In Search of the Forty Days Road

by Michael Asher

  A little later on, after the meal, old Abdallahi sidled up to me and asked for some medicine for his headache. I guessed that he wanted more of the morphine substitute which I was carrying, and which I had inadvisedly given him previously. The Arabs constantly asked for medicine of any kind, and seemed to suffer a great deal from headaches and stomach trouble. At least half of the time, however, I suspected them of taking pills without reason as if they were some kind of magic potion. This was confirmed towards the end of the journey, when I explained that I had nothing left but chloroquin, for the treatment of malaria. They insisted on taking it, though they obviously did not have malaria, and the following day asked for more.

  This time I explained to Abdallahi as well as I could that I was keeping the drugs he wanted in case something serious happened and sent him off, glowering resentfully, with some Aspro. I returned my attention to the conversation, to find that Adem was baiting Saadiq, who claimed that he had once been a pilot, taking cows from Darfur to Omdurman.

  ‘How did you know the way?’ Adem asked.

  ‘I followed the stars.’

  ‘You followed the stars by day! By the life of the Prophet! You’re a better man than all of us!’

  Everyone, except Saadiq, guffawed with laughter, and I warmed to Adem’s sense of humour. He was by far the most talkative of the group, and his mouth was always full of jibes and jests. His wit was often directed at Saadiq, who had a well-known tendency to romanticise his experiences. Although I was no less a target for his acid tongue, I came to like and respect this clever and cheerful man who always seemed to be in good spirits, though the others might be depressed.

  The Hamedi remained the most openly friendly of the Arabs, though he lacked Adem’s sense of humour. By the end of the first week he seemed very tired, and he confided that this was his first trip across the desert. Unfairly, though, he seemed to get the lion’s share of the work, and at first I suspected that this was because he was from a different tribe. But I knew that it was customary amongst the Arabs for the youngest member of a family to perform the most menial tasks, and realised that their treatment of the Hamedi was a reflection of this rather than a deliberate slight.

  Abu Musa was a quiet, good-natured man who remained steady and unperturbed in most circumstances, though I found his way of speaking particularly hard to understand. I came to dislike the old Abdallahi for his constant wheedling. The others respected him for his age, and even Abu Sara tended to listen more open-mindedly to his demands than to those of the others.

  On the second morning out of El Koma, we awoke to find that two of the camels were missing. They had broken their hobbles and disappeared in the night, no doubt in search of water, for it was now five days since they had drunk. Abu Sara and Abu Musa saddled up and rode off to follow their tracks, while we took the herd slowly on, moving in open order so that the camels could make use of any grazing which they passed. At noon the pilot and his friend returned empty handed.

  ‘We followed the tracks for a long way, by Almighty God!’ declared Abu Musa. ‘But they must have been moving fast, not stopping to eat.’

  They’d gone too far for us to catch them. ‘The blame is on that Hamedi!’ said Abdallahi acrimoniously. ‘Son of a donkey! He should have been watching them!’

  ‘By God, O people, I can’t stay awake all night!’ shouted the Hamedi defensively.

  ‘That’s enough!’ cried Abu Sara. ‘They’re gone, and that’s the end of it. Never mind. God is generous. Now we must think about water for the herd.’

  Indeed, as we moved out that afternoon, I noticed an eerie, rumbling moan from the camels, faint at first but growing steadily louder into a curiously harmonious, haunting descant. Saadiq told me that this was their ‘song of thirst’.

  That evening we camped in open desert near Umm Hejlij. Abu Sara, ’Ali Mohammed, Saadiq, and I rode to the wells, where we found a family of Zayadiyya. The men were bearded and fair-skinned, and the girls beautiful, with braided hair. We sat in a semicircle in the sand and they brought us fresh water in a bowl.

  ‘How is the water?’ Abu Sara asked.

  ‘The water is little,’ answered one of the Zayadiyya.

  ‘We have a hundred and forty camels to water.’

  ‘By the will of God, there will be more tomorrow, but now there is scarcely enough for our own animals.’

  ‘It would be better to return in the morning,’ agreed ’Ali Mohammed.

  Abu Sara grunted, then chuckled bitterly, ‘By the life of the Prophet, I’m glad these camels aren’t mine!’ He agreed reluctantly to come back the next morning, and we rode back to the herd disconsolately, ’Ali Mohammed staying with his kinsmen at the well. All night the camels rumbled and moaned, and before sunrise Abu Sara was off to the well. He returned an hour later as we sat around the fire.

  ‘Those sons of a dirty whore!’ he exclaimed. ‘Would they give us water? By God that ’Ali Mohammed gave me no help, father of two tongues that he is. I won’t forget him! Look, brothers, they sent me off with two skinsful! Two!’

  ‘Curse their fathers!’ said Saadiq. ‘But what do we do now? If the camels don’t drink soon, they’ll die, by God!’

  ‘No, not yet, not yet!’ cried Abu Sara. ‘I’ve seen them go for ten days without water in summer. But we must leave immediately for Umm Qozein.’

  I had wondered often since my first days with a camel how long these beasts could actually survive without water. Everyone I had asked had given me a different answer, and I had long since understood that the question was as futile as asking, ‘How far can a man walk?’ The answer depended on many factors, including the size and age of the camel, the season and temperature, how fast the animal was moving and where it had been bred. A camel raised on the fringes of the Libyan Desert, for instance, would be far hardier than one brought up in the damper pastures of South Darfur. A camel feeding regularly on green vegetation in the cool season may not need to drink for forty-five days, whereas camels travelling fast in summer and eating little, as ours were, felt thirst every four or five days. The six days our camels had lasted was already considerable.

  We pushed the herd on all morning, but they moved slowly and resentfully, and at midday we found a copse of bush where they could feed. Some Zayadiyya appeared from nowhere with a sheep, and Abu Sara bought it. At once all the Arabs offered their hands to heaven, asking God to bless the animal, and Abu Musa recited the first verse of the Koran. Then he slit its throat with a single stroke, still murmuring prayers, and the carcass was hung from a nearby tree. Saadiq and Abu Musa proceeded to butcher the animal, with my assistance, first peeling back its skin, then removing the intestines and stomach.

  Meanwhile Adem lit a fire, and when the flames of the matchwood had died down, the ribs and brains of the sheep were placed on the glowing embers and eaten almost raw. The remainder of the meat was made into a stew, served in two great pots; the Arabs used all edible parts of the animal, mixing them with strong pepper and spices. The Zayadiyya joined us for the meal, thinking nothing of the fact that they had sold us the sheep, and one of them asked for, and received, the fleece. Afterwards they stalked off without thanking us or wishing us well. It is the custom of the nomads to leave without fuss. Greetings are lavish in the extreme, whereas farewells are usually peremptory. Since hospitality is something expected rather than considered a special favour, thanks are not thought necessary, or even understood, in this context.

  That afternoon we moved through petrified forest where the sand lay bloodred between the cleft hooves of the bushes. I was able to see the skill of Abu Sara in a new perspective. I marvelled at the way he managed to keep the herd together through the tangled obstacle course of the scrub. It seemed almost as if he had an instinctive feeling for the job, a kind of extrasensory empathy between himself and the camels, as well as the skill resulting from years of experience. He told me later that the herd had a structure and o
rganisation of its own. He pointed out the ‘leader’, a huge buff-coloured bull, which walked always at the apex of the herd. If this individual could be directed correctly then the others would follow, for the herd instinct was very strong. This was easily seen if we halted our riding-camels for a moment while the herd carried on. They would fret and roar, acting uncontrollably until they were back in the ranks of the mob.

  My large white camel was too slow for herding, but Abu Sara allowed me instead to ride a spare riding-camel from the herd, and I was able to learn some of the skills of the camel-man. Urging one’s own animal forwards at a fast pace, without allowing it to break into a run, was difficult and required constant concentration. Travelling behind the herd, we determined its speed, cracking our whips and singing. Two riders always stayed at the rear flanks, keeping the animals pressed tightly, but constantly one would stray off course and would be followed by a detachment of others. Then one of the Arabs would shout, ‘Chase that camel!’, and the nearest rider would break off and pursue the splinter group. It was this situation which required the most skill, for the pursuer had to handle his camel so as to force the runaways back towards the body of the herd, without allowing the group to fragment further. It was easy to make the runaways move in the opposite direction to the one required. This caused endless trouble, for it meant that at least two riders had to leave the main herd to retrieve the absconders. Gradually I learned how to angle the breakaway group back to the mass, and to work in concert with the other riders, anticipating and correcting the camels’ movements.

  The night covered us like a blanket, without moonlight, and we lay on a gravel plain west of Umm Sunta. After eating, we retired in the usual way. I slept soundly, exhausted after the hard ride of the day, but a short time later I was shaken awake by Saadiq, who said, ‘Get your camel, quick, we’re going to Batatikh!’

  ‘What’s up!’ I asked.

  ‘A Kabbashi came from the wells at Umm Qozein, and said there’s no water, we’ve got to move quickly now. The camels must drink!’

  The others were already up and saddling their camels amidst great excitement and exclamation, and moments later the herd was moving through the unreal, gilded sheen of the moon, newly risen. For hour after hour we rode in that eerie otherworld of the desert shelf. The camels rumbled with thirst, now louder than before, like a growl of distant thunder, and the Arabs moved back and forth round the edges of the herd. All around us lay the boundless nothingness of the desert night. Our world was an island in that vast sea, an island of six Arabs, an Englishman, and a hundred and forty-seven camels which were slowly dying of thirst. The night stretched forwards and backwards, impenetrable and infinite. I was unable to monitor the time, as none of us had a watch, and I was aware only of the rocking motion of my camel, the silvery coalescence of the herd moving before me, and the wraithlike figures of the others, in soft focus, beyond its perimeter.

  The aches in my back and legs felt like hot irons, and I was constantly fighting sleep, sometimes drifting into that dream world between the unconscious and the conscious, where illusions become reality and reality illusions. I felt shattered, but I was determined not to let it show, nor to succumb, for I knew that the ethos of these desert men did not encompass nor allow for the admission of weakness. I suspected, however, that they were suffering too, for often one of them would dismount and run along behind the herd, obviously afraid of falling asleep in the saddle.

  The going became harder and harder, and I had to will my body to carry on. We could not even stop to drink, for our water was scarce, and my throat was as rough as plaster. I was battling against the mounting tonnage of exhaustion that pressed down upon me. I had lost all sense of time, and began to fill the vacant, monochrome hours singing folksongs, in opposition to the Hamedi, who kept up an unflagging version of his favourite song, ‘The dar Hamed Maidens’, on an almost operatic scale.

  The moon described a half-parabola above, and I watched it, waiting for its descent, when a faint, hardly perceptible glow appeared on the horizon. At first, partly because I had no idea how long we had been riding, I imagined that it was yet another optical illusion to add to the many I had seen in the dream world of the night. But slowly, unmistakably, the light increased. It was the dawn, like the answer to a prayer. Never had the coming of day seemed to welcome or so magical.

  Suddenly, Adem broke away from the herd, and rode directly over to me. ‘Morning of goodness, brother!’ he said, smiling.

  ‘Morning of light!’ I replied.

  ‘And upon you be peace,’ he said.

  One of the hardest experiences of my life was over. I felt, with a rush of emotion, that this man, this uncompromising Arab, who had never before said a friendly word, nor made any allowance for me, had with this standard formula of greeting saluted me more than a thousand assurances of friendship could have done. I felt within his words the first budding of a brotherhood born of a shared hardship.

  From that moment onwards I began to feel no longer an outsider, but part of that tight little world we had created amongst the seven of us.

  I knew then that the route I had taken across the desert was not and never had been important. I was no explorer, and other Europeans had been here before me. Others would come after, but most of them would come by truck or Land Rover, cut off from this hidden dimension I had found. The desert was only sun, rock, and sand, but its treasure lay in the hearts of these men who lived within it, these desert Arabs, the last survivors, not of a race, but of a culture in its original form, whose like had all but disappeared from the rest of the earth, and whom it had been my privilege to know. This, I realised, would be the prize that would stay with me always.

  As sunrise burned red and gold in the throat of the skyline, we stopped to make tea. Abu Sara said to me, ‘By God, it was a hard night, wasn’t it?’

  I suspected, wrongly, that I was somehow being tested, and replied with false nonchalance, ‘It wasn’t too bad.’

  The old desert guide just smirked, and said, ‘It was hard and it’s going to be harder: we’re not at Batatikh yet. It’s a long way from here. We’ll stop to drink tea, then we go!’

  It was another six gruelling hours before we drew the herd in by the wells at Batatikh. The Hamedi had fallen a little behind and I guessed that he was as drained of strength as I. Abu Sara and Abu Musa were towers of control, and even old Abdallahi seemed in remarkably good condition. Obviously proficiency and resilience in desert travel was proportionally related to age and experience. I estimated that we had been riding for twenty-seven hours out of the last thirty. There was no grazing for the herd and they huddled together in the raw power of the sun, bleating pitiably with thirst. It was now eight days since they had watered, and even Abu Sara considered the situation critical. He went off to the wells, and returned within half an hour. He dismounted and unsaddled silently, and we sensed immediately that he had once more been turned away. He sat down heavily and said, ‘No water, the wells are dry!’

  No one spoke. It seemed that the tremendous effort we had put into the previous day’s ride had been wasted. We ate ’asida and the remains of the sheep morosely, and afterwards held a council.

  ‘The herd must drink in the next two days,’ said Abu Sara. ‘It’s eight days since we left El Fasher, and they haven’t watered. We cannot afford to find another well dry.’

  ‘What about Umm Badr?’ suggested Abu Musa. ‘There must be water there!’

  ‘But it’s so far away,’ cut in Adem. ‘The camels will die before we get there.’

  ‘There is no other way,’ said the guide. ‘If we move as fast as possible, we may just make it, by the will of God.’

  ‘By the will of God!’ they echoed.

  Umm Badr was a settlement in the territory of the Kawahla and Kababish tribes, where there was a perennial water pool in a depression in the rock. It was certain to have water, for these tribes watered their vast herd
s there in summer. The problem was one of distance. Was it possible for our herd, already weak, to reach Umm Badr before they began to collapse?

  During the night we had crossed the border between the dar of the Zayadiyya and that of the Kababish. Amongst the valleys and dry watercourses we passed that afternoon, I saw tents of woven wool, with knots of camels couched around them. Fine herds of buffs and whites grazed amongst the thornbush, and occasionally we saw riders in the distance, travelling at a tripping speed, the hooves of their camels hardly seeming to touch the ground.

  The Rizayqat seemed more wary and alert in this territory. I rode for a while with Abdallahi and he pointed out the white tents of a Kababish encampment in the distance.

  ‘This is Kababish country,’ he said. ‘There is no government here. If you so much as touched one of their goats, schchch—’ He drew a finger across his throat. ‘Weapons rule here.’

  I was surprised that the Rizayqat, who had a reputation as fierce fighters, should be in awe of the Kababish. When I saw how well the Kababish were armed, however, I realised that their wariness was well founded, since they were carrying nothing but daggers.

  That night we camped on a narrow plateau east of Umm Sunta, and for the first time, Abu Sara explained that one of us must be awake all the time in order to watch for bandits. As usual it was the Hamedi who bore the brunt of the work, and for some time I sat up with him, watching the stars and listening to the grunting and moaning of the herd. It must have been about midnight when we saw two riders approaching on light camels. They stopped a short distance from the camp and shouted a greeting.

  At once, Abu Sara woke up. ‘Welcome, welcome!’ he shouted. ‘Come near, come near!’

  The two guests brought their camels into the camp and couched them, then joined us around the rekindled fire. I noticed as they sat in the firelight that they were quite distinct in appearance from the Rizayqat. While my companions were very dark, with close-cropped skulls, the newcomers were a shade lighter, with soft black hair which fell in unkempt rats’ tails around their ears. They introduced themselves as Kababish of the Umm Badr clan, and assured Abu Sara that he would find water there, if we could reach the place before our camels foundered.