Under the Red Sea Sun

by Edward Ellsberg

  We came down for a smooth enough landing and were taken promptly to the Officers’ Mess of the Air Force for lunch. We stayed in Kano only long enough for lunch, but even in that brief time, two things struck us forcibly. One was the temperature. It was hot, 105° in the shade, but as it was dry, it was bearable. The other was the tall black natives, striding along with heavy burdens skillfully balanced on their heads, clad in white robes of the cut of flour bags (which on close inspection many of them were, brand names and all). Never had I seen such utterly black Negroes; they were so black they seemed to have almost a bluish tinge.

  After a swift take-off (no waiting in the sun this time), we headed for Maiduguri, 300 miles further to the eastward and our stopping place for the night, since no night flying was being done along that lonely route fringing the southern Sahara. The scenery was more of what we had passed over approaching Kano—tiny native villages composed of round thatched huts, sparse vegetation, and nothing of any great interest.

  I had a headache, eyestrain I thought, brought on by the glaring sunlight, and the afternoon air over eastern Nigeria was rather bumpy which made most of the Army passengers seasick. None of us were sorry when a few hours later we dropped down on Maiduguri airfield on the eastern edge of Nigeria, ending our first day’s air voyage, though it was still only late afternoon.

  An airways bus, driven by our own pilot, took us all, passengers and plane crew, from the hot airfield to the Pan-Am station some miles away, where at least there were palms about to give some shade.

  There was a village of Maiduguri near by, which we had glimpsed from the air, but all hands were quite content to stay at the station. There the buildings, of typical Central African architecture, were built for comfort only and that was all we were interested in. Every building in the compound was the same—one-storied, with thick mud walls, rather high, and over all a heavily thatched roof, sharply pitched, projecting considerably beyond the walls to shade them, and clear of the side wall tops by several feet so that an open space for ventilation was left all around the building. Undoubtedly it was needed.

  What took our eyes most on arriving, however, was a shower bath, pointed out to us by the pilot. It was primitive, but effective. Atop a fenced enclosure some twenty feet square and eight feet high, stood four fifty-gallon ex-gasoline drums, connected to impromptu shower heads. The water supply was simple—no pumps, no pipes, no valves, no meters. Half a dozen black boys with buckets on their heads brought the water, four more blacks alongside the drums overhead poured it into them, and there you were.

  We were all hot, sticky, and uncomfortable. Sightseeing in Maiduguri could go hang. Immediately we had dumped our bags and ourselves into the open-topped, mud-walled rooms assigned us in the main quarters building, we were all stripping. In a few minutes, clad only in towels and shoes and carrying our own soap, we were all trekking through the hot dust to the shower a hundred feet away. There, four at a time, we reveled under the coarse sprays while the grinning black boys overhead poured on the water.

  By the time all of us had dressed again in dry clothing extracted from our now available bags, the sun had set and it was cooler. Outside in the dust, native merchants, scenting trade, were spreading their wares for display—leopard skins, python skins, elephant tusks, ivory souvenirs, and native weapons of all kinds. Since I had no place within my scanty plane allowance to carry an ounce more, I refrained from purchasing anything, though some magnificent boa constrictor skins were insistently offered.

  Tiring of the traders’ persistency, I turned away back to the quarters, just in time to glimpse something odder even than the huge boa constrictor skins unrolled a moment before at my feet. Now that all the Westerners had cleared it, there in solitary state was our Mahatma Gandhi, fully clothed, carrying a towel, heading for the shower enclosure, and wonder of wonders, still carrying his umbrella! Did he intend, I speculated, to hold that over him while he stood beneath the spray?

  About an hour later, dinner was announced as served in a separate mud-walled building, some distance from the quarters. While it was to be nothing special, only the regular evening meal for the Pan-Am and the Army airfield personnel who far outnumbered us, we needed no second urging to be on time.

  Dinner was served by barefooted black boys clad in the usual white flour sacks, simply but effectively tailored with three holes cut in them for head and arms, but it was far better served than by the surly white stewards we had left on shipboard. And what a dinner! Creamed spinach soup, fried chicken, roast beef, some delicious native vegetables, excellent mashed potatoes, and real apple pie with cheese! Shades of the unlamented S.S. Pig’s Knuckle! How we fell on that dinner!

  But bur Hindoo companion disdained it. Apparently nothing they served (or its cookery) came within the boundaries of his religious taboos, and not till a can of sliced peaches was brought and opened in his presence, did he deign to take anything at all.

  Darkness fell quickly. As we were due to make an actual early dawn take-off for a long flight next day, I turned in at 8:00 P.M. Rather than sleep in the room assigned which still retained quite a bit of the heat absorbed during the day, I elected to use one of the narrow iron beds set up in the open outside, where it was already cooler.

  Fully clothed, I crawled into the bed beneath the netting. Then I saw that that all-important mosquito net, draped from outriggers at head and foot, was solidly tucked in under the mattress all around me before I undressed and slipped into my pajamas. Of course, to anyone with reasonable experience in a Pullman upper berth, this last was no trick at all.

  I dragged the sheet over me, then very shortly a blanket also, for it was remarkable how cool it soon got there in the open, once night had fallen. I gazed upward through my mosquito netting at the brilliant Equatorial stars, then swiftly went sound asleep for the first time in over a month. Here in the African desert was a comfortable bed, so different from those on the Pig’s Knuckle, where the pillows, to mince no words, literally stank, and the mattresses were hard as rocks.

  At 4:30 A.M., still in complete darkness, we were all turned out to dress hurriedly and breakfast before departure. The breakfast matched the dinner—pancakes with real maple syrup, and delicious coffee. That finished, just as the first indications of dawn appeared, we were herded back in the airways bus.

  Hastily the pilot counted noses in the early twilight to make sure he had everyone, then slammed the bus door. Meanwhile, Colonel Gruver, just as anxious to ensure none of our party was missing, was doing the same. As the pilot threw in the clutch and started, Colonel Gruver sang out,

  “Pilot, wait! You’ve left a man. That Hindoo is missing!”

  Instead of stopping, the pilot only shifted into second, then into high. When finally the bus was well under way, he half turned his head to answer,

  “That’s O.K. He’s staying over in Maiduguri on business. Don’t bother.”

  That certainly seemed odd. What business could our Hindoo, having moved heaven and earth to get aboard our plane in his urgent desire to get speedily back to India, suddenly have discovered in the God-forsaken village of Maiduguri to cause him to abandon the plane in Central Africa? But in view of the pilot’s curt reply, no one commented any further and we moved swiftly on to the airfield.

  In the dim twilight, we took off, from several thousand feet aloft soon to witness the sunrise, abrupt in its suddenness in the clear, dry desert air. When the plane had finally been leveled off, the co-pilot took over and the pilot came back into the passenger compartment, apologized to Colonel Gruver.

  “Sorry to have cut you off that way in the bus, Colonel, but I couldn’t discuss that Hindoo while we were still on the ground.”

  “Oh, that’s all right, pilot, no apologies needed,” Colonel Gruver assured him. “I was just afraid you’d forgotten him and the plane would be hung up again while somebody had to go back for him. But what’d he want to stop in Maiduguri for? He didn’t show any signs of having business there last night up to the time
he turned in.”

  “He stayed there on business, all right, Colonel, but it wasn’t of his own choosing.” The pilot swung about to take in General Scott and the rest of us. “Along about 11:00 P.M., when everybody was asleep, a coded radio message came in from British Army Intelligence. It said to seize that Hindoo suddenly before he could destroy anything, search him thoroughly, report results, and then hold him incommunicado in Maiduguri for further instructions. Well, since this is British territory, the airfield manager sent into the village for the head of the British constabulary to do the job. He came out with a couple of limey assistants and you should have seen him work.” The pilot paused, apparently recalling the scene admiringly.

  “That lad knew his stuff. He got that Hindoo asleep, so he certainly had no chance to destroy anything, and got him and all his belongings out of there into the airfield manager’s office without waking up anybody else. Then they searched him thoroughly, and I mean thoroughly—went through everything he had and didn’t find a damned thing of interest. After that they stripped him and looked in his mouth, his ears, his nose, between his toes, under the soles of his feet. He came through that as innocent a Hindoo as you’ll ever find. Then they nailed him with the goods. How do you think?”

  Nobody hazarded a guess; we couldn’t imagine.

  “By his umbrella! Of course, that constable had gone over the umbrella one of the first things he did—opened it, closed it, found it had a solid wood shaft and handle, no hollows in it to hide anything. But when he couldn’t find anything anywhere else, it struck him the Hindoo certainly set store on that umbrella—he’d had it with him in his bed when they grabbed him. So the constable went back to the umbrella. It had a long metal ferrule over its wood tip; nothing unusual in that, but he thought he’d see. So he worked off the ferrule, and there it was! Wrapped round the tip of the umbrella under the ferrule were long thin strips of paper covered with fine writing, some in German, some in Hindoo. It took two men to hold that half-portion Hindoo when they found that!

  “Well, they took that Hindoo and all his stuff off to the hoosegow in Maiduguri to await developments, and I went back to sleep. And that’s the business that’s holding him in Maiduguri. He won’t be flying the rest of the way with us.”

  So there, sequestered in the hands of the British Intelligence on the edge of the desert in Central Africa, we left our Hindoo and his secret Nazi instructions, weeping even more copiously, I imagine, than when his other plane, stopped halfway round the world from us by Japanese bombs falling on Honolulu, had also failed to carry him further along toward India and sedition.

  CHAPTER

  13

  THE PILOT, WITH THAT EXPLANATION off his mind, started back for his controls. Just before he ducked through the forward door, he turned and added,

  “We’re over French Equatorial Africa, which is in the hands of the Vichy French and they’d intern you if we landed. So we’ve got a long nonstop hop to make on this leg all the way to El Fasher in the western Sudan before we can come down. But that Vichy crowd have got no planes to bother us while we’re in the air, so I’m going to fly low now. We’re passing over the Lake Chad country, which is the best wild animal spot in Africa, and maybe you’ll see some of ’em.”

  In a rather swift descent, we came down to 800 feet. Below us was only desert country—nothing green whatever, with only the African version of sagebrush and desert trees, and the bare earth looking very dry and burned. A couple of lions (startled by the roar of our engines, no doubt) bounded madly away through the brush. We spotted a few gazelles and some half dozen ostriches, then crossed a small river with a few crocodiles basking in it. The river seemed out of place, for Heaven knows where the water might come from; the multitude of fine dry river beds we saw, all of sand, seemed more in keeping.

  That was all, for it was too uncomfortably hot that low down to stay long, and shortly the pilot took us up to 5000 feet again and continued eastward, with the country below getting more barren and sandy.

  The hours dragged on with the plane droning steadily eastward and our aluminum seats getting harder and harder. Having no other use for our overcoats, we soon were all using them, folded up, for cushions to sit on, while monotonously, mile after mile, we sped across the dead plain below.

  Some hours out, the ground, still barren, began to get somewhat mountainous and we rose to 7000 feet. Then up we went still higher, to clear a mountain range with peaks rising to 9000 feet, with their ridges clearly visible not far below us—jagged, burned very brown, no vegetation on them. Nor any snow either, for they all looked too hot for that.

  The air became quite bumpy and the plane began to bounce round in lively fashion. Whoever invented the old saw about riding on air as the ultimate in smoothness had obviously never been in a plane with air currents beneath him rising off hot mountain peaks.

  We got over the mountains safely and settled into straighter flight. All hands breathed somewhat more easily. Had we crashed anywhere, even the Vichy French and their internment would have been welcomed to save us all from dying of thirst, for the caravans we spotted creeping along beneath us were few and very far between.

  Once again we had desert country to fly over, but soon we reached the western Sudan and there was friendly territory beneath us—friendly, that is, politically only, for the desert looked no more inviting. Then briefly we encountered some more mountains, not so bad this time. Shortly beyond them must have been some water, for there below was the little town of El Fasher on the western fringe of the Sudan, where several important caravan routes crossed to justify its existence. We had flown 900 miles since leaving Maiduguri.

  We came down on the airfield for a stop to have lunch while the plane refueled. It was hot, as usual. At this field, run by the British, there was no such meal as we had had at the Pan-Am stations. Food was evidently scarcer and strictly rationed. A couple of sandwiches and some warm water had to suffice.

  Meanwhile, at El Fasher I got a grim reminder of why I had not got off by air from New York. On the field were the burned remains of a Flying Fortress. Just off the field at Kano had been the crushed wreck of another. How many of these early Fortresses had not even made Africa, I never learned.

  We took off shortly for our last eastward leg to Khartoum on the Nile. We hurdled some more mountains, flew over more desert, and finally in the late afternoon came down on the airfield, the largest we had yet seen, outside Khartoum. We had covered 1400 miles since dawn.

  When the plane taxied to a stop and we emerged, I gasped as if I had stepped directly into a blast furnace. At the first whiff of that blistering air, involuntarily I stopped breathing. We had thought we had been hot before, but we had met nothing like that Khartoum field. We rushed for the nearest building to get out of the sun and of that dry, baking heat that seemed to shrivel the lungs.

  Khartoum was the air crossroads of Africa. Eastward ran the route to Arabia and India. Part way along that course lay Eritrea, where the regular flights never stopped. Southward ran the route to Durban and Capetown. Northward a thousand miles was Cairo, where I was to report to General Maxwell before proceeding to my station. We would stay overnight in Khartoum and the next morning separate, some few going on to Eritrea in other planes, General Scott and most others going to Cairo.

  Very soon the sun set, and with its disappearance the desert sands cooled off and the air quickly lost its burning heat. Once it was dark, Major Goff and I went into Khartoum to see the famous city where, at the junction of the Blue and the White Niles, Chinese Gordon had been killed and Lord Kitchener of Khartoum had made history in avenging him.

  Khartoum itself was something of a disappointment. It was a modern enough European city of fair size, about half the population of Kano. But it was neither Egyptian nor Sudanese in architecture and about as exciting as Main Street, with its street cars and its cinema showing an American movie.

  The one compensation which the major and I got for our twenty-mile ride over terribly dust
y roads from the airfield was a view by flashlight (Khartoum was blacked out) of a statue of Chinese Gordon astride, not a horse, but a camel. This was the first equestrian statue I ever saw which could claim any real novelty. It stood boldly out in the little beams of our flashlights against the night sky, a really magnificent bronze.

  Next, though we searched carefully in the black-out, we could find no statue of Kitchener in Khartoum, where he won his fame and his title. Possibly if he had fallen victim to a fuzzy-wuzzy spear near by instead of to a German U-boat in far distant waters, it might have been otherwise.

  So back we went to the airfield to turn in after a fatiguing day. Our quarters, adjoining the airfield, were in what we were told was a girls’ college before the war. We slept in one of the ex-dormitories. They must have had those native girls living on a high spiritual plane in that college. The narrow beds, reminiscent of Queen Nefertiti’s long-gone day, had only rope for springs and the pillows consisted of short cylindrical rolls packed hard with straw, which gave me a pain alternately in each ear as I rolled from side to side.

  We were under way early for Cairo and glad to get high up into the air before the sun really got to work. For some distance north we followed the Nile, to get a startling impression of how that river is Egypt. Only a narrow strip, rarely as much as a mile wide, along either bank was green. Outside that strip the hot sands came in on both sides to a sharp line of demarcation between desert sand and irrigated fields. For almost a thousand miles we saw that—the thin ribbon of green, intensively cultivated bordering the Nile, running through the desert on each side.

  Away from where the Nile waters the land, is the most terrible desert on earth from Khartoum north to Cairo. The deserts we had crossed coming from Lagos across Central Africa were as nothing to this. I could well believe that nowhere else on earth or in the sea or in the air could one find an area so absolutely devoid of any form of life whatever—no birds, no animals, no men, no vegetation. Here was only burning sand—sand in ripples, sand in ridges, sand in waves, sand dunes, barren rocks bordered with sand, scorched mountains with never a bit of green on them rising from seas of sand with rivers of sand flowing down their sides like glaciers, and vast clouds of fine sand thousands of feet up in the shimmering air, drifting over the sand below—everywhere desolation, aridity, and sand.