In Search of the Forty Days Road

by Michael Asher

  The next two days were the hardest I had experienced so far, and I felt myself becoming physically weaker as we rode deep into the timeless desert nights. Finally we arrived at the well of Rameiti, a single waterhole in a clump of acacia and ushur bush. As the herd broke around the bush we were greeted by a group of Handab Kababish. They were small, knotty-muscled men, much darker than the Ruwahla, and at once I sensed that their friendliness was not only due to the fact that they knew Abu Sara, but was also the genuine delight in meeting outsiders felt by inhabitants of the inner desert. For the first time in this alien country, it seemed that we had found some allies.

  Almost at once we went about watering the herd. The Arabs began to mould a great dish of wet mud and sand from which the camels could drink and some youths of the Handab began drawing water from the well, which was quite shallow. The liquid was stagnant and almost the colour of milk, yet it tasted as sweet as wine after the foul stuff we had been carrying. The dish was only large enough for the camels to be watered in pairs, and at intervals the well would run dry, which meant that the task was a protracted one.

  Much of the day I spent sitting in the shade of an ushur bush, talking to the Handab. The darkness of their skin showed that there was some Nubian blood in these men, though their stocky, light frames were well adapted to the desert environment. Abu Sara seemed relaxed and at ease with them, and I guessed that they knew his true origin. At noon, Saadiq cooked two huge panfuls of ’asida and the Handab obviously relished the food, since they existed for most of the year on camels’ milk. As we drank tea after the meal, Abu Sara asked them if they had seen any Ruwahla.

  ‘There were two of them here last night,’ replied one of the Handab. ‘They said they were going to Dongola, but I didn’t like the look of them, by God the Great! Listen, brothers, they said some zurqa were bringing stolen camels up from the south. But where were the zurqa? There was no one except you!’

  ‘Look, I think these men are bandits,’ replied Abu Sara. ‘They’ve followed us from Umm Badr, by God! Where did they go?’

  ‘They’re nearby, camping in the wadi.’

  The watering took the rest of the day and most of the night, but though dead beat from the work, we left early in the morning with a group of Handab. The Handab rode tiny, immature camels, which seemed to suit their own dimensions perfectly. We followed the line of a small wadi but did not travel far, for all of us were tired, and we made camp under some lalob trees. After eating, the Arabs went to sleep almost at once, and I wrapped myself up in a blanket and dozed.

  I awoke to find that two more Arabs had arrived in the camp. They were sitting by the remains of the fire, with the Handab, and two lean camels were couched in the sun, outside the ring of shade afforded by the trees. With a sudden shock I recognised the two Ruwahla who had been following us. They sat amongst four of the tiny Handab, smouldering and dangerous, their eyes sparkling darkly, their bearded chins thrust forwards in defiance. Abu Sara and the Rizayqat roused themselves, moving with a deliberate slowness which held that familiar coiled menace. I moved closer to hear what was being said.

  ‘Why have you come, brothers?’ asked one of the Handab.

  ‘We think some of these camels are stolen. Some of them have Ruwahla brands.’

  ‘The guide is a trustworthy man. I have known him for many years. These men are not bandits! They have papers for all their camels.’

  ‘What is this talk of papers? A stolen camel is a stolen camel, paper or no paper!’

  ‘You are the Father of Two Tongues,’ the Handabi said suddenly. ‘You came here telling us that these men were zurqa, but I know they are Arabs.’

  ‘They say they are Zayadiyya, but their tongue is not like that of the Zayadiyya. They lie!’

  The discussion went on for some minutes. The Rizayqat said little, as insult and counter-insult were fired. It seemed that the Ruwahla were trying to persuade the Handab to support them in their claim to our camels. Slowly, though, the Handab with their calm, heavy voices began to wear the others down. The voices of the Ruwahla were raised in objection: ‘You are not Kababish to support such men!’

  ‘These Arabs are honest. You are not. You come here telling lies and expect us to help you. Go, and do not come back to this land!’

  The Ruwahla stood up, and I thought for a moment that one of them was about to draw his dagger: his hand rested on it momentarily.

  Then with a deft movement, one of the Handab reached below his blanket and brought out a short automatic rifle. It was a Kalashnikov with a folding paratroopers’ butt. He did not point it at the Ruwahla, nor make any threatening gesture. Rather, he held it as if he had brought it out for cleaning. But the meaning was clear. I recalled Abdallahi saying, ‘Weapons rule here!’

  The Ruwahla scowled darkly, as if they were about to let fly a string of curses. They looked at the Handab, at Abu Sara and the Rizayqat, and met the reflection of their own harsh, narrow-eyed stare, which is the hallmark of the desert Arab. For moments, it seemed, no one spoke. Hollow time washed amongst us, this ossified group of humans, frozen forever in an aggressive attitude, and no more than a microscopic blemish on the surface of the great Libyan Desert, which stretched away infinitely on every side. Then the Ruwahla turned and mounted their camels in perfect unison, cocking their legs over the saddle horns and launching immediately into a trot, back across the yellow sands. We stood silently, wondering if these ghosts which had haunted us were finally exorcised.

  ‘They are bad men!’ said one of the Handab.

  ‘I thought you were going to kill them!’ said Abu Sara.

  ‘Kill them?’ the little Arab looked surprised, and there was an unexpected ‘clunk, click’ as he drew back the cocking handle of his weapon. No bullet was ejected into the sand: the rifle had been empty. ‘I got it out for cleaning, that’s all. But I don’t think they’ll follow you again!’

  We thanked the Handab, and paid them for their water. With minds easier and less exhausted, we set out that day on the last stretch of our journey to the river.

  18. RETURN TO THE RIVER

  THE NEXT MORNING WE AWOKE beneath a sheer scar of smooth black rock, which formed a continuous wall as far as the eye could see. This was Jebel El Ain, a mysterious flat-topped shelf, which runs unbroken across a hundred miles of desert. If the fear of Ruwahla raiders was behind us, then this last section of the journey to the river was a continuous battle to hold back the tide of fatigue that threatened to engulf us.

  The floor beneath the mountain was hard-packed sand, perfectly flat and featureless, without the faintest hint of vegetation. Each day resembled the previous one, so that the journey became a dissembled blur in my mind. I found it difficult to keep track of dates or times, and was always aware of the continual heaviness in my body, and the blinding fire of the sun, which seemed to penetrate deep into my being.

  Now it was hunger and weakness that wore down the herd. Every day we saw nothing but sand and the solid, intractable black face of the plateau. We were totally immersed in our own tiny universe of men and camels, seeing no one and nothing beyond our own microcosm of society. Now I saw why unity amongst us was essential, why Abu Sara’s unquestioned authority was the order of things. It was survival, pure and simple, for here there was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide from disagreement. It seemed at times as though I was living in a bizarre dream world, a fantastic Salvador Dali landscape, arid beyond imagination, wandering through a desolation of sand, without end or beginning.

  All day the camels festered in the sun, for now there was no shadow, no blade of grass, or leaf or tree to help ease the grip of thirst. They stumbled on, following the irresistible dictates of herd instinct, to certain death. A great change had been wrought in their condition; they were weak and thin, and flaps of useless flesh hung in obscene folds from their ribs. My own white had become feeble and Saadiq’s bull seemed to be on its last legs. To our riding-camels
we now gave a little water, poured into a depression in a canvas sheet, and mixed with a little rock salt.

  I had grown familiar with many of the camels in the herd: the small red with the limp, the large buff with the white eyes, the playful female, the black with the overdeveloped hump. I felt almost sad that after such an heroic journey, these animals should end up on some butcher’s slab in Egypt. I asked Abu Sara how many beasts were sent to Egypt each year, and he answered that although he was not sure, he guessed that at least ten thousand went from the west of the Sudan alone.

  ‘It is not possible to know,’ he continued, ‘for they are taken across the border in secret.’

  ‘Smuggled?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. Every merchant or tribesman is supposed to pay tax on each camel exported to Egypt. But of course no one pays, and we enter the country by secret ways. If the police stop us, then we give them money. They will let us through, but they won’t let you in. They will know you are khawaja by your face.’ When I pressed him, he insisted, ‘It is a big problem as things are with the police. You think I have a passport? No. And if they found you they would say that you are a spy and we helped you. That is why I won’t take you!’

  I could see that his word was final, and although I had been told this at the beginning of the journey, I was still disappointed. I knew, however, that from Dongola the herd would be following the Nile into Mahas country, the ‘Belly of Stones’, an area which I had already explored extensively, and I felt a little consolation in this.

  I wondered how the Rizayqat felt now the conditions were becoming harder. It was obvious that each of them was affected in some way for they had become more sharp-tempered and irritable. Every night, for instance, after the herd had been hobbled, there would be the same endless argument over the number of ’uqals, some of which were always lost during the day. This was doubly annoying, for it was an unspoken rule that no one could drink until the hobbling had been settled. Luckily such disputes were soon forgotten.

  Some of the camels began to go lame, red sores developing on the velveteen soles of their feet. This was usually amongst those of the herd which had been reared in the grasslands of the south, and which were unused to the scorching desert sand. When this happened, the Rizayqat cut out patches of leather from a thick sheet they carried, and sewed them on to the wounded feet like shoes.

  One day, during a particularly severe abu farrar, augmented by a blustering wind, which blew a breath of steel across our vision, we struggled to erect our little tent. To my surprise, Adem said, ‘This is like a war, O people! And this desert is the enemy!’

  It was the first time I had heard any of the Arabs express such an opinion of the desert, and I realised that though the desert was far more familiar to them than it was to me, they no more regarded it as a friend or ally than I did, but as a quarterless foe against whom all one’s strength was required merely to survive. Often though, the desert moved me intensely with the utter enormity of its scale, and lost in the grasp of its deep spell, I would forget the herd and allow them to stray, only to raise cries of ‘Chase that camel!’ and curses from the others.

  They had no concept of natural beauty in this sense; when I tried to explain to Abdallahi, he looked puzzled, and after a time said, ‘Well, at least it’s clean.’ This, I realised, was a concession to my eccentricity.

  The journey started to turn into an endurance exercise. By day I dreamed unwillingly of coolness, smooth falls of water over rock, gurgling white-foamed mountain streams, ice-cold lemonade. We rode until midnight every evening and now, when I dismounted, I noticed that my legs wobbled for the first few minutes, and I was horrified to see how emaciated they had become. Abdallahi once poked me in his irritating way and told me, ‘You’ve become weak!’

  I scoffed at him, yet inside I knew he was right, and I felt embarrassed beside this thin old man who was old enough to be my grandfather, yet who could survive so well in this hostile world when I, a young European, raised on protein and orange juice, was struggling so hard. The Hamedi, however, seemed in a worse state than I. Each night he would fall asleep as soon as the hobbling was completed and have to be shaken awake when it was time to eat.

  We left the plateau of Jebel El Ain far behind and entered a region where sand was piled up in immaculate pieces of natural sculpture. Abu Sara told me that he could recognise individual dunes from previous journeys.

  One morning, after leaving the mountain, I noticed a stream of blood and matter pouring from the rear end of one of the females.

  ‘She wants to give birth!’ Adem told me.

  I was amazed at this apparent miracle, for I had not even been aware that she was pregnant, so thin had she become. As we moved, the stream became more effusive, and suddenly, in a shower of liquid, a small sac was deposited in the sand. Inside was a perfect baby camel, stillborn. The mother did not even stop to inspect the dead offspring, but carried on in the omnipotent compulsion of the herd. The Rizayqat were quiet and I sensed that they, like me, felt a poignant sadness at the merciless privations of this wilderness. No Arab, I was sure, could fail to be moved by the potential birth and subsequent death of a camel, since they regarded these animals as a gift from God. The Prophet Mohammed himself was a desert guide, and must have spent hours watching these fascinating creatures. It seemed to me that the history of the camel and that of Arabs and Islam were inextricably bound.

  Later that same day during the afternoon halt, I was roused by a shout from the Hamedi, ‘Saadiq’s camel has collapsed!’

  I joined the others around the prostrate beast, which was shivering piteously in the last throes of exhaustion and hunger. Some water was brought, and Abu Sara began to slit its nostrils with his dagger. The other Arabs thumped and kicked at the animal, pulling its tail and trying to make it stand, but the camel showed no sign of reviving. ‘It’s finished!’ said Saadiq sadly, shaking its head. We left it shivering in the sand, to die alone, far from the ranges of its homeland, to become yet another pile of bones, another signpost on this relentless road to the Nile. Saadiq was heartbroken. He had gambled all his money in a game of chance with a savage enemy and lost.

  ‘The desert is hard!’ he said. ‘It’s a place for men, by God!’

  ‘God is generous!’

  ‘Amen!’

  The next day we entered a plain of laval rock, where the sand had been leached away from the surface, leaving nothing but massive metallic clinkers of stone. The sore-footed camels found this terrain difficult, for their velvet-padded feet were adapted to the flat sands, and this new obstacle only added to their misery and fatigue. It was so hot that the heat drove one almost to madness, but as we laboured on into the afternoon, Adem said unexpectedly, ‘There! Smell the wood smoke! It’s a camp!’

  Sure enough, passing over the brow of a hill, we saw a clump of scrub, within which was a well. Outside the perimeter of the bushes, in the desert itself, were four wooden cabins, belonging to a family of the Umm Metto Kababish.

  We drove the camels into the trees and began to unsaddle, when a ragged group of Arabs came out to greet us. Like the Handab they were small and wiry, with skin like uncured leather and straggly black beards. Most of them wore nothing but tattered sirwel, and some were barefooted. Their faces were more strikingly Semitic than any I had yet seen and they spoke with a slow, deliberate diction, which seemed to reflect their character.

  The houses of the Umm Metto were constructed of layers of brushwood and stood in the sun among a cluster of dunes. Around them I noticed some women and children. The women were beautiful, with shoulder-length black hair, worn loose and unbraided. They were naked except for loincloths and their skin shone as if it had been oiled.

  The Umm Metto were desert Arabs who lived all the year round in this wilderness, seeing no one but the Arabs who brought herds and caravans on the route to the Nile. They owned camels and some goats, but their lives seemed hard in the extreme. Ap
art from their livestock, they owned nothing but cooking pots and saddlery. I saw, though, that most of them had automatic rifles which they kept close at hand. They wore the desert like a mantle, as if it was their natural environment.

  They were the Bedu whose vision I had been following since I set out from Dongola so long ago, and whose reality had taken me down many strange paths. It was ironical that I should find them within a stone’s throw of the place I had left months before.

  The Kababish had once been a poor tribe of sheep-herders, but had grown strongly by control of the watering-places on the desert routes to Libya and Egypt. They had increased their strength by raising livestock from tribes such as the Hamar, and now had the largest number of camels in the west. It was difficult to equate the knowledge of their tribe’s power with the apparent poverty of these Umm Metto, especially when, within a few minutes of meeting them, two men had asked me for libess or underclothes. It was Saadiq who solved the mystery for me, ‘They’re not really poor men,’ he said. ‘They just look poor. They live in the desert, and never go into towns to buy cloth, so their clothes wear out and they look like beggars. When you ride a camel, your libess is the first thing to wear out. That’s why they always ask for libess.’

  In the desert, material possessions are disadvantageous to survival, and therefore the Umm Metto live a frugal life and avoid ownership of much other than their herds. To these Arabs camels represent wealth; not their market price, but wealth itself, a precious commodity like gold and gems. Since their status system within the tribe is also based on camels, they hate to sell them, although it is occasionally necessary in order to obtain essentials such as tea, sugar, flour, and spices.

  A little later we moved a few miles further on to a well which had more abundant water, and began watering the herd again. I sat and watched the Umm Metto boys straining on the leather ropes, their brown bodies glistening as they frantically filled the hollowed-out tree trunks from which the camels could drink. This was not a labour of love, or a free service for travellers: the Kababish charged fifteen piastres per head for the water and since they used little money, this represented to them a substantial income.