There was no sign of human life, apart from an old, wooden scaffolding over the well shaft. In this season, most of the Arabs who lived in this area were away on their migrations to the south. We unloaded in a copse of arak trees, and turned the camels loose to graze. It was good to see them eating voraciously at last. After the equipment had been dumped, Mohammid and Balla rode down to the wells to fill our skins. The camels scattered along the wadi. Ballal and I took the weapons and went to guard them. I climbed to the top of a sandbar and scanned the desert to the south for riders. The party that had been pursuing us had disappeared as completely as if the sands had opened up and swallowed it whole.
Late that afternoon, we climbed out of the wadi into another great sand sea bordered by the hills of Rahib. I was mesmerised by the strangeness of the world in which I found myself. It was almost as if we were no longer on earth; so strange were the shades and colours of the desolation. Later, we passed through a gorge of rock and came into a gravel plain bordered by a long wall of basalt to the east, and that evening, we moved into the weathered rock massif of Zalat Hammad.
The next morning, I woke to find myself in a fascinating world of rock and gravel. It was a mysterious, primitive world, a world of greys and blacks; a blue carpet of tight stones, scarred with fallen flakes glimmering manganese-red, blocks of sandstone, and deep ranks of cliffs, where amber sand lay in slopping piles. Mohammid went off early and came back saying that there was plenty of grass growing between the rocks. After a discussion, it was decided that we should remain here for the rest of the day so that the camels could graze. El ’Atrun was no more than a day’s journey north, and Mohammid and Ballal would ride to the oasis to prepare the way. Mohammid said that he would see us the next morning at Bir Milani, the southernmost well in the El ’Atrun oasis.
There was little to occupy me all day, so I took my shotgun and went off to explore the sand drifts, dunes, and rock chimneys. After about an hour, I returned to the camp. On the way, I came across another set of prints that had followed my own before turning back. The prints were shoeless and long in step; they could only belong to Balla. I wondered why the Arab had followed me so mysteriously. I did not question him when I arrived in camp, but the thought worried me for the rest of the day.
Just before sunset, Balla and I went to collect the animals. I still carried my shotgun and he took his long-shafted axe. We walked for about twenty minutes before we came across the animals, gathered in the lee of a ridge of shattered rocks and sandstone fragments. Many of the camels had sat down, for the grazing was very sparse and they were tired after the long trek. As we reached the ridge, Balla walked forward slightly, and suddenly, I saw him stiffen. He inched further cautiously and dropped, crouching by a boulder. I watched him, mystified, wondering why he was performing this strange act. Then he beckoned to me and motioned me to keep quiet. As I crouched by him, I saw what he had seen first. About a hundred metres away, a group of men were unsaddling their camels amongst the rocks. The men were short and negroid, wearing long shirts and skullcaps. ‘Slaves!’ Balla hissed. ‘Meidob! They are the bandits who chased us. They will steal our camels.’
I looked at the men carefully. They certainly looked like Meidob, but I saw no sign of weapons, neither did there seem anything overtly sinister about them. Their camels were strung like a caravan, and were not riding animals. I was convinced that they could not be the men who had followed us. ‘You have got a gun,’ Balla said. ‘Kill them! Go around this ridge and shoot them from behind! If you do not, they will put an end to us all!’ At first, I thought he was joking. Then I noticed that his hands were shaking and his breath was coming in short pants. For a second, I wavered. In that moment, my thoughts travelled through an entire gamut of ideas and images: fear, suspicion, amusement, loathing, pity, courage, and cowardice. I had wanted to be accepted by these Arabs. Now I had been asked to pay a price that I could not pay. These men could well have been enemies, and to kill an enemy and take his camels was acceptable to these Arabs. Yet I knew I was not prepared to kill anyone, even bandits. To fight in defence of my companions was one thing, but to initiate the attack was something quite different. ‘I am not going to kill anybody unless they attack me first!’ I said. Balla stared at me with eyes full of hate. I realised that I suspected his motives. Was he merely trying to test my loyalty? If so, how far would he push it? Was he trying to gauge my gullibility? Or could he be intent on stealing Meidob camels with my assistance? Could it be my camel and possessions he was after? Was he just stark-staring crazy? ‘You bastard! Son of the forbidden!’ he swore. ‘You are a disgrace! Give me the gun and I will do it!’ This was even more frightening. Once he had possession of the shotgun, there was no telling what might happen.
‘No one is doing any killing with this gun!’ I told him. Then I walked away with as much dignity as I could muster, feeling his eyes boring with hot anger into my back. I was stunned and numb as I walked back to our camp—out of my depth, lost, and farther from home than ever before. Worse than the fear was a sense of confusion that was enhanced a thousand-fold by the loneliness and desolation around me.
He brought the camels back alone later. After dark we lit a fire and made some kisri. Old Ali seemed quite unaware of the incident, though he knew the Meidob were encamped not far away. This strengthened my conviction that something strange was going on in Balla’s mind. We sat apart from each other and treated one another with polite forbearance. I felt that the root of the problem was that we did not understand each other; we were men from different worlds, too far apart to touch without willingness on both sides. Balla had no such willingness, nor the obligation for it. By far the most frightening aspect was the fact that we were 200 miles from the nearest settlement, outside any kind of jurisdiction in the hard, raw face of the real world, where personalities counted more than laws. I knew now why St Exupéry had called the desert ‘the land of men’. Yet I was determined not to lose control, and was proud that I had mastered my emotions. I was afraid, but I would not give in an inch to fear. Danger was always to be expected in the desert and could come from any quarter, but I had never expected it to come from within.
That night, I lay down with my shotgun near me and my pistol in the pocket of my jibba. It was the most terrifying night of my life, fraught with fears and confusion, but it was a night in which I learned something of myself and of these desert people. I awoke the next day to the realisation that if I had ever regarded my travels in the desert as a game, that game was now over. Only the cold, desperate realities of survival were left for me to pursue.
_____8._____
Bringing Back the Salt
A desolation of desolations. An infernal
region. I have passed through it and
now have no fear of the hereafter.
Ewart Grogan, quoted in The Sudan Today, 1970
IT TOOK UNTIL SUNSET THE next day to reach Bir Milani. Wad at Tafashan collapsed twice in the afternoon. Both times, we managed to pound him into life again, and though he staggered to his feet, there was a glazed look in his eyes that told me death was not far away. I knew that a camel would continue until the point of utter exhaustion, then just sit down and die. Wad at Tafashan had already gone beyond his physical limit, and would survive now only on the power of the will. Ironically, I thought, the same applied to myself; this harsh land had no mercy on man or beast.
We moved slowly, drooping from hunger and fatigue. The plain seemed to go on and on. To the east was the massive hogsback of Jabal Bint Umm Bahr (‘Daughter of the Sea’). It seemed a ludicrous name for a hill in this arid place. We were moving towards what looked like a white cliff, under which was a seam of black rocks. As the hours passed, the rocks took on a soft and fuzzy aspect, but it was not until we were almost upon them that I realised they were trees. They were growing out of a mass of steep dunes. As the sun cast long, grey shadows across the sand beside us, we stalked in amongst them. Here in the midst of nothing was an island of life.
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p; We found a place between the dunes and began to unload. Before it was quite dark, Mohammid and Ballal found us. We made porridge and afterwards, I flopped down on my sheepskin. I knew that there was a chance now for my camel to survive, and at least I had reached El ’Atrun, which had been my goal for so long. I had never dreamt that the way here would require so much in tears, toil, and sweat.
The next morning, we crossed the plain towards the limestone ridge that hid the salt pan from our view. As we moved closer, I noticed two palm trees to the east, and to the west, a small grove of palms that marked the wells. At the same time, a great caravan emerged from the misty sheen of the valley, coming directly towards us. The camels were dark spectres on the dust flats, striding on unswervingly like robots. Each animal carried two bloated leather bags of salt and was strapped to the beast in front by a leather rope. Four men walked with the caravan. They were Arabs of Darfur with dark and hooded faces. They passed without waving or turning aside, stalking on south as if mesmerised by some great power.
Under the palm trees, there were no permanent wells. Instead, there was a wet area, where the surface was covered with a growth of spiky hallif grass, where pits had been dug out for generations. We spent most of the morning digging out one of these pits with shovel and mattock. It was hard work, for we were still weak with hunger. Slowly, the pit filled up with green water. It smelt of sulphur and tasted slightly brackish. Mohammid said, ‘You will be running to the wadi when you drink this stuff!’ His prediction proved correct, and later in the day, when I was attacked by severe stomach cramps, I found for the first time amongst the Kababish that I had developed diarrhoea.
Our camels kicked and fought to get near the water, and we had to keep them off with sticks and whips. Wad at Tafashan was the last to drink. As I watched him sucking up the liquid, I felt a deep sense of relief—his chances of survival were steadily becoming greater.
When all the camels had drunk, we re-saddled them and led them on to the salt pans beyond the ridge. The salty crust of the earth glistened white in the sun. The place was dotted with nests of sacks and ranks of miniature slag heaps that had been thrown up over the years. Lines of camels were couched across it, and there was the sound of picks and shovels as a score of men worked on the salt. To the west stood the glittering hulk of a Fiat truck. To the east was the humpback spur of Jabal Toli’a, squatting like a watchtower over the workings. On the rim of the salt pan was a ragged line of shacks that housed the oasis’s population of salt diggers.
There was nothing here but the severe and comfortless panorama of the desert.
We settled our camels, calling out a greeting to the men nearby. They called back, but did not stop work. We dropped our equipment and Mohammid and Ballal drove the camels off to the dunes below Toli’a, where there were some sallam trees in leaf. Before he left, Mohammid said, Tomorrow, you can go and look after the camels. You will be no good at digging the salt so you may as well do something useful!’
The surface of the salt sheet was scarred and blistered by the workings of nomads over hundreds of years and smothered by the droppings of their camels. After we had eaten, we laid out our tools and stripped down to the waist, ready to work on the salt. The ground was soft and easy to break with a pick, and the salt seam lay about eighteen inches below the surface. I swung the axe, delighting in the chance to exercise some different muscles. Again and again I attacked the ground, splitting the soft calcium crust and sending up showers of dust, totally lost in the new frenzy of activity. When I stopped to rest for a moment, I noticed old Ali and Balla digging a few yards away. They wielded their tools feebly, with ineffectual movements of the forearms that produced poor results. I saw at once that neither had a clue about using a pick and shovel. I had been afraid that I should be embarrassed once more by their superlative skill, and this turn of events amused me so much that I began to laugh. Both of them stopped work and looked at me.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ Ali asked.
‘Nothing!’ I replied, grinning maliciously. I remembered then that nomads hate manual work. The look of utter distaste on their faces was hilarious. I had been schooled well in the art of entrenching in the army, and knew the technique inside out. There was a right and a wrong way. It was childish but incomparably sweet to wreak a little vengeance on them at their own game.
The chunks of pinkish crystal we turned up were natron—sodium carbonate. Such deposits were probably the residue left from ancient seas that had long ago evaporated. This rock salt had been in use for at least 2,000 years and was one of the crucial secrets of the embalming process in ancient Egypt. There were several such salt oases in the Libyan desert and Herodotus told of a caravan route that united them all. El ’Atrun was the most renowned, as it was the first main station on the Darb al ’Arba’in—the ancient trade route from Darfur to Egypt. The first European known to have visited it was W. G. Browne, who had come here in 1793 and found the Kababish Arabs with their camels. Douglas Newbold and William Shaw, the first men to explore the south Libyan desert, had been here in 1927 and found Kababish of the Umm Mattu and ’Atawiyya with 300 camels. Eleven years later, Wilfred Thesiger had been here on his first desert journey and had caused a scare, his party being mistaken for an Italian invasion force.
In the past, the oasis had often been threatened by raiders of the Gur’an from the nearby Ennedi mountains in Chad. The British had stationed a detachment of camel corps at Jabal Toli’a, then known as Jabal Kashafa, and the sangar that they had built still stood on the sugarloaf summit of the hill. The salt pans had been raided by Sir Ali Wad at Tom’s men in 1911, and they had returned with a small herd of stolen camels.
When Mohammid and Ballal returned, they were surprised to see the piles of the red mineral that had appeared in their absence. Mohammid examined my pile and weeded out some of the lumps, which he said were too diluted with earth. Then the two of them stripped down and we worked together solidly until sunset. By this time, we were knee-deep in the salt, and our hands were blistered and raw from digging. The salt entered our cuts, bursting blisters and making them sting badly. After dark, a cold wind dragged across the workings. We made a fire sheltered by our saddlery. As we sat around it, Balla said, ‘Of course, cutting salt is really the work of slaves.’ The others snickered at his obvious meaning, but I said nothing. I noticed with secret satisfaction that nothing more was said about my looking after the camels. The next morning, Mohammid went off to them without a word.
It was pleasant to flex my muscles in the cool of the morning, but as the sun climbed higher, the effort became harder. Gusts of wind blew the caustic salt dust into my eyes, ears, and mouth, while the sun baked my skin from above. My movements grew steadily weaker as the lack of nutrition took effect. This backbreaking, laborious work required steak to sustain it. Around noon, Mohammid returned from the east, and I decided I could continue no longer. I had already piled up twice as much as the others, and I could see that my companion was pleased. I put on my shirt and went with him to visit the tiny settlement.
The huts were crudely made of timber and sacking. The place was almost deserted, for the workers who lived here were all on the salt pans, where they filled sacks for the large trucks at £S3 a sack. Many of them were former slaves of Kababish families who had found a lucrative yet hardly comfortable trade here in El ’Atrun. As we walked between the shacks, we were called over by a group of youths. They were not Arabs but had the broad, black faces of townsmen and wore long Arab shirts that looked clean and white beside our mould-yellow garments. They greeted us with the short townsman’s greeting, which seemed very abrupt now I had become familiar with that of the nomads.
The men told us that they had come from Darfur by truck and were travelling to Libya. They would complete the journey on camels, which they had already bought from passing salt caravans. They were waiting for a guide to reach the oasis with the main party. The border between Libya and the Sudan was officially closed for diplomatic reasons, though the Li
byans often welcomed workers from the Sudan to augment their tiny workforce. Hundreds of Sudanese migrated there every year, many of them by camel. But the way was dangerous between El ’Atrun and Kufra, and many townsmen, unaccustomed to the desert, had died on the way. Many others had been turned away at the border post at ’Uwaynat, and had been forced to’ return to the Sudan on exhausted camels.
The youths were bright and optimistic, and talked about schools and jobs, about the government politics. They were educated and informed and knew the workings of the world. Mohammid leaned against the hut, bored by the talk, which meant nothing to him. It occurred to me suddenly and very clearly that these men and I were from the same culture, the same environment. They were black and spoke Arabic, yet they lived in the same dimension as myself. It was a dimension from which Mohammid and my other companions were excluded. Later, though, the tables were turned when one of the youths asked Mohammid, ‘Don’t you have any camel’s milk for us?’
Mohammid looked at him incredulously and replied, ‘Are you mad? Is this the place to find camel’s milk?’ Then he got up and said, ‘Come Omar, let us find some sacks for our salt.’
As we walked away, he muttered, ‘Slaves! They are all talk but they know nothing, by God!’ We bought some sacks from a huge fat negro who sold food to the salt workers. He told us that he had originally come here as a worker and had used the profit he had made to set up as a small trader. He had originally belonged to the ’Ol of Sheikh Hassan himself.
We returned to the digging in the early afternoon. The others had stopped for a rest and were sitting in the shade of a canvas sheet. Mohammid and I had brought eight camels with us. Each one, except for Wad at Tafashan, would carry two bags of salt each weighing about three gontar. This meant that each camel would be shifting almost 600 pounds, which was maximum capacity even for such camels as these. Only Mohammid’s riding camel would be spared this weight, and would carry lighter bags. As I worked in my pit, Mohammid sorted the natron into piles, throwing away the dross and preparing the stuff ready for sacking. By the end of the afternoon, we had enough to fill ten bags.
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