In Search of the Forty Days Road

by Michael Asher

  Occasionally, Abu Sara would ride around the perimeter of the herd, to make sure everyone was in a good position. He rode an enormous bull camel of superb lines, and carried a thick coil of ’uqals, which rattled as he rode. He pointed out to me an old bull which was dragging behind and I recognised it as one of the eleven we had brought from Mellit.

  ‘That one won’t last long!’ he told me, as the bull wobbled errantly from side to side. Sure enough, within half an hour it had collapsed in the sand. We did not stop the herd, but Saadiq and Adem went back to truss the camel up. ‘We’ll go back for it this afternoon,’ Abu Sara explained, ‘when the herd is grazing.’

  ‘Will it die?’ I asked.

  ‘God only knows!’ he replied. ‘Perhaps many will die on this road!’

  After about two hours, when already I was beginning to think that I could travel no further without a drink, we came to a shallow depression, where thornbush was growing. Abu Sara directed the camels into the trees and finally the Arabs couched their camels in the shade of a large heraz tree and began to make camp. I noticed that all of them, including the guide, were using the rough-framed packsaddles. I had thought of myself as having very little equipment, but I was well supplied in comparison with these men, who each had no more than a blanket, a canvas sheet, and a ragged saddlebag made of sackcloth or leather. We had twelve full skins of water, which were loaded either side of the packsaddles.

  There were six Arabs and myself in the group: Abu Sara, Adem, Abdallahi, Saadiq, Abu Musa and the Hamedi. Still I found them distant and uncommunicative—only the Hamedi seemed friendly, and I suspected that this was because he, too, was an outsider. The Arabs continually kept themselves busy, twisting new ’uqals from pieces of bark, repairing saddles, sharpening daggers. Abu Musa, a tall man with a bullet-shaped head and a thick black beard, began to cook parts of a sheep he had brought with him. Abu Sara sat down on the sheets we had laid out, and I took the opportunity to ask him about our route.

  ‘We go north, though the country of the Zayadiyya,’ he told me, ‘then into the dar of the Kababish. That’s where we have to be careful, by God, for they don’t like us, and where is the government in the desert, if not them?’

  I asked him how many times he had made this journey before.

  ‘Believe me, khawaja, I’ve been a desert man since I was a youth. That’s how I learned to be a “pilot”. I’ve seen over sixty rains, so I must have been this way fifty times at least!’

  I was aghast at the revelation of his age. If he had said forty, I should have believed him, for he exuded strength and alertness. I tried to imagine myself at the age of sixty, riding a camel across one of the earth’s most severe deserts, and failed. Yet Abu Sara was not the oldest of the group; Abdallahi claimed to be over seventy, and to remember the days of Sultan Ali Dinar.

  Throughout the journey, in fact, I was constantly surprised by the toughness of these Arabs. Only the Hamedi was under thirty, yet though the Rizayqat lacked his large muscles and his youth, they seemed far more resilient than he. It occurred to me that the physical shape of the Rizayqat was the result of natural selection in an environment where only the strong survived.

  When the sheep was cooked, Abu Musa laid out the meat in a dish. It was only ribs and head, which were raw in some places and charred in others, but nevertheless I relished the meal, especially as Abu Sara told me it would be the last meat for some time. While eating, the Arabs crouched around the pot in such a way as to prevent the soles of their feet from facing the food, which was considered very impolite.

  Before dipping their hands into the communal dish, each man would say bismillahi!—literally, ‘in the name of God’. It was an epithet that preceded everything the Arabs did, whether mounting camels, cooking, or washing their hands. During the early stages of the journey we washed our hands with a little water before eating, but licked them clean afterwards. As we moved further into the desert, however, we used only sand to clean ourselves.

  After the meal, we drank a cup of hot, sweet tea. Arab tea was usually very strong and very black because the water which they carried was always tainted. The making of the tea was a long, ritualistic affair, requiring great precision. The tea-maker, a man of some standing in the group, constantly tested his product, sipping it from a spoon or pouring a few drops from a glass. Tea is regarded by the Arabs as a great luxury, and after a few days in the Libyan Desert, I began to understand why. Like them, I began to crave its stimulating effect.

  After tea had been drunk, Saadiq and Adem rode off to see how the collapsed camel had fared. They returned several hours later and told Abu Sara that it had died.

  The guide shook his head, and said, ‘That Juma, he’s a bandit. Why does he buy such camels?’

  I decided against expressing my wholehearted agreement since I remembered that Juma was from Abu Sara’s tribe, but I was pleased that someone else had discovered the truth.

  Abu Sara went to fetch his camel, and suddenly the camp erupted into activity, the Arabs rushing about and shouting. I wondered what was happening, and the Hamedi said, ‘We’re going!’ I was mystified at the sudden animation, and put it down to the fact that this was the first day of a new journey. In fact, I found that the Arabs constantly behaved in this way, shifting from neutral to top gear without any interim buildup.

  We moved the herd out, following a series of rocky outcrops into undulating land. It was only then that I understood that after all the months of planning and speculation, I was actually on my way into the Libyan Desert. The land was scattered with volcanic rock, the many shades of which glinted amongst the roots of the thorn trees which punctuated the landscape. We carried on as the afternoon sun drooped towards the western horizon, casting a silver silicon sheen around the massed insect-like feet of the camels. Shortly after sunset, we dropped down into a wadi with a bed of hard-packed sand, and halted the herd.

  As we began to make camp, I asked Abu Sara why we had moved such a short distance. He told me that we would be travelling relatively slowly for the first few days, in order to make the best use of the grazing in this area. Further on there would be no grazing, and we would be travelling until late every night.

  When we made camp at night, the camels were not left to feed freely, because of the danger of their wandering away or being taken by thieves. First, the riding-camels were unsaddled and the equipment dumped on the ground. We had with us a pack-camel, carrying four heavy sacks of flour, which was to be our food as far as Dongola, and this also had to be unloaded. While two of us carried out this task, the others would go about the painstaking job of hobbling each of the hundred and forty camels. Not until this work was completed did anyone drink water.

  The heavy waterskins were never left on the ground overnight, but were hung on the sides of the packsaddles, which made admirable frames. The water would be poured out into a wide bowl and each of us would drink in turn, squatting down on our haunches: to drink while standing was considered rude. At first, I sipped the liquid in small mouthfuls, thinking that it would be assimilated less quickly this way, but I noticed that the Arabs quaffed it in great draughts, and soon I was copying them. Certainly I never felt bad effects.

  Often on our journey to Dongola we were thirsty, but as time went on I found thirst far easier to withstand than the scorching heat of the desert. No one ever drank water alone, or without offering it first to another. At the evening halt, indeed, there were constant protests by the one to whom the bowl had been handed that one of his fellows should drink first, and often the reciprocal protests became quite animated, despite the fact that we were all very thirsty.

  After we had drunk, each man would lay out his meagre bedding with his saddle at his head. The Arabs slept on their canvas sheets with a single blanket for cover. They always slept very close together, despite the vast area at their disposal.

  That first night in the wadi, the air seemed electric with the cha
tter of the Rizayqat as they sat on their blankets stripped down to their sirwel and busied themselves. Abu Musa lit a roaring fire. The Hamedi and Saadiq went off to collect firewood, while Adem and Abdallahi set to work stitching sackcloth over the rough straw pads of their saddles.

  Abu Sara began pasting spare waterskins with gotran, which prevented the empty skins from becoming hard. I sat a little apart from the Arabs. I didn’t yet feel part of this group. One of the problems was that I found their dialect a little difficult to understand. Although my Arabic had become proficient, the Rizayqat had many terms and expressions that were unique to them. When talking to them individually, I was able to hold my own, but when they spoke together I had difficulty in understanding them.

  Abu Musa cooked ’asida, and when it was ready, Abu Sara called me over to join them at the pot. The ’asida was served in a large dish, with two saucepans of gravy. Everyone took massive chunks and ate them fast, and with great relish. I ate with the same gusto as the others. If someone stopped eating before the food was finished, the Arabs would shout ‘Eat! Eat!’ in great earnest. Usually, however, the other would mutter alhamdulillah, ‘praise be to God’, repeatedly, licking his fingers until the eaters were convinced that he was really satisfied.

  When we had eaten and drunk more tea, the Arabs began their evening prayers. On this first night they made many raka’, in an attempt to make up for those they had not done during the day. This was a strictly irregular practice in Islam, though it probably seemed logical to the Rizayqat, none of whom had read the Koran. I noticed that once we had penetrated deeper into the desert, and became more exhausted, some of my companions performed their prayers far less frequently.

  Before going to sleep, I smoked a cigarette, the one luxury I had allowed myself. The Arabs generally did not smoke, though Hamedi and Saadiq occasionally asked me for a cigarette. Some of them used tombak, a kind of snuff which was inserted between the gum and the lower lip. The effect was pleasantly anaesthetic, but the long-term effect on the nervous system probably devastating.

  In the morning I awoke to the sound of the Rizayqat reciting their prayers, and a little later, I rose to join them at the fire. The first task to be completed was the loosening of the camels so that they could graze.

  When this was done we huddled together around the hearth and splashed a little water over our faces. Occasionally we ate cold ’asida, left over from the previous night, with oil, but generally we had only two meals a day. After the tea-drinking, Abu Sara would fetch his camel and begin to saddle. This was the silent signal for the rest of us to ‘scramble’, and it always followed this strict sequence, with the guide saddling first. I once inadvertently saddled before Abu Sara, and incurred his severe wrath. He had Saadiq explain to me that the organisation in the desert was ‘like the army’. I did not repeat the action.

  The mob which we escorted were to be sold in Egypt for meat. They were mostly males, some of them gelded, with the well-developed humps which showed that they had been reared for this purpose. The riding-camels we used were all bulls, since the western tribes of the Sudan never rode females, and all had undersized humps from the constant bearing of a saddle. However, a riding animal put out to graze could develop a full-size hump within a year.

  The wooden packsaddle which the Arabs used was a large frame like a double clamp, joined at either side and resting on coils of straw. It was held in place by a cord of bark fibre looped around the camel’s neck and under its tail. My own saddle was much easier to manage, since it depended only on tightening the girth, and because of this I was often ready before the others.

  I never saw the Rizayqat treat their riding-camels badly. This was because, in the desert, their lives depended on them. The death of a man’s camel meant a reduction in his chances of survival, and if he were alone, death was almost certain.

  When we were ready to go, we would mount and begin to gather the herd by galloping around its skirts and forcing the camels into the centre. Once they were shoulder-tight, they would be forced into a bottleneck made by two riders, and Abu Sara would count each one as it walked through. This painstaking process had to be gone through twice a day, in the morning and after the midday halt. When the counting was finished, the guide would take up his position on the left hand side, and we would move out, forcing the herd onwards. Although we never travelled faster than a walk, the camels actually made fast progress, covering an average of thirty miles a day. The Rizayqat drove them with their traditional herding songs, some of which had words, and others merely consisting of a series of sounds, such as ‘wei wei oooh wei!’ The Hamedi hardly ever stopped singing. This would have been fine, if it had not always been the same song that he sang: a mysterious little number which he called the ‘Dar Hamed Maidens’, and which was accompanied by an inordinate amount of whistling and grunting.

  I was sometimes irritated by these men, their arrogant attitude, their hostility to everything which was strange to them, their imperative way of speaking, and their quickness to excitement. But I knew that I was among men whose lives were not at all affected by all the things which my upbringing had taught me to hold precious. In fact, they owned almost nothing belonging to the twentieth century, and as we travelled deeper into the Libyan Desert, I felt that extraordinary sense of timelessness that I had experienced so often with the Arab nomads.

  When I looked at my companions or listened to their talk, I saw nothing that set them in a particular time; it could have been any age within the span of a thousand years or more. Reading and writing had no place in their lives. Their alphabets lay in other spheres: the tracks left by camels in the sand, the colour, texture, and value of the grazing, the worth of a camel or goat. Their picture of the world was quite different from my own. They did not measure distance in miles or kilometres, did not know that the earth was a sphere, or that it moved around the sun, that the stars were anything but lights to guide their way, or that the moon was more than a means of judging the flux of the seasons. I found this refreshing. Metaphysical questions did not concern them: there was One God and all things stemmed from him. Their store of practical knowledge was supremely adequate for the lives they led, and I envied their simple, uncluttered concept of existence.

  Generally, we would travel until the sun became hot, around noon, then make camp under a tree for the afternoon. If there was no adequate shade, the Arabs would erect blankets and sheets as a temporary shelter. During these siestas, the camels would eat whatever was available, but even these hardy desert creatures would stop eating in the middle of the afternoon and seek out any shade they could find. We would take turns to leave the shelter of the camp in order to watch the herd, making sure that none of the animals strayed too far, and keeping an eye out for thieves. I often had to steel myself for the foray into the blistering inferno of the afternoon: the heat seemed to crush one with its massive pressure. Even in the shade of our makeshift tent it was too hot to move, but out in the open desert it was almost unbearable.

  I appreciated my Arab headcloth and its voluminous layers. On my first day, sitting on my haunches, being slowly simmered by the sun, I was reminded of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land:

  ... where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water.

  After three days we arrived in El Koma, a village near the wells of Abu Ku’ where I had met the Zayadiyya, in the heart of the country of the Awlad Jerbo clan. The Rizayqat were expecting to water the herd there and we camped near the wells amongst some scrub. It was evening when we arrived, and I was stunned by the splendour of the scene: the sun going down wreathed in plumes of magnolia, the moon coming up like an inflated yellow balloon in the east. The acrid smell of the camels touched my nostrils as they shuffled about, champing the sparse grasses, and I heard the startled cry of an enormous vulture, and the snap of its wings as it launched itself heavily into the sunset.

  Abu Sara and Ab
u Musa rode off to the wells, and I helped the others to hobble the herd. Abu Sara and Abu Musa reappeared later with long faces. They were accompanied by a stranger and as we gathered to greet the newcomer, Abu Sara growled, ‘The wells are dry. There’s no water for us here. We’ll have to go on to Umm Hejlij.’ Then he introduced our guest to us as Shaykh ’Ali Mohammed of the Zayadiyya, and told us that he would be our rafiq, as far as Umm Hejlij. I was intrigued by what had been left unsaid. Abu Sara’s manner was slightly resentful, and I wondered if ‘The wells are dry’ was a euphemism for ‘These sons of dogs will give us no water!’ I wondered too if ’Ali Mohammed had been sent to keep an eye on Zayadiyya grazing.

  The next morning, as we moved out, I rode alongside the Zayadi. I asked him guardedly if there was likely to be any trouble from camel-thieves in Zayadiyya country.

  He laughed, and replied, ‘There are bandits everywhere, why should there be none here? But by the will of God, there will be no trouble.’ He gestured expansively towards the landscape. ‘Look at this country. There is grass; there is thornbush; there is water. Our people are few but our herds are large.’

  It seemed to me that ’Ali Mohammed was something of an uninvited guest; nevertheless, the Rizayqat treated him with respect and courtesy.

  Often on this journey other Arabs attached themselves to us with hardly a by-your-leave, yet they were usually welcomed without reserve. Arab traditions of hospitality are born of necessity. In this arid land survival often depends on cooperation between individuals; it is a case of do-as-you-would-be-done-by. To the Arabs no invitation is necessary: karm—hospitality, is simply the custom, to be expected and received with equanimity. Woe betide all who fall short in the exercise of this tradition.