A Desert Dies

by Michael Asher

  When Salim returned from his foray in the jizzu a few days later, he at once agreed to give me another camel. He was an ’anafi, a slim, sturdy dromedary from the Awlad al Ingleez section, with an unusual steel-grey colour. One of the herdsmen told me that his name was Wad at Tafashan, ‘The Son of the One which Ran Away’. I was delighted with him. Salim said that he would keep Wad al ’Atiga in his herd until the wound healed.

  Not long afterwards, I had a chance to test him out, when I rode to the travelling merchant at Umm Gurfa al Himera with Wad Tarabish and two of the royal family, Mohammid Wad Ali and Salim Wad Ali. The herdsmen had run out of the chewing tobacco that they craved, and Himera was the only place nearby where it could be obtained. It was normally a full day’s journey, but Wad Tarabish said that by travelling fast, we could ride there and back in a day.

  We set off soon after sunrise. The Arabs were all riding superb racing camels and carrying their rifles. Salim, known to everyone by the nickname Shawish, was mounted on his famous racer Wad aj Jaddi, ‘The Son of the North Star’. He was a tall, handsome lad, dignified and intelligent. Mohammid was a little younger, a lightly built youth with a reserved manner. Both of the men wore their hair in great uncut plumes, still in mourning for Sheikh al Murr.

  After half an hour, Mohammid spotted four gazelles in a grove of thorn trees and slipped silently off his camel to give chase. I watched him as he disappeared into the bushes, a slim figure with his hair sticking up like iron filings on a magnet. He carried a ·22 hunting rifle in one hand and a tripod in the other, with a thick ammunition belt lapped around his waist. A little later, there was a dull report. Then the Arab came walking back disconsolately, saying, ‘They were too far away. They escaped.’

  We rode fast across a sandy plain and climbed a steep pass into the belly of the Umm Gurfa plateau. It was late afternoon when we came through a gap in the rock wall and saw a Hamdab camp at Himera below us. There were a score of tents, nestling under the black cliffs, and beyond them stretched a plain of semidesert from which rose the red cliffs of plateaux like mystical islands. Around the camp was a forest of sallam trees. The trees were in bloom and the air was sweet with their perfume. Camels and goats browsed at the foot of the rock wall.

  We were welcomed by the Hamdab, who brought us sour milk and a dish of meat. They pressed us to stay, but it was almost sunset and Wad Tarabish said that there was a storm in the air. We bought tea and the tobacco we had come for, tied up in pound bags. Then we said goodbye to the Arabs and rode back quickly up the narrow path into the mountain. Darkness had already fallen, and the storm caught us at the head of the valley. The night was split by streaks of lightning and the air was filled suddenly by choking dust. A violent wind hit us from behind, threatening to hurl us from our saddles. ‘Come on!’ Wad Tarabish shouted. ‘We will race the wind!’ We rode fast, coursing forward on the wind-crest like surfers riding a wave, crashing through the screen of dust. We rode four abreast as the dust lashed against us, running ahead of the storm like wild untamed creatures, yelling excitedly as we narrowly missed a bush or a cairn of stones. We rode on regardless of the danger of being thrown or struck by the lightning that scintillated in the sky like fireworks, going faster and faster in the grip of the surging forces of nature that it was beyond us to control.

  By the time we had come down into the valley on the north side of the plateau, the storm had passed. We trotted on in the calm of the night, as the pulsing silver of the stars replaced the violent whiplashes of lightning. It had been the most exhilarating ride of my life.

  The following day, At Tom and the others returned from the north, driving four camels that they had acquired from the Arabs of the desert. Two days later, we said goodbye to the nuggara herdsmen and rode east with our Requisition camels, now more than twenty strong. Salim Wad Hassan had decided to stay with the ilbil; in his place came Juma’ Wad Tarabish. The old man who had come with us as hostage was sent back to his camp.

  We moved over a wild, bleak landscape, where the colours were grey and white, broken only by two volcanic plugs called Tilib al Barik and Tilib al Wilayd. At noon that day, we came down into Wadi Tifrig, where two Haworab tents were pitched by some puddles of muddy water. At Tom sent Wad Fadul to the tents to buy liquid butter, and I went along with him. The tents were surrounded by flocks of goats and inhabited by two women, ragged but beautiful, with braided locks. Two naked boys with currycombs of hair rolled happily on the palm-stalk bed inside one of the tents. The women were friendly and told us that their men had gone north with the camels in search of jizzu. I wondered how they protected themselves in this wild land, and Wad Fadul pointed to a rifle hanging on one of the guy ropes.

  ‘Arab women are not afraid to use it!’ he told me.

  The women sold us butter that we took back to our camp in a glass bottle. Afterwards, At Tom said that we needed more flour, and instructed Wad Fadul to ride to Hamrat ash Sheikh, about a day’s journey south. I volunteered to go with him, anxious to see this tiny settlement that had once been the headquarters of the nazir Sir Ali Wad at Tom.

  It took us five days to collect the flour and find At Tom’s party again. We met them at the pool at Kilagi, where scores of Kababish families had gathered to enjoy the last dregs of the season’s rainwater. We remained there for almost a week, watering our camels and preparing for the next stage of the journey, into the waterless pastures of the jizzu.

  Meanwhile, the work of collecting camels continued, and by the end of the week, our herd numbered about forty head. At Tom decided that Juma’ Wad Siniin, Ibrahim, and Hamid should take them east to the Wadi al Milik, while the rest of us rode north. On the tenth of October, we said farewell to the others and headed to a hidden gelti an hour’s journey from the pool, where we filled our waterskins. We had ten small goatskins and the large cowskin, and as we crouched at the water’s edge, scooping up the liquid in bowls and pouring it into the leather vessels, Wad Fadul said, ‘Fill them well! There is not even a smell of water in the jizzu, and we have no she-camels with us for milk.’

  That night, we camped with an ’Atawiyya family in Wadi Himera, and in the morning awoke to see the desert lying like an amber carpet on all sides. As we rode north that day, the wind whipped across us, bearing a shroud of dust. We wrapped our faces in our headcloths and bent forward into it. The camels struck on into the mist of white sand, through which we could see the fangs of Jabal Shaynat, ground into stumps by the gyrating blast of the wind.

  For several days, we trekked on through a surreal waste of pale moon colours. The sand foamed before us and behind us, and during lulls in the storm, we saw around us mysterious pinnacles, like icing-sugar moulds. The vast landscape played havoc with my sense of scale and speed. At times, it seemed that we moved all day but got nowhere. The horizon was dominated by the fluted hump of Jabal ’Aja, which came into bleary focus in the morning but by midday had retreated into the soupy haze of the sand like a turtle into its shell.

  In some places, the sand was covered with a faint emerald stain from the grass, and in others, it had been roughened into ridges by the woody roots of the tomam. Nowhere amongst these fossils of life was there grazing for our camels, though almost everywhere, the surface spoke of nomads and their animals. The sand was crisscrossed by tracks and scattered with billions of pellets of camel dung. At late afternoon, the wind dropped, leaving a pure azure sky untainted by cloud. Slowly, the yellow egg-yolk of the sun slipped across the ragged skyline and left the world in darkness.

  We moved slowly. Our camels were exhausted after their trek of hundreds of kilometres. The baggage camel went lame, picking up one of his rear legs in a pitiful arc and stumbling haltingly after our caravan. Hunger began to pinch us. We had no firewood and not a single tree was to be found in these wastes. The wind scoured us, and when it dropped, the searing heat of the sun took its place. These endless ergs were beautiful, but they held no comfort. I asked Wad Fadul if he preferred this area or the semidesert further south. ‘If the g
rass grows here, this area has no equal,’ he said. ‘But when there is no grazing, it is a demon of a place.’

  And there was no grazing. We pressed on and on, shrunken with hunger and thirst, lolloping forwards across our saddles as the sun slowly fried us, searching desperately for something to feed our camels. Anything that had grown here had been consumed long ago by herds migrating north or south. At times, our quest seemed hopeless. I was aware that ahead of us, there was nothing but a featureless wasteland for a thousand miles, without shade, without grazing, and without water. It seemed that we were pushing far into unknown country, deep into the remote corners of an uncharted universe. But this was an illusion. Once, not long ago, the Kababish had ranged into the desert hundreds of miles north. Before that, nomads of an unknown race had herded their long-horned cattle as far north as the Mediterranean coast. Some vast change had taken place here. It had turned these pastures into a desolate land. The long hours became days, and the camels bleated with hunger. Wad Fadul said grimly, ‘We go on, but God alone knows what we shall find!’

  Then, one morning, we spied an outcrop of white rocks far in the distance. As we came closer, the rocks resolved into a nest of about twenty camels. Soon, we saw that they were couched on a wide patch of grass, gutub, and khishayn. Our hungry camels saw it, too, and began to trot forwards, drooling. Beyond the camels stood a single tent, like a tiny cell of cool shade in an ocean of nothingness. It was only with difficulty that we managed to drag our animals away long enough to be unloaded. As they grazed, we joined our canvas sheets together and guyed them to saddlebags, covering the surface with blankets to protect them from the throbbing heat.

  Two Arabs emerged from the tent and greeted us with solemn dignity. From inside, I heard the cries of an infant and the soothing voice of a woman. The Arabs belonged to the Ribaygat. They were squat, muscular men with stubbly brown faces, their hair in long, matted shags. They wore nothing but knee-length sirwal, torn and stained to a shade of khaki, with daggers on their left arms and rosary beads curling around their necks. They walked barefoot on the stinging-hot sand.

  One of the men brought us a bowl of sour milk. As we drank in turn, I looked around at the camels on their sparse grazing, and the enormous empty vista of the desert beyond.

  I asked the man, ‘How do you live here? What do you eat?’

  ‘We have only milk,’ he said. ‘But it is enough. What we miss most is tea. We have no sugar and little water to make it.’

  ‘Don’t you shoot game?’ At Tom inquired.

  ‘We sometimes kill a gazelle, but not often these days. The gazelle have gone west and moved farther into the desert. When I was young, there was every kind of game. We shot oryx and addax, and there was addra and ostrich. The gazelle used to be in herds in the wet season. You would see them coming out of the hills, thirty or forty of them together, grazing like goats. Now you never see more than four or five, and you are lucky to see that many. We used to shoot ostrich often. They have piles of meat, and you can fill a pot from the oil in their bodies. We used to find their eggs sometimes. There is plenty of food in an ostrich egg, by God!’

  ‘Why has the game gone?’ Wad Tarabish asked.

  ‘It is the dryness,’ the Ribaygi answered. ‘You remember how the jizzu used to be? All that is gone now. The jizzu has not bloomed properly for years. There are patches of it, around Kantosh and Fashafish. But it is not like the old days.’

  The old days in the jizzu were Mahmoud’s favourite subject, and he explained to At Tom and I how the jizzu life had been the best time of the year. ‘It was hard, by God!’ he said. ‘You might stay in the jizzu for three months, even four. I know men who took their camels as far as Nukheila, even ’Uwaynat, and were gone for five months or more. In all that time, you hardly drank water. You slept on the cold ground shivering from the wind. If you wanted water, it was ten days’ journey, by God!’

  ‘Then why was it so good?’ At Tom demanded drily.

  ‘Because of the camels,’ old Adam cut in. ‘They got fatter and fatter. There was so much milk; you did not know what to do with it. There was no need for water, by God! You could drink milk all day!’

  We moved on in the late afternoon, and the smooth, featureless plain of desert closed in again on all sides. During the afternoon, Adam spotted a single tree. We rode over to it together to see if there were any firewood. Its branches were like the petrified tentacles of a great, dead octopus, and as we reached out to touch them, they broke and dissolved into powder. ‘Termites!’ Adam said. Any termite colony that had lived here had become extinct long ago. We gathered up a few shards of wood and rode back to join the others.

  We saw nothing else for the next two days, and our bodies continued to wither from lack of food. Several times, Wad Fadul found the tracks of gazelles and ran off on foot to look for them. I knew all the arguments for conservation, but they were meaningless here. All that mattered was the ache in my stomach and the desperate craving for meat. I felt sure he would be successful, but always, he came back empty-handed.

  We passed north of the hills of Handaliyat, riding across plains of smooth sand bordered by peaks and knobs of rock hammered into weird shapes by the inexorable process of erosion. Once, we discovered a thick growth of tomam grass. It was useless as grazing, but Mura’fib declared that it could be used instead of firewood. We couched our camels and the Arab instructed us to collect as much of it as we could, while he dug a small T-shaped trench in which he made a fire. The tomam burned with little heat and had to be replenished constantly. In the end, our efforts produced no more than a pot of lukewarm tea.

  As the days passed, I noticed that the Arabs became increasingly sharp and bad-tempered. There were many lessons to be learned in the desert. It removed complications. Its vastness pared away the trappings of men and reduced them to their true scale. Here, At Tom was just another thirsty man; water and food were shared out equally to nobleman, servant, freeman, foreigner, and slave. Equality seemed to be the natural order of the desert. The idea of aristocracy seemed out of place here; it belonged to the Sudan. We were beyond that world in the far-off country of the Sahara.

  At last, we saw the black plug of Jabal Kantosh towering above the plain, and within a few hours, our camels were grazing in the lee of the mountain. Far to the north was a scree of glinting grey stones that turned into a herd of grazing camels, as numerous as termites. To the east, another herd came suddenly into sharp focus on the skyline. After days of deadness, the desert was suddenly full of life.

  The amber shelf of sand was deeply grained with green, but everywhere, the grass was short and cropped by the thousands of animals that had crossed it in the previous weeks.

  As we made camp, setting up our canvas shelter at the foot of Kantosh, several Arabs couched their camels nearby and came to greet us. They shook hands with us one by one and sat in the shade asking for news from the south. Some of them brought us bowls of sour milk, which were cool and refreshing after our long ride.

  We remained in the area of Kantosh for several days. Every morning, the ghaffirs would ride out to the herds, claiming camels or sending the nomads to meet At Tom. Much of the day, our shelter was full of ragged men who begged water and crowded elbow to elbow under the awning as the heat and dust scourged the arid plains. Many migrations passed us. Some would halt near our camp and set up their tents for the night. Now, all the Arabs were moving south. ‘What little grazing there was, is finished,’ Wad Tarabish told me. ‘The Arabs are returning to their dammering places in the south. That means the grazing there will be used up before the summer comes. By next April, the Kababish will be in trouble. Then the herds will start to die.’

  When our water was used up, we had to rely on the milk given to us by the nomads. My companions began to look weak and listless, drained of energy. The wind from the north blew constantly, and it was worse at ground level, for it was here that the heavier dust particles were carried. At midday, the heat and the wind were so savage that we co
uld do little but wrap ourselves in shawls to preserve the moisture in our bodies and lie in the shade until the heat died.

  When the wind dropped in the late afternoon, the desert was breathtakingly beautiful. Then I would walk across the plain with my shotgun, losing myself in the vastness and the last white veil of the blizzard. When all the Arabs and herds were out of view, a feeling of utter loneliness descended on me. For a while, I savoured its bittersweetness, glad to be away for an hour or two from the strain of speaking Arabic and the pressure of practising the manners and customs of a foreign culture. In those moments of relief, I imagined that I could live this life forever. I told myself that I needed nothing more, and I savoured the knowledge that I could survive in this wild land. I had been brought up in a society where everything was provided, yet here I was reduced to survival level, where the decisions a man made were always concerned with life and death. I was still an outsider; perhaps I would never be anything else. Yet already, the environment I had lived in for the last few months had begun to mould me, as it had moulded these nomads for centuries. It was as if, after looking at the world through a single window for almost thirty years, a new and more illuminating one had suddenly opened up.

  When I returned to the camp in the evenings, my companions would greet me, saying, ‘Omar! Come and drink milk!’ I would sit next to them in the sand as the camels burbled around us, and the kaleidoscope of the sunset threw a pattern of colours across the sky. I looked out across the land of emptiness and stark beauty and felt at peace. This was what I had come to see, to feel, to be part of.

  It was almost the end of October when we moved to the Wadi al Milik. We had collected more than ten camels, and now the grazing was gone and the Arabs were moving out of these desolate pastures. The wind dropped obligingly as we struck camp, but the sun came out with redoubled severity, as if in compensation. As we drove our herd on, we were riveted to our saddles, and the heat braised us like boiling fat. We passed through mile upon mile of nothingness, grinding on slowly over low dunes and stunted hills. At night, we camped with some Nurab in the lee of a ring of low sandhills. They were brothers, morose little men dressed in headcloths and tobes, who brought us bowls of sour milk as we made camp in the sand. One of them sat down with us and said, ‘The jizzu is dead. We have been here only two weeks and there is nothing left. The news is all bad. We have nowhere to go but the south, and when the grazing there is finished, God knows what we will do!’