Shelter Rock

by MP Miles

  Angel ran to the door. It was still dark outside. Sunrise here would be around 6.30am. He glanced at his watch. 5.10am. Plenty of time. He looked for his shoes.

  “Shit,” he said.

  His watch was on Johannesburg time. He hadn’t changed it. Local time was an hour ahead. It was 6.10am. He estimated he was five kilometres from the river, the wrong side of town. 5K. Under twenty minutes. Angel bolted through the door.

  He sprinted south, dogs barking outside a hospital on his right, heart pounding until he reached a sleeping gas station. He stayed on the road rather than run through side streets in the dark, his feet echoing and chest heaving.

  At the twin square towers of a cathedral Angel slowed and took his bearings. The river was to his left but he was too far north with no direct route to the steamer dock. He ran south still but now off the main road that curved away from the river, down dirt paths between block houses with flat roofs, heading past a truck park toward the old mosque.

  He could see the river now, hear the noise of the port area. He turned left heading east and tripped, staggering and falling into a row of parked motorcycles. He had to be very close. Shaking himself free he sprinted to the port.

  Dawn was just breaking over the Nile, the slow flat water reflecting orange. He leant gasping against a pile of logs. He was too late. The old barges had slipped from the bank, the paddlewheel steamer already churning water off the dock.

  *

  With some relief Ralph felt the barge slip lines and move over flat water in a pink and grey dawn, the white egrets still at roost. The barge moved silently, pushed from behind by the old paddlewheel steamer that had never been powered by steam. The river was ill-defined and slow-moving. From its source at Lake Victoria to Juba the river dropped six hundred metres, but from Juba to Khartoum, over twice the distance, it dropped only seventy-five, slowing almost to stagnation in the Sudd. Over the river and small lakes Ralph watched floating plant life that had formed into huge islands of matted vegetation up to thirty kilometres long. At times he couldn’t see the river at all, pernicious hyacinth spreading over the water surface, choking the channels and impeding traffic until the barge forged a path with its blunt bow. Over the hyacinth and the rafts of floating papyrus were grasslands flooded by the river so that it was impossible for Ralph to tell where the water ended and the land began. This flat flood plain the size of Belgium was not the edge of the river, as rain-flooded grasses appeared and disappeared overnight. At the very edge, often far away, Ralph strained to see the wooded grasslands cultivated by Dinka, Nuer and Shilluk.

  Entranced, he waved to small fishing communities of two or three thatched homes, completely isolated from the world, perched on dry ground. They took very little fish. It had been estimated that the Sudd part of the Nile could support a catch of seventy-five thousand tons of fish and still be self-sustaining. Only about 11,500 tons were taken, not a fifth of its potential. A valuable export industry lay untapped. A little was dried and sent to the Congo where it was in big demand, but most of that caught was consumed locally.

  Ralph’s new Japanese friend was called Hisao. He tried to redress the imbalance. Hisao was an expert fisherman, hauling catch over the side of the barge that had locals sighing with admiration. Species identification was his only handicap. He would offer strange looking river-dwelling creatures, some not even resembling fish, to his audience, and if they took them to eat so would he. Mudfish, and at night huge air-breathing vundu catfish powerful enough to pull a fisherman to the bottom, were turned back or their bloody gills used for bait, as were knifefish, deadly to touch and with the shock of an electric eel. Tigerfish, a vicious predator with fierce razor-like teeth, were eaten even though the meaty flesh was bony and slightly oily. Nile tilapia, introduced to eat mosquito larvae and snails and hopefully control malaria and bilharzia, thrived in the brackish waters of the Sudd and were a delicacy. Disappointingly, Nile perch evaded Hisao. It was no reflection of his extraordinary ability but only because they lived in deep-water lakes and not in the shallows of the Southern Reach.

  Humming to himself over a little charcoal fire, Hisao would cook his catch, carefully select the whitest meat, and with his fingertips gently feed Ralph fish so fresh that the flesh squeaked against his teeth when he ate it.

  For hours they would sit at the entrance to their home, unable to talk to each other, pointing out crocodile, hippo and painted hunting dogs. The quantity of wildlife astonished them. It came as no surprise when, in exaggerated mime after reading aloud a Japanese guidebook, Hisao explained to him that there were more antelope in the Sudd than in the Serengeti.

  Together, over tilapia dinners, they marvelled at cranes and pelicans fishing, black and white sacred ibis wading, and prehistoric looking shoe-billed storks with heads like a whale. Ralph thought Hisao showed him that there were four hundred species of bird in the Sudd, although numbers that large were difficult to communicate on two hands.

  Ralph had taken a book about Sudan from the nuns at the convent. He consoled himself with believing it wasn’t theft. He’d paid fifty dollars for it. From it he read of ever-present threats to the Sudd and that it might not always remain as unspoiled. Construction had started on one of the largest irrigation projects ever attempted in Africa, a plan to divert the Nile around the Sudd by digging a canal to channel the water away from the flood plain. Over fifty-five per cent of the water entering the Sudd evaporated. It was estimated that when complete the Jonglei Canal carrying Nile water away from the Sudd would increase the quantity of water downstream in Egypt by five to seven per cent and provide irrigation water for an additional eight thousand square kilometres of farm land. The Jonglei was to run from Bor in a straight line due north to the confluence of the Sobat River with the Nile near Malakal, a huge German excavation rig named Sarah already at work. The benefits would be solely for Egypt and the north of Sudan. The environmental destruction of a unique natural habitat for herds of buffalo, elephant and hippo, and the detrimental social impact on the activities of the south Sudanese indigenous tribes that depended on the Sudd for cattle rearing, were completely overlooked. To understand Sudanese politics one had to be either a prophet or a fool.

  An old proverb said that when Allah created Sudan he laughed. Another said that he cried. Allah alone knew. His influence, however, became more and more obvious when the White Nile widened after Lake No, the Sudd now behind them, and they approached Kosti and the bottom of the brown half of Sudan on Ralph’s map. At dawn on the seventh day out of Juba, in the river town of Melut 140 kilometres north of Malakal, Ralph saw his first mosque. The muezzin made adhan, the long, ornamented repetitions of his voice summoning Muslims for mandatory worship. Ralph was at the end of Africa. It was the start of Arabia.

  *

  From Kosti, Ralph wanted to walk but he soon felt lonely and wished he’d caught the train with Hisao. The road had crossed the Nile and, after a two-hour slow walk from the bridge, the road and railway paralleled each other. For a further seven kilometres they ran just forty metres apart, reminding him of what he should have done. The railway then ran in a dead straight line from Rabak to Sennar with few stations. Four train halts had been placed with precision exactly twenty-five kilometres apart. Ralph wondered if it had been built by the British, the distance the same as that between market towns in Dorset.

  The road to Sennar went through a moonscape, the temperature away from the river making Ralph weak and stumble. Near to the first halt a crowded train went past and Ralph saw somebody standing on the roof, waving, shouting his name. Ralph watched the train disappear. Sadly he limped along, struggling. Through a haze he saw a thin man sitting by the road, waiting for him. Hisao walked towards him, lifted his rucksack without saying anything and walked alongside him wordlessly, slowly, at his pace. Ralph wanted to cry.

  It stayed hot and dry, dust storms, a prelude to rain, reducing visibility and forcing them to shelter from the sun and
wind at a sandy town called Jebel Moya, three-quarters of the way to Sennar. While bed-bound and bored at the convent in Juba, Ralph had listlessly read a pamphlet, a data sheet on a new drug by Wellcome that told of the company’s historical involvement in Sudan. In the late Neolithic period from 500 to 100 BC, Jebel Moya had been a mortuary complex for pastoral peoples, a combined cemetery and settlement that had been excavated before World War One by Sir Henry Wellcome. He’d dug up 2,800 graves. Ralph watched craftsmen in mud-walled buildings making ornamental beads to adorn the dead, just as they had two thousand years before.

  They saw few women. In the south of Sudan, away from Islamic practices, women were subordinate to men but enjoyed much greater freedom than in the north. Female circumcision was not practised in the south and a cult called Zar, that conducted ceremonies to pacify evil spirits and cleanse women of afflictions, did not exist. Women had greater freedom of movement, were consulted on public affairs and played an important role in the mediation of disputes. In the north, girls remained in the household, segregated from festivities, eating separately and after the men.

  Hisao, apprehensive at sleeping among the dead, was keen to leave Jebel Moya in the morning, leading Ralph by the hand through the village to the railway platform. Ralph pulled him stubbornly to the road. They would walk.

  At Sennar they met the Blue Nile, except that it was brown and turbid. Their walking rate had slowed, the breaks more frequent and longer. In Wad Madani a local thought they were making a dangerous journey and that Ralph should have a lucky amulet. He demonstrated how powerful it was by holding a scorpion. Ralph bought it while Hisao arranged a ride in a lorry to Khartoum.

  *

  It was the first week of June, the hottest time of the year in Khartoum, with average temperatures well over forty centigrade and the harmattan, a hot dry desert wind from the north. Ralph felt tired and needed to sleep at night so he chose to stay at the Hotel Royal. It was seventy piastres a night, twenty piastres more than the youth hostel, but there were fans in the bedrooms.

  He looked thin after Juba and the Nile and ate frequently at the police canteen on El Mahdi Avenue, usually as much as he could eat bowls of meat and lentils for about twenty cents. It was costing just a dollar a day for food and accommodation.

  Khartoum had at one time been a focal point in the trade of African slaves to Arab countries. Now there was an aspirational monument to national unity and a large open-air market just south of the Great Mosque, Souq Al Arabi, a large area devoted to gold, a historic trade. The Egyptians had retreated south into northern Sudan when their ancient empire had passed its zenith and was threatened by a succession of Hittites, Assyrians and Romans. Nubia became the source of much of Egypt’s gold, an estimated forty tons a year.

  Ralph went to the British Embassy, a formidable building in a square by a park looking at, and deliberately overpowering, the Republican Palace. Taking the advice of the man called Rots, he received a call from his parents on a telephone that said ‘Unsecure Line’, a nice lady from Cheltenham sitting demurely in the room with him throughout, Ralph unsure if it was to stop him saying something he shouldn’t or in case he stole the phone.

  A familiar voice came through six thousand kilometres of wire.

  “Ralph?”

  “Hello, Dad.”

  Afterwards he wished he hadn’t called. It was the second of June, the start of the loveliest month in Dorset, his mother’s birthday, weather for drinking in the garden of a village pub, The Plough at Manston or The Two Brewers, daylight until after nine at night. Mum would pick vegetables from the garden for lunch to go with lamb, small potatoes with tender skins and crispy beans, and sit under a tree reading until teatime. He wanted to be there.

  Ralph looked in the door of the last bastion of the British Empire, The Sudan Club. He could hear the chink of snooker balls and smell the pink gin. An immaculate doorman looked at him and shook his head.

  In the souk he bought a turban, a wide strip of lightweight white cotton about ten metres long, not knowing what to do with it. The stallholder spent fifteen minutes teaching him how to wear it until, exasperated, he gave up and prayed, Ralph hoped for him.

  He headed to the Egyptian Embassy on Gamma’a Avenue for a visa but dawdled, delayed and distracted by the zoo opposite, baffled why anyone would confine hippo while so many lived so close, just down the Nile a short way. In Khartoum Africa already felt very distant.

  Twenty-four

  The lunchtime crowd had spilled out of The Northumberland Arms onto central London’s Gower Street, drawn from the beery gloom of the public bar into the early June sunshine like bees.

  Jumbo Cameron sat inside at a small table pulling apart a beer mat, thinking of work. October and November the previous year had been busy with four explosions in London at barracks and burger bars. Since then things had quietened down, until yesterday.

  “Penny for ’em,” said Zac.

  “Bloody Palestinians,” mumbled Jumbo into his glass.

  Zac had heard all about it. The Israeli ambassador had just been shot on Park Lane outside of The Dorchester hotel by Abu Nadal, a militant group splintered from the PLO.

  Jumbo threw shredded remnants of cardboard into an ashtray.

  “I would like to know how Israeli civil servants can afford to eat in The Grill at The Dorchester anyway. Costs a bomb.”

  Jumbo knocked his pint back in three wide gulps.

  “Another, sir?”

  “Thank you, Zac.”

  Zac stood up to join the throng three deep at the bar.

  “Oh yes, can you remember a Ralph Phillips?” he asked.

  “Vaguely.”

  Zac knew that meant Jumbo remembered perfectly. He always did. He hid the embarrassment of owning a brilliant brain, efficient as a well-organised filing cabinet, behind the mannerisms of an inept Great War general.

  “He was a walk-in,” Zac said, elbowed out of the way by a baying broker in a black suit.

  “Where?”

  “Khartoum. He walked in and asked to use the phone. Cheeky bugger.”

  Walk-ins were aspiring defectors or ‘offers of service’, often with grand proposals or earth-shattering secrets, who appeared out of the blue at the front desk of foreign embassies. There was a protocol for dealing with them, usually disbelief and suspicion followed by polite refusal. If they were serious they’d come back.

  Jumbo smiled.

  “What did he do? Call his mum?”

  “Exactly that.” Zac thought of the boy he’d met in South Africa, quiet and serious, reserved yet good-humoured. “Odd fellow.”

  “The best ones are,” said Jumbo.

  Zac agreed.

  “Yes, I was thinking. We should meet him, see what he’s like, see if he’d be of any use.”

  Jumbo was thinking only of Israel and the conversation he was scheduled to have that afternoon with a youthful and precocious minister from the Home Office.

  “If you like, Zac.”

  “He’s done well, sir. Easy to lose your way out there, easy to say the wrong thing, look the wrong guy in the eye and end up with a meat cleaver in your skull. Nobody would know, nobody to help.”

  “He’s not back yet.”

  “True, true. Many a slip.”

  “You want to recruit him?” Jumbo asked.

  Jumbo’s own recruitment had been just as unconventional. An invitation during his final year in ’72 from a history professor at Durham to meet a friend in London, an interview for a job that had never been explained where it seemed they’d talked only of the Rolling Stones, an instruction by mail, ‘DO NOT REDIRECT FOR ADDRESSEE ONLY’ in large red print on the envelope, telling him to report to what looked like a tanning salon in Twickenham. It had been a while before someone quietly informed him that his employer was called the Security Service. Then he’d gone to school. At a remote dairy farm i
n Yorkshire they’d taught him to measure the dimensions of buildings using his thumb on an outstretched arm, and to take clandestine notes inside his trouser pocket. It had looked like he was playing with himself. He’d expected something clever inside a special watch but they’d given him two inches of a soft pencil and pieces of card cut from a box of tea bags.

  “If he gets home we’ll make an assessment; how’s that, Zac?”

  Jumbo started destroying another beer mat.

  “Actually, you’ve reminded me of something.”

  Zac turned from the bar.

  “I thought there might be a small error in a report you wrote, let me see, yes, it was dated 31st January.”

  It didn’t surprise Zac in the least that Jumbo had been quietly cogitating the fine detail of a report written more than four months previously.

  “You said that it would take fifteen minutes to drive from the city centre to The Circle.”

  Zac guessed Jumbo was being purposefully ambiguous in public. He couldn’t remember how long the drive from Pretoria had been.

  “Yes, that sounds right.”

  “You were correct. It’s only twenty kilometres from the Union Buildings,” said Jumbo. “I measured it the other day.”

  Zac tried to recall South Africa. He’d driven out of Pretoria toward The Circle and then Pelindaba, before meeting Angel at a farm further down the road and climbing Shelter Rock. Zac smiled. Sheltering Rock. Appropriate. He got it now.

  “In the north-western part of the country we are referring to, there is an area larger than Germany but with practically nobody in it.”

  “I see,” said Zac, confused.

  “If you had all that empty space why would you locate a site like The Circle so close to the seat of government?”