by MP Miles
Zac was catching up, as always Jumbo ahead of him. The significance of where South Africa had built and stored its nuclear weapons hadn’t occurred to him. At the time the focus had been on how they might deliver them.
“Wouldn’t you put the nasty things in the middle of nowhere in case something went wrong?”
Zac had lost his place at the bar.
“Where do they store them in the US?” Jumbo asked.
“Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas. The big square ones in the middle. They try and keep them at least a hundred miles from a major city.”
“Exactly. With that in mind, Zac, don’t you think The Circle is in rather an odd place?”
“Perhaps The Circle has to be close to Pelindaba,” Zac whispered.
“They aren’t here.”
Jumbo was right. In the UK, the original uranium enrichment plant, equivalent to Pelindaba, had been at Capenhurst in Cheshire, while Aldermaston and Burghfield, similar to The Circle, were in leafy Berkshire, two hundred miles away.
“And the last time I looked, Tennessee was a long way from Texas.”
Jumbo was referring to Oak Ridge, the US Atomic City in the Appalachians that supplied fissile material, and the sixteen-hour drive west down I-40 to the Pantex weapon assembly facility in the desert near Amarillo.
Jumbo looked at his watch.
“Zac, forget that pint. Get me one next time. Sailing Club Tuesday evening?”
Zac’s mind was elsewhere. South Africa building The Circle twenty kilometres from the Union Buildings was like the UK storing its nuclear weapons at Heathrow or in Dagenham. It didn’t make sense.
“Right.”
“I’ve got to go. See you back at the office.”
It was a Friday afternoon. Jumbo didn’t expect to see Zac until Monday morning.
“Yes, sir. I’m right behind you.”
As always, thought Zac.
*
The train from Khartoum ran north along the Nile. At al-Mogran, the confluence of the White Nile that Ralph had followed from Uganda with the Blue Nile from Ethiopia, the water was surprisingly placid, where Ralph had expected turbulent cascades.
From there to Wadi Halfa it crossed the Nubia, numbered stations the only civilisation in a hot sandy desert. At station number six, train bogies lay abandoned in the sand. Ralph rode with others on the roof of the train, his turban pulled across his face. It was hard not to feel like Lawrence.
From the station at Wadi Halfa it was a one-kilometre walk over the brow of a hill to the Aswan Ferry terminal. A boat left after midday two times a week for the two-day trip to the High Dam. Ralph had been warned that it was important to take your own food and drink, the water on board taken straight from Lake Nasser. Bilharzia, a parasitic disease causing abdominal pain, diarrhoea, and blood in stools and urine, became a major concern. In terms of economic impact it was second only to malaria and endemic in Egypt due to the dam and irrigation projects along the Nile, common in farmers, fishermen and children who played in the water. The intermediary host was a freshwater snail, and Ralph worried about going in the water let alone drinking it, bilharzia the last thing he needed after hepatitis. Fool and hot sweet tea were available, however, and included in the ‘Deck Class’ price of less than three Egyptian pounds – about five dollars. Cabins were available and generally free of the rats that otherwise ran over you as you slept. Ralph risked the rodents and arrived early to claim some deck space before it became too crowded.
*
Alim called Angel from a noisy coffee house in the street below his Cairo office.
“Who is this guy?” Alim shouted.
“He’s just a boy. What do you know?”
“Not a lot, Angel. He caught the ferry to Aswan and has disappeared.”
Angel smiled.
“Yes, he’s good at that. We need to find him. He may be in some danger.”
“When I hear something I’ll go myself and hunt for your Englishman,” Alim reassured him.
Angel put the phone down, disappointed but then cheered. It may be a good thing Ralph had disappeared. If Alim wasn’t able to find him in Egypt then no one could.
*
The Aswan ferry broiled into Egypt. At one time Nubians lived where now there was only the water of Lake Nasser, the construction of the Aswan High Dam destroying Nubia as it was inundated by the Nile trapped in the valley. Fifty thousand Nubians were resettled north of Aswan and provided with land, new homes and financial support. They hated it. The government had built cement block houses, different from their traditional homes and less comfortable. Family groups had been separated and historic rivalries ignored. Many Nubians rented their land to other farmers and moved to the cities, the family bonds broken. A handful returned to Nubia. Ralph looked enthralled at the farming villages they’d established on the shores of the new Lake Nasser – traditional homes, brightly coloured with sand floors and not all rooms having a roof. There was no need. It never rained.
Aswan town was some way from the ferry port. A train went from the quay into town and taxi drivers touted bossily for business. A muleteer offered Ralph a ride on a very thin donkey for a dollar but he declined, walking over the High Dam to the west side of the Nile and then, after ten kilometres through dusty wasteland, crossed back to Aswan town on the top of the Low Dam.
Ralph favoured the river rather than the town centre and continued north to a ferry terminal on the east bank at the outskirts of Nagaa Ash Shalabab. It had been a twenty-five-kilometre walk and taken him ten hours. He was in pain, weak and unfit, his feet bleeding in worn boots.
Beyond the tourist river cruisers small traditional sailing boats moored themselves securely to a dock, working commercially as they had for millennia. An unnamed felucca carrying stone, low in the water, lay on the outside of a raft of similar lateen-sailed boats. Ralph negotiated his passage. It would cost him five dollars, including food.
They sailed by day, Mahmoud the helmsman steering with his foot on the tiller. At night they would camp on the shore close to a fire of sycamore fig. Aswan in June reached forty centigrade by day but only ten at night, and it felt very cold. Huddled by the fire they coached him in Arabic. Ralph wasn’t sure how much use it would be. They taught him first most of the parts of a woman’s body and then progressed to how to say ‘I love you’. Ralph concluded that people were the same all over the world.
It took three slow days to reach Luxor, their speed entirely dependent on the current, a strong Etesian wind blowing towards them from the north making sailing impossible. They arrived in the dark, slipping under the illuminated Temple, the Southern Sanctuary, with the current behind them, and docked for the night on the Ancient Quay.
It was to be the last part of the trip that Ralph would make on water. From Luxor he walked north again, along the east bank of the Nile through farmland.
*
The construction of the Aswan High Dam had made Lake Nasser the largest artificial lake ever created and had turned the Nile into a huge and predictable irrigation ditch. In simple terms, it had put farmers in control of how much water went to which crop and at what time. Like farming everywhere, there were still problems; in Egypt they were a decreasing fertility of the soil, the weather, and very small farms.
Before the High Dam was built the land had been fertile due to the river flooding, then depositing silt and nutrients as it receded. Now, the life-giving silt became trapped by the dam and remained in Lake Nasser. Downstream, with reduced deposition, the water table rose and the soil became saline. The river now brought regulated water flow and life, but it made the ground salty and crops suffered and died.
And then there was the wind. A wind called the khamsin blew from the desert in April for days on end, a 140-kilometre-an-hour sandblaster, shredding plants and produce. There was nothing that could be done. Along with the sand that the khamsin carried, t
he hot desert air could cause a twenty centigrade temperature rise in just two hours. Plants that weren’t ripped to pieces shrivelled in the heat.
The farms were small, their size limited to fifty feddan, about twenty hectares. Nobody could own more land than that, although people tried to find ways around it. It was a good socialist model but it did nothing for efficiency and economies of scale.
Despite these problems medium-sized landowners, those with six to ten feddan, could show a profit, something a grower in Europe could never hope to do with only three or four hectares. Most landowners, however, were peasant smallholders with less than five feddan, too small an area for profitable agriculture even in Egypt. These farmers worked for larger landowners as well, or found seasonal work in towns.
How any of them survived was a mystery to Ralph. As he walked he looked at the crops being grown. There was no grass. The water buffalo, milked instead of cows, had to eat something. There was no grazing but there was clover and corn, presumably for animal feed. They grew beans and lentil, wheat and barley, sugarcane and onions. All of them rotating around and around on little patches of land. Around and around.
And then Ralph stopped, unable to move. Like an epiphany he knew the answer and it seemed both simple and a miracle of nature and ingenuity. The alluvial soils were still very fertile, despite the rising water table, and the khamsin only blew in April, and then not all month long. The rest of the year there were near optimum growing conditions. That helped, but wasn’t the reason Egypt didn’t starve.
The secret was double, or even triple, cropping. On each piece of land two or three crops a year could be grown. The fertile soils, freely available water and good growing conditions lasted all year round. There was no winter. Suddenly a farmer’s ten hectares became twenty or even thirty hectares of crops cultivated. Although Egypt had the lowest cultivatable area per capita of anywhere in the world, double and triple cropping meant it could survive and its people could be fed. Since the 1960s the average food consumption had increased by a thousand calories a person a day, and the amount of protein eaten had increased by nearly thirty per cent, both to levels similar to those in developed countries.
And not only were Egyptians clever, they were kind. Ralph would arrive in a village, changed into his long trousers and a button-down shirt, and look for an elder male. Most villages seemed to be split into quarters, with four clans. Each clan had a house to entertain visitors, and Ralph never went in the houses where they slept with their wife, or wives, and unmarried daughters. If Ralph saw the women at all they would be veiled. The family was usually extended, the father’s single and married sons, and their wives and children, all living in houses in the quarter. Young deferred to old, women deferred to men, and the father controlled all of their possessions and income.
Their most deeply held values, honour dignity and security, came from being part of a family as well as from God. They practised a simple, honourable and benign form of Islam, family and kinship the most important things in life.
The clans often vied with each other for power and influence in the village. Ralph learnt that he could use this to his advantage. Providing food and shelter to a foreigner showed to the other clan elders how knowledgeable he and his sons were of the world outside and of international affairs. They would boast of it in the following days.
A son, if not the father, would always speak a little English, and both were proud when given the opportunity.
“I am the eldest son,” Ralph would tell them, but never that he was the only son. “My father is a merchant. A trader.”
“And he has land?” they would enquire.
“A little.”
A very few feddan, thought Ralph, but enough for Dad and Mum to grow a few early potatoes in springtime, to pick runner beans through summer and cabbages and leeks in winter.
Ralph’s social standing and position in his own village was then instantly understandable to them. He was the eldest son of a merchant who wasn’t landless.
“Ahlan wa sahlan.”
“Welcome,” the son would translate.
Ralph had learnt from Mahmoud the felucca captain to say greetings that sounded Masri, Egyptian colloquial Arabic, not the official Fusha.
“Fursa sa’ida,” he would reply, “Ismee Mark. Ana min England.”
When invited inside to eat he would remove his shoes and compliment the son on the house. He waited to be told where to sit, ate with his right hand only and showed his appreciation by giving the compliment of eating seconds. At the end of the meal he would offer money three times until the father would joke, ‘U’af! Itassal bil bulees!’. It was his final word, but Ralph would say ‘Shukran gazelan’ and leave a few dollars tucked under his plate anyway.
He did it nine times walking the east bank of the Nile, nearly three hundred kilometres from the tourist sights of Luxor towards the university town of Asyut through Qena and Sohag. He would have been happy to continue for the rest of his life, wandering the countryside, watching with interest the farmers at their work, eating and sleeping in a different village every night with honest, kind Egyptians.
*
Alim had driven from Cairo at half past four, in the cool of the dawn. The previous afternoon a report had been delivered to his desk in a hot office. His company imported air conditioners and he wondered why they didn’t have one of their own. He had read the note slowly, the paper already damp from someone else’s sweat.
“On the road to Asyut?” he asked no one in particular.
In the evening he’d had a long phone interview with a very nervous rural police lieutenant on his curious report of a wandering Englishman. Then he’d called Angel.
From Asyut, Alim had followed the river south through Al Mutiah, Baqur and Abu Tij. At nine o’clock, thirty-five kilometres from Asyut, he found Ralph hobbling up the road towards him, just outside a town called Sidfa. He drove past without slowing, stopped out of sight and turned around.
Alim offered him a lift. He was heading that way, he said, back to Cairo to his employer, the El-Nasr Export & Import Company, exporting batteries, tyres, industrial equipment, building materials and foods. In reality they exported anything they liked and imported mostly information. It was only a cover organisation after all, a front for the Mukhabarat, the Egyptian General Intelligence Directorate.
Ralph had a pain in his toe that made him limp. He’d started late in the day and, because of it, he accepted the lift. Alim soon convinced him that he’d made the right decision by saying that he had been walking, appropriately, in the month of Shaban, when, of old, people scattered and dispersed to find water. Ramadan, literally the month of ‘burning heat’, was due to start in a few days. It was the 21st of June 1982, Hijri year 1402, and from the 23rd people would fast in daylight hours. They became grumpy until they were used to it and would be less likely to help Ralph with food and accommodation.
As they drove Alim talked about farming. Egypt was a desert, ninety-seven per cent of the land area uninhabitable, but the Nile valley and the Delta were the most extensive oasis on earth and home to ninety-nine per cent of the population and all of their food production. Alim had been in the area buying vegetables. It is a noble thing, he said, to grow food, to feed people. Ralph thought about his future.
“So, where have you been?” Alim asked.
“In Egypt?”
“Yes. Did you come from Sudan?”
“Correct. On the Lake Nasser steamer from Wadi Halfa to Aswan.”
“And then?”
“I walked over the High Dam and crossed back to Aswan to catch a felucca.”
“Did anyone stop you crossing the dam?”
“No. I just walked across.”
It was a military area. Alim would remember that for later.
“What boat did you take?” he asked.
“Just some locals in an old sailboat. Except we
didn’t sail anywhere, just drifted down the river.”
“What fun,” and then innocently, “What was it called?”
“I don’t think it had a name. It had a number on it but it was all in Arabic.”
“Of course. Who was the captain?”
“Mahmoud.”
Mahmoud was about the fourth most common given name in Egypt.
“Is that it?”
Ralph shrugged.
“Nice chap.”
“So, how far did you go on your little sail?” Alim asked cheerfully.
“To Luxor. Right under the Temple. We stayed the last night on board tied to the dock and I left at dawn the next day.”
“When was that?”
“Nine or ten days ago, I think. Yes, the 12th of June.”
“And you’ve been walking since then?”
“It’s been really interesting. All the farming, it’s quite amazing.”
Ralph had joined fields in open country four kilometres out of Luxor and followed a canal close to the river. He’d stayed off the Cairo road as much as possible, preferring minor roads and tracks through rectangles of crops and small villages. It had been hot but easy walking on flat land, like Holland on a summer day. Navigation had been easy – just keep the big river on the left. He’d walked as he had in the Cape, starting early to cover as much as he could by lunchtime and then resting before ambling for a few hours in the late afternoon while looking for a convenient place for the night. In this manner he could do thirty kilometres a day. If he’d been stronger he could have done much more. The easy flat going had helped enormously, as had his turban. He wasn’t sure he wore it in the correct fashion as it covered most of his head, face and the top half of his body, but despite its weight it kept him cool and made him less conspicuous. By his best reckoning it had been two months since his initial infection with hepatitis and he still felt weak. The flat terrain and his turban helped, as had his rest in Juba and on the Nile River steamer under the care of Hisao. He realised he would have been too ill to walk from Kosti towards Khartoum without the help of his Japanese friend. Hisao had flown from Khartoum, to where Ralph never knew. They hadn’t spoken a word to each other. He knew nothing about him other than his first name and the island he came from, Hokkaido, cool, green and wet, its climate, area, population and economic activity very similar to Ireland. He missed him.