had been to Sudan once before, four years previously, when I’d volunteered to lead an expedition driving two ambulances from England to a hospital in Malawi. It had been an eventful trip, not least because we were arrested in Egypt and detained for ten days by the secret police, a stop that had left us scrabbling to make up time by driving across the Sahara Desert in less than thirty-six hours. To say that I don’t remember much would be an understatement – those hours passed in such a sleepless blur that I can barely recall crashing through a police roadblock on the outskirts of the Sudanese town of Dongola, and almost being cast from the side of a cliff in the ensuing carnage. But one thing that did come out of that journey was my chance meeting with Mazar Mahir, a tour guide of Ancient Nubian descent whose family business controlled the tourist trade in Wadi Halfa, the town on the Nile that marks the border between Sudan and Egypt. Mazar was known throughout the world as the go-to man for Sudan, and over the past years, we’d stayed in intermittent contact. At first, I’d hoped Mazar himself would accompany me for the Sudanese leg of this expedition, but – perhaps wisely – he had declared himself too busy. I didn’t blame him – his life was consumed with hosting tourists and helping them get out of trouble with the Egyptian authorities. But it is not for nothing that the Sudanese are hailed, the world over, as the most hospitable of hosts. ‘I have a suggestion,’ Mazar had said to me, ‘and his name is Moez. He is my little brother. He’ll meet you at the airport. See if you like him, Lev. He says he can walk.’
And that was all I knew about the man waiting for me in the airport: not that he was a good guy, nor that he was very experienced, only that he could walk.
&
nbsp; It was, I decided as he silently led me to his car, an inauspicious start.
After a night at the Acropole Hotel, I wended my way to meet Moez at his office in downtown Khartoum. Less than a week had passed since that fateful night in Bor, but already it felt like a lifetime ago.
With the morning light filtering through the shutters of his tiny first-floor room, nestled between a spluttering air-conditioning unit and a lethal-looking fuse box, I was able to consider Moez more thoughtfully.
‘Salaam Alaikum,’ he said, respectfully.
‘Inta Kwies? Tamam?’ I smiled back. ‘Sorry,’ I added. ‘I’ve forgotten most of my Arabic.’
‘Mafi Mushkila. No problem. I will teach you. Tamam?’
‘Tamam,’ I said.
‘Chai?’
Well, that one was easy. I gratefully accepted his offer of tea and followed him to the corner of his claustrophobic little office. Here, the walls were covered in photographs of Moez with tourists, scientists and archaeologists. In between hung traditional paintings: African masks, posters of the famous Pyramids of Meroe, shelves of Bedouin knives, fossils, pieces of broken pottery and even some bones. ‘It’s all original,’ Moez said with a smile. ‘Sudan is full of these things. I like rocks, particularly: granite, quartz, gold. Anywhere you go, you can just pick it up.’
‘Gold?’
‘Oh, it’s everywhere. It’s where the word Nubia comes from.’
‘What is?’
‘Gold. Nub means Gold. Like my guiding company – Nub Kush. And the Nuba mountains – the Golden Mountains. This is where the Ancient Egyptians came to find gold, and then the Phoenicians, and then the Arabs, and then the English. And now . . . the Chinese. Sudan is a golden country.’
I looked at Moez as he poured the sugary black tea into two small, chipped glasses on a silver Chinese tray. He looked to be in his late thirties, with curly black hair. His face, finely featured, with big almond eyes, looked almost feminine and complemented his high cheekbones and rather large ears. He didn’t look Arabic, but nor did he look black. He was pure Nubian, an ancient Semitic people who have been the fathers of Sudan since ancient times, and whose homelands are in northern Sudan and southern Egypt. In the half-light of the room, I wondered how this man might fare as my guide. I didn’t have the luxury of time to decide. The plan was to be at the southern border tomorrow, back with the river. It had been too long.
I asked him outright: ‘Can you walk?’
‘Yes.’ He smiled. ‘But where are we walking?’
I had presumed Mazar had told him. It seemed inconceivable that he hadn’t – and I began to wonder if this was all a practical joke between the brothers.
‘I’m walking the Nile. I have been ever since Rwanda. Only . . . the fighting in the South drove me out. I’m here to start again. Tomorrow, I’m going south to the border and, from there, I’m following the river – all the way into Egypt.’
With a studious air, Moez wandered across the room and consulted his diary. ‘How long will this take?’
‘Two months,’ I said, ‘more or less.’
He contemplated it further, lost in the diary. ‘I’m free,’ he said with bewildering nonchalance, ‘but I’ll need to pack a bag first.’
The deal was done, whether I liked it or not. I had a new guide – one, I suspected, who would be as different from Ndoole Boston as water from sand.
The mountain at Al Jabalain loomed like a giant black hand over the arid savannah. Stepping out of the car, palming payment to Salaah, the fat Nubian driver who had driven us the two hundred miles from Khartoum, I stared into the south. Only two hundred kilometres further south lay the northernmost edge of the great Sudd. I must have been staring at it too long, because as soon as Moez had lifted the cheap bicycles we had bought from the back of the van, he came to my side.
‘At least you’re still alive.’ He smiled. ‘If you’d gone into that place, you’d be dead by now – and I’d still be looking for work. Do you know how few travellers come to Sudan in the summer?’
We had come as close to the border as local security agents would allow, into a land of arid plain and desert scrub. As Salaah disappeared into the north, it seemed unbelievable that this landscape could border the mightiest swampland on Earth. The only things to break the endless flatness were outcrops of evil, thorn-ridden acacia bushes – and, of course, the river itself. Here, the Nile surged due north, for a short time forming the border with South Sudan itself, before piercing the heart of Sudan. Along its length ran a bullet-straight tarmac road, gleaming black against the parched wilderness.
All of a sudden, the vastness of the journey ahead seemed impossible. Even the two hundred miles back to Khartoum felt inconceivable. Whether it was the defeat in South Sudan, or just the simplicity, the starkness of staring out at hundreds of miles of open scrubland, I wasn’t sure – but a strange sense of doubt was starting to bubble up within me.
‘You should ride,’ I said, as Moez balanced his packs on one of the bicycles.
‘Ride?’ he said, aghast. ‘Why should I ride? If you’re walking, then I’m walking. This is walking the Nile, not riding the Nile.’ He finished wrapping the straps around his bag and, without another word, began to push up the road. I looked at him, in his black jeans, polo T-shirt and baseball cap, discreetly covering a balding head. On his feet was a pair of fake-leather shoes, with one sole already hanging off. Moez might have claimed to have escorted archaeologists and scientists around the vast emptiness of the Sahara – but I suspected it was probably from the comfort of a Toyota Land Cruiser. Under my breath, I muttered to myself, ‘He won’t last the week.’
The truth was: I didn’t know if I would either.
The next days seemed to last for ever. Sudan was a new beginning, but for the first time, the walking seemed a pointless exercise. I found no comfort in putting one foot in front of the other. Flanked on one side by huge electricity pylons and featureless scrub, every day was the same. The road was so straight it began to feel interminable.
We reached the town of Kosti on the second day, crossing to the river’s eastern bank to continue the endless trek north. Behind me, Moez struggled on without words. It was difficult to push the bike, especially along the riverbank where the sand was deep, but I kept my head down, ignored his travails, and barrelled on. Soon, Moez and I were walking some distance apart, saying nothing to each other for long hours. He was struggling in stoic silence, but I had no words of encouragement for him, and he in turn had nothing to say to me. I began to hanker for Boston’s wild conspiracy theories, his diatribes against the state of Africa, anything that might have distracted me from this vicious silence. Sights, sounds and smells – all of these were extravagant luxuries now, devils that slowed me down: all I wanted was this inane trek to be over. Even the river seemed a phantom. Pain had become irrelevant. The blisters, sores and cramps no longer mattered. Every day, I got up, walked another marathon – and either the pain would go away, or it wouldn’t. Whatever the case, the next morning, I got up and did it all again.
I would have walked through the night to reach Khartoum, anything to be rid of this endless expanse, but memories of Matt Power slowed me down. Pushing Moez too hard might have been fatal – but, by halving my pace, I doubled my frustration. Every slow day was a half-day, and a half-day wasted; half a day that I could have been closer to the finish, closer to home. I woke every morning, feeling sick to the stomach at the thought of the long months of nothingness, of endless dunes and unchanging horizon. The comforting greenery of the jungle was far behind – the variation, the hills, the wildlife that had kept madness at bay. With so much to see, it had been easy to be distracted, but here in the wasteland of Sudan, it seemed all I had to look forward to was an endlessness of searing heat and sleeping in roadside shacks amid piles of rubbish. The desert wasn’t supposed to be like this. I’d had romantic notions of sleeping under the stars against a backdrop of ancient ruins – but all of that lay somewhere to the north, in a v
ery different desert. I had to get there first.
Conversation, when it came at all, was a laboured thing. ‘How long have you been working with tourists, Moez?’ I asked, and had to force myself to listen to the answer.
‘Since 2001,’ he said. ‘I like the tourists here.’ He winked at me, with the look of a devil. ‘Especially the Japanese ones . . .’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘They have skin like the waters of the Nile, so smooth and soft,’ he said dreamily.
Moez might have been a teetotaller, who bookended his days with prayer, but it seemed he had an eye for different things as well. He had trained as an artist, studying at the University of Sudan in Khartoum, and the paintings I had seen hanging in his office were, in fact, his own creations. He had also travelled widely. Somehow, he’d convinced several former – female – clients to show him around their home cities in Europe. ‘I even went to China once,’ he began, ‘and to Libya. We went over the border illegally, looking for gold. And prehistoric rock art. It’s amazing, the things you can find.’
‘Do you know,’ I said, ‘you might be even more opportunistic than Boston.’
‘Who?’
I pushed on up the road. ‘He was an almighty blackguard,’ I chuckled, and Moez just smiled.
There were imperceptible changes in the landscape. The villages we passed were no longer the thatched round houses of the south, but all adobe mud with high compounds. The men of these villages all wore white jellabiyas and the women – what few could be seen – wore the hijab, or the niqab. It was my first real reminder that Sudan is an Islamic nation. Indeed, this was the reason South Sudan had fought so long and hard to secede – to gain self-determination for the Christian and Animist peoples of the South.
I woke, that morning, as I did every morning: on a string bed, at the side of the road, listening to the morning traffic – Nuer refugees fleeing the South for the inner-city ghettos of Khartoum – hurtling past. From the houses that lined the road, men emerged to piss in the street and hawk up great globules of phlegm into the sand. As I did every morning – if only to remind myself that the days were continuing to trickle by – I checked the date of my diary: it was 5 May.
