The Men Behind

by Michael Pearce

  “Times when the merchant’s agents will pick up the slaves?”

  “Yes. It has to be done secretly, of course, because the British get so excited about it. The traders usually pick a place outside a town—”

  “In the hills outside Hamada, for instance?”

  “Well, yes.” Soraya pouted. “You’re not really interested in me. You’re only interested in your work.”

  Zeinab had been saying much the same thing. It wasn’t true, really. There were lots of things he was interested in. Soraya, for a start.

  “Not so,” he protested, stroking the back of her neck.

  Soraya sat up.

  “We could go somewhere,” she said, eyes gleaming.

  Owen thought that perhaps it would be better if they did. They were beginning to attract attention. Private endearments in public were not a feature of the Muslim way of life, even in a seedy night club.

  Afterwards, though, with Soraya nestling drowsily in his arms, his mind returned to his other interest.

  “They told me at the Citadel that you had left your man,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Soraya sleepily.

  “Was that because you came to me at Hamada?”

  “Yes,” said Soraya. “No,” she corrected herself, “it was because I didn’t give him any money afterwards.”

  “I didn’t give you any money.”

  “It was for love,” said Soraya, sitting up suddenly, wide awake, eyes flashing. “We did it for love. That is what I told him. He hit me and I stabbed him. A Ghawazi girl does not take blows. Unless she wants to, of course. You can beat me if you like,” she offered, slipping back into his arms.

  “No, thanks. I am sorry, though, to come between you and your man.”

  “It’s all right,” said Soraya. “He’ll come back. Or perhaps I’ll go back to him.”

  Owen was relieved to hear that the stabbing had not been fatal.

  “What were you down in Hamada for?” he asked. “Were you taking messages to Ali Osman?”

  “There probably were messages,” she said, “but that wasn’t why we went to Hamada. We were going to take the guns down to Khamda.”

  “Guns?”

  “Didn’t I say? The slaves are not paid for in money, they’re paid for in guns. Guns are always wanted in the Sudan.”

  “The Mahdi?”

  “Isn’t he dead?”

  “Yes, but…” Owen wondered if he had stumbled on something. Ever since the Mahdi’s forces had been broken by the British and the British had taken over running the country, it had been the constant fear of the Administration in Egypt that the Mahdi’s supporters would regroup and rise again.

  “Who are the guns for?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Guns fetch a good price in the south.”

  He would have to look into this. If arms were getting through to some of the big tribes in the West, particularly the more independent ones around Darfur, that was something the Administration needed to know.

  “The gypsies take the guns down to Khamda?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why there?”

  “That’s where we meet the slavers.”

  “You trade the guns for the slaves?”

  “We don’t trade anything. We just carry the guns.”

  “Why do you have to call in at Hamada?”

  “Because that’s where the guns are. That’s where we pick them up.”

  “You don’t bring them down with you?”

  “No. That would be too dangerous. The guns don’t come that way anyway. They are landed at the coast, at Ras Gharib. Then they are brought across the desert to Hamada.”

  “What happens there?”

  “They’re just left there. There’s a place in the hills.”

  “By a shrine?” asked Owen, light beginning to dawn.

  “Yes. Up in the hills. Near where you found us.”

  Owen, his lips touching the nape of Soraya’s neck, reflected. The arms trade and the slave trade were both illegal. Both, however, were widely practiced.

  The slave trade was rooted deep in the culture of the area. For centuries Arab slave traders had come down from the north and for centuries the black villages of the south had supplied them with slaves. Khartoum, the capital of the Sudan, had been the great slave center of Africa until the British had arrived and put a stop to it.

  Or thought they had. Slaving was now illegal in the British-governed Sudan but how could a handful of District and Police Commissioners, less than a hundred in all, police a million miles of desert? In the remoter areas slaving still thrived. And it was only too easy to bring slaves across the desert without going near a town, without coming within sight of human habitation, up and out of the Sudan and into the nearly equally remote southern and western parts of Egypt.

  From there it was equally easy to ferry them across to the coast and ship them across the Red Sea to places where not only no questions would be asked but slaves were a normal feature of the economy.

  Slaves were still in enormous demand throughout what remained of the Ottoman Empire. Black slaves from the Sudan fetched a particularly good price.

  The arms trade was newer. It was, however, quite as profitable. To own a gun was the ambition of every desert Arab. It sounded, though, as if these guns were being purchased in bulk. It would be very interesting to know who by and what for.

  Both trades were highly profitable. He wondered what the volume was.

  “How often do the slavers come?” he asked.

  “Four times a year. This time, however, there were too many guns to be shipped in one load. Another is coming.”

  “It is still to come?”

  “Yes.”

  “When is it due to come?”

  “Any day now.”

  “At Hamada?”

  “At Hamada.”

  “Do you know…?”

  But Soraya’s mind had moved on to other things.

  ***

  The students were on the streets again.

  “Something we could have done without right now,” said McPhee, preparing to go out with a detachment to quiet them down.

  “It was bound to come,” said Owen, taking it with what to McPhee was surprising equanimity. “Things have been too quiet.”

  Ever since he had returned from Hamada there seemed to have been an uncanny lull. The huge demonstration in front of the Abdin Palace had drawn off a lot of the anti-Government energy and the number of sporadic local outbreaks of violence had fallen sharply.

  Even—and this was surprising—the reports of following had dwindled to a trickle. What instances there were seemed attributable more to game-playing youths than to genuine terrorists.

  “You’ve got them scared,” said the loyal McPhee.

  Nikos had a different view.

  “Those two were the only ones who could make bombs,” he said. “When they blew themselves up there was no one else Rashid could go to.”

  “That doesn’t explain the followings,” Owen pointed out.

  “Nine-tenths of them were imaginary anyway,” said Nikos.

  The lull, for whatever reason, was welcome. But now it seemed to have ended. And the British had only themselves to blame.

  What had brought the students again on to the streets was the evident determination of the British to pursue Mahmoud for the prominent part he had played in the Abdin demonstration. They had, apparently, demanded his expulsion from the Law School.

  “Victimization!” declared the student with the tribal scars whom Owen had remarked previously, pounding his fist on the café table.

  “Victimization!” his friends round the table echoed.

  “Victimization!” said Georgiades, a little late, but then he was always a bit slow to cotton on.

 
“We must resist!” declared the scarred student passionately. “Give way now and they will trample our liberties forever!”

  “Resist!”

  “Resist!”

  The cries rose to the plastered ceiling of the café. The newspapered patrons of the café, however, among them Owen, read on with indifference.

  “Let us march on the Citadel!”

  “Let us march on the Palace!”

  “Let us lie down in front of the English Barracks and tell them they can shoot us if they wish but Mahmoud must be reinstated!”

  “Yes! Yes!”

  There was a general thumping on tables.

  “What’s up?” asked the proprietor of the café.

  “We are going to march on the Barracks.”

  “Good. You wouldn’t like to start as soon as possible, would you?”

  The students rose indignantly and trooped out. Outside, they hesitated for a moment.

  “Oughtn’t we to go to the Dean’s first?” asked Georgiades. “I mean, we don’t know yet that Mahmoud has actually been expelled.”

  The students thought that a good idea and set off to march to the Dean’s office, gathering support as they went. By the time they reached it, their numbers had swollen to such an extent that they filled the small square in front of the School offices.

  They stood there for some time, shaking fists and chanting slogans, until at last someone came down to ask what they wanted.

  They demanded Mahmoud’s reinstatement.

  “He hasn’t been expelled yet,” said the emissary. “The Dean is still making up his mind.”

  “He oughtn’t even to be considering it,” declared the student with the scars, who had constituted himself the students’ leader.

  “He’s got to consider it,” said the emissary. “He’s received a direct request from the Minister of Education.”

  This didn’t please the students at all and there was pandemonium in the square for the rest of the morning, which ended only when the students learned that the Dean, and everybody else, had gone home for lunch, using a back door.

  There were no windows for them to break and they had to content themselves with hurling stones at the heavy wooden shutters.

  The Dean’s decision was announced the following day. He had previously gained considerable respect, even from the students, by his willingness to bend procedures and admit Mahmoud as a special case to certain lectures. Now he lost it all by bowing to British pressure.

  He had reluctantly reached the conclusion, he said, that it was in the best interests of the Law School for the special arrangements made for Mahmoud to be terminated. Mahmoud would therefore be debarred from attending further lectures.

  The students rose in fury and marched in a body first to the Dean’s office, where they threw stones for several hours, and then on in a mass procession to the Abdin Palace, where they demonstrated until it was dark.

  The situation seemed so ugly that the Army put itself on full alert. Doubtless it was knowledge of this, and the fact, of course, that it was dark, that finally induced the students to go home.

  The Khedive delivered a formal protest to the Consul-General both about the injustice to his subjects and about the Civil Administration’s tolerance of violence and disorder on his very doorstep.

  The protests continued for some time, although not on quite the same scale. They were substantial enough, however, to force the Administration into a misguided concession. In a blatant attempt to appease the students the authorities released from prison a former student, one Elbawi, who had been convicted of an attempt on the life of one of the royal family.

  This did not please either the Khedive, who made another formal protest to the Consul-General, or the students, who saw it as an attempt to fob them off with something which ought to have been conceded long ago anyway.

  Elbawi himself had the right attitude. He declared himself innocent of anything other than fighting for justice. That struggle must go on. The injustice presently being done to Mahmoud was merely another in the long series of injustices which characterized British rule in Egypt, and he called on the students to resist it as he himself had tried to resist a previous injustice.

  The students thought it a pretty good speech, a brave one, too, in view of the fact that the British must be keeping their eye on him and would certainly have no hesitation in clapping him back in prison if he showed any sign of stepping out of line.

  There was very keen interest, to say the least, when Elbawi submitted an application to be readmitted to the Law School and allowed to complete the course of studies interrupted by his imprisonment. Student feeling ran high. The Dean, no doubt aware of that, wisely accepted Elbawi as a student, thus repairing some of the damage caused by his previous action.

  Elbawi was reinstalled as a student and took up his place immediately. On his first morning the students carried him triumphantly around the square outside the Dean’s office. Elbawi made a tremendous speech, rather like his first one.

  After that, though, he settled down quietly as a student. He did not even join in the processions and demonstrations the students were now organizing every day. The students were surprised at first but then on reflection understood that in the circumstances the poor chap could hardly be expected to do anything else. He had probably been told that any sign of public dissent would see him back in prison.

  What he was prepared to do, however, was address private meetings. Over the next few days he addressed dozens of these, in cafés, in lecture rooms, in students’ lodgings.

  For the most part he spoke about his time in prison. He spoke with surprising restraint, quietly, objectively, as if he were describing what had happened to someone else. But on occasion, and especially when he was describing the time he had spent cutting stone in the quarries at Tura, he could not keep the bitterness from breaking through.

  You felt that though for the moment there was nothing much he could do, at some point in the future, given half a chance, he would want to strike back.

  The one who was really bitter, though, and understandably, was Mahmoud. As he said, the British kicked you out of Government service and then when you tried to find a job not in Government service they kicked you out of that too, or at least stopped you from earning a living at it. They had you either way.

  And that was how it would always be, he went on, while the British were in control. It was Mahmoud today, he told the students; it would be them tomorrow. The only way out was to resist now, to drive the British back into the sea, as he put it.

  The students cheered heavily at that. Mahmoud was so right. That was the only way out.

  Georgiades, who had been pretty close to Mahmoud at one time, when they had been in prison together, but who now seemed to have drifted a bit apart, wanted to know how exactly they were going to manage that. He thought it would be pretty difficult to drive the British into the sea.

  Some of the students were rather impatient with him, the one with scars particularly. Others, however, who knew he meant well, pointed out that the wave of student protest, which was still pretty small at the moment, would mount higher and higher until it became a great tide which would sweep the British away.

  That seemed to satisfy Georgiades. You only had to point these things out to him.

  The wave of student protest, though not yet of gigantic proportions, was washing around with sufficient vigor to alarm the Army. They made it clear to the Consul-General that they felt things were getting out of hand and that it was only a matter of time before they would have to be called in.

  The Mamur Zapt, however, seemed to be taking it all very calmly.

  ***

  He was, though, having trouble on another front.

  “Hamada?” said Zeinab incredulously. “Again?”

  “Something has come up.”

  “It’s th
at girl!”

  “Nonsense. She’s in Cairo.”

  “So you know!” pounced Zeinab. “You’ve been seeing her.”

  Owen lost this one, too.

  ***

  This time he went by the desert, leaving the boat at Faza, where a tracker was waiting for him with camels. They rode through the night and reached the hills above Hamada just before dawn.

  The tracker hid the camels among the rocks and then they climbed on foot up the stony slopes, the sun coming up behind them as they walked, lighting the ground with a strange unearthly light.

  He was cold and stiff after his ride. In the desert at night the temperature plunged down towards freezing point. He had wrapped himself in Bedawin robes but now was glad to stretch and exercise himself. The sun gradually became warmer on his back.

  They curved around the hillside into the darkness again and emerged on a little ledge which looked down into a valley. The valley ran back up into the hills and halfway up; as the sun reached around the hill and lit up the lower slopes, he saw a low, white-walled building.

  One of the trackers touched him on the shoulder and pointed. A little beyond the shrine, low in a hollow, so low that you could hardly see it, was another building. It was built of the same mud bricks as the shrine but, without the white stucco of the shrine, blended inconspicuously into the rock.

  “The Place of Salt,” said the tracker.

  “That is where the arms were taken?”

  The tracker nodded.

  The consignment had arrived two days before. There had been twenty baggage camels in the caravan, all heavily loaded. They had come in the afternoon when the world was at siesta and it had taken until nightfall to unload them.

  The men who had come with them spent the night on the rocks in front of the Place of Salt, huddled for warmth around a solitary campfire made from dried camel dung. There was, of course, no wood, either in the hills or in the desert below. In the morning the men had left, taking the baggage camels with them.

  The men in the Place of Salt had worked on for most of the morning, stacking the arms more securely, probably covering them with bags of salt. They had left too.

  “We watched all day. There are no guards.”