To Run Across the Sea

by Norman Lewis

  Abu Rof fosters the intense sociability of lives lived outside in what is for the most part of the year a good climate. Neighbours carry out their beds to sleep on the beach, which is furnished like a communal room with domestic objects, chairs, the occasional sofa, a kitchen stove, most of these softened in outline by pigeons’ droppings. The villagers swap tall stories, pray a little, brew up tea, and polish each other’s shoes, and turbaned and immensely dignified men gather in clear spots among the domestic litter for a game of marbles.

  The backdrop to this amiable scene is the brown ramparts thrown up by the Khalifa and held with hopeless courage for an hour or two against the cannon fire of Kitchener’s expedition sent to avenge the death of Gordon and to recover the Sudan. Kitchener’s gunboat, the Melik, with its paper-thin armour and single three-inch gun, is still tied up a mile or so upstream.

  Sheikh Hamid el Nil’s cemetery, and the tomb of this holy man, whose name implies his mystic involvement with the river, is a short taxi-ride away. It has become the centre of a dervish cult, hardly more than tolerated by Islamic orthodoxy, which views gymnastic devotions with the same uneasiness a practising Anglican might feel in the presence of Holy Rollers at worship. I drove out on Friday evening, when all Khartoum relaxes, to see the dervishes whirl. About 100 of them had marched in under their flags and were engaged in a preliminary workout. The drums crashed, and the dervishes began to jerk and twitch.

  There was nothing exclusive about the occasion. Any bystander could join in, and many did. A hard core of devotees whirled in professional style, but the onlooker caught up in the spirit of the thing was free to improvise. The drums imposed their own tremendous rhythmic discipline, but within this framework anything went. One pranced about, leapt, galloped, whirled until eliminated by vertigo, howled, shrieked, frothed at the mouth if possible, while the dervishes cracked their whips and lashed out with their canes. It was to be enjoyed by all; all good, therapeutic mania, like a ‘Come Dancing’ session with 10 marks out of 10 for contestants who could throw a trance or work themselves up into a fit.

  My driver, who had been standing by his taxi, soon began to suffer minor convulsions and, after grabbing at the steering wheel through the window in an effort to hold himself back, suddenly tore loose, picked up a stick, and went bounding away. A few minutes later he appeared again, exhausted and reeling, but spiritually renewed. ‘If you believe in God, sir,’ he said, ‘why do you not join us?’ It was an experience he thought I ought not to miss.

  I had no objection when he suggested a visit to the nearby tomb of the Mahdi, liberator of the Sudan from Gordon and the ‘Turks’. It proved to be a garish edifice of recent construction, reminding one of a space-ship on its launching pad. Kitchener destroyed the original tomb. He had the Mahdi’s body dug up and went off with the head with the intention of turning it into a drinking cup, deterred only from doing this by Queen Victoria’s startled outcry. Winston Churchill refers with distaste to this incident in ‘The River War’. He speaks of the Mahdi’s ‘unruffled smile, pleasant manners, generosity, and equable temperament’. ‘To many prisoners he showed kindness … to all he spoke with dignity and patience.’ His limbs and trunk were flung into the Niles. ‘Such,’ says Churchill, ‘was the chivalry of the conquerors.’

  The driver obtained my admission into the enclosure from which non-Muslims are normally excluded, on the promise that I would join him in a prayer, and I duly stood with him and did my best to recite the words of the Arabic formula.

  The Nile is rarely easy to approach. In the Sudan, river steamers only operate for about a quarter of its length, and roads following the valley are usually out of sight of the water. I had arrived with an introduction to the owner of a motorised felucca, but he had gone out of business, and the only man prepared to offer long-distance transport was a Mexican white hunter who offered 25 days’ hunting for £15,000. He mentioned as an inducement that on a recent expedition a client had had the good luck to shoot a bongo, an exceptionally rare species of antelope, only to be taken in the Sudan.

  It would have been nice to go to Juba, capital of the deep south, to visit at least the fringe of the extraordinary papyrus swamp known as the Sudd, and stay in Juba’s hotel where colonial nostalgia is so acutely felt that friends who had been there were prepared to guarantee that Brown Windsor soup was served with every meal. There were severe impediments to this project. In the Sudan communications are coming close to total breakdown, and this vast African country offers a foretaste of the likely predicament of the Third World when, in the end, petrol ceases to flow.

  The beautiful lady in the tourist office broke the news to me that such were the fuel shortages that the plane to Juba could be held up there for as long as a week, or, at worst, a month. Shortages of this order might delay, once I got there, the proposed return by river boat, and it was hard to come by precise information as to what was happening in the south because the telephone lines were out of order.

  Every world traveller will assure you that the Sudanese are the nicest people you are ever likely to meet, and I was beginning to agree. It was Saturday morning and there seemed to be a faint whiff about the place of the aphrodisiac smoke of acacia wood burnt in certain rituals on Friday nights. Young ladies in flowered chiffon saris came and went, smiling and giggling, shaking hands and touching their hearts, while the lady in charge of the office broke her depressing news.

  ‘You could go by car,’ she suggested, ‘but you may have to queue eight hours for petrol.’ She added that the car would cost £125 a day, mentioning that the journey to Juba occupied at least five days in each direction, and that 250 gallons of petrol would have to be carried. It was a moment, if ever there was one, to seek refuge in the art of the possible.

  I ran to earth the only man in Khartoum with a Land-Rover for hire; he found enough petrol to fill his tank and for two spare cans, and we set off with the object of travelling as far south as this meagre ration would allow. An asphalt road took us to Jebel Aulia, where we crossed the dam built in 1934, which was covered as if by graffiti with the great names of British engineering from those far-off colonial times. Here fishermen, casting their nets under a screen of herons and fishing eagles, were taking Nile perch from the water. These they bartered with the villagers for such things as firewood and eggs. Beyond Aulia the road, marked as confidently as ever on the map, turned into a tangle of interlacing tyre tracks in a near-desert. Its surface was as flat and hard as a cricket pitch and once in a while we drove into a drab village, overtopped by a chocolate and green minaret, with the mirage lying like stagnant water, and creeping back as we charged up the streets. Such villages, just beyond reach of the Nile floods, were so poor that even the vultures had given them up. Nothing, absolutely nothing, was ever thrown away. The rains came in autumn, the villagers grew a single crop of sorghum, and after that their lives teetered on the edge of survival for the nine months to the next rains.

  When we stopped for a midday snack a chance remark by the driver put the whole predicament of the underfed four-fifths of the world population in stunning perspective. Schooled in the proprieties of the well-nourished fifth I made a move to gather up our litter. He was horrified. ‘Leave everything,’ he said. ‘The goats will deal with the orange skins, even the paper, and the Arabs will turn the beer-cans into cups. Come back here in an hour, and you won’t see a trace of anything.’ Since the vultures had lost hope and gone away, animals that had died from natural causes lay scattered about these villages quite intact, but mummified by the sun.

  We turned away to the east, passing without warning across the frontier between arid savannah and the brilliant fertility of the nearly two million acres of the Gezira, the great garden of the Sudan filling the triangle south of Khartoum between the Blue and White Niles. A glum prospect of mud huts afloat in the mirage still showed through the rear window, but ahead was a soft bedazzlement of green fields moated with running water, and sparked with the refulgence of brilliant birds; great wadin
g storks in absurd postures, ten kinds of kingfisher, green cuckoos and crimson bee-eaters, insect-hunting from the telegraph poles where they perched in their hundreds. The Nile valley, throughout the length of its passage through the arid lands, is the paradise of birds, drawn to its water and the teeming insect life of its marshes and its saturated earth.

  It was intended back in the twenties that the Gezira project should provide cheap cotton for the Lancashire mills, but each year less cotton is grown for export and more food for home consumption, although the Gezira still provides most of the national income. It is not quite the success story it was, and production in most sectors is in decline. The management of water on this scale is a complex affair and technological breakdowns are compounded by a brain-drain to the affluent Gulf States. Water levels are maintained by specialists at pumping stations and irrigation regulators, who are required to be in constant touch with one another through the telephone network. This has begun to break down, so that canals frequently overflow and land is damaged by excessive flooding.

  It is said, too, the canals are no longer kept as free as they should be from weeds. This not only reduces the efficiency of irrigation, but has provoked a marked increase in the incidence of bilharzia. I was told that 80 per cent of Gezira children before the age of 10 now suffer from the disease, and the anaemia and chronic diarrhoea it entails. The shells of the snail that acts as host to the parasite in the intermediate stage of its development were to be seen everywhere in the mud excavated from water-courses.

  A quick forage round the market was to produce enough fuel, a gallon here, a gallon there, for a two days’ trip to the north, and our first stop was at the sixth cataract of the Nile, where the river slips between burnished coppery hills and a miniature gorge. The description cataract over-dramatises a fall in the water, rippling over pink stones hardly more than a few feet high; but here the boats taking part in Kitchener’s river war had to be dismantled once again to be reassembled only a few yards further on (nuts and bolts had sensibly replaced rivets in their construction), and there is a local legend that here they were bombarded by Mahdists who remained miraculously immune from the Maxim guns by reinforcing the chainmail they wore with pages from the Koran.

  There were wide, tranquil waters above the babble of the cataract, with palms, beanfields and birds and butterflies galore, and little girls were tugging goats by the ear, one by one, down to the water and actually persuading them to drink. Here I ran into the corruption spread by tourism even in this remote place. A year or more back, before petrol shortages had closed them down, an agency had been accustomed to send parties of trippers to this enchanted spot, and a local peasant, under the pretence that he owned the land, had levied a toll on access to the river. Watching from his lookout he spotted the Land-Rover’s approach and hurried to lay branches across the path, charging £1 per head before he would remove them. It was the first and the last time that I heard the hateful word baksheesh in the Sudan.

  The track leading to the north followed the railway line and in the space of an hour we passed the wreckage of two derailed trains. They had become a centre of local pilgrimage, and while we were examining the second train several goat-herds came into sight from behind the rocks to make a cautious, tiptoe approach as if for fear of disturbing a sleeping, but potentially dangerous animal. One of them picked up a stone and threw it at a mangled tanker-truck, and the sound of the stone striking metal was shrill and bleak in the dry air. They came up and shook hands with us repeatedly, delighted at the relief from the terrific monotony of their lives offered by the wrecked train and the sight of fresh faces.

  In this vicinity, at the approach to the important river junction at Shendi, we found ourselves among 100-foot-high mounds of immense ironstone boulders, heaped together in such a way that it was hard at first to accept that they had not been built by human hands. Scattered over the sand the shapes resembled squat armless Venuses, 100 tons of sand-polished sculpture by Henry Moore, sand-logged dinosaurs, black iron shards, and meteorites.

  Shendi, at one of the old crossroads of Africa, had always lived off the river traffic and the caravan routes crossing the Nile at this point. It had been an emporium of ivory and slaves, particularly the slave-girls brought down from Abyssinia, those highly valued harem items whose jet-black skin was—as an early writer put it—as cool to the touch as a toad, mentioning that a toad was sometimes kept on hand to enable the would-be purchaser to convince himself of the truth of the claim. Shendi had fallen into a decline highlighted by the loss of one of its ferries. It had been out of action for a year, although the spare parts necessary to get it going again had been delivered some months before, remaining in their crates by the river bank where they had been dumped from a lorry, and probably forgotten.

  Here a pull-in for market traffic offered the huge and expensive luxury of Pepsi Cola, English cigarettes (high-tar content for the Third World), a packet of which cost an average Sudanese worker a day’s wages, and hardboiled eggs by way of a snack. Children were waiting to seize upon and suck the discarded shells.

  A hard day’s drive brought us by evening to the site of the ancient Nilotic kingdom of Meroë where we camped for the night among the low pyramids—there are about 200 in all, clustered in groups over the low hills. They remain so well preserved, so clean-cut in their outlines that a few of them could be mistaken for follies built here by some Sudanese Victorian eccentric. The obvious clue to their antiquity lies in the fact that so many have lost their tops, dismantled in search of treasure by an early Egyptian military expedition tricked by an impostor into coming here in search of gold.

  Throughout most of its course through the Sudan the Nile is surprisingly difficult to reach behind the green mosaic of its gardens and its innumerable irrigation ditches. All this invaluable land has remained in the same families for many generations, producing a precisely calculable return and a sufficiency of food for all, based on a stable equation of birth and death. Antibiotics have destroyed this equilibrium. Until now epidemic sickness has carried off most of the children of the Third World in the first year of their lives. Now they survive to compete with each other for food supplies that have reached their limits. Up to four crops a year are raised at Meroë, but there is no way of coaxing more food from the soil, and even the volume of water supplied by the Nile has come close to its limit. Too many heirs divide the family plots into smaller and smaller segments, and too many peasants are already struggling to survive on the produce of a rectangle of land the size of a suburban front garden. Malaria, typhoid and hepatitis have been almost eliminated, but only at the expense of strengthening the hand of starvation.

  There seems to be no remedy in sight for this situation, which is allied to another long-term threat in the Sudan—that of desertification. There are more mouths to be fed everywhere, not only in the Nile valley itself but in the vast arid areas of semi-desert that border it. A few years back the greatest drought of this century coincided with the quadrupling of world petrol prices. The annual grasses failed to come up because there were no rains, and the herdsmen, impoverished by the loss of their stock, and no longer able to buy kerosene, began to cut down the last of the trees. No one is more keenly aware of the function fulfilled by the trees than the desert nomad, but he was up against the wall. The acacias and the desert apples were turned into firewood, and the desert was on the move again.

  The first symptoms of this creeping sickness of the earth were to be seen at Meroë, where sands were blowing into the green fields by the river, and one saw lorries stuck in sand-drifts where only two or three years back there had been a surface as hard as concrete. A few weeks before my driver had made the trip up to the north, passing a spot between Karima and the Egyptian frontier. Last time he had been in the vicinity there had been a grove of date palms there, with a bit of a garden producing a few cucumbers, with a well and a donkey turning a water-wheel. Of this nothing remained but a few palm fronds sprouting like feather dusters from the top
of the dunes.

  I flew to Cairo, passing over the Aswan High Dam and the 300-mile-long lake it has created. Lake Nasser came as a surprise. The mind’s eye had presented an immense version of a highland reservoir, and I was unprepared for this great sprawl of water, for its headlands, capes, its inlets and creeks by the hundred—even its fjords—all of them alien and out of place in this dry and incandescent land. Egyptians will say of this much-advertised solution to all their problems that it has turned out to be a mixed blessing, and there is an undertone among them of murmurings and doubts. A typical Third World thirst for industrialisation, cost what it may, has been satisfied by the dam and the electricity it has generated, and it would be unfair to suggest that many of the factories brought into being have been as disappointing as the one that produced so many millions of headless pins. The question is whether in the long term Egypt’s capability as the most lavishly endowed of all agricultural countries may have been placed at risk.

  The natural rhythms based for thousands of years on the annual flooding of the river and the soil’s renewal by the silt deposited by the floods have been disrupted by the dam. Artificial fertilisers, expensively produced, will be required as a substitute for the silt, but the perennial irrigation—which replaces the annual flooding, and drying off—has entailed problems of drainage which can only be solved by an expensive system of deep drains, which Egypt cannot afford. In the absence of drainage the build-up of salt carried in the river water will lead to a decline in the soil’s fertility. It has recently been discovered that the loss of silt has accelerated the river’s flow, eroding the banks and threatening to undermine the bridges.