In Search of the Forty Days Road

by Michael Asher

  I found, anyway, that I had a more pressing problem. The little water I had possessed had run out in the night. I was out of water, and had no idea how far I was from a well or settlement. The sun came up like a flaming halo above, the hours passed as I plodded on west. I found not a single settlement. Even the thick semidesert brush disappeared, and I found myself in a wasteland of plain sand, covered in places with a light down of grass. By midmorning, my throat was already choked with dust, I smoked a cigarette, but this only made my mouth drier and my throat sorer. I carried on, feeling drier and drier, hoping desperately that I would meet someone from whom I could ask directions. The qoz became increasingly desolate, and though I ran into occasional patches of vegetation, I dared not stop to rest. All through the burning afternoon the camel and I ploughed on, until I was feeling faint from dehydration, mysterious pains shooting up my spine. Then, when I had almost given up hope, a village appeared like a mirage before me, a green orchard oasis in a sea of sand. It was the Hamar town of Wad Banda, still so far away that it took me almost an hour to reach the small marketplace.

  I couched my camel, and asked the nearest person for water with the last of my strength. A Camel Corps trooper came up and took charge, urging me to sip the water gently rather than swill it down. He then took me to the Police Post, tied up my camel, gave me tea and coffee and invited me to stay for the night. I felt exhausted and weak from the effects of dehydration and the sun, yet I knew the day’s experience had been a hard lesson: in this merciless land water is not a thing to be taken lightly. I asked the police trooper how long a man could last in this heat without water. ‘Not more than two days,’ he told me. I thanked my lucky stars I had not been forced to spend another night out in the qoz.

  It took me another four days to reach the Darfur borders, and in many ways they were the most difficult of my journey to the west. East of En Nahud, I had come to rely on the Hamar’s detailed knowledge of the area. I now saw that it was this knowledge, rather than any fabulous sixth sense, which was the Arabs’ true strength: the same strength, perhaps, which had allowed ’Ali to recognise Hamar camels without seeing their markings. Our journey to En Nahud had gone smoothly because ’Ali and Osman had known exactly how much ground to cover each day, but without such knowledge my progress was sporadic and inefficient.

  An additional problem was the camel himself. I noticed quite early on that he would not travel so happily alone; camels, like humans, are social animals and are far more relaxed in a crowd. Quite often during those four days he refused to leave villages in which he had been well fed, or the cool shade of a tree in which we had rested, and I had to force him onwards with a stick. A particularly unpleasant trick of his was to wait until we were passing a thick acacia bush with low branches, then make a sudden dart into the shade. This could have been far nastier than it was, considering the size of the thorns; luckily I always escaped with small cuts or tears in my clothes.

  Usually I stayed in a village, presenting my official letter to the shaykh. As Alfred Mobile had predicted, none of them could read, and I felt that even without the letter I would have been welcomed. Each Hamar village was different in character, and each retains a special memory for me. In Wad Banda, for instance, I remember the Kawahla girls who had come in from the qoz to water at the wells. I found them strikingly attractive with their creamy-brown skin and long black hair, their gold nose rings, ivory bracelets, and bare feet. Some Kawahla, I was told, had settled in the village, though most of these women escorted caravans of donkeys from their tiny camps in the open range, where their people raised the camels for which they were renowned.

  I passed through Sulayl, and finally arrived in Ed Damm Jamud, the last sizeable settlement in Kordofan. It was dominated by three huge and ancient baobab trees which stood exactly in the centre of the place. I went to inspect the trees and found with a shock that they were covered in English graffiti: ‘W T S’, ‘T C’, and other initials carved into the massive trunk. At first I thought this must be a hoax, but I was told that the carvings were genuine. They had apparently been left by the soldiers of Wingate’s force who had camped here on their way to Darfur in 1916.

  They had marched to Darfur to defeat the Sultan Ali Dinar, autonomous prince of the Fur tribe from whom the region gets its name. After the fall of the Mahdi, in 1898, when Kitchener had destroyed Sudanese opposition at Omdurman, Darfur was the sole region of the Sudan which had retained its independence, protected by its remoteness. The trouble had begun, however, when the French advancing from the west had annexed part of the western border of Darfur. The British were worried about French encroachment on their sphere of influence, and since the borders could not be settled while Darfur remained independent, the British had set out across Kordofan with two thousand soldiers and two aircraft. It was curious to think of British Tommies relaxing under these same great trees, all those decades before, and it seemed that the village had actually not changed at all since those days.

  I stayed the night with some Hamar. It was perhaps the most beautiful evening I had experienced in the bush of Kordofan. As sunset came, I sat in the sand with the Arabs, whose voices played an endless fugue around each other in the silence of the day’s end. The sun was an orange globe sinking over the sharp roofs of the huts, and before us the colossal trees seemed to preside over the orchestration of the sunset.

  Two large camels lumbered past, followed by a boy on a white stallion.

  Suddenly, the clear voice of a muezzin struck up, calling the faithful to prayer, the fine notes seeming to draw together the threads of magical African beauty I saw before me:

  ‘God is greatest, God is greatest.

  I testify that there is no god but God.

  I testify that Mohammed is the Prophet of God.

  Come to the prayer,

  Come to the celebration,

  God is greatest,

  There is no god but God.’

  6. SHADES OF ARABIA

  Far are the shades of Arabia

  Where the princes ride at noon.

  Walter de la Mare, Arabia

  IN THE COOL HOUR AFTER dawn, the Zayadiyya were already gathered at the wells of Abu Ku’ to water their herds and flocks. A great mob of camels, reds, whites, blacks, and buffs, were grazing on the sparse vegetation around the wells, and the long iron troughs were obscured by a press of donkeys, sheep, goats, and camels vying for a place, bleating, roaring, spitting, and bucking.

  Women wearing brilliantly coloured dresses struggled and fought, hissing and chattering like excited birds over their waterskins, tossing their braided hair and their peach-brown shoulders. Ranks of the swollen skins lay amongst the mud and the animal filth, ready to be loaded on camels and donkeys, and men stood around in languid groups. They were fair-skinned and bearded, and clad in dust-coloured shirts, pantaloons, and hand-stitched leather sandals, their headcloths luttering exotically across their foreheads.

  As I stood amongst them, dressed like them, it seemed to me that I had entered another world, separate from the semidesert land of Kordofan. Reflected in the faces around me, I could see the unmistakable shades of Arabia. All around was an ocean of amber sand, and in the distance the craggy, broken red teeth of the hills erupted from the silent desert.

  The flocks and the camels, the pale Arab faces, the open sands: all these seemed at a far remove from the rich Kordofan bush in which I had been travelling. As I watched, a young boy suddenly snatched an enamel bowl from an older girl. She snapped at him like an angry bitch, laying into him with tooth and claw, and seizing a heavy stick with which to lash out. It took four grown men to separate the children, and I was amazed at the strength and ferocity of this slip of a girl. Her volatile power gave me an unexpected insight into the nature of these Arabs.

  I had arrrived at Abu Ku’ that morning, about a week after crossing the borders of Darfur at the village of Sherrif Kabashi. As the days had passed, the landscape had become in
creasingly arid: the baobabs had disappeared and the green acacia scrub had been replaced by acres of petrified bush, where the trees stood grey and bald as stones, their branches as brittle as glass. In places I crossed flats of open desert, relieved only by stunted grasses and low mukhayyit. I had passed through the broad basins of valleys and plateaux where mountains—prussian blue, slate grey, and red ochre—lay like impenetrable barriers around the perimeter. Here for the first time in the west, I had encountered the withering haboob, the freak wind from the north which dragged the sands of the Libyan Desert south, obliterating the fertile lands of the Sudanic belt.

  I had left the land of the Hamar far behind, and had rested in the settlements of a variety of tribes, amongst them the Jiledad, the Berti, and the Bani Umm Ran. Their villages seemed bleak and severe after those of Kordofan, the African-style huts looked out of place in this more desiccated environment.

  In Abu Ku’, however, I had entered the dar of the Zayadiyya, a small Arab tribe inhabiting the southern skirts of the Libyan Desert. To my great excitement, I realised that for the first time I had come into contact with desert bedouin: the nomadic herdsmen whom I had journeyed so far to find.

  In Abu Ku’ I met two Zayadiyya who agreed to take me to Mellit, the gateway post between the Sudan and Libya, which was the centre of the land of the Zayadiyya. It was a journey of two days only, but a fairly difficult one, across trackless desert and through the belly of flinty hills. One of the Zayadiyya, called Taha, had fair skin and an eagle nose, which displayed his unmistakable Semitic ancestry; the other, his cousin Ahmed, was a shade darker, but with the same finely formed features. Both were small, lightly built men dressed in full-length jellablyyas and layered headcloths.

  Taha told me that they were travelling to Mellit to sell four camels in the market there, which was one of the largest in Darfur. He pointed out to me two fine seven-year-olds and two younger calves which were roped together in pairs, neck to neck. Finally, he studied my own camel appraisingly for a long time, his eyes missing nothing, working carefully over the saddle, the rug, the saddlebag, and the waterskins.

  ‘What’s your work in Mellit?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m looking for some Arabs who are travelling up the Forty Days Road,’ I said.

  ‘I want to travel with them.’ I realised at once how ridiculous my words must sound. Taha regarded me silently, without surprise. I understood later that this was partly because he had not the slightest idea what I was talking about, for later on he asked me the same question several times. It was approaching midmorning by the time the camels were watered and prepared for the journey, and we finally set out across the open waste. The Zayadiyya were riding lean bulls, and driving before them the four camels which they intended to sell. As we began, Taha turned to me and said, ‘Are you all right?’ I looked around at the sweeping grandeur of the desert, the powerful dignity of the camels, the calm nobility of the Arabs, and answered, ‘I’m complete!’ Which indeed I was.

  As we rode, the Zayadiyya questioned me, as usual, about my tribe and country. They were surprised to find the Ingleez had no camels, and seemed to think that I must be very clever to have learned to ride one here in the Sudan, I did not spoil the impression by telling them of the misfortunes I had suffered in Kordofan. They questioned me about my camel and about each item of equipment in turn. They identified my camel as a Howari, and told me that it had become weak.

  ‘Anyway, it’s not good for the desert,’ Taha told me.

  ‘Its stride is too short.’

  I noticed that though the camels which the Zayadiyya rode were no larger than mine, their stride was considerably longer. I was not displeased with my bull, however, for it had crossed four hundred miles of semidesert and been subjected to the whims of an inexperienced handler.

  Ahmed and Taha talked incessantly of camels, and it was obvious that their animals were the absorbing interest of their lives. Both were using riding-saddles of polished wood, far more expensive than my own, draped with precious furs and rugs, and a variety of saddlebags.

  They told me that the leatherwork and saddlery of the Zayadiyya were famous, and I learned later that the ornateness of a man’s saddle amongst the Zayadiyya was a sign of status and a way of showing off to the girls.

  As they rode, talking endlessly, their eyes never rested, but darted about, taking in everything. Once Taha pointed out a herd of camels at the base of a distant hill, looking no larger than ants, and often they drew each other’s attention to the tracks and spoor of various animals in the dust, which alone I should never have noticed.

  Taha told me that the Zayadiyya was a small tribe, of the same Juhayna family as the Hamar. ‘But we have many camels, because our land is perfect for them,’ he said. ‘They prefer this dry land to the damp areas of the south. When the desert blooms, there is much grass and many trees.’ He told me that the tribe had two important sections: the Awlad Jabir and the Awlad Jerbo’. While some of the Awlad Jabir were settled in Mellit, most of the Awlad Jerbo’ were nomads and ranged their camels far into the Libyan Desert. Indeed, Taha did not exaggerate about the large numbers of camels owned by his tribe.

  Later that year, during my journey to Malemal Hosh in the Libyan Desert, I saw herds of up to two thousand camels owned by single families of the Zayadiyya.

  At about midday we came across the dry bed of a wadi, along which some thornbush was growing, and the Zayadiyya decided to make camp for the afternoon. We couched and unsaddled the camels, and the Arabs showed me how to bind the forelegs of my Howari with a plaited leather thong, called a gayd, looped at one end and knotted at the other. The thong restricted the animal’s movements while still allowing him to feed freely. The two men set up the camp methodically, erecting a canvas sheet between two thorn trees to allow us a few square feet of shade. Beneath it, they laid out a similar sheet, on which they piled their rugs, sheepskins, and blankets. They hung our water skins carefully amongst the bushes, then poured out a bowlful of water. I watched as Taha added to this a little flour and sugar, mixing it in with a twig. The mixture, which was called habsha, was more refreshing than water, as the extra ingredients took away the taste of gotran or tar which continually tainted water carried in skins.

  Ahmed made a fire from some bone dry wood which he had collected, ignited by a fistful of straw. He laid out some cooking vessels, and began to make ’asida from the yellow flour he carried. We ate crouching around the pot in the usual manner, and afterwards drank sweet tea.

  After the meal, we settled down in the shade as the sun began to incinerate the amber sand around us. I asked Taha about his experience in the desert. ‘I’ve been to Libya twice,’ he told me. ‘It’s a journey of thirty days from Mellit, but by God it’s a hard one. That desert is empty—no trees, no grass, nothing.’

  I asked if it was a dangerous journey.

  ‘Many have died out there,’ he said. ‘The Arabs go to Libya to sell camels, they take them to the oasis of Kufra. Then they are taken to Tripoli by lorry. Tripoli is a big market: camels come there from Algeria, Tunis, and Niger, but camels from the Sudan are the best—the others are so small.’

  ‘How do you find your way across the desert?’ I asked.

  ‘Every group has a khabiir, a pilot. He is a man who knows the desert routes. By day he follows the landmarks, the hills, the colour of the sands, or even the direction of the wind. At night he follows the stars.’

  ‘But since Libya became rich,’ Ahmed joined in, ‘many people have gone there just to get work. Some are Arabs, but many are townspeople, who know nothing of the desert.’

  ‘Yes,’ continued Taha, ‘and many of them died. What about last year, you remember, brother, forty men were lost at once.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Two men of the Meidob arrived in the oasis of Nukheila, the only well between El Atrun and the Libyan border. They were almost dead, and some say mad. Their story
was that they had set out from Mellit with forty men, mostly townsmen. At first things went all right, but they had no pilot with them, so they followed lorry tracks! Lorry tracks, by Almighty God! Of course, along came the haboob, and where were the tracks? The Meidob made their way to Nukheila, but no one but God knows what happened to the rest!’

  ‘These people have no brain!’ said Ahmed. ‘They take with them bad skins which fall to pieces, then where is the water? They fight over what is left, or they drink too much at the beginning, and have none at the end. They are not real Arabs, these people, and they don’t understand that the desert is a hard place.’

  ‘Many of the Zayadiyya are pilots,’ Taha told me, ‘because they know the desert well. A good pilot can ride to Libya alone.’

  ‘My cousin is a pilot,’ Ahmed said.

  ‘You know the story he told us? He was leading a large party, and one of them was a big, fat merchant from Nyala. After two days, he said he couldn’t ride his camel any more. “My body hurts all over!” he said. My cousin said that if he didn’t ride they’d leave him in the desert. “Leave me then!” he said.

  “But by God the Great, I’m not riding again! Never!” Do you know what they did? Tied him in a basket, and hung it from the saddle. That’s how he made the journey! But, mind you, he was much thinner at the end!’

  This talk was fascinating; like most Arabs, the Zayadiyya loved telling and listening to stories, and were skilled orators. I found that the constant practice of the previous month had improved my Arabic, and I was able to comprehend more of what they said. I felt sure these experienced Arabs could tell me about the Forty Days Road, which I still intended to find. I asked Taha about this but he looked at me with the same blank stare which had first accompanied my mention of the name.