Impossible Journey

by Michael Asher

  Rob came from Reading. He was an educated man, trained as a lawyer, who had worked in a bank and as the manager of a petrol-retailing company. He had never been happy in Britain. A broken home had led to a broken marriage. He had come to the Sudan as a volunteer teacher, as I had, intent on starting a new life. He had been in the Sudan almost seven years and had been a Muslim for five.

  The Sudanese sun had not bronzed Rob. Instead, it had left him stony-grey. There were new lines of strain on his face since I had last seen him. Rob invited us to his house. He would have taken the camels too if we had not already sold them in the market. He was about to leave for Khartoum, he said. The Ministry of Education had perpetrated the ultimate treachery of terminating all contracts with English teachers in Darfur province. The teachers were volunteers and were paid a pittance anyway, but for Rob, the change could not have come at a more inconvenient time. He had just proposed marriage to a young Sudanese girl, one of his students, and had every reason to suppose that his offer would be favourably received.

  ‘I had to ask her in the office, between classes,’ he told me. ‘That’s the only way I could talk to her alone. I told her, “Look, I won’t give you all the chat, because everyone else will be here in a minute. I want to marry you!” You know what she said? “It’s no problem with me, professor!” Imagine that! I went to see her father with a Sudanese friend, and the father told me she was engaged to a cousin. They always say that. She told me she’s not interested in the cousin, so I still have a good chance. In the end, they listen to what the girl wants, you see.’

  Marinetta was not impressed with the Muslim way. ‘It’s like choosing a wife from a catalogue!’ she said.

  *

  The police chief wore a green bush shirt decorated on the collar with silver secretary birds, the national emblem of the Sudan. His mouth was small and tightly closed, as if he normally wore dentures which were for some reason missing. ‘It’s out of the question,’ he said. ‘You can’t travel by camel in Darfur. It’s a security matter.’

  I explained that I had a letter from the Sudanese Ambassador in London granting us permission to cross the Sudan by camel. Surely, a police officer couldn’t overrule an Ambassador?

  ‘This letter is a year old,’ the officer said.

  ‘Eleven months,’ I corrected him. ‘That’s how long we have been in the Sahara.’

  ‘There have been new developments since then,’ he said. I already knew what they were. Colonel Gaddafi’s shadow was everywhere.

  Marinetta suggested the UN. They had helped us in the past, and we hoped that they would be able to do something for us now. The UN Development Programme boss in El Fasher was a Texan called Bob Siddell. He looked trim and cunning with his spectacles and neatly brushed, silvering hair. ‘I yewsta be an oilman,’ he said, ‘but the company went bust. I kinda miss the oil business, though.’ Bob’s war had been Korea, where he had been an intelligence officer for General Westmoreland. He spoke fluent Japanese, and his Arabic was coming along. Bob’s task in El Fasher was to supervise the spending of $76 million donated by the Italian government to the province of Darfur. I asked him to repeat the figure. ‘Seventy-six million dollars,’ he said. The money was being used to build a new road joining El Fasher to Gineina, to sink a hundred new wells, and to rebuild or refurbish ten hospitals. There were also projects to build warehouses containing stockpiles of seed in case of future drought and to establish projects for cultivators. I told Bob the nature of our problem. ‘I’ll do what I can,’ he promised.

  When we called at his office the next day, Bob told us that he had spoken to the man in question. ‘I said that you were British and Italian and that the Sudan is currently in receipt of a lot of aid from both your countries. He said that even if he wanted to give you permission to go north, he couldn’t. Only Khartoum can do that.’ My heart sank. Khartoum lay 400 miles away, and the hot season would soon be upon us. Our money was short now, and we had to reach the Nile before high summer or we would be in trouble. I explained this to Bob, who smiled knowingly, like a Cheshire cat. ‘He did say, however, that if you were to leave without permission, there wouldn’t be much the police could do about it once, you were outside the city. The only areas barred are Kutum and Mellit.’ Marinetta and I looked at each other. We had been given the green light.

  That evening, we held a conference of two at Rob Hydon’s house. Rob had left for Khartoum and had generously allowed us to remain there. We had been barred from Kutum and Mellit, both of which lay to the north of El Fasher. Mellit had been on our proposed route, which would take us across the south Libyan Desert to Egypt. Now we realised that this way would be fraught with problems. We decided to head northeast from El Fasher into the neighbouring province of Kordofan. There, just across the provincial border, lay the camps of the Kababish, a confederation of Arab tribes among whom I had lived and had many friends. In Kababish country, we would be out of reach.

  The first, most dangerous task was to get out of the town without being seen or stopped. If the police caught us within its perimeter, they would be obliged to arrest us to save face. We had bought three fine new bull camels in El Fasher market, ferrying them back to Rob’s house one by one under the cover of darkness. We had tested them carefully before buying them to make sure they were placid and unexcitable. We restocked with food and bought a new set of waterskins and a new saddle.

  We were up well before dawn on 23rd March. It took two hours to get the new loads right. When the three new camels were loaded, I told Marinetta to open the street door of the yard. She took a deep breath, and the zinc door creaked open. She peered out into the sandy avenue that tilted down towards the market. She looked both ways then beckoned to me. ‘Come on! There’s no one!’ she said. I led the camels out into the street. Then it was ‘Eyes front! Left-right-left-right!’ down into the marketplace, where women in many-coloured robes were setting up piles of limes and oranges among the stalls. There was the warm smell of animal dung. Men on donkeys were trotting across the sandy square. Some goats mooched about, nuzzling at yesterday’s peelings. We marched straight across the square, expecting to be stopped at any moment. No one took the slightest notice of us. We coiled through the wooden stalls and plunged into a steep alleyway that, I knew, led directly out into the desert.

  No sooner had we entered the alley than Marinetta hissed, ‘Maik! There’s a lorry full of policemen coming!’ Thinking that she was joking, I looked behind. A battered Commer truck was following us, carrying half a dozen green-jacketed policemen. The driver hooted, and the camels snorted nervously. As bold as brass, Marinetta held up her hand, shouting, ‘Stop! Stop!’ to the driver. The man grinned back at her and slowed the truck to an idle. I quickly manhandled the camels into an intersecting alley. As the truck swayed past, the policemen waved to us cheerily.

  Moments later, we emerged from the town into a vast, rolling plain of amber laced with green. At the plain’s edge, we saw the carved black husks of the Wima hills, darkly silhouetted against the carmine sky of sunrise. Beyond those hills, seven days across the desert, lay the borders of Kordofan. Beyond that lay the homely camps of the Kababish Arabs, where I had spent three of the best years of my life.

  Edge of Darkness

  We crossed the Kordofan border near Umm Gozayn and turned north towards Umm Sunta, where the chief of the Kababish Arabs, At Tom Wad Hassan, always pitched his tents. Marinetta was excited at the prospect of meeting an Arab chief. ‘I knew an Arab prince once,’ she told me. ‘It was in Somalia. He was a Saudi—I’d read about him in the newspapers.’ She had met him at a conference, and he had liked her because she spoke Arabic. A few days later, she found herself with an invitation to his quarters in the palace and a chauffeur-driven car to take her there. ‘Can you imagine it?’ she said. ‘It was like a dream. Here was a man who had everything, even his own private plane, inviting me!’

  ‘What was he like?’

  ‘He was fine at first—quite romantic. He recited a poem for m
e. Then he started talking about sex. He said it was unnatural for a woman like me not to have a boyfriend.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘That I was quite happy as I was. I wasn’t interested in sex. It was the romantic idea of meeting a prince that I liked. You know what he told me before I left? He said that even though he had enough money to do anything he wanted, he wasn’t happy. He said that money was a lot nicer when you hadn’t got it. “When you’ve got it, it means nothing,” he said. “It’s getting it that matters.”’

  That just about said it all, I thought.

  Sheikh At Tom wasn’t that kind of prince. He was the hereditary sheikh or nazir of the Kababish confederation, the largest nomadic tribe in the Sudan. His tents were arranged in family groups, standing out like slices of fresh cream from the dull, metallic cages of the acacias in Wadi Umm Sunta. As soon as we arrived in the camp, old friends surrounded us. Other hands than ours unloaded our baggage and hobbled our camels, setting them out to graze in the scrub.

  The nazir was about my own age, a big, husky man with a broad face, capable of both charm and fury. He was a diplomat, generally liked and respected by his people, an able leader and a just mediator. He had inherited the nazirate from his father Hassan only two years before and was the great grandson of Sir Ali Wad At Tom, KVCO, one of only three Sudanese ever to have been knighted under British colonial rule. At Tom welcomed us with dignity and genuine warmth. As we sat in his presence, almost everyone in the camp came to greet us. Many of them were old acquaintances and travelling companions of mine, who were curious to see ‘Omar’s wife’. One of my closest friends, Juma’ Wad Sinniin, told me, ‘Now you are a complete man, Omar!’ He had offen told me a man was not complete without a woman.

  The sheikh too had married since I had last seen him, as had several of the younger men I had known. Marriage seemed to be in fashion here after the deaths of scores of children and old people in the drought. The Arabs pulled my leg about the duties of marriage and asked me if my wife was pregnant yet. When I answered, ‘No,’ they shook their heads and laughed, saying, ‘It’s not possible the way you’ve been travelling! You haven’t had time for it, by God!’

  ‘Either that or they were too tired!’ someone else joked.

  None of them was surprised by our extraordinary journey. A certain section of the tribe was of Moorish origin; all of them had come from Mauritania on foot or by camel. The Moors were known here as Shenagta, a corruption of the word Chinguetti. Most of them had passed through the Sudan on their way to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia, making the pilgrimage that is a duty of Muslims. All of them had taken wives from among the Kababish and had settled down contentedly in a village north of the nazir’s camp.

  Sheikh At Tom ordered a sheep to be slaughtered in our honour. We were famished, and it seemed hours before the meat was ready. We sat on rope beds in the nazir’s great guest tent. The Arabs sat cross-legged around us or crouched by the walls on their haunches, tilting their heads to one side in the familiar, half-diffident manner. Their faces were both black and brown, exhibiting their mixed African-Arab ancestry, many of them as wizened as parchment with sprouts of whisker and headcloths the colour of dust. A pair of muscular salukis were stretched out by the door gap. From beyond it came the twittering voices of women and the mixed smells of woodsmoke, roasting meat, urine, and animal dung, a comforting, homely matrix of odours. Some servants brought us glasses of red tea. There was a feeling of peace that was almost tangible, a sense that everything was in its rightful place, hallowed by timeless tradition. I was comforted to see that little had changed since the Great Drought. Yet I learned that this serenity was an illusion.

  The Kababish were gloomy about the future. Their main complaint was that supplies of American grain, which they had received until recently, had been stopped. The rains had been poor again this year. ‘The British said when they left that this area would become uninhabitable within a few years,’ the nazir said, ‘and they were right. It’s already almost impossible to live here.’

  Another friend, Salim Wad Musa, told me, ‘If the rains aren’t good this year, there will be another famine and no doubt.’ I asked him what had become of the OXFAM restocking programme that had been started in the region. Its aim was to supply goats and sheep for poor nomad families that had lost their livestock in the drought. ‘They give six sheep and four goats to each family,’ Salim said. ‘Then after a year, they take the stock back and the family keeps the offspring. That’s supposed to encourage them to look after the animals. But it won’t, of course. They’ll end up by eating them.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’

  ‘Because you can’t look after animals without grazing, and OXFAM can’t provide that. Only God can provide grazing. Then you need to buy salt for your stock and a donkey or two to fetch water.’ Ninety per cent of Kababish donkeys had died in the drought. ‘They will end up by eating them,’ Salim repeated. ‘What the Arabs need is rain.’

  We were distracted by the arrival of the meat. I had already warned Marinetta that the first offering would be the raw heart, lungs, kidneys and liver, which the Arabs considered a great delicacy. But when the tray of diced red flesh was placed in front of us, I noticed a momentary look of disgust cross her features. I hoped none of the Arabs had seen it. ‘Come on,’ I told her in rapid English, as the expectant faces turned towards us, ‘they’re waiting for us to eat.’

  She gulped and took a large, slimy cube of liver from the tray. Her hand paused for a fraction, then she popped it firmly in her mouth and chewed with every sign of enjoyment. ‘Delicious!’ she commented.

  Later, the servants brought in trays of roasted meat and steaming millet polenta, and we ate until we could eat no more.

  We left Umm Sunta under a frail sickle moon and walked north for two hours towards the village of the Shenagta, the Moors who had settled among the Kababish. Our camels glided behind us in the darkness. They were heavily laden now, lugging sacks of sorghum for their feed in the empty desert ahead. The three camels were adolescent males and had been bred by the Gor’an nomads from the Chad border. The largest and strongest was called Wad An Nejma or ‘Son of the Star’, and Marinetta had chosen a trim camel called Wad As Suf, ‘Son of the Fur’. The third camel was called Galil Al ’Agl, which meant that he had the brains of a simpleton. A chorus of barking dogs announced the proximity of the Shenagta village. We spent the night in the wadi nearby and watered at the well there at sunrise.

  The village was dominated by a white stucco dome that marked the grave of a marabout called Feki Ibrahim. He had walked here from Mauritania in 1940. The Moors at the well were lighter-skinned than the Kababish but wore the same nicotine-yellow shirts and headcloths. We shocked them by speaking Hassaniyya. ‘Where did you learn that?’ they asked.

  A Moor called Talib invited us into his store for tea. ‘Red tea, not green tea like we have in the old country,’ he said apologetically. He must have been sixty, I thought; his eyes were edged in crow’s feet, and his hair was silvery-white. He belonged to the Laghlal tribe, which made him a distant relative of Mafoudh. ‘I came here by camel in 1948,’ he told us. ‘It took us fourteen months to get to El Obeid. From there, we went to Mecca.’

  I asked him why so many Moors had settled there rather than returning to Mauritania. The environment was very similar—indeed, this place could have been anywhere in the southern Sahara. ‘It was because most of us are marabouts,’ Talib said. ‘There were few marabouts in the Sudan, so we could make a good living.’ At first, they had sold charms and performed religious services; later they had branched out into trade and commerce. I wondered why they had made such a long pilgrimage from the western Sahara when the journey was not compulsory for those Muslims who hadn’t the means to make it. ‘The Lord rewards those who make sacrifices in His name,’ Talib said. ‘There is hardship in such a journey, but in hardship, there is baraka!’ It was the word Muslims used for the magical power of God.

/>   As we loaded our girbas and jerrycans, Talib advised us, ‘Don’t tell anyone you’re going to Egypt. Life is dust here!’ And on that note, we led our camels across the scrubland towards the curving crust of Jebel Hattan, the great plateau that marked the horizon to the north.

  The sunlight glazed the dust-bowl surface, and the heat dripped down like hot fat, cooking our brains under the thick headcloths. The way was punctuated by wells, where teams of Arabs drew water for their hustling, stamping camels. Jebel Hattan stayed on our right, dwarfing the desolate scrub. To the northwest was the rampart shadow of another plateau, Jebel Meidob. It was the home of some black nomads who had been bitter enemies of the Kababish for generations. The two mountain blocks faced each other like grim frontier citadels, contesting the no-man’s-land in the valley between.

  The heat was sudden, and it made us dizzy and depressed. That morning, we lost not only one of my sandals but also one of our priceless new girbas from El Fasher. Even our camels were sweating. The Nile still lay 600 miles away, the Egyptian border at least 1,000. We were already beyond the normal limits of human endurance. If the heat remained like this, we should be lucky to survive.

  In the afternoon, we met three Arab boys who were herding sheep. They begged us for water, and as I poured it, one of them asked, ‘Is your land far?’

  ‘Yes, it’s far,’ I answered him.

  ‘Will you get there by tomorrow?’ he inquired.

  ‘Only if I went in an aeroplane,’ I said.

  ‘Can’t you take your camels in an aeroplane?’ he asked disarmingly.

  We arrived at the bore well at Greywit not long after first light. There was a graveyard of saddles and camel litters like a funeral pyre; they had been abandoned there by nomad families that had fled to the cities during the drought. I supposed that many of those who went had never returned. The well head was crowded with beautiful girls carrying waterskins and dunking them in the steel troughs. The girls were coffee-brown with buttered hair, braided and quartered by leather thongs and cowries. The young men were wolf-lean with vortices of wild hair. The older men wore headcloths and thick leather belts. I asked around for a guide who could take me across Jebel Hattan as far as the next well, Khitimai. An Arab called Ahmed volunteered. He had a round, cheerful face and was very honest-looking. He took us to his camp, riding on a lame, little donkey and leading his small son on a camel laden with five or six shiny waterskins.