In Search of the Forty Days Road

by Michael Asher

  ‘What does he mean?’ he asked the other.

  ‘You mean the Forties Way,’ said Ahmed.

  ‘But that’s not in the desert, it goes to Omdurman!’

  I tried to explain that this was not what I meant, but it became obvious that neither knew of the Forty Days Road. This was mystifying, for many people had talked about it, not only in Dongola, but also in Kordofan. How was it that these desert men who lived in Darfur itself did not know it?

  As the blistering heat began to wane, Ahmed started to make more tea. While he lit the fire, Taha and I went to collect the seven camels, which had managed to wander a distance of about half a mile, despite the restricting qayds. We drove them back, swinging our sticks. Taha told me not to stand too close to their back legs.

  ‘They kick,’ he said. ‘And if they do, that’s the end!’

  Everything was packed quickly and efficiently, and we mounted to begin the evening trek. As we travelled, the hills began to close in around us, unbroken chains of soft ochre rock, sculpted into towers and terraces by the forces of erosion. The hills passed, and gave way to legions of russet-brown knolls which rose unexpectedly out of the flat desert. By sunset these features were behind us, and we found ourselves in a rippling tableland, obscured at the edges by a blue mist which first washed the colours out of the sun, then drowned it completely.

  Not long after dark, we came to an area of coarse grass, and the Arabs discussed making camp there. Ahmed decided to ride ahead a little, to see whether more abundant grazing was to be found, but he returned within half an hour, and told us that we had better make camp here. We set up the camp as before, laying out our equipment and turning the camels loose in the grass.

  After supper of ’asida, we sat close together in the darkness, and Taha and Ahmed began to talk. I asked them a few questions, and realised that they actually knew very little about the world outside their own section of it. Their main interest in foreign countries seemed to be in the weapons they produced. I noticed that they themselves were not armed and asked if it was the custom not to carry firearms in this area.

  ‘The Zayadiyya have many weapons,’ Taha told me, ‘and they know how to use them. Those who travel with herds are always armed. There are plenty of thieves out there.’

  ‘Last year, in Wadi Howar,’ began Ahmed. ‘What about that, by God! The Bedayatt took six of our camels, may their fathers be cursed!’

  ‘The Bedayatt?’

  ‘They’re a tribe from the Chad borders. They wear their headcloths like this …’ and he swept his ’imma across the lower part of his face. ‘They don’t know Allah, those men! They are notorious thieves. They took six of our camels, at night, by God!’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘We made a search party and followed them. We knew where they’d be: the Tagabo Hills. They always hide there because it’s so rocky that tracks disappear. But we found them, by God, we found them in a wadi, with the camels eating. They saw us coming and opened fire. One of us was hit and fell down with his leg smashed, but there were eight of us and we all had rifles. I had a Kalash with me. My uncles said we should try to get around the other side of the wadi, so I and two others ran through the rocks and into the trees. Then we put our guns on tripods and fired and fired until the Bedayatt ran away, and left the camels. One of them was dead, though, because I saw them carrying him away.’

  Ahmed shook his head, ‘Those Bedayatt. They’re animals! What happened two years ago in Mellit! Some Bedayatt came into the market with camels they’d stolen from the Zayadiyya. The owner was there and recognised his animals. He walked up to them. A brave man, by the life of the Prophet! But what happened? By God they drew their pistols and shot him dead! Then they jumped on their camels and rode off into the desert! Wild animals! Not people!’

  I asked, as lightly as I could, whether the Zayadiyya also stole camels.

  Taha said, ‘All tribes have their robbers. Even the Zayadiyya. Some families think that stealing is a test of manhood, and a man can’t marry until he’s stolen a few camels. The Arabs steal only a small number, not like the Bedayatt. They steal whole herds, and drive them off into Chad. Then their women make up poetry about the bravery of their men. Tsch!’

  On my return to this area in 1982 I learned that Taha had been shot dead by some Kababish after a raid in which they suspected him of being involved. It transpired that he was notorious as a camel rustler.

  As the conversation dwindled, the Arabs went off to collect the camels, and drove them into the camp, where they were knee-hobbled around the fire. It felt strange, yet oddly reassuring, to be surrounded by these reptile-like heads, bobbing and twitching. I lay down and drifted towards sleep.

  Suddenly, I felt something, featherlight but distinct, crawling with a ticklish step over my hair. I awoke with a start and saw an enormous black spider shooting under Taha’s blanket. I shouted a warning and seized my club: the Arabs were up instantly, battering away with their sticks until the assailant was dead. Then Taha laughed and told me it was a haramba, a harmless type of spider which inhabited this area.

  Feeling somewhat embarrassed I returned to my sleeping bag and shortly fell into an undisturbed sleep. The next day we entered Mellit at about eleven in the morning, and I waved farewell to the Zayadiyya, who were taking their camels off to the market. The town was set on a series of dunes which sloped down to a natural cleft in the rock, where rainwater gathered. There were hundreds of camels watering there when I arrived, but I rode past them and up to the police post. A rather mystified sergeant escorted me from the office of the police chief to that of the district governor, and showed me in. As I entered, I felt like a gatecrasher at an official reception. The governor sat behind the standard gargantuan desk and was in deep conversation with four portly, double-chinned gentlemen in tent-like but immaculate jellabiyyas. All faces turned to me, and reflected in the twitching of nostrils, I realised with mortification that I was still wearing the soiled araagi and bedraggled headcloth which had remained unwashed since I had left En Nahud.

  The governor turned to me and said in English, ‘What can I do for you?’

  I related my story, and ended by saying that I had come with the intention of contacting Arabs who were travelling north along the Forty Days Road.

  ‘Forty Days Road!’ said the governor, incredulously, and there was a ripple of laughter from the portly gentlemen.

  ‘Yes,’ I added. ‘The old caravan route to Egypt.’

  ‘Oh, I know of it,’ went on the officer. ‘It’s just that it hasn’t been used for a hundred years! There’s no water on that route now, and anyway there’s no need to use it when the other ways are safe.’ There were more giggles from behind and I felt myself flushing. ‘Do you mean that no camels are sent from here to Egypt?’ I asked.

  ‘Plenty, but they don’t go by that way, and they don’t go from Mellit itself and they don’t go at this time of year, when the desert is difficult for even an Arab, but death for a European.’ I felt shattered. I had been planning this for a year, and had ridden almost five hundred miles just to get here.

  ‘What you should do is sell your camel and …’

  ‘Go by lorry? Yes, I know!’

  Outside the office, I stood looking out across the stony square to where my camel was tethered beneath a nim tree. I began to understand what had happened, and why the Zayadiyya had known nothing of the road. Part of Sudanese hospitality was always to tell a guest what he most wanted to hear. Those I had spoken to in Dongola about the ancient route had been affected by my obvious enthusiasm, and their polite lies had built up in my mind into a vivid picture which was not close to reality.

  As I stood there pondering this, a young man with a fresh, humorous face approached me, wearing the uniform of a local administrator. He introduced himself as Farah Yusuf, the local forestry officer. He had heard my story, he said, from the police chief, who sh
ared his house, as did the governor, and he wondered if I would like to stay with them for a few days.

  After a wash and a good meal, I felt better, and began to consider what I should do next. The journey which I had made had been interesting and eventful, but to me it had been no more than an apprenticeship, a chance to test myself against the harsh conditions of the Sudan in summer. Now I felt a tremendous sense of anticlimax, yet to go into the Libyan Desert alone would be madness.

  I asked Farah why the Forty Days Road was no longer used. He told me: ‘The caravans used to go that way because the routes further south were unstable, and liable to attack, as were those across to the river. The caravans only left once a year, and with huge numbers of camels. They might get attacked, but the desert is a big place, and they could stick together. Now of course it is no longer necessary to avoid southern routes.’

  ‘Which route do they take?’

  ‘That I cannot tell you, only the camel-men can do that.’

  The smiling and energetic Farah was almost fanatically interested in forestry. He had been sent to Darfur to help prevent the deforestation which was taking place as a result of the southern movement of the desert. Each year, he told me, the desert moved up to ten kilometres south. At this horrifying rate, the whole of the fertile Sudanic belt would be desert within a few decades.

  ‘The tribes have already been affected,’ he said.

  ‘Take the Zaghawa—thousands have run away to the cities, their herds and flocks dead, the same with some of the Berti and Zayadiyya. No one can actually live in the desert, you know, but the tribes were supported by the patches of vegetation and the water sources there. Now these are disappearing, and those which are left are very valuable. The tribes fight over them: there have been some serious battles between them.’

  I was astounded to know that the traditional way of life of these tribes was being eroded, not by the adoption of western ideas, but by changes in the delicate balance of their own environment. Ironically, in technically advanced Libya, the problem was being tackled by using products of the oil industry, but the Sudan could not afford to preserve its ancient way of life by halting desert creep. I spent the next day exploring the market, and examining the famous Zayadiyya leatherware and saddlery. There were rows of stalls, full of pretty Arab ladies in colourful tobes, who sold saddlebags, whips, saddle-pads, ropes, and hobbles. Waterskins hung in colonies from the roofs, with rich sheepskins, carpets, and belts. Everywhere the air was pervaded by the savoury odour of fresh leather, and everywhere it reminded me that Darfur was still the land of the camel.

  7. THE TRACK IS MARKED BY BONES

  Now no one can be found alive who remembers

  the old trade along the Arba’in.

  Ralph Bagnold, Libyan Sands

  WE SAT IN THE RUINS of Old Kobbay and watched some Tungur children watering their donkeys. There was only one well, encircled by a wooden rim into which, over the years, the well-ropes had cut deep grooves.

  The children poured the water into a trough made of a hollowed-out log. One small girl, with a round black face, her plaited hair covered in dust, held her stick protectively over a pregnant she-donkey which drank from the trough. Occasionally another animal would push through for a drink, only to receive a short, sharp whack on the snout from the little girl. Lost in their own small world, these children were probably unaware that the overgrown plain which surrounded them was once the site of a legendary town. For here had stood the southern terminus of the great Forty Days Road, once the Sudan’s most vital artery of trade with the outside world.

  Now there was nothing left of the streets and market squares except the dark patterns of their foundations left on the earth. The houses had long ago crumbled into dust, the alleys which had once swarmed with men and camels now lay under thickets of lalob and sayal trees. Kobbay had become a dead town, peopled only by these few children who now toiled away at a single well where there had once been many. I had wanted for some time to see the place from which the great trade caravans to Egypt had set out. Although my attempt to travel up the Forty Days Road had been unsuccessful, the old caravan way still fascinated me. For this reason I had made the two-day journey from El Fasher with my colleague Donald Friend and a pair of borrowed camels. That there was little to see here did not disappoint me. I had learned much of the history of this area since I had first arrived in Darfur armed only with some hearsay stories which were fallacious and inaccurate. The knowledge I had gained brought the dead town alive for me. I knew that the wealth of the Kayra sultans, who had controlled Darfur up to the death of Ali Dinar in 1916, had been founded on the trade flowing up and down the Forty Days Road. For centuries the chief commodity had been slaves.

  Men, women, and children had been taken from the south of Darfur in their thousands. Armed slave-raids were a full-time occupation of the Muslim tribes, who would often surround and capture entire villages. Only the children, the women, and the younger men would be taken, and frequently the remainder would be slaughtered. The captured slaves would be brought here, to Kobbay, and sold to merchants in the thriving market. The slave-caravans would leave the town at irregular intervals, sometimes with several years between them, sometimes with many departures in the same year. Each caravan may have comprised up to two thousand camels, and taken up to a thousand slaves in addition to other merchandise.

  Only one European is known to have travelled on this route. In 1793, an English traveller named W. G. Browne arrived in Kobbay having made a journey by camel of almost one thousand one hundred miles from Upper Egypt. Browne left Assyut, the northern terminal of the darb al arba’in (as the caravan route was called in Arabic) in April of that year. He set out in the company of some Egyptian and Maghrebi merchants and about a hundred and fifty men and a guide from the Fur tribe. Most of these men had left the Sudan in the previous year, and had spent the winter in Egypt. It was the hottest season of the year when they left the Nile. Both camels and men suffered from thirst and exhaustion. So many camels died, in fact, that at the oasis of Selima, just within the present borders of the Sudan Republic, some of the merchants had to bury their goods for collection later. From Selima the caravan had passed to Bir El Malha, the present-day El Atrun oasis. Browne noticed that then, as today, the oasis was renowned for the production of rock salt, which was used in the manufacture of snuff. He also mentioned that the wells were likely to be infested by a people he called the ‘Cubba-Beesh’, whom he described as: “A wandering tribe who, mounted on the swiftest dromedaries, rapidly traverse the desert and live by plundering the defenceless.”

  Browne arrived in Kobbay in July, having spent almost four months crossing the Libyan Desert. He found here a medium-sized town of mud houses, which could boast a mosque and five Islamic schools arid was populated by Arab merchants from many parts of northern Africa. Browne remained in Darfur for some time as the guest of the local king, Malik Ibrahim. He noticed that, when a caravan was being prepared for departure in Kobbay, it engaged the attention of the entire country, even forming a kind of chronological peg by which people could reckon.

  As I sat in what remained of the old town, I tried to imagine what it had been like in Browne’s day. I pictured the streets full of roaring camels and a flux of voices speaking many different tongues. There would have been fair-skinned Egyptians, Libyans, and Tunisian merchants and traders of the Jellaba Arabs from the east. There would have been black soldiers in chainmail and armoured helmets, the cavalry of the Kayra sultans who ruled the region. There would have been Baqqara Arabs bringing in trains of slaves, and veiled Tuareg from Air riding their short-legged camels. On the days preceding the departure of the caravan, there would have been great excitement in the town: the slaves would be prepared for departure, the squares full of camels laden with ivory and copper, rhino horn and hippopotamus teeth, ostrich feathers, gum arabic, pimento and tamarinds, parakeets and monkeys. There would have been pilgrims from the Hausa an
d Fulani peoples of West Africa, about to embark on the most hazardous section of their journey to the holy shrines of Arabia.

  Before them lay a trek of more than a thousand miles in one of the least hospitable areas on earth. As they set off north, the camels moving in scores of separate convoys, the slaves and strangers would have been amazed to see how the vegetation became scarcer, and finally disappeared, leaving them in a stark, mysterious wasteland. The slaves probably walked freely in columns and squads, for in this pitiless landscape there was nowhere to run, and safety lay with the caravan. If the slaves became sick the caravan-masters would goad them on, with sticks if necessary, for the caravan could slow down for no one, obsessed as it was by the necessity of reaching the next source of water.

  A valuable slave who was unable to walk might occasionally be allowed to ride on a camel’s back. But the camels were precious, heavily burdened by goods and weakened by thirst and the lack of grazing. More often the exhausted slave would have been left to die in the open desert while the caravan continued on its relentless way north. How many human beings perished in this way, pushed beyond the limits of their endurance to leave their rotting flesh for the carrion birds, will never be known.

  From Kobbay, the first halt on the journey was El Atrun, within two hundred and fifty miles of which there was no permanent water-source. All provisions for slaves, camel-men, and merchants had to be carried by the camels. Water was conveyed in great ox-skins of the type I had seen in Umm Ruwaba, two to a camel, and food consisted of a paste made of millet flour which could be mixed with water and drunk without cooking. This paste is still in use amongst some tribes today.

  The slaves would probably have been fed like animals from communal bowls, though the caravan-masters would have seen to it that they did not starve, for a thousand miles is a long way to walk on an empty stomach, and the caravaneers had every reason to protect their investment.