by Levison Wood
It was Nero, though, who saw the value in Africa and, by negotiating a problematic peace with the Nubians, was able to indulge his other passion: exploration. Nero was clearly fascinated by the Nile and especially the mystery surrounding its source – so much so that he ordered a party of Praetorian soldiers under the command of a tribune and two centurions to go and look for it. No Europeans had ever ventured this far south before and it was a bold expedition. Not only did they travel further than any Roman had ever gone – crossing, as I was about to (in the opposite direction), a vast chunk of the Sahara Desert – they also came face to face with their recent enemies, the Nubians. What they encountered must have been a pleasant surprise – for, after following the Nile through the Kushitic Kingdom for the best part of a thousand miles, they came across the splendid capital of Meroe, over whose remnants I now looked. Far from being barbaric savages, as some Romans believed, they found the Nubians rich and developed. Meroe had a flourishing metal-working industry, and its pottery was famous throughout the ancient world. The Nubians also dealt in slaves, ‘exotic’ animals, and textiles made from cotton – a sure indicator that agriculture and industry were then more widespread across the Nile than they are now.
‘They must have been awed by these pyramids, too,’ I said to Moez, who – despite having been here a hundred times before – was still agog.
Awad and Ahmad had finally caught up, dragging Gordon, Speke and Burton with them. In spite of the magic all around, neither of them seemed to be interested in the ancient structures.
‘Do they even know what these are?’ I asked.
Moez asked them, but Ahmad only muttered back: ‘Piles of stones.’
‘Don’t they care?’
‘It’s not that they don’t care – they just don’t have a concept of it. Time, history, tradition . . . They don’t have reverence for anything other than God.’
Telling Ahmad and Awad to stay with the camels, Moez and I ventured closer to the north cemetery. Pyramids rose out of the crust on either side of us and, as the sun began to fall, they cast long shadows, giving the scene a surreal appearance. These were nothing like the Pyramids of Egypt, thronged by tourists day and night. The Pyramids of Meroe were smaller, and nowhere could we see any signs of human habitation. Dwarfed by the ancient monoliths, Moez pointed out the hieroglyphs etched into the walls: dog-headed gods and the sign of Anubis; depictions of eagles, rams and crocodiles. He pointed to later inscriptions, too, names carelessly carved into the rock: W. Matthews RE and R.A. Trowbridge, 1898 – a clear sign that the English soldier of the Victorian era cared but little for the antiquities the colonies.
‘They seem so small, compared to Egypt.’
‘They are smaller,’ said Moez, ‘but not as small as you think. Most of these pyramids are buried under the sand. The desert’s so much deeper than it was when Meroe was at its height. It would take an army of men to excavate these pyramids and find out what was truly inside. But, one day, we’ll know . . .’
As the sun began to set, I felt like I wanted to be alone, and tramped off as Moez and the others returned to set up camp in the shadow of the tallest pyramid. Awad and Ahmad were befuddled at the thought of camping here, but I wanted nothing more than to see the dawn break over these magnificent structures. Alone, I climbed to the ridge, letting the last rays of sunlight warm my face as they disappeared into the desert beyond the mighty Nile. Suddenly, I felt very small. The realisation was finally dawning on me that the footprints I was trailing across Africa were ephemeral, transitory things – that, whatever I could accomplish with this expedition, it could never last as long as these symbols of civilisation before me. Here I was, on the threshold of the ancient world, where human beings have left a tangible reminder of their existence in the form of great tombs pointing to the heavens – a dedication, as it were, to the gods, of their own achievements and sacrifices. It was a humbling feeling.
Only days ago, I had been buoyed by the thought of passing the half-way mark and beginning the long road home – but now another thought drew me in. Tomorrow, I would begin my journey into the Nile of antiquity, a Nile whose history and people have been recorded in a way that, further south, was not the case. This was the cradle of civilisation, a place where empires had risen and fallen millennia before there was even such a thing as England.
It must have been here, in the shadows of these pyramids, that the little band of Romans, having come from the north on the adventure of a lifetime, prepared for the next leg of their expedition, into the vast swamps of the Sudd. Though one dissenting Italian historian, Giovanni Vantini, believes they made it through to the glittering expanse of Lake Victoria, it is more widely believed that the Sudd defeated them, just as it defeated me. I think I now knew how they must have felt. They, too, had watched the sun set across the Nile from the ridge on which I sat – only, for them, they were departing from the known world, into the unknown. I was going the opposite way – back into the known; both into the past but, also, the future.
THE SANDS OF TIME
Bayuda Desert, Sudan, May – June 2014
The town of Atbarah, home to more than a hundred thousand people, straddled the river two days north of the Pyramids of Meroe. A grey, industrial town, Atbarah was brought to life by only two things: the seasonal confluence of the Nile and the River Atbarah, the Nile’s most northerly tributary; and the two men who tumbled out of a taxi on the highway running into town.
We had been tramping for more than forty kilometres under unrelenting sun. Caked in dirt, eyes to the ground, all I heard was the revving of an engine and a screeching of tyres. It was the camels who spooked first. Loping nervously to the side of the dusty highway, they craned to look back. Too late, I did the same. A taxi overtook us in a cloud of sand and slowed to a stop just ahead.
Out of the door tumbled Will Charlton. As I had known he would, he was here to keep his promise.
‘And look who I found,’ said Will as the second door opened.
Another figure staggered into the dust, all teeth and smiles. In a second, I was being smothered in its arms.
‘Ash!’ I began. ‘What the . . .’
Ash Bhardwaj was as old a friend as Will – I’d known both of them since university. Ash enjoyed the finer things in life – a modern-day dandy roaming the coffee shops of East London in tweed jackets and skinny jeans, I’d often thought of him as an Indian Oscar Wilde. When I’d left the army, Ash had invited me to help him run a luxury ski lodge in Switzerland – and, on the day I turned up in Verbier to join him, I’d discovered him standing outside the chalet wearing nothing but a bath robe and flat cap. ‘Brandy?’ he’d bellowed, with the biggest grin I’d ever seen. ‘It’s 9am!’ I’d said, but Ash had only rolled his eyes in disgust. ‘I know. We’re behind schedule.’ I still don’t remember the rest of the month.
By the time Ash had released me from his bear hug, Will had reached into his pack and produced a small gift. When he opened his hand, a single pack of condoms was sitting in his palm. ‘Emergency water carriers,’ he declared. ‘That’s the only use they’ll get out here. Well, you did say you wanted some company crossing the desert, didn’t you?’
I’d lived with Will at university in Nottingham years before and we’d travelled the world together ever since we’d both joined the army. Will had become a doctor and, when he wasn’t on operations with his unit, or on exercise in some far-flung part of the world, he was always on the lookout for another adventure, so it was hardly surprising that he’d used up his annual-leave allowance to come and keep me company.
‘Can’t have you crossing the Sahara on your own!’ he said with his usual dark humour. ‘You need me here in case you pile in . . .’
At a canteen in Atbarah, I introduced Will and Ash to Moez. Awad and Ahmad were content to camp outside the town, but we decided to make the best of what Atbarah had to offer before the long desert crossing would begin. Atbarah is a major centre for railway manufacture in the Sudan, and has the air of an
industrial town – but it served the best chicken and liver I had tasted in weeks. As we ate, Moez got to explaining the way ahead.
‘The river bends west, but then it reaches the Meroe Dam, and the reservoir behind it. We have to avoid it at all costs.’
‘Why?’ asked Ash. Ash was a travel writer, with a knack for getting ridiculous assignments, and the urge to quiz Moez a little further was instinctive. ‘I thought we had to stick to the river. Aren’t those the rules of your expedition, Lev?’
‘They are, but . . .’
‘Listen,’ said Moez, ‘it isn’t that simple. The Meroe Dam’s only five years old, but they’ve been talking of damming the river here, at the fourth cataract, for decades.’ The Nile traditionally has six cataracts – places where the river is noticeably more shallow, broken by rocks and giving rise to white-water rapids – between Khartoum and Aswan in Egypt. ‘It’s the most powerful dam in the country, and also the most destructive. Almost fifty thousand people were displaced to build it – that’s as many as the High Dam in Egypt.’ Moez’s face was tightening in anger at what the government had done. ‘Nobody in the government listened to those people. They’d rather not have had the electricity than be forced from their homes . . .’
I could tell he was about to say something he’d later regret, so I decided to interject. ‘The importance of that dam to Sudan can’t be overestimated. It practically doubled the amount of power in Sudan. And that means . . .’
Finally, Ash understood: ‘You mean there’ll be army there?’
‘Everywhere,’ said Moez, calmer at last. ‘It’s a prime piece of national infrastructure, so it’s guarded to the hilt. If we try and go near it, they’ll think we’re spies or foreign agents. Saboteurs. They’ll shoot us on sight.’
‘So what’s the plan?’ asked Will, skewering another piece of liver with his fork.
I produced a crumpled map and spread it out before us. ‘We’re going to leave the river, and cut across the Bayuda Desert instead. We’ll follow one of the old camel-caravan routes, and bypass the dam altogether. There won’t be soldiers out in the desert. Anyway, I figure, dressed as we are, we’ll pass for roving Bedouin. Speaking of which . . .’ It was time for me to produce my own welcome gift for Will and Ash: two new jellabiyas in perfect white. ‘We have turbans, too,’ I said grinning.
Will and Ash took theirs and spent an age trying to wrap them around their heads.
‘And your camel handlers out there,’ Ash began, ‘they know where we’re going?’
Bala had said they knew the Bayuda like the backs of their hands, that they had made the crossing many times before, droving camels along the old caravan routes. ‘I trust them,’ I said – because I did. Awad and Ahmad seemed a step out of time with modern Sudan, but above all else, they knew the ways of the desert. ‘Boys,’ I said, ‘you can’t back out on me now . . .’
North of Atbarah, the Nile was flanked by farms of verdant green. Along its banks, a procession of pylons marched down from the Meroe Dam, taking electricity to the masses of Khartoum. For a day, we walked through plantations of cotton and sorghum, orchards of date palm – but, on the edges of the farmland, the bleak, lunar plain stretched out for as far as the eye could see.
The Bayuda is a vast volcanic desert, over one hundred thousand square kilometres of open plain, jagged mountains, sand dunes and black volcanoes. This eastern extension of the Sahara was formed several million years ago by the Earth’s crust pushing up, spewing out lava and diverting the Nile on a three-hundred-mile detour. For the last few thousand years, the Bayuda has formed an inconvenient barrier to those travelling along the Nile, whether it be adventurous Romans in search of its source, or entrepreneurial Nubians extending the trade of their city states. For all those travellers, as for me, the choice was stark: stick to the river and add hundreds of miles to your journey, or risk a perilous desert crossing. Many preferred to take the shortcut – and, over time, a caravan route was established. Much later, the Bedouin Arabs dug a series of wells along the way, features that still exist and that have saved hundreds of lives across the generations. When General Gordon was besieged in Khartoum and the British sent troops to relieve him, they hedged their bets by sending one column of troops by boat up the Nile, and establishing the elite ‘Camel Corps’ to charge across the Bayuda and reach Khartoum fastest. It was the fact that this new camel cavalry had to spend ten days re-watering their beasts at one of the Bedouin wells that meant they arrived at Khartoum two days late to save poor Gordon. Nevertheless, the British used the same tactic thirteen years later, when Kitchener was sent to reconquer Khartoum, with the two columns rendezvousing outside Omdurman for the final confrontation. The rest of that is, as we know, history.
The village of Kadabas was to be our last stop before entering the desert. Forced away from the riverbank by irrigation ditches and pipelines, we returned to the desert road, marching north with the pylons through miles of acacia scrub. By fall of night, we had reached Kadabas, one of a succession of adobe villages along the road. Stark and lonely, it must have been too trivial to be tapped into the electricity flowing down the wires, because not a single light shone among the shacks, except an eerie green glow from the minaret that rose from the mosque.
In the village, an old man emerged from his hut to greet us. ‘You must be Pakistani Dhawas?’ he asked.
Stumped, I looked at Moez. ‘Teachers,’ he began. ‘They’re quite common in these parts. Some preach jihad but they’re mostly harmless.’ Then he turned to the stranger. ‘Not teachers. Explorers. These men are walking the Nile.’
‘Of course,’ the old man said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. ‘But first, you must stay in our village.’
I began to tell Will and Ash how hospitable the villagers had been in every part of Sudan, all the way from the border, to Khartoum and beyond – but the man continued to chatter, and Moez continued to translate.
‘No, not only tonight,’ the man went on. ‘For always. We will feed you. A house will be provided at no cost to yourselves. Please, come this way . . .’
As the man returned to the huts, beckoning us to follow, Ash muttered, ‘Do you think this is a good idea?’ I only shrugged and tramped after the old man. ‘We need to stay somewhere, Ash. One last night before you sleep under the stars for a week.’ I hesitated. ‘Or you could always stay out here with the camels . . .’
Eventually, resisting the overtures of the old man to forever make this our home, we made camp behind one of the adobe huts. As the old man from the village brought us food, insisting we share what he had, Will produced a stack of old Russian maps he had somehow procured. What we were looking at were out-dated charts of the interior of the Nile’s great bend. At a scale of one to five-hundred-thousand, they showed all the trails marked between the contours, and small blue dots scattered across the sand.
‘The Bedouin wells?’ Ash asked, tracing the blue dots with his finger.
We could only assume that was the case; none of us had the faintest grasp of the Russian language.
‘What if they’re not?’ Ash went on. ‘What then?’
‘We’ve got water,’ I said. ‘Enough for six litres each a day. The crossing should take eight days. If it’s any longer, well . . .’ I paused. ‘Awad and Ahmad travel this way all the time. They know the desert like the backs of their hands. That’s why they’re coming with me. The camel trader Bala promised it.’
‘Oh well,’ said Ash, ‘if he promised it . . .’
‘Do you know,’ Moez began, ‘if we make this crossing, we’ll be the first to cross the Bayuda by foot at the height of summer. That would be a miraculous thing.’
‘You see, Lev,’ Will chipped in, ‘there might be a world-first for you in this expedition after all . . .’
‘Wait a minute,’ said Ash. ‘Why has nobody done it before?’
The thought had dawned on me too.
‘Oh,’ said Moez, ‘the Bedouin know the desert too well to risk such a
thing . . .’
Long into the night, we sat staring into the blackness over the desert. Only when our fire had finally flickered out did we turn in ourselves. I barely slept that night, lost in thoughts of the desert to come.
In the morning, Awad and Ahmad were waiting for us on the outskirts of Kadabas; Gordon, Speke and Burton already saddled and laden down with the packs and jerry cans we would be dragging into the desert as supplies. On the outskirts of the village, we said our goodbyes to the old man, who still insisted we return. As the village gradually dwindled and disappeared behind us, masked by a mirage of heat and knolls of sand, the sun was flooding the desert with a golden sheen. This land we were walking into looked solemn and quiet, as alien to man as the stars above. We hesitated before going on. It is only natural, I suppose, to hesitate on the threshold of stepping into the unknown. So, on the edge of the desert, three white men stood in nervous anticipation, unused to the emptiness of the horizon. Moez, Nubian to his core, and Awad and Ahmad, Bedouin through and through, strode off without a second thought.
‘Come on, Ingleez!’ shouted Awad, from his saddle atop Burton. ‘You’ll be blacker than a Beja if you stand around in the sun all day. Get walking!’
‘Gentlemen,’ said Ash, ‘we’re about to walk across a small, but not insignificant, chunk of the Sahara Desert. We don’t know where the wells are, we’ve only got enough food for eight days, and there is a bloody great volcano in the way. Do we really know what we’re doing?’