A Desert Dies

by Michael Asher

  The desert was the familiar colour of apricot, wind-furrowed and silent except for the crunch of camels’ feet and the occasional eerie musical note which seemed to be produced by the wind on the rocks. Fadlal Mula said it was the crying of the jinn who inhabited these lonely places. ‘You cannot see them, but they are here just the same.’ The breeze flowed over the bed of sand like the sea tide, whispering like a voice in the chasm of my ear. There was little talk between us, and my mind was still and quiet, taking in the emptiness and the beauty, and the unresolved miracle of myself and this Arab riding across it.

  At midday, we found a patch of yellow grass and stopped to let the camels graze. Fadlal Mula made a flat loaf of bread that he called Umm Duffan. He mixed flour and water to make the dough, flattening it on a stone then burying it in the sand beneath the ashes of the fire. After a while, he dug it up and tapped off the ash and dust with a stick. Then he broke it up into a pan and poured oil over it. It made a change from porridge.

  We rode for many hours in the afternoon, and the mountain came closer. Padlal Mula told me, ‘In Jabal Musawwira, there are pictures. There are pictures of cows and men and houses. They are very old. They were made before the time of the English. They say there is a serpent living in a well there, and that the serpent guards a hidden treasure.’

  ‘Do you think it is true?’

  ‘Yes, I have seen the tracks of the serpent. Some Arabs have seen the serpent itself.’

  Just before the sun set, we led our camels over the rockpiles of Musawwira and came down into a grove where some gigantic boulders were covered in carvings of long-horned cows, jumping matchstick men, and square huts. There seemed to be two distinct styles, but neither was of great artistic merit. I wondered who had made them, and in what era. Cows had not grazed in these pastures for millennia. The artists were certainly nomads who had ranged through these lands when they were quite different from the arid wastes of today. The Kababish had replaced them, perhaps even absorbed some of them. The cattle nomads had disappeared, pushed south by the great changes that had taken place here. Now it was the turn of their successors.

  Fadlal Mula seemed anxious to move, and I wondered unfairly if he were afraid of meeting the serpent. I chaffed him cruelly about this and he said, defensively, ‘You will believe it when you see its tracks!’ But the only tracks we saw that evening were those of two hyenas. There was a churned up area of sand where they had fought and few drops of blood on the surface. The fact that these animals could survive here seemed more wonderful to me than any serpent.

  Soon after darkness fell, we came down into the valley and saw the dim light of a fire. ‘We have arrived,’ my companion said. In a few moments, we were riding in amongst thick shadows of trees, where woodsmoke hung on the night like a cobweb. There were several fires smouldering around us, and the soft murmur of voices in the shadows. I could smell the rich odours of camels and goats. We couched our camels by the dark shape of a tent, where a young Arab came out to greet us. He was Mohammid Wad Fadlal Mula, who was to be my companion on the long-awaited journey to El ’Atrun.

  Part 2

  The Journey to El ’Atrun

  _____7._____

  A Small Salt Caravan

  A land whose beauty is the beauty of a

  moment, whose face is desolate,

  whose character is strangely stem.

  Winston Churchill, The River War, 1899

  I AWOKE TO THE CRACK of a gunshot and the thump of a bullet as it struck the air. I rolled out of my blanket in alarm. Only a few feet away, Fadlal Mula and his son stood, holding what appeared to be antique rifles. The air was full of the sour scent of cordite and a thin wisp of smoke still hung round the two Arabs. They were small men, no more than 5’ 5” in height, dressed in old shirts and sirwal. Their clothes were stained the usual nicotine-yellow and torn in many places. Both wore woollen caps set back on their shaven skulls, and cracked skin sandals on their feet. Mohammid grinned as he noticed my alarm. His father walked up to a thorn tree a few yards away, running his bony hand along its trunk. ‘Missed!’ he said. ‘See, these old guns are no good!’ Then both father and son came to shake hands and wish me good morning.

  We sat down on our canvas sheets near the tent. It was a single shugga of camel hair slung over a crude frame. Nearby, a woman was working over a fire on which a black kettle was vibrating. She was a lean, dark figure dressed in a skirt of coarse blue cotton. She looked worn and wrinkled, and there were flashes of silver in her plaited hair. Nevertheless, she held a tiny infant to one dark breast as she worked.

  Fadlal Mula handed me his rifle. It was a single-shot breechloader, badly pitted with rust. ‘My father had it made,’ he said.

  ‘How do you get the bullets?’ I asked.

  ‘We make them here,’ he told me, holding up a brass cartridge case containing a flat-nosed bullet. They are not very accurate. But they always kill if they hit the target!’

  Soon the woman brought a pot of tea and some dates, which she set before us. We produced our enamel mugs and Fadlal Mula poured out the thick black liquid with great ceremony. It was bitter and very hot, and we sipped it with the loud, slurping sound that manners demanded. ‘We have no sugar,’ declared the Arab mournfully. ‘But eat some dates with the tea. They will sweeten it: As I drank, I surveyed the scene before me. The hearth area where the woman worked was enclosed on one side by a fence of thorn branches and on the other by the tent. Within those few square feet of ground lay almost everything the Arabs owned: saddles, cooking pots, saddlebags, ropes, waterskins, and grindstones.

  I noticed that young Mohammid was regarding me with keen interest. I returned his stare. I guessed that he was assessing me and wondering how we should get on in the desert. He looked about twenty years old, as lightly built as his father, but with a broad head that seemed a little top-heavy on his frame. He had a wide, rather cruel smile and often broke into raucous, madcap laughter. After a while he said, ‘You don’t look all that strong to me. Can you lift a sack of rock salt?’

  ‘I have never tried it.’

  ‘It is very heavy,’ he said.

  ‘No, Omar is blest,’ cut in his father. ‘His coming is lucky for you. Without him, you would have to go alone.’

  Mohammid did not seem impressed. ‘Why do you want to go to Al Ga’a?’ he inquired. ‘Your camel will not carry enough salt to sell in the market. Is there something else you are looking for?’

  ‘I want to see it, that is all,’ I replied, realising that Al Ga’a was the Arabs’ word for El ‘Atrun.

  He looked at me as if I were completely mad. ‘The way is hard and dangerous,’ he said. ‘There are bandits of the Meidob on the way. They would slit your throat for nothing.’

  ‘God is generous,’ I said. The young Arab grinned again and showed his yellow teeth. ‘Perhaps you will be all right,’ he declared.

  The treasure to be found at El ’Atrun was rock salt, which the Kababish had been mining there for centuries. The mineral was essential for their herds and flocks, and could also be sold in local markets at a considerable profit. They had once carried on a lucrative trade in the stuff, though in recent years, much business had been wrested from them by the owners of the great Fiat lorries that carried tons of it to distant towns every month.

  Mohammid and I walked around the camp. There were half a dozen families living there, and as we went from tent to tent, a small crowd gathered around us. The women in their blue cotton skirts, many of them holding brown babies, stared at me and asked questions. Mohammid related my story patiently. ‘He is from the Ingleez. He was with the nazir at Umm Sunta. Yes, that camel was given to him by the nazir’s son.’ From our short tour, I glimpsed the hardship of life here on the edges of the great desert. The greatest problem was scarcity of water. Though there were several wells sunk into the damp grey clay on the edge of the camp, I noticed that most of them were dry. The two that produced water did so very slowly. This meant that the Arabs had to take turns filling
their waterskins or watering their animals, and the wells were always surrounded by people. Peering down one of the shafts, I saw with shock the features of an Arab leering back at me from the shadows within. Mohammid smiled at my surprise and said, ‘He is digging it out, but it is foolish, by God! Soon, all the wells will be dry and we will have to move.’

  ‘Why do you stay?’ I asked. Mohammid pointed to the other side of the camp, beyond a grove of siyaal trees, where I saw a plot of green millet, standing up like rows of soldiers on parade. The millet,’ he said. ‘As soon as it is ripe, we shall go.’

  ‘I thought cultivation was unlawful in this rangeland,’ I said.

  ‘They say it is,’ the Arab answered nonchalantly.

  ‘But who is to prevent us, here in the desert?’

  ‘But is it not a disgrace to grow crops?’ The youth laughed again. ‘Of course not. If we settled down and became farmers—if we stopped moving, then we should become like the slaves. But we will never do that. The millet will feed us for a year, and we will not have to sell our camels.’

  As soon as it was dark, we brought the camels into the camp and hobbled them. Campfires flickered amongst the siyaal groves and the night was pregnant with woodsmoke. We laid our canvas sheets near the fire, for the nights had turned cold, and Hawa, my host’s wife, brought a wide dish of sorghum porridge. It was a pinkish mess drowned in sour goat’s milk. Mohammid told me that they preferred camel’s milk, but there were no she-camels in the oasis.

  Shortly after we had eaten, a crowd of men came to visit us. They appeared out of the darkness one by one in their torn shirts and rags of headcloths. They crouched near the fire, squinting at me in the flickering light, holding their weapons out before them. After a few moments of silence, they would get up and, with great consciousness of their dignity, disappear again into the night. I realised they had come just to look.

  When they had all left, Mohammid, Fadlal Mula, and I covered ourselves with our blankets and lay down to sleep. The fire began to die and the heavy scent of woodsmoke seemed to drench our clothes. Soon, there was no sound but the rhythmic breathing of animals and men.

  The only disadvantage of the sleeping place was that it was infested with dung beetles. These small, black insects were very industrious in constructing smooth, round clots of dung about the size of golf balls. They would wheelbarrow the balls with their powerful rear legs on a desperate safari across my canvas sheet. As I extended my hand to halt their progress, I would be rewarded with a handful of wet dung. I knew that in ancient Egypt, the dung beetle, or scarab, had been a powerful symbol: one of the guises of Amun-Ra and the incarnation of the sun. But then, I told myself, no ancient Egyptian had been forced to sleep with them as bedfellows.

  I stayed at lidayn for three days. I was anxious to set off, but water was scarce and we had to wait to fill our skins. There was no other water source between lidayn and Wadi Howar, about six days away. In addition, the Sarajab had strong taboos about which days were propitious for journeys. They would not start on Wednesdays, Fridays, or Sundays.

  On the evening of the second day, I discovered that I had acquired yet another set of bedfellows: lice. They seemed to lie dormant in the waistband of my sirwal during the day, only to sally forth on a guerilla raid during the night. They did not bite, but were extremely irritating. I was unable to wash my clothes because of the lack of water. These Sarajab never washed anything for the same reason. They wore their clothes until they dropped into rags. The pots were left out to dry in the sterilising sun, but clothes were never washed. The lice were the only effect of this lack of hygiene that bothered me.

  We filled in some of the time hunting for hares and gazelles in the hills. Mohammid showed me how to use the gazelle traps. The trap consisted of a piece of thickly plaited straw, twisted into a wheel about six inches in diameter. From the rim of the wheel, a number of spokes extended inwards, leaving a small opening. The animal’s leg would pass through the opening and the gazelle would be unable to withdraw it because of the sharpened spokes. The trap would be fixed over a pit and camouflaged with sand and vegetation. It seemed that the gazelles in this region were wise to the trick, for we never caught anything.

  During my stay, I was constantly visited by people who did not disguise the fact that they were just curious to look at me. I suppose I was the first European many of them had seen and they wondered why I had come to their remote world. ‘Why are you going to Al Ga’a?’ was the question they all asked, and they never seemed satisfIed with my answer. One night, after I had retired, I heard one of Mohammid’s cousins saying to him, ‘How do you know he is not a bandit? He might kill you in the desert and steal your camels! I advise you not to go with him.’ At first, this seemed so ridiculous that I felt like laughing. Then I realised how real had been the fear in his voice and how serious it might be to begin the journey with such suspicion between us. It was only then that I felt how utterly remote this place was, and just how isolated these Arabs were. To them, I was a nobody from a tribe they did not know and a place they had never even heard of. I saw how lucky I had been to ride with the Nurab, who understood where I was from, simply because the nazir had been there. Yet I was proud of Mohammid when he answered, ‘I am afraid of no one, not the Meidob, nor the Gur’an, nor the Zaghawa. And I am not afraid of him!’ As I lay there, feigning sleep, I began to appreciate the real courage of this young Arab.

  Life in the oasis seemed to grind on at its own pace. For the women this was literally true, for they spent much of their time grinding grain on their hand mills. This type of mill had been used in the Sahara for thousands of years, probably with little alteration although several different types had been found in neolithic sites in the desert. I often watched Hawa as she placed a few grains at a time on the stoop of the base-stone and let them trickle down as she ground them, sweeping the flour into a bowl every few minutes. After an hour or so, her little daughter, aged about nine, would take over and begin grinding furiously. It might take several hours to produce enough flour for one meal.

  Every morning, the women milked the goats and made liquid butter. The milk was poured into a special skin and slung on ropes from the branch of a tree. Hawa would shake the vessel briskly from side to side until the liquid butter separated from the buttermilk. The liquid was considered a great delicacy and often stored in glass bottles held in leather pouches.

  I found it strange that the children here were shy and reserved, even with each other. I thought that this reflected the bitter hardship of life here, which gave them little chance for amusement. Children were set to herd animals almost as soon as they could walk, and the small boys spent most of the day herding the house camels or preventing the goats and sheep from entering the cultivated land. Mohammid had a brother, a little younger than himself, who was off with the camel herd further south.

  On the afternoon of the second day, Mohammid and I took two camels and rode out into the belly of the hills to collect fodder, which would be food for our caravan on the way to El ’Atrun. We climbed the steel-grey slopes of Jabal ’Aja and were rewarded with a view of lidayn. It lay like a pool of perfect green on the pastel plain, ringed by an atoll of hills with jagged black peaks and walls of orange. We found a dry watercourse that was lined with good grasses. We had a number of rope baskets to fill. I had never imagined that there was a particular skill to pulling up grass, but I was wrong. At first, I tried to pull with a twisting action, my thumb pointing downwards. Within minutes, my hands were blistered and bleeding. Mohammid laughed unmercifully. ‘Don’t you know how to pull up grass? That is ridiculous! Every child knows how to do that! Look, like this.’ He grasped the stalks with his thumb uppermost and jerked downwards. The grass broke off perfectly. ‘Just like a camel eating!’ he said. As my hands were already sore, I found the correct method difficult, and as the day wore on, it became increasingly obvious that I was far behind my companion. While he was filling his second basket, my first was only half full. He said nothing more
, but I guessed that he was scoffing inside. I knew enough about desert Arabs to understand that they made no allowances for outsiders.

  On the third day, after sunset, Mohammid and I took our bedding down to the wells to spend the night there. We wanted to be sure of filling our waterskins. As usual, there was a crowd of people there, mainly girls and young men. The girls were beautiful, with copper skin and fine-boned faces. Their braided hair was slicked with butter and fell in bunches across their shoulders. They wore skirts of the familiar blue cotton and wraps of coloured cloth across their upper bodies. Many of them wore gold nose rings and earrings, and heavy silver bracelets on their ankles and wrists. It seemed that the wells were a social centre after dark, where young men tried to show off to the women and to each other. That evening, one such young man, rather thin and weak looking, was declaring in a loud voice his intention of riding to Libya on his camel. ‘I am going to become a rich man there!’ he was saying. ‘I will come back with thousands of dinars!’

  ‘Be sure to bring me a new rug,’ smiled one of the coquettes.

  ‘And Hassan,’ cut in another young lady, ‘be sure to bring me a new set of cooking pots.’

  ‘And do not forget to bring me a sheepskin,’ piped up a third girl. ‘A good one, mind you!’

  The women burst into giggles. Hassan suddenly realised that they were mocking him and went silent. Mohammid laughed with the womenfolk. I began to realise how powerful the women were in this society, and how effectively they could dismiss any man who was over-boastful or inadequate.

  The next day, we began to prepare our equipment. Mohammid laid out his four pack saddles and cut lengths of wood that he fixed between the saddle horns. These were special adaptations for the heavy salt packs we were to carry. We tested and rolled spare waterskins, and Mohammid twisted new hobbles out of wool. By midmorning, everything was laid out on the oasis floor. Our riding camels would carry riding saddles that would support all our provisions. These consisted of a bag of sorghum flour and the millet flour I had brought from Efayn, with a smaller bag of unmilled grain that Mohammid told me we should drink with our tea. We also had dates, tea, some sugar saved for the journey, and a bottle of liquid butter. It seemed pathetically little for a journey of more than 400 miles in a waterless, comfortless, shadeless wasteland. I had to remind myself that for the Sarajab, such meagre rations were normal. Mohammid had his rifle and I had my shotgun and pistol. Each of us carried a dagger, a mattock, a pick, and shovel for the salt, a long staff of inderab wood for lifting the sacks, some matches and a torch. I had my whip and Mohammid his camel stick. Our saddlebags held cooking pots and kettles, and we carried two full girbas of water. Apart from this, we had our canvas sheets, sheepskins, blankets, and very little else.