In Search of the Forty Days Road

by Michael Asher

  ‘Go in peace!’

  I watched the lean Zaghawi as he stalked off towards the grass huts, his spears sloping over his shoulder. Then I wrapped my headcloth carefully around my face, and led my camels into the main street. There was the usual row of rotting stalls and dilapidated mud shops. Luckily the place seemed almost deserted. Three youths sat in the sand and eyed me sullenly as I passed. A single trader wished me salaam ’alaykum. At the far end of the street, I passed the tiny police post, and just as I did so, a man wearing the green uniform of the shorta came running out, and shouted to one of the sullen youths, ‘Hey! Mohammed! Bring us three teas. With milk. Be quick, by God!’

  He cast not a single glance in my direction, so familiar must the sight of camels have been to him. I carried on steadily, not looking at him, and trying not to seem hurried. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him re-enter the building. Only then did I release a great sigh of relief beneath my headcloth. If the trooper had known I was a khawaja, I would certainly have been stopped, and had he but glanced at me, he would surely have noticed my white hands and feet. I had escaped by the skin of my teeth, but I had escaped. Just outside the northern limits of the town, I found a wadi shaded by heraz trees, in which some tribesmen of the Gimmar community had collected to water their cows. I couched my animals in the wadi and asked some women to fill my waterskin. They were friendly and hospitable, but I found myself unconsciously parrying their questions about my tribe, my destination, and my origin. I saw that this attitude was making them suspicious and I hurriedly loaded my skin and mounted.

  As I climbed out of the wadi, the way stretched before me: sand, thornbush, rock, and more sand. This was the border path to Tina, a comfortless, shelterless landscape, supreme in its bleakness. There would, I knew, be a few Zaghawa villages dotted about, though how much I could rely on their protection, I was not sure. If I was caught in open country by the Bedayatt, I could expect no quarter. I was a stranger, in a remote corner of the world. Behind me lay threat of discovery by the police, and before me the dark menace of the Bedayatt reared like a spectre. I remembered Omar’s words, ‘They will be after your camels!’ and the story told by the Gimmar. I halted the bull, and extracted my pistol from the bottom of the saddlebag, loaded it, and placed it in a canvas holdall, which I slung from the saddle horn. Now this weapon seemed nothing more than a toy.

  Some time later I made camp for the afternoon by a narrow watercourse. As I sat cooking my ’asida, a pretty girl came out of the scrub, driving two cow camels with a stick. From her peach-gold skin and luxurious, uncut locks, I knew she was Arab.

  ‘Hello!’ I said as she walked by.

  ‘Welcome and peace!’ she replied softly, and as she disappeared into the brush, I heard her humming a light melody. Shortly after this, a man appeared from the direction in which she had gone. He was unusually fat for a tribesman, wore a singlet of cotton and carried a woodcutter’s axe slung over his shoulder. The man had small, mean eyes, and even as he greeted me I could feel the suspicion in them. He said that he was an Arab of the Erayqat, a branch of the Rizayqat.

  ‘What is your tribe?’ he asked.

  ‘Al Ingleez.’

  ‘Do the Ingleez ride camels?’

  ‘This one does.’

  ‘Where’ve you come from?’

  ‘Gineina.’

  ‘What’s your work there?’

  The questions went on, and I grew irritated by the blunt manner in which he asked them. I began to saddle my camels as he spoke, but disliked the threatening way he stood over me as I did so.

  ‘Are you going to Tina?’ he asked.

  I replied that I was.

  ‘You should not go alone. The route is very dangerous. Don’t you know the Bedayatt are raiding the borders? Only last week they killed four men of the Gimmar. If they find you here, your life won’t be worth a shilling!’ His words seemed to take the form of advice but his manner was belligerent, as if he were threatening rather than advising.

  ‘If you sleep alone they will find you by your fire. They will come upon you silently and kill you. What can you do?’

  I murmured something intended to brush the man off and prepared to mount my camel, when suddenly he grabbed my arm.

  ‘Hey! Where did you get that camel? It has Erayqat brands.’

  ‘I got it in Gineina market.’

  ‘How do I know you’re not a bandit?’

  I began to feel glad that my inquisitor was alone, and I was armed.

  ‘I have the paper here,’ I said. ‘I’ll show you it.’

  I unzipped the holdall which carried my pistol, and slowly took out the weapon, stuffing it into the ammunition belt at my waist. Then I removed my yellow certificate of ownership and waved it before the Arab’s nose. His eyes fell first on the pistol, then on the paper.

  ‘I got this camel from Rashid Omar,’ I said, before he could speak. ‘Look, this is his seal.’ I showed him the ink-mark of the shaykh’s signet ring. ‘If anything happens to me or my camels, Rashid will be very angry. He is my friend.’

  I took the headrope of the large bull and led the camels off, hoping that the man would not follow. I saw him watching, his axe in his hand, until his plump figure was obscured by the thorn trees. I moved on as quickly as possible, for the man had unnerved me considerably. Now I knew I was really alone in this no man’s land, for even my potential friends the Rizayqat were hostile and suspicious. I thanked providence for my pistol, but wished sincerely that I had brought with me only one camel. I had discovered now that the animals did not travel well together. If I was riding, the bull would constantly shy away into the acacia trees, trying to turn south. The calf squealed and moaned continuously as if he were about to be butchered, and several times the rope which strung the two together snapped, giving me enormous problems. Often I was forced to lead them by hand, but even this was difficult, for the bull continued to hang back and often I had to lean hard on the headrope as if I were dragging a heavy weight up a steep incline. These difficulties slowed my progress tremendously, and I realised that this was the worst possible situation in which to discover the inadequacies of my transport. Even if attacked, I could not rely on my camels to ensure a speedy retreat.

  That afternoon, however, I met a small herd of camels belonging to some Erayqat, driven by a toothless old shaykh and his son, who rode horses. These Arabs were friendly, and stopped to talk. The old man was delighted to find I was English, and began to talk about Guy Moore. As many others had, he enquired if the Ingleez were coming back. The Arabs told me that they were still moving south on the mowta migration which they had begun late that year. I asked the shaykh if the Erayqat had had trouble with raiders.

  ‘We haven’t seen any this year,’ he said. ‘But the Mahamid have been eaten by the Bedayatt. They are dogs and sons of dogs! Last week they killed some Gimmar near Kulbus, by God, did you hear?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This is a dangerous road for one alone, where is your rafiq?’

  ‘I was travelling with a Zaghawi.’

  ‘The Zaghawa are all right. At least some of them are. But they’re all one kind. You can’t trust them. Anyway, there aren’t many villages between here and Tundebay. Once you get there you’ll be safe, for they’ve sent a troop of border guards on horses to watch the road between Tundebay and Tina.’

  His words gave me little comfort, for I had almost as much wish to avoid the border guards as the Bedayatt, and I hoped that there would be some way of avoiding a meeting with them without exposing myself to any other dangers. Tundebay, however, was two days away at my present rate of progress, and in those two days anything could happen.

  As night came I was alone, travelling through a petrified thorn forest which extended for mile upon weary mile. The bleached-grey bones of the trees seemed to hide all manner of menace within the deep pools of their gathering shadows. The camels sensed this
too for they were nervous and recalcitrant, and after almost a day of heaving them up hill and down dune, I was exhausted. I swore at the camels and at myself, but kept my pistol ready. I told myself that if I was seriously threatened by anyone I met, I would shoot to kill. Then I laughed at these thoughts, for it would have been too easy for someone to have approached me in a friendly way, and strike while I was unguarded. The pistol was a toy, really intended for practice-shooting, and no match for the Heckler-Kochs and Kalashnikovs of the tribesmen.

  Still I pressed on through the ethereal world of the darkness. All was still and soundless, but the silence was oppressive, as if something evil and predatory was waiting to strike.

  Eventually I was too tired to continue and led the camels away from the track deep into the bush, where I couched and unloaded them and laid out my camp. I was reluctant to light a fire, remembering what the aggressive Arab had said, yet I was hungry and my hunger won out. I made ’asida and tea and doused the flames immediately. I found myself listening in the darkness, my two camels forming a wall around me. I was afraid, but resolved to take on whatever came. I knew that this corroding fear was born of loneliness, and had I had a companion all would have been well, though the danger no less. Eventually, with my pistol beneath me, I lay down to sleep but I got little rest. Every time the camels shifted or groaned I was up and ready, staring into the darkness. And so it continued until dawn came like an injection, creeping soft and cold amongst the grotesque framework of the bush.

  The next day the camels went even more slowly and I made agonisingly little progress. By midmorning, however, I broke out of the forest and it was a relief to see open acres of sweeping grass prairie before me once more. Moreover, in the clearing was a chain of Zaghawa villages, which stood like fairyland castles on the top of a ridge of dunes, ancient hill forts which commanded a view for miles over the open country. Around them were corrals, fenced in by hedges of thornbush, in which the Zaghawa camels grazed, and my own beasts fretted to join their unladen fellows. Soon I came to the fringes of another thorn forest, and stopped for the afternoon rest. For the first time I began to consider whether I should go back to Kulbus. My progress was so slow that I began to doubt if I could reach El Atrun. I decided, however, that I must press on to Tina, no matter what happened, and change my camels there. As for the border guards, I should have to take my chance with them. For the second night I camped alone in the forest with the bushes curling vicious and hostile around me, like Arthur Rackham illustrations, and it seemed almost as if I was living in some hallucinatory dream world beyond the reality I had come to know.

  The morning was crisp and sharp like a spring day in England and the mirkwood seemed endless and unforgiving. Once again, though, I broke out into the refreshing light of a clearing overlaid with a stubble of grass. Not long after, I heard the sound of hoofbeats on the hard sand and turned to see three riders approaching from the east. They wore thick headcloths and old blue greatcoats buttoned up to the neck, and one of them carried a shotgun across the horn of his stallion’s saddle. Their horses looked swift and sleek, and their faces dark and inscrutable. A warning-bell sounded in my brain, and I recoiled. Couching the large bull, I crouched behind his shoulder with my hand on my pistol. If this was the enemy, then I was ready to fight.

  The men approached me at a trot, and halted a few yards away, greeting me with as salaam ’alaykum.

  ‘Where are you going, khawaja?’ one of them shouted.

  ‘To Tina,’ I answered.

  ‘You shouldn’t be on this road. This road is dangerous. The border is near and the Bedayatt come across this way all the time.

  ‘What’s your tribe?’ I asked them.

  ‘Zaghawa of the Ango clan,’ the speaker said. ‘Listen, this area is bad for strangers. You should not travel alone. Go to Tundebay, our village, and visit the sultan there, Sultan Hissein. He’ll give you a guide to Tina. The knowledge that I was near to this village came as a great relief, until I remembered that the border guards were there. I was ready, though, for a trick from these supposed Zaghawa whom I did not trust. However, the spokesman continued, ‘We’re going to Tundebay, you can follow us.’ For a few moments I mulled over his words. On the one hand these men might be Bedayatt, trying to take me off guard. They spoke in heavily accented Arabic, though I knew that the speech of the Zaghawa and Bedayatt was the same. On the other hand, they were riding horses, while the Bedayatt were more likely to ride camels, since horses were used for local transport only, and none of the tribesmen was carrying food or water. I decided that they were telling the truth. The problem remained, however, with the border guards. If, as they said, they were travelling to Tundebay anyway, they would report my coming as a matter of course. Whichever choice I made there were problems.

  ‘All right,’ I said, at last. ‘You go on, and I’ll follow.’

  The three men rode off at walking pace, and I followed on at a safe distance behind, wondering what the next few hours would bring. About an hour later, we arrived in Tundebay, a fortified village dominated by a huge heraz tree, like a fantasy scene from Lord of the Rings. My camels were couched in the corral and I was escorted inside the walls of the stockade to the hut of the sultan. This was the first time I had been inside a Zaghawa settlement, and I saw that it was quite different from the villages of the Mesalit and the other farming tribes to the south. The huts were larger and constructed far more solidly. Each house was surrounded by a series of courtyards, large and small, which opened into one another in an intricate system of access.

  The sultan was an unusually tall man wearing a sweeping white jelabiyya and headcloth. He greeted me graciously and ushered me to a rug beneath a small shelter. Very soon four or five men wearing police uniforms appeared. They sat cross-legged on the rug and, though they were both friendly and polite, began to ask questions about my nationality and business. By the greatest of luck, however, they did not ask me for a letter of permission, but told me that I must report to the police post in Tina as soon as I arrived there.

  ‘The road between Tundebay and Tina is safe,’ one of the guards told me. ‘You’ve passed the most dangerous part, but you must report to the police chief in Tina, who is responsible for travellers.’

  I knew that I had not escaped the clutches of the law, for there was no way I could avoid Tina now if I wished to re-equip for my journey to El Atrun, and it would be there that my real problems would start.

  For the next day and a half I travelled over grassy downs, clotted with acacia from which scarlet crags of rock jutted like the teeth of some predator. The camels went badly, but I felt more at ease in this open landscape, resigned to the problems I was going to face in Tina.

  Sometimes I came across places where the poor soil had been leached away, leaving only red sand and defiles of sharp rock. Only a few years ago, this country, like other parts of Darfur, had been savannah woodland, teeming with animal life, giraffe, zebra, lion, and leopard. The landscape was now no more than the dry bones of its former richness, inhabited only by gazelle and wild chicken. Years of drought had sheared away the vegetation and driven the wildlife far south. Soon, I knew, the land would be too poor to sustain the cows and sheep of the Zaghawa and the tribesmen would follow in the wake of the many who had fled to the towns, such as El Fasher, where the Zaghawa already composed almost half the population. These patches of rocky ground, which would never again be fertile, heralded the approach of the deadly kataha, the drifting sands of the Libyan Desert which every year move further and further south. Within ten or twenty years, unless drastic measures were taken, this area would be absolute desert, capable only of supporting camels. The Zaghawa of the Ango and Kobbe clans who inhabited the tiny settlements in this area had moved here in living memory from the north, which had already become too dry to support their herds. Before long they would be forced to move on again, and then there would be no alternative but to abandon the traditional way of life
from which this Saharan people had lived for centuries.

  On the morning of December 1o I saw Tina in a depression below me. Beyond it the landscape lay rolling and open for hundreds of miles, but the town was centred on a narrow watercourse called Gar Hajjar, which marked the border between the Sudan and Chad.

  The town was set on white dunes, and there were no trees except on the banks of the wadi itself. I saw that the Zaghawa had constructed their houses from chunks of red rock, in the absence of cane and grass, and this gave the settlement an unusually solid appearance, like an imperfect imitation of a Cotswold village. My arrival in the town caused a great stir, for, as I learned later, I was the first European to have been there for some years, and certainly the first to have arrived dressed like an Arab and leading two camels. A crowd of fascinated children gathered around me shouting khawaja! khawaja! but I was rescued by a local teacher, Tijani Bashir, a wiry, rather gruff-mannered Zaghawi, who led me to his house and helped me to unload the camels. Soon I was visited by Ibrahim Khalil, a young Zaghawi of the Kobbe clan, whom I knew from Gineina. He took charge of my camels, finding a herdsman to mind them, and later Tijani took me to the house of the hereditary sultan of the Kobbe clan, Sultan Dowsa. The Kobbe were the tribe that inhabited Tina and its surrounds, and they regarded themselves as a distinct branch of the Zaghawa family, akin to the Bedayatt. Their sultan was an old, old man, who had been famous at the time of British colonial rule. At his house, however, I was told that he was ill and was unable to see me. Instead, I was introduced to his eldest son, Bishara, who was himself a man of over sixty. He told me that his father was reputed to be well over a hundred years old and had scores of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. He was one of the Sudan’s old-style tribal monarchs, who still employed a man upon whose back he stood while mounting his donkey. Bishara was a tall, spare, thoroughly gracious man, who offered me tea and talked about Guy Moore, within whose jurisdiction Tina had been during British rule.