by Ted Simon
From Cairo to Aswan the train ran for a night and a day. I boarded at the blacked-out station in a tumultuous rush of bodies to share a two-berth sleeper with a fat middle-class Egyptian in robes and turban. I also shared the sumptuous chicken feast he had brought bundled in a large white napkin, and he politely accepted a bit of my fruit. We munched together contentedly until it was time to sleep, undistracted by efforts at conversation because he spoke only Arabic.
Most of the following day I watched Egypt and the Nile pass by from the dining car window. I saw no missile pads or airfields, though a company of newly drafted soldiers came on board for a short distance. There was a bruised astonishment in their eyes that brought back sharp memories of my first weeks as a conscript.
I enjoyed the train, but resented the onward rush of it, that rationed me to such fleeting glimpses of life outside. It was a quite different world, I realized, viewed through this thick screen of plate glass.
At one of the inexplicable stops trains make between stations I found myself looking down directly on to a rice field beside the track where a grizzled old man and a boy were turning the soil with hoes. The man wore only a tattered galabeia. As he leaned forward to chop at the mud it revealed the whole of his stringy body tightening with effort and his genitals swinging back and forth. Beside him stood a woman in a black robe and shawl, also old but slim and perfectly erect. In contrast to the old man's coarse, dull face, her features were exquisitely drawn. Her eyebrows, nostrils and mouth were arched like spring steel under tension, expressing complete authority and contempt for her circumstances. She held a long and slender cane, like a wizard's wand, and supervised the work with smouldering eyes.
Pharaoh's daughter could not have looked more handsome or commanding than this woman standing bare-footed in a rice paddy. The group was quite oblivious of the train or of my stares. I saw that there was nothing they wore or used that they might not have had thousands of years ago. If I could discover, I thought, the secret of this woman's presence and the old man's submission I might have the story of Egypt, but before I could melt the glass with my eyes the train took me away.
The ferry is tied up at a wooden wharf above the Aswan Dam. It is not one boat but two; two small paddle steamers lashed together and run on a single paddle. The nearest one is First Class. I and the bike have to cross to the Second Class boat. While this is no problem for me, I can see immediately that it will be impossible to manhandle the bike there. I can see that, but the porters can see only a glorious opportunity to earn a fortune in baksheesh by achieving the impossible.
'Yes, yes, yes,' they scream and, in a flurry of brown limbs, they fight with the Triumph up a gangplank, over a rail into a narrow gangway, through hatches, over sills and bollards, four hundred pounds of metal dragging, sliding, flying and dropping among roars and curses and pleas for divine aid, while I follow helpless and resigned. Finally the bike is poised over the water between the two boats. The outstretched arms can only hold it, they cannot move it, and it is supported, incredibly, by the foot brake pedal which is caught on the ship's rail. Muscles are weakening. The pedal is bending and will soon slip, and my journey will end in the fathomless silt of Mother Nile. At this last moment, a rope descends miraculously from the sky dangling a hook, and the day is saved.
For three days and two nights I drift up the Nile along Lake Nasser. The sunrises and sunsets are so extraordinarily beautiful that my body turns inside out and empties my heart into the sky. The stars are close enough to grasp. Lying on the roof of the ferry at night I begin at last to know the constellations, and start a personal relationship with that particular little cluster of jewels called the Pleiades which nestles in the sky not far from Orion's belt and sword. Really, those stars, when they come that close, you have to take them seriously.
I sleep illegally on the roof of the First Class boat, because the Second Class deck is indescribable. I would rather swim than sleep there. Hundreds of Nubian camel drivers are returning to the Sudan, with their huge hide bags and whips, to pick up another consignment of camels and drive them remorselessly up into Egypt. They are all dressed in grubby white, and lie side by side among their bundles across the deck. The crevices between them are caulked with a mixture of orange peel, cigarette ends and spit. The hawking and spitting, which is a constant background murmur to Arab life, here rises to become the dominant sound, louder than speech, louder than the ferry's engine, drowned out only, and rarely, by the ship's hooter. Lungs rasp and rip, you can hear the tissues tear into shreds, and the glutinous product flies in all directions. I am not ready for that yet.
During the first night we cross the Tropic of Cancer. During the second day a Turkish passenger goes mad. He has been looking more pale and drawn by the hour. Now, with his black eyes buttoned to the back of his brain he begins to twirl in the saloon, stopping suddenly to point his finger and cast some fatal spell. He collapses, then rises to twirl again. His eyes have seen something too terrible to be borne.
The ferry ties up in the night somewhere south of Abu Simbel, and the Turk is taken ashore, but after much discussion he is brought aboard again and we continue. When we land at Wadi Haifa at midday he is quiet.
I meant to ride from Wadi Haifa, but the police say I must take the train at least as far as Abu Hamed, and I cannot get petrol without the help of the police. I have made friends with a Dutch couple, and once on the train I might as well go with them as far as Atbara. What's a few more miles in the whole of Africa?
The train rattles on through beer, supper, songs, sleep, tea and English breakfast. In the oval, engraved mirror of a colonial dining car I actually take notice of my face for the first time in a long while. Action has freed me from self-consciousness, and I am becoming a stranger to my own appearance. It is a very satisfying feeling. I no longer think of people seeing me as I see myself in a mirror. Instead I imagine that people can see directly into my soul. It is as though a screen between me and the world has dropped away.
Through the carriage window the desert has been sweeping past, almost unbroken, for hours. I stare at it mesmerized, trying to imagine myself riding over it. Now there are signs of life: some animals more thorn trees, tents and huts. The train slows. Atbara Station. The corridor is jammed with people and bundles. My mind is in gear again. To meet trouble halfway, what disasters shall I anticipate now? Perhaps e bike has vanished off the train somewhere en route? Maybe half of it will be missing? Or I will be asked to bribe someone to unload it?
The wheels screech on the rails. The crowd tumbles off. The bike is still there. Nothing is missing. There are no problems. To me this is a sort of miracle. I wheel it to where my bags are heaped on the platform and pack them on as children peer into the speedometer where they believe the soul of the machine to reside. I flood the carburettor. For God's sake start! Don't give me any trouble. It's too hot to wrestle with you now.
One kick and she starts. You lovely machine.
First to the police, to be registered as an alien. The locomotive is hissing and panting in the station. I can hear it across the road. It howls and clanks into action. Plunk, plunk, plunk-plunk-plunk-plunk as the train's vertebrae stretch. It rolls away to Khartoum, but now there is more noise, and agitation continues with a taxi for my friends, and the bike following, to find a hotel. The hotel.
Atbara is a frontier town; mud houses, wooden facades, and the enveloping dirt road filling all the spaces between like a brown flood ready to reclaim it all. Here is a more imposing street, red brick and cement. Is this the hotel? We stop. The taxi leaves, but the travelling noise goes on in my head. We're not there yet. The building looks abandoned.
'Hotel?'
An old man sweeping leaves shakes his head angrily, and points down the street.
Alongside the next building is an alley. It debouches into a garden with tables and chairs rooted here and there among the weeds. A cemented veranda at the back of the building gives access to a series of closed green doors. Hotel!
&nb
sp; At a round iron table sit five men.
'Hotel?'
'Hotel, yes. Come and sit.'
One last effort, to fetch the bike into the garden, park it against the veranda, close the petrol tap, walk to the table . . . and sit. The noise stops.
The sun is getting low now, the light is yellow and grainy. The five men are gathered like a conspiracy of pantomime pirates. One has a black eye-patch, another a vivid scar. The one next to me, an Arab in galabeia and turban, has a squint and a thin-lipped smile of artless evil. Every child in the audience knows he has a dagger under his robe.
The table is laden with date sherry bottles, all empty but one. With exaggerated hospitality the Arab sweeps up the sleeves of his galabeia and pours out glasses for the Dutch couple and myself. Yo-Ho-Ho and a bottle of date sherry.
The pirates are passing a joint round. The Arab waves it in the air and murmurs sibilant nonsense as though in a haze of mellow stupefaction, but his eye is much too bright. The scent of the smoke is delicious, the silence around us is like a cool bath. Is anything more relaxing than the hospitality of harmless villains? How do I know they're harmless? I don't, and yet I do.
The Arab invests in another bottle of sherry and we sit for an hour as the sun goes down, lost in lazy contentment. During that hour I feel I have arrived in the Sudan.
A muscular black man comes towards us, urgently, asks us to come to the hotel. The bar is open now, and a naked bulb is shining down on ugly plastic surfaces. I am very reluctant to leave the garden. The man insists. He has a tigerish body, too restrained in his neat shirt and trousers.
I am coming to see if you are alright, and I find you sitting with a bad man. I am Pabiano,' he said, 'My name is Munduk, my brother is in the police. That man is not good. He is a teep. He is only pretending drunk so that others will become drunk. Then he steal prom your pocket. He has been in prison.'
I look back to the table. In the last faint light the Arab has twisted in his chair to look at us, one arm outstretched towards us, the long cotton sleeve trailing, imploring us to return. I feel a sad affection for him. There was a kind of understanding.
Three nights in Atbara. From the ceiling hangs an enormous propeller, slowly kneading the thick night air. During the days I prepare for the desert. There is an obstinate electrical fault in the bike. I take the lens off the headlamp, and it spills wiring over the veranda, pitifully, as though vomiting its entrails. I work on it as martial music drifts across the wall from a school Sports Day. By evening the bike is repaired, the hernia sewn up. I have been considering how to carry water. I have brought a collapsible plastic container, and can carry a gallon on the back of the bike, but I am not quite convinced it will work and I want a reserve. If I fill the aluminium bottle with distilled water, then I can use that for the batteries also. A garage fills the bottle for me. I have to cross two hundred and fifty miles of desert to Kassala and the next petrol pump. With three gallons in the tank, and the jerry half full I should have plenty. Tomorrow I will buy more, just in case. Today I can't because I haven't enough money. It is Sunday and the banks are closed.
I have asked everyone about the way to Kassala. They all say it is 'queiss', which means good. Thomas Taban Duku, the registrar of aliens, said so. It was more usual for people to go to Khartoum, but many buses go to Kassala, at least one each day. He could not remember anyone coming by motorcycle before, but then, he said, a motorcycle can go anywhere. If a bus can go, then so can a motorcycle, isn't it? And faster even. 'The road is queiss'. He was quietly confident.
So is the man at the hotel. He says it's a good road, now the rains have gone. And the Michelin map calls it a marked and recognized track.
Munduk also says it will be easy. He comes to the hotel, and that evening, under a waxing moon, we visit his house to see how to make date sherry at home, and then to look at the Nile.
'Here is the Blue Nile,' he says. 'The White Nile is one day walking from here.'
He is wrong. The Blue Nile joins the White Nile at Khartoum two hundred miles upstream. How can he be so wrong about something like that? Who knows? Away from Western cities you get used to it. If you want to know something, you ask again and again. When many opinions run together they thicken to form a fact. Isn't that the essence of modern theoretical physics? So often it seems that every scientific principle has its counterpart in social behaviour. Simon's Hypothesis? Waves & Particles. Critical Mass. Fission, fusion, all of thermodynamics and Maxwell's Demon as the exception that proves the rule . . . My head is flying and my feet slip into the marsh. Eye Pierce Heaven, Foot Stick in Mud. As I stumble out I see Munduk prowling round some bushes, more like a tiger than ever, sniffing the air, cocking his ear. He reminds me of Castaneda's Don Genaro looking for a car under a stone.
'Serpent,' he says. 'Or some animal maybe. I show you how we hunt in the bush.'
He and his six brothers, he says, fled to Uganda when the Moslems killed his parents in the war. They lived by hunting in the bush. Now all his brothers are famous. So he says. Why not believe him, until it becomes important?
Atbara is among the hottest places in the world. In summer it goes to 110 degrees in the shade. In winter it simmers at a few degrees below ninety. Shops do their business early and late in the day. Banks, I thought, would do likewise. But no. In Atbara, as everywhere else in the world, bankers followed their own inscrutable whims. Opening time was nine-thirty.
It was already half past seven. I was packed, paid up, booked out, and ready to go. By ten the last cool hours of the morning would have evaporated. I thought I had enough petrol. What need could I have for money in the desert? The time was ripe to begin my great adventure, to catch the tide.
I rode out of Atbara directed by dry, black fingers.
'Queiss, queiss,' said the owners of the fingers. 'Road good, this way.'
Atbara's only stretch of tarmac gave way to mud. I went past the Ethiopian prostitutes' quarter, alongside a last row of mud houses and came to a piece of stony ground surrounded by thorn trees. Spread out before me was a vast heap of stinking rubbish. No road. Not a sign of a road. I was not looking for tar or paving or even made-up dirt, but there was not so much as a track.
The difference between men and gods is farce.
During all the months of preparation, the girding of loins and steeling of resolve, the one feat which I thought would set me apart from mortal men was my single-handed crossing of the Atbara desert.
And now I could not find it.
I rode back into town to ask again. Once more I followed the fingers, other fingers, along the same route. I could find no other way.
Twice I inspected Atbara's garbage, and twice I returned. I was in a fever of impatience and I felt completely ridiculous. If Neil Armstrong had lost his way to the launching pad he could not have been more frustrated.
There was a police station along the way which I had carefully avoided, but now I could think of nowhere else to go for an explanation. I was always afraid of involving myself unnecessarily with officials. Generally when a man in uniform has something unusual brought to his attention, his instinct is to stop it. Uniform is as uniform does. There are honourable exceptions however. The Atbara police delayed me, but they did not stop me, and they explained that the road to Kassala did, indeed, go past the rubbish tip. And I began to understand, with some embarrassment, that in Sudanese English the word 'road' has no mineral connections, it simply means 'the way'. I had fallen into the simplest linguistic trap, imagining that the road had a physical reality. There was no road; only an imaginary line across the desert.
By now it was nearly nine o'clock. I should have swallowed my pride, gone to the bank, cooled off, and left the following day, but I was rolling under the momentum of my own folly, and I knew I could not stop or something might break. A dream, for instance.
This time I rode round the rubbish tip. Beyond it was a gap in the trees. Through it I saw the open desert. To the right of the gap was another heap of fresh garbage,
and as I rode past it a big red eye met mine.
The eye was level with my own. It was inflamed, and encrusted with dirt. The dirt was sticking to the few vagrant hairs that remained on its bald and dreadful head. I was deeply shocked by it, and rode on before I had collected my wits and assembled the images. Then I saw that it was a monstrous bird, of human proportions, with a great pendulous beak and long and filthy white neck. I wanted to turn back, but I was carried on relentlessly by some inner current, and the bird became for a while a mythical beast and guardian of the desert.
I rode into the desert. It looked flat, but of course it was not. Nor was it sandy, but made of a rather greyish, fairly compact stuff halfway between sand and soil, littered with small shards of stone. I found I could ride across it quite easily, and the faster I went, the smoother the ride, though stopping might be a problem.
The question was, which way to go? Ahead and to the left, the desert stretched to infinity, only interrupted by the well-defined profile of an occasional umbrella tree. To the right, however, perhaps a mile away, was a line of trees, which I first took to be the edge of a forest. Then I realized that they were palm trees, and that they must define the bed of the Atbara river, which ran from Atbara to Kassala. My first great fear was dispelled. Obviously I could never be lost in the desert as long as I kept the river bed in view.
Also there were tyre tracks, quite deep ones, made when the ground was softer at the end of the rains, but their direction was puzzling. Some headed towards the river, others made for the heart of the desert, none followed the route I thought I should take. I tried to move closer to the river, but the ground became softer and occasionally even drifted into dunes which would certainly swallow my wheels. I wondered whether the desert-bound tracks might be aiming for a better and firmer route away from the river, and I followed one for a way, but it showed no sign of bearing right, and as the river line was almost lost to sight, I thought better of it and headed back.
