A Desert Dies

by Michael Asher

  Later, I climbed the cliffs around the watering place with Juma’. From high above, the gelti looked tiny and impotent in the midst of the acres of black volcanic rock, with its covering of gleaming quartz, red granite, and ebony lava. In the distance was a wall of sand dunes, bleached blue by the winds of darat. Juma’ showed me the jizzu pastures, lying east and west of the mountain, saying, ‘There will be no jizzu this year.’ Then he pointed north and said, ‘That is the Great Desert.’

  I spent the rest of the morning at the gelti, watching the comings and goings. Men and women crouched in bevies around the pits, waiting for them to fill up, and rows of waterskins lay around them, bulging like well-fed slugs. Much of the work was done by women. They were sensuous figures with their gaily patterned headcloths and their neatly pointed breasts, throwing back their long braided hair and smiling to display perfect white teeth as they poured water from the water pits or loaded their camels. I could easily have watched them all day, but I was called to our camp by At Tom to share a meal with the massive Ali Wad Ibrahim. As we were eating, Juma’ came running into the camp clutching his ·303 rifle and crying, ‘The slaves have taken one of the camels!’ He held up a hobbling rope and told us, ‘I thought the animal had wandered off, so I went to fetch it. It was the four-year-old we got yesterday from the Awlad Sulayman. Then I found footmarks and a little further on, I found this! They have taken it and no doubt!’

  Those Awlad Sulayman are not to be trusted,’ Wad Fadul said.

  ‘I saw the son of one of them at the gelti this morning. I tell you he is the thief. He has taken back the camel that his father gave us!’

  At Tom told Juma’ and Mura’fib to follow the tracks of the thief, and the two Arabs took their rifles and saddled quickly, riding south after the tracks of the stolen animal.

  It was sunset when they returned, bringing with them a youth of about fifteen. He sat, frightened but unbending, in the sand before At Tom and Ali Wad Ibrahim. ‘I said it was the Sulayman boy!’ Wad Fadul declared. What do you think of him, the dirty thief!’

  ‘A donkey!’ Juma’ said. ‘He was too slow. If he had not stopped at his father’s camp, we would never have caught him. If you are going to steal, do it properly, by God!’

  Mura’fib told us how they had followed the tracks, trotting fast on their camels, and had been led straight to the Sulayman camp, where we had spent the previous afternoon. ‘We only just got him though,’ he added. ‘When we arrived, he was saddling another camel, intending to run off into the hills.’

  ‘His father said that the boy had a great affection for the camel,’ Juma’ went on, ‘and offered us another one instead. I told him that stealing was stealing.’ The boy said nothing and stared in front of him. ‘He made no excuses,’ Juma’ added. ‘He said the camel was his.’

  ‘We will show him who that camel belongs to,’ At Tom declared.

  He discussed the matter with Ali. Both of them had judicial powers. Ali was magistrate for the Khitimai region and, as At Tom was officially the plaintiff, it was decided that Ali should judge the case the following morning. He told me that he had authority to deliver sentences of five years’ imprisonment, a heavy fine, or twenty-five lashes.

  We left Umm ’Atshani the next morning before the boy was ‘tried’, taking the disputed evidence with us. We heard later that the thief had been given twenty-five lashes, and that the sentence was summarily carried out by one of Ali’s bailiffs.

  ‘It is the best sentence he could have got!’ Wad Fadul said. ‘It will be no more than sport to him. He is an Arab of the desert. Pain will not worry him, by God!’

  _____5._____

  Legendary Pastures

  After the cloudburst, the desert blossoms

  like a rose, but only for a short time.

  During that time, however, the nomads

  can move in, graze whatever animals

  they keep, and move out again when the

  vegetation dries.

  Maurice Burton, Deserts, 1974

  WE CAMPED AT NOON IN some siyaal trees just north of the mountain. After we had eaten, At Tom called us together and told us that here, the party would split up. He would take Wad Fadul, Mura’fib Mahmoud, Ibrahim, and Wad az Zayadi north into the desert, while Juma’, Hamid, Adam, and I should ride south with the herd and the baggage camel, and meet up with the nuggara herd near Jabal Hattan.

  I was bitterly disappointed not to be included in the desert party, but At Tom explained that this was simply because there were no spare camels that were suitable for desert conditions. The sore on Wad al ’Atiga’s back made him unrideable, and the only trained camels in our small herd that were not exhausted were four-and five-year-olds. I swallowed my disappointment, but when Juma’ said, ‘We shall find some ’Atawiyya moving south and ride with them,’ I was consoled by the thought of travelling with these desert Arabs on their migrations.

  We helped the others to load their camels then lined up to shake hands. At Tom said that God willing, he would see us near the pool at Shigil after a week. ‘Go in peace,’ we told him, and stood watching as the six men mounted and rode off into the sand mist.

  Then we gathered our belongings and our weapons and drove our herd south towards the steppes.

  Juma’ took up the guide’s position on the left flank of the herd, and Adam stalked along on the right, straddling his small camel with his long legs folded easily across its neck. His craggy, clean-shaven face was shadowed by the woollen cap he wore instead of a headcloth. He carried a service-issue shotgun that hung by its strap on the rear horn of his saddle. I was riding one of the four-year-olds, fast but lacking power, and took my place at the back of the herd. Behind me came Hamid leading the baggage animal. He was about eighteen, with smooth, black skin and clean, rather obstinate features. He was inexperienced and impulsive, but as strong as an ox.

  For the rest of the day, we rode across an almost featureless plain of sand, and the wind from the north sprayed us with fine showers of dust. The next day, we made camp with some ’Atawiyya during the afternoon. They were on their way south out of the desert pastures and had settled for the night along a watercourse, where some tundub trees were growing. With them were about thirty camels and a mixed flock of sheep and goats, which were already feeding amongst the trees when we arrived. A group of women with long, braided hair and brightly coloured dresses were busy laying out their belongings and erecting three small tents in the bushes.

  As we set up our taya alongside them, an old man came to greet us. He was slim and very upright, with a twisted grey beard and eyes glazed with trachoma. He wore the remains of a pair of sirwal and was barechested except for a length of cloth looped around his back and thrown over his shoulders. His headcloth seemed moulded to his temples. He wore a black-hilted dagger on his left arm and carried a ·303 rifle. As he shook hands with us, three of his sons came up behind him. They had long hair growing in curly mops and wore torn shreds of jibbas that were thin and yellow with age. All of them carried rifles.

  The old man inquired which family we belonged to then sent off his sons to fetch a goat. He sat down next to us in the sand and, as Hamid began to make tea, he said, ‘The scouts have cheated us, by God! There will be no jizzu this year. There was none last year or the year before that. I cannot remember when the jizzu last bloomed. Perhaps it is finished. Life is hard for the Arabs, by God!’

  ‘They say there is sa’adan in the east,’ Juma’ commented. ‘It is growing in patches around Jobul Kantosh.’

  ‘Patches!’ spat the ’Atawi in disgust. ‘What good are patches? It will not be enough for all the herds. By God, I remember when the camels got so fat that they could not walk, and we had to help them to stand up. Sometimes they ate so much that they burst, by the life of the Prophet!’

  Old Adam shook his hoary head. ‘Where are those days now? Perhaps they will not come back:

  ‘God is generous,’ Juma’ said.

  ‘Yes, God is generous,’ they agreed.
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  Not far away from us, a girl of about fifteen was trying to gather some sheep, picking up twigs and throwing them at the animals as they scampered away. She wore an underskirt of coarse blue cotton that reached down to her ankles, and above it, a dress of flowery green material. Her hair, treated with butter, fell down across her shoulders in a cascade of fine braids, and she wore thick bracelets of old ivory on her wrists and silver chains around her ankles. Another girl, slightly older, was collecting firewood in the bushes. She wore only an underskirt and a scarlet tobe wound around her head like a turban, falling down the smooth copper skin of her back.

  Several more women were working by the tents. Two of them held infants and there was a gaggle of older children. The tents were much smaller than those I had seen in the dikka and were set up in a line with the door gaps facing south. Around them lay some old riding and pack saddles and the arched frame of a litter. A tree nearby was festooned with goatskins; several of them were the medium-sized girbas used for carrying water, and there were many smaller skins holding sour milk.

  The sons soon came back with a fat black goat. Hamid slit its throat and slung the carcass on a thorn tree. The ’Atawiyya boys drew their daggers and helped him to peel the skin off. When the furry mass was free, one of them rolled it up carefully, saying that it would do for a waterskin. I watched as Hamid skilfully slit the animal’s belly and cleaned out the inedible organs.

  While the meat was being roasted, I walked around the camp with Adam and the old ’Atawi. The women came up to shake hands with us, removing their leather sandals as they did so. The children also shook hands, except for the infants and the very young. These, we touched lightly on the head, raising our closed fists to our lips and repeating the words of greeting, which their mothers answered for them.

  The old man showed me inside one of the tents. The camel hair roof had been slung over the uprights so that the sides hung down and touched the ground. There was very little space inside, and the palm-stalk bed had been laid on the sand and covered with goat hair rugs. From the uprights hung some saddlebags and two basketwork jars, grey with age, which contained flour and unmilled grain. In the corner of the tent stood a carved, wooden milking vessel called a kabaros, a crudely fashioned wooden mortar, and two flat grindstones.

  Several clay pots decorated with an intricate striated pattern lay in the dust outside, and I asked the man if these were made by the Kababish. ‘Never!’ he answered. The Kababish do not make pots. They are made by the Nuba.’ Adam laughed and explained that to be a potter was considered a disgrace for an Arab.

  The Arab showed us his camel herd. He was evidently proud of his animals and with good reason: there were some superb racing dromedaries amongst them. I was careful not to ask how many camels he owned or to praise them; I had already learned that the Arabs believed in the ‘evil eye’ and that if a stranger complimented livestock or children, some accident would befall them. For the same reason, they would never reveal to strangers the number of animals or children they had, feeling that to declare the number was to challenge fate to reduce it. Almost all the Kababish believed in this superstition, and I remembered how the nazir had insisted that it was outdated and primitive, and how the very next day, when I praised his best riding camel, he’d snapped, ‘Do not put the “eye” on him!’

  Later, Hamid called us back to eat the ribs and the roasted meat of the goat. Juma’ had ridden off to catch a young she-camel that had run away, and Hamid set a generous portion of meat aside for him. To have forgotten a travelling companion would have been a tremendous insult.

  The lights of the animal had been mixed with onion and spices and made into a stew, which we ate last. Afterwards, Hamid took the goat’s head and buried it in the sand under the hot ashes. ‘We will eat it tomorrow,’ he told me. ‘It will be delicious, after it has baked all night in the sand.’

  It was late afternoon when Juma’ came back, driving the lost she-camel before him. ‘So much trouble just for a worthless three-year-old!’ he grumbled. Adam went up to hobble the animal, but she screamed as if he were about to slaughter her and charged off towards the ’Atawiyya camp, where the young Arabs blocked her way. As they tried to grab her, she turned tail again, shooting back towards us. Adam took a lunge at her, moving in a surprisingly sprightly way for his age, but he was too slow. Hamid managed to fix both hands on her tail and, running along behind her, suddenly heaved her off balance so that she collapsed into the dust. At once all four of us pounced on her and Adam fixed knee hobbles on both her legs, saying, ‘She won’t try that again!’

  Next morning, we were up at first light, and Hamid dug the goat’s head out of the sand. He tapped the dust from it and smashed it open with an axe, giving each of us a piece. I was given the left eyeball and part of the brain. As he had told me, it was truly delicious; I understood why the Arabs considered the head the best part of the animal.

  The ’Atawiyya had already brought their baggage camels into the camp and the tents were being carefully folded and fitted on to the pack saddles. The women lashed their litters to the backs of three great bull-camels and draped them with rugs and cloth. The litters were built on to the frames of pack saddles and fitted the camel in exactly the same way. They enclosed the woman and her infants in a capsule of shade as they moved from camp to camp. The basketwork vessels, pots, saddlebags, and even the grindstones all had a particular place below the litter, and the water and milkskins were slung from a separate camel. When everything was ready, the nomads collected their herd and flocks and moved off in a grand procession. The women climbed into their litters and took the children, who were handed up to them. The great beasts rose steadily to their feet and strode majestically after the livestock, the baggage animals trailing after them in a long caravan.

  We mounted up and followed with our herd and baggage camels. Before long, several families who had spent the night nearby joined us, each with its complement of flocks, herds, and litters, so that we were in the midst of a great train of men and animals that stretched more than a kilometre through the desert. We moved with solemn pageantry over the smooth desert crust that was whitewashed by the ceaseless wind from the north. Here and there, dead trees raised their bone-dry limbs from the sand like segments of gigantic insects. The landscape was so vast that even this magnificent cavalcade seemed no more than a trail of ants.

  By midmorning, the sun was roaring like fire and the pale sand threw back its heat and light into our eyes, parching the membranes of our throats. We climbed up the gently rising side of a valley and the herds and flocks drilled themselves into ranks and files. As they climbed, the sun caught their bodies, making them glow like mirrors. On the far side, the desert glistened before us in a mantle of amber, ochre, and orange, shining with a blinding intensity as far as the distant darkness of the mountains. All day, the procession went on and the black litters rocked silently to the rhythm of the march, hour upon hour, as the sunlight spilt down across the glaring sand and the brown shapes of the hills came steadily closer.

  We stopped again before sunset where some nissa grass had sprouted in tufts across the sand, and the families spread out into the desert. Everywhere, camels were couched in clusters, with baggage dumped in piles upon the sand. Boys dressed in tattered sirwal coursed along the sand on young camels, heading off flocks of sheep and goats and turning them into the grazing. Within minutes, the Arabs had scooped out round holes with their daggers, setting up the tentpoles and draping the camel hair over them. The tents sprang up like mushrooms across the landscape. We made camp alongside the same family, and after we had piled up our equipment and drunk water to ease our parched throats, I watched the same group of women breaking up firewood and lighting fires outside the skeletons of their tents. The sun hovered a few metres above the horizon. Its fire burned out and the cool of the late afternoon descended on us, bringing with it a sense of restfulness and peace.

  Just before the sun set, three Arabs came walking towards our camp. Juma’ said
, ‘Here come the ’Awajda we saw at Khitimai. Now there will be trouble!’ They were narrow-boned men with ferocious, mud-dark faces, fearless and brutal. I remembered having seen them at the pool at Khitimai, when At Tom had been collecting camels there. They refused the tea we offered and sat down in the sand nursing their rifles. Almost at once, one of them said, ‘We have come for the camel Sheikh at Tom took from our family at Khitimai. You have no right to take it. We gave a camel to the last Requisition and to the one before that. We must have that camel back!’

  ‘Do you have the paper to prove it?’ Adam asked.

  ‘Paper? We have no paper. What do we need with papers? That camel is ours.’ ‘We cannot give you the camel back without the paper,’ Juma’ cut in. ‘Sheikh at Tom is not here to approve it.’

  ‘Then we will take it, sheikh or no sheikh!’ the Arab declared.

  Juma’ grinned, but his eyes went cold. Old Adam’s craggy features assumed a sour expression. Even young Hamid stopped what he was doing and glared at the three men.

  ‘You shall not touch that camel,’ Juma’ said with chilling calmness. ‘If you touch it, you will answer to the nazir himself.’