A Desert Dies

by Michael Asher

  afterwards.

  Douglas Newbold and William Shaw,

  ‘An Exploration of the South Libyan Desert’, Sudan Notes and

  Records, 1928

  WE CAMPED UNDER THE SUGARLOAF of Jabal Toli’a, east of the salt pans of El ’Atrun. I climbed up once again into the old sangar and scanned the landscape to the north. I could see the little but the weathered sandstone ridges that lay between here and Nukheila. Our destination, Zarzura, lay far beyond that, in the remotest and most dangerous part of this desert.

  Newbold and Shaw had been the first Europeans to cross this stretch, in 1928, but Nukheila had been put on the map three years earlier by Dr John Bell and Prince Kemal ad Din Hussein, who had reached it from the west in Citroën cars.

  Newbold and Shaw had entered the area with nineteen riflemen of the Hawawir and had passed scouts to watch for raiders of the Gur’an. These raiders had terrorised the desert for years and confounded all attempts to capture them. It was thought that Nukheila was used as a base by the Gura’n, especially in summer, when the rest of the desert was hot and lacked grazing for their camels. The raiders were led by three brothers, the chief of whom was called Gongoi.

  Newbold and Shaw found traces of Gongoi’s raiders at Nukheila but they saw no one. It was winter and the Gur’an had probably retired into their homelands in the Mourdi depression, sallying forth only when the explorers had passed. A few months later, they attacked El ’Atrun twice, armed with modern rifles; they killed some Kababish and stole their camels. So seriously did the British government take this threat that they despatched a motorised machinegun section to intercept them, but the cars foundered in the desert steppe, and by the time they reached El ’Atrun, the raiders had disappeared. They surfaced within a short time, 250 miles away in Chad, where they made three attacks and stirred up the French authorities.

  Now, over fifty years later, it could scarcely be said that the shadow of governments fell any darker across this desert than it had in those days. There was no more Gongoi, perhaps, but if anything, the condition of the desert was less hospitable than it had been then.

  A piece of flying grit touched my face. I heard a deep sigh from far away, as if the earth were sobbing. Over the northern horizon lay an angry red smear of dust. Within an hour, the simoom hit us.

  We lashed our headcloths firmly around us and brought our camels in from the sallam groves, where they were browsing. We rolled ourselves in shawls and blankets and lay amongst the tamarix bushes as the red sand and dust whipped past.

  The storm lasted only till sunset, when we crawled out and lit a fire. ‘The summer is with us and no doubt!’ Juma’ exclaimed. ‘It is the wrong season to search for an unknown place. I knew when I saw the Pleiades setting a few nights ago that we were too late.’ I knew he was right, yet I was doggedly determined not to give up unless I was forced to. I looked closely at the Arab as he sat amidst the tamarix, wondering if he was going to back out of our agreement. He wore his brown jibba and his old army beret with the ‘unofficial’ black lining uppermost.

  ‘Many have died in this part of the desert,’ he began. ‘Often because of the simoom. Have you heard the story of Ahmad Wad Mohammid, the brother of Ibrahim who was with us on the Requisition? He was travelling to Kufra with three companions. They had ten camels with them to sell in Libya. They ran into the simoom north of Nukheila and lost the way. They soon ran out of water. They killed a camel and drank the water from its guts. When that was gone, they slaughtered another, then another. In the end, they had killed all the camels in the herd and had to start on the riding animals. Two of them died of thirst and Ahmad and another arrived in ’Uwaynat half crazy. Ahmad told me he would never risk it again. Thirst is a bitch, by God!’

  There were many such stories amongst the Kababish. It frequently happened that men rode off in pursuit of raiders or of a lost camel only to get lost in the simoom and never return. The mummified corpses would be discovered in the desert, years later perhaps. These stories taught me that the essential factor in surviving the simoom was navigation. Without accurate navigation, all the waterskins in the world would not save a life. ‘We can navigate in the simoom with a compass,’ I told Juma’. ‘Your head may spin in the simoom, but the compass needle doesn’t.’

  ‘And will the compass show us how to get to Zarzura?’ Juma’ asked.

  Just then, we were interrupted by a woman who approached our camp timidly, carrying a baby that looked sick and malnourished. Hanging on her skirts were two little boys whose ribs pressed through the skin of their chests. The girl was pretty but pitifully thin, her face deeply lined by scarification and her hair in rat’s tails. She would not sit down but told us she belonged to the Awlad Sulayman and that her tent was pitched nearby. ‘My husband took our camels to the south four months ago,’ she explained. ‘And I have heard nothing from him since. ‘My children are hungry. We have only a few goats to live on. You have come from the south. Perhaps you have news of him?’ Juma’ had no news of him, but he gave her a small amount of money. We watched as she walked sadly back to her tent. I wondered if she would see her husband again,

  It was much later, on our return to Wadi Howar, that we learned her full story. The husband was by no means dead. He had sold a camel in Umm Sunta and sent some money to his wife, entrusting it to an Arab who was travelling north and who watered his camels in Wadi Howar. The Arab was none other than the young Sarajabi, Kalklayt. When the husband finally returned to El ’Atrun, his baby had died of starvation.

  Next morning, we filled our skins at the pits near El ’Atrun and set off north across the rocky plain. It was hard going at first. I felt Hambati wince as his sore feet encountered the rough surface. Eventually, Juma’ examined the feet of both camels and said, ‘Thank God! The soles are not pierced. They are just worn thin. Don’t worry, Omar, sore feet never killed a camel yet!’ All morning, the wind blew on us with its furnace breath. There was little dust, but the heat alone was suffocating, intensified by the rocky ground as if by the refractories in a giant oven.

  We crossed a plain towards the weathered sandstone ridges that I had seen; they formed the ragged edge of an eroded plateau. The plain beneath was covered with metallic debris from extinct volcanoes. We rode over depressions filled with fine, blue dust, and places where the rock glittered white as polar ice. To the east, the wall of the plateau was bronze and russet-red, cut into fantastic shapes by the forces of the desert. The heat seemed to eat away my skin like acid, even through the folds of my headcloth and the cotton of my shirt. I felt as though a great hand was squeezing my head like a lemon.

  At midday, we descended into a wadi where there was a single tundub growing. We made our camels kneel, hobbling them tightly, and slung our canvas under the branches, anchoring it to our saddles. We laid our sheepskins down and sat on them, trying to summon enough energy to make the meal. We had agreed to take the cooking in turns, and it was my turn. Though the heat had robbed me of my appetite, I knew I must force myself to cook and to eat.

  I began to build a fire downwind, collecting a few pieces of wood. I steeled myself against the seductive call of the shade. Taking a strip of sack cloth from the pack saddle as kindling, I built a shelter against the wind with our saddlebags and lit the fire with a single match. I noticed with satisfaction that the camels were crunching the shoots of the tundub.

  We ate the kisri an hour later. ‘Not bad!’ was my companion’s verdict. Before we left, he got out the axe and cut three parallel bars and a horizontal one into the trunk of the tree. It was the Nurab camel brand. ‘It is the custom,’ he told me. ‘When you find a good tree for gayla—the afternoon rest—you mark it with your brand. There are some famous trees in the dar that many people use on their journeys.’

  A steep pass led to the plateau. It was walled-in by massive blocks of black stone and scattered with boulders that looked as if they had been nibbled by giant termites. There were tables of sandstone patterned in purple and white, and on the summit,
great bars of gravel interspersed with deep sand. The camels floundered and stalled. We were forced to dismount and continue on foot, crossing false valleys and climbing up again into the hills. There were no tracks and not a sign of life. At every step, the camels sank in up to their hocks, tottering and almost falling, gasping at the effort. Miraculously, they stayed upright as we waded on through the sand. I kept my compass in my hand constantly so that I should not lose the bearing, even though we dropped time and again into deep corries where the walls seemed to have been eroded by time. We clambered out again to cross yet more disjointed groynes of rock. After two exhausting hours, we came to a high place from where we glimpsed the horizon. There was a line of hills, no more than dark shadows in the far distance, and between us and them, a rubbish dump of stone clusters laid on a bed of sand. It was an enormous, asymmetrical, formless wilderness, as alien in appearance as the moon; the strangest landscape I had ever seen.

  At sunset, we halted for prayers. The moments of silence were luxury. Neither of us wanted to rise from where we sat on a bed of rippled sand, yet somehow, we raised ourselves and rode into the darkness for three more hours.

  We made camp on a sheet of flat sand with the silent, unknown wilderness around us. Juma’ cooked the dried gazelle meat we had brought with us and I laid out our canvas sheets before the hobbled camels and fed them sorghum grain, which I poured on to the sheets in handfuls. The animals fought and squabbled over it. Before Hambarib had even finished his own ration, he lurched over to Hambati and tried to drive him away and secure a second meal. I had to separate them with a whip. After we had eaten, we sat in quiet meditation. Juma’ thought he heard the hiss of a lorry engine, but it was the sigh of the wind. It was easy to imagine sounds in this eerie silence, but there was nothing here—no insects, no animals, no birds; not a single tree or a single strand of grass. There was no life here save for two human beings, one black, one white; and two camels, one white, one red. We were in an unknown place marked on no map on an unknown planet, somewhere spinning silently in space.

  Next day, the simoom started with redoubled force. By the middle of the morning, it was so hot that breathing became difficult. The heat seemed to lie on my back like a heavy overcoat. The camels groaned and trembled as their feet touched the sharp, hot rocks. Not even the tracks of small animals showed on the surface of the sand. There were no comforting signs here.

  We rode over broken knolls and ridges, where pools of water seemed to lie between the stones only to evaporate at our approach. Once, Juma’ spotted a rich clump of hadd bushes and made over to them, only to find a field of smooth black boulders. On another occasion, I spied a whole forest of trees at the bottom of a valley, but found they were small hummocks of sand that had collected around columns of black rock. The intense heat produced a mood of aggression and cut our patience short. At noon, we erected our shelter, digging holes for the wooden uprights we had brought. ‘You are digging the holes the wrong shape!’ my companion told me. ‘They are supposed to be round!’

  ‘What the hell does the shape matter?’ I exclaimed angrily. ‘It is damned hot! Let’s get on with it!’ He was right, though, for when we tried to sling our canvas sheets, I discovered that the uprights would not stand firm in my oval holes and tilted over irritatingly. The shelter gave us no protection from the simoom that blasted over us as we curled up in our shawls. ‘Why do you want to find Zarzura?’ Juma’ muttered miserably. ‘Why enter the desert at this time of year? It is madness!’

  ‘Then you must be mad for agreeing to come!’ I answered. I got out the Michelin map I had with me and showed him the entire Sahara. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘If you went westwards from here, you would find the desert like this for thousands of miles as far as the Maghreb. I want to know all that desert. One day, I will cross it all!’

  He shrugged and spat some of his valuable saliva. ‘There is nothing in the desert but thirst and heat!’

  I already knew that the blinding heat of noon could produce a kind of temporary madness with symptoms of depression, aggression, and paranoia. I knew that as soon as the temperature cooled, the madness disappeared without trace, and the emotions returned to normal. No one, not even the hardiest of nomads, was immune to the effect. The secret of combating it lay in the knowledge that it would pass.

  In the afternoon, the going was a little better for the camels. We crossed great sheets of sand with only a smattering of rocks. The wind dropped around sunset and the coolness came over us like a blessing. I looked east as the last rays ofthe sun burned in the ragged neck of the hills, and I thought that if we carried on in the line of my sight for ten or eleven days, we should come to Dongola on the Nile. I thought of how I had arrived there more than five years before and looked across the great desert, wondering what lay within it.

  As the darkness came, the stars lit up and we discarded the compass for Polaris, keeping it over our right shoulders. It was very dark. Once, Hambarib veered noticeably east, and we wondered if he had smelled trees. We both sniffed deeply, hoping to catch the strong scent of sallam that would carry far in these wastes, but we found nothing. Disillusioned, we made camp. It was a wretched camp that night. I had hoped that we should be camping in Nukheila. I had worked out that the oasis was only twenty hours’ ride from El ’Atrun. We had been riding for nineteen without any sign of the place. I knew that the rocks had slowed us down, and I hoped that our detours had not taken us too far off the bearing. I wondered how accurate our astral navigation was. I had a copy of the 1940 survey map, which showed few features. The simoom had sucked away some of our water from the skins despite the covering of sackcloth, and our liquid was dangerously short. To cap it all, we had only a limited amount of sorghum for the camels and could not afford to feed them that night. They sniffed hungrily at the saddlebags and licked their dry lips. Neither of us would have been able to recognise Nukheila from afar and, though I had read the report made by Newbold and Shaw, it was almost impossible to imagine what the place might look like. All I knew was that it lay in a great depression, which might or might not be visible from the south. Both of us knew that if we missed the oasis, we should be lost in the most arid stretch of the Sahara. Our chances of survival without Nukheila were precisely nil. It was a bleak prospect.

  Then Juma’ said suddenly, ‘This year will be called by my family, “The Year of Juma”s Trek with the Nasrani Omar, in Search of Zarzura’’!’ I could not help laughing. The thought cheered us both up. Afterwards, as I watched Juma’ praying, I found a bloated camel tick in my blanket. It made me grin to see the ugly little creature and to think that in all this blighted wilderness, the only living thing I could find was this bloodsucker, which I had probably brought with me.

  There was no sign of the oasis when we set off at first light. We crossed ridge after ridge of sand and rock and saw nothing. As we climbed each one, I thought, ‘Now we shall see it!’ but there was only a line of thick, crescent dunes stretching like an impenetrable barrier across the way. It took more than two hours to reach them. They jutted out of the plain steeply, tightly fitting together to form a continuous belt. We turned east to skirt around them. After a while, Juma’ cried, ‘Look! Takhlis! It only grows where there is moisture!’ I looked down to see a single tuft of grass, spiky and quite green; around it were the unmistakable tracks of a jerboa. This one tuft was an oasis in itself, a tiny micro-system. It was life, and life meant water. Somewhere, beyond this barrier of dunes, lay the oasis of Nukheila.

  Juma’ slipped from the saddle and I held the camels while he scrambled up the hill of loose sand. In a few moments, he slithered back again, saying, ‘I can see nothing, but I can find a way through these dunes.’

  We led the camels up the slopes. The camels stumbled, but their feet did not sink deeply into the sand. Over the first wall of dunes, we came to a flat plain again. We saw more takhlis growing amongst the rocks. There was a narrow tunnel leading between another wall of bare hans that were moulded into perfect amphitheatres by
the wind. We climbed over the second wall of dunes and descended into a low area, where the surface was marred with deep ripples. Here, the going became very hard. The camels sank almost to their knees in the sand, floundering about and exhausting themselves further. Often, Juma’ thought the way impossible, and we were forced to retrace our steps and work our way around. We ran into more soft sand but had no choice but to struggle through it, leaning heavily on the headropes and hoping dearly that they would not break. It was still early but as excruciatingly hot as the previous day, and the wind blew sand continually into our faces. We climbed a steep slope and fell, panting into the sand. I felt the sun stinging through the back of my shirt. Finally, Juma’ asked doubtfully, ‘Are those trees or rocks?’ I looked up. Far to the north were the vague grey shapes of what could have been the heads of palm trees, though they could equally have been columns of rock. We had both made such mistakes on the previous day and had felt foolish: neither of us was willing to commit ourselves again until we were sure.

  We mounted our camels and rode down to a lava field. Juma”s gaze read the ground and then spun back to the mysterious grey line ahead. Signs of life grew more numerous. There was the track of a gazelle, and a few old camel droppings, then the carcass of a she-camel, a parcel of untouched bones in a parchment shell of dried skin. A few steps further on, we came across a tundub tree, then four or five more growing behind a crest of rock. ‘This place will be called Omar’s tundub!’ Juma’ said. ‘This is your route to Nukheila!’ We both smiled at each other and our arguments were forgotten. There could be no doubt now: I looked at the grey line ahead. The ghostly shadows had become the heads of huge palm trees. We had arrived.

  Half an hour later, we were in the great, green circle of the southernmost section of the oasis. Newbold and Shaw had named it Wa’arat al ’Abid (‘The Oasis of Slaves’), since it was here that they had found traces of occupation. I learned later that the Arabs called it Wa’arat al Ba’ud (‘The Oasis of Mosquitoes’). As it turned out, this was a most appropriate name.