A Desert Dies

by Michael Asher

  The oval shadow of Ras Tagaru loomed up beyond the horizon. After sunset, we camped to the east of the inselberg. We ate another miserable meal and retired unsatisfied. The same gnawing pinch of hunger kept me awake all night, and in the morning, we were up again before the sun rose, working frantically. Now, there seemed nothing so important in the world as getting this salt back home. It was not my salt, but these Arabs had thrown down the gauntlet to me with their mockery, and I was determined that I should neither weaken nor fail. Some astonishing atavistic instinct seemed to have me in its grip. I was utterly drained of energy, yet I suddenly seemed to be able to call upon new sources of power that I had scarcely known existed. I was working on the level of instinct. I was pure aggression, pure survival. My companions growled at me and I growled back. I could have eaten anything, hunted and destroyed. I could have killed. Only survival seemed to matter, and bringing back the salt. I no longer felt fear; that was behind me now. I did not understand Balla’s hostility, but I no longer cared. I was a desperate predatory animal, longing for the pain and the hunger to end; yet something inside me wanted it to continue forever; so intense had the experience become.

  The next time Balla said, ‘You are not a real man!’ I was ready for him. I stopped abruptly and fixed him with a piercing stare. He stopped walking, thinking that I would strike him. Instead, I thrust my whip into his hand and said. ‘If you think you are such a man, strike, by God!’ Then I turned my back on him and stripped off my jibba in a single movement. The cold wind touched my bare flesh and turned it to goose bumps. ‘You asked for it!’ I heard him say. I stood tensing myself for the blow. I told myself that whatever happened I must not flinch or cry out. I remembered Juma’ saying, ‘The first lash is like fire! It is harder than the knife!’ I heard the faint swish as the whip came down. Then there was a thump as the lash struck the sand beside me. I turned back and saw Balla giggling sheepishly. I put out my hand for the whip and he returned it carefully. ‘You could not endure it!’ he blustered.

  ‘You had your chance!’ I snarled back.

  ‘Come on, you fools!’ Mohammid said. ‘Or the camels will sit down. Then we shall be stuck!’

  All day, I was unable to get the thought of food off my mind. No matter how I tried to redirect my thoughts, I always ended up imagining a feast. I thought longingly of some dates I had once given away and about the lizard we had eaten at Al Ku’. I thought of the goat-milk sauce we had had at lidayn and even of the wildcat Wad Ballal had killed in Darfur. Only my chewing tobacco kept me going, and that had now dwindled to almost nothing. I was obliged to follow the Arab practice, spitting out the chewed lump into a container so that it could be chewed again.

  That afternoon, we were back in the jizzu. Mohammid told me that there had been good pastures east of Tagaru in past years, though now there was little but a few clumps of nissa. Occasional rings of camel droppings were a reminder of those more prosperous times. Once, we passed two fennec foxes that dashed for their earth as we went by. ‘Supper!’ Balla said, and he and Mohammid went off to hunt them while I took the caravan on. I did not object this time. They came back with the foxes half an hour later. Mohammid described how they had dug them out of the earth and strangled them. One of them had bitten Balla badly on the hand.

  That evening, after we stopped and unloaded, we sat down to cook the foxes. There was no firewood, so Mohammid suggested that we should collect all the dried camel dung that we could find. There was plenty of it scattered about, and Balla and I emptied two saddlebags and went off to collect it with our torches. The dung was in flat, brown pats, which was the best type for burning. It was as hard and brittle as wood. Mohammid piled it up in the hearth and set light to it, crouching and blowing hard for many minutes, until it began to smoke and glow. It gave out little heat. Balla skinned the two animals. They looked very small and fragile. I helped him to cut up the carcasses, already licking my lips. I could have eaten them raw, so hungry for meat had I become. Soon, the enticing smell of cooking flesh filled the air. When it was ready, we ate ravenously, dipping our hands into the pot and tearing at the gristly joints with our teeth. I hardly noticed the taste. It was meat—that was all that mattered.

  Afterwards, we sat by the smoky ashes. I still felt hungry, but the meat had dulled the acuteness of the hunger. Mohammid began to sing, the same haunting camel song that he always sang. Above us, the stars were very bright, and there were some familiar constellations: Taurus, Orion, and the Pleiades. The camels chattered and spluttered somewhere in the darkness. Mohammid’s melody seemed to hold back the yawning emptiness that assaulted us from without and within.

  When we loaded at dawn, I felt dizzy. As I lifted the sacks, the surroundings went out of focus and a heavy weight seemed to swim in my head. I shook myself sharply to get rid of the feeling, but it recurred several times. The sun was hot that morning, and we had three weary stops to pick up fallen loads. Just as everything seemed to be going smoothly at last, one of Balla’s camels cast both sacks, which burst and threw chunks of salt across the sand. ‘Now we shall have to stop!’ Balla declared. It was afternoon, the hottest part of the day, and the sun was fiercer than usual. We couched the camels one by one and dropped the bags. We had to empty out the broken sacks, careful not to waste anything, even the salt dust, before Balla restitched them with his packing needle. Meanwhile, Mohammid and I tried to make a shelter. We had no uprights on which to sling our canvas, so we buried our rifles up to the stocks and threw the sheet over them. When the work was finished, we all crowded into the shade, curling up side by side and trying to keep our limbs out of the sunlight.

  I must have fallen asleep, for I awoke to find an Arab standing over us. He was a Kabbashi wearing a jibba and a long headcloth furled around his head and neck. He carried a dagger but no rifle. Mohammid and Balla did not get up, but blinked at him lazily. ‘I need some water,’ he told us. ‘I have got some goats here, but my water has run out.’ He held up a goatskin. Mohammid shifted himself resentfully and, half asleep, poured half of the contents of our skin into the Arab’s vessel. The Arab thanked us. When he had walked away, our eyes turned instinctively back to the waterskin. There was only enough water left to make tea.

  After it had been made and drunk, Mohammid said, ‘That is the last we have to drink. Now we will see who the real men are!’

  Somehow, we managed to load for the second time that day. Then we set off, going slightly east of south, towards the blank horizon beyond which, still miles away, Jabal ’Aja stood. It was desperate going now. The camels lurched on, shattered by the weight of the salt. We were too thirsty to talk, and as the cold night fell, we went on silently. The first quarter moon came out, misted by the dust. At midnight, we made camp. As soon as the camels were unloaded, we curled up in our blankets, protected from the wind by our saddlery. There was to be no meal tonight, no tea, not even a sip of water. We had not eaten since the previous evening, and my stomach felt as if it had been twisted and strained by an invisible hand. As I lay down to sleep, I thought, ‘So this is what hunger is really like!’ I nursed my aching stomach all night, and no sleep came.

  The next day, thirst took over. Until then, I had thought of little but food. Now my mind seemed to hunt down images of succulent fruit, long, cool drinks, and cascading water—vivid, detailed pictures drawn from deep within my memory. My mouth and throat felt scarred and pitted, as if they had been cleaned with a wire brush, and a stinging pain in the kidneys had me doubled over the saddle. The camels limped on, near to the point of collapse. The sun came up like a beacon and rained its streams of fire, but I knew that we were lucky. In summer, we should have been seriously ill by now.

  We were hoping to see the outline of Jabal ’Aja that morning, but we crested horizon after horizon without spotting it. Every inch of ground seemed agony. When I tried to speak, my words came out in a drunken drawl. Mohammid and Balla complained of headaches, and there were slicks of dry white saliva on their lips. My own head seemed to roar
like a furnace.

  I had the familiar feeling that we were getting nowhere. The horizon was continually blank, and only the sun moved to show that the time was passing. It seemed that we were doing no more than marking time, marching on the same spot as the temperature shifted from cold to hot and then to cold again. At last, Mohammid said, ‘There must be a migration nearby. I am going to get some water.’ Balla and I took the camels on, watching the youth as he trotted off into the distance.

  We did not speak. We were both bent over our pommels and rocked steadily back and forth to the hypnotic rhythm of the camels’ tread. I hardly dared hope that Mohammid would be successful. Within an hour, though, we watched him trotting back. ‘He has found some!’ Balla said, and at once my eyes sought out the comforting bulge of the waterskin slung from his saddle. As he came nearer, the sound of swishing water seemed to fill the air.

  ‘Thank God, I found some Hamdab!’ Mohammid said as he came up. I was about to couch my camel to drink when I noticed that the others made no attempt to do so. I realised that we would press on as normal. We rode for another three, thirsty hours and halted after sunset near some acacia trees. We went through the drills of unloading and setting up camp. Mohammid made a fire and we sat down next to it. ‘Now we must drink,’ I thought. To my dismay, however, Mohammid filled our two kettles and hung the waterskin in a tree. He set them on the fire and we sat with our eyes glued to them. No one commented. When the water boiled, Mohammid performed the customary rituals. He filled the teapot and set it on a bed of ashes. Then he poured out a cup, tasted it, and poured it back in. ‘Where are your cups?’ he asked in the usual way. We produced them and he lifted the pot with exaggerated dignity and filled them. We waited until he had filled his own cup, then we raised them, whispering, ‘In the name of God!’ as if it were a toast. The first mouthful of tea was scalding hot and ate through the thick layer that had formed on my tongue. Undeterred, I drank it down in long gulps until it was gone. Never before or since have I tasted such wonderful tea.

  We awoke to find ourselves under the wall of ’Aja. I was still thirsty, but the wind from the desert was cool, and I knew now that we were almost home. The camels perked up, and we rode instead of walking. Within two hours, the lidayn was in sight, a circle of inviting green in the pastel plain. Suddenly, Balla said, ‘I shall leave you here.’ We exchanged glances once. There was no goodbye or shaking of hands. The youth just took his lead rope and led his camels away, going west towards a nugget of black cliffs. I turned to watch as he rode. He seemed a lonely, almost tragic figure in his wretched shirt as his spare body rocked slightly and the camels plodded on behind him. I watched him until the tiny caravan had become a string of beads on the landscape. Then Mohammid said, ‘That Balla is a bad lot. We should not have travelled with him. You cannot trust him at all!’

  Suddenly, the trees of lidayn were all around us, and Arabs were running out and shouting welcome. In moments, we were couching our camels by Fadlal Mula’s tent. The broken-faced Arab came out and shook us by the hands, embracing us and clapping us on the back, saying, ‘Your return is blest! Thank God for your safe return!’ Other hands than ours unloaded and unsaddled our camels for the first time. We were led off to the small tent where we sat in a daze, waiting for someone to give us water. Instead, Fadlal Mula presented us with some dwarf melons that had grown in his millet plot. As I bit into the juicy fruit, I thought that there could be no more fitting reward for such a journey.

  I rested for the remainder of the day, and in the evening, Fadlal Mula sent his youngest son to massage my feet with a bottle of liquid butter. As the boy rubbed the stuff in and gently massaged them, I thought that this act spoke more than words could ever do. It was, I knew, a singular honour.

  After dark, Fadlal Mula said, ‘We had better slaughter a goat.’ He went to fetch one. Mohammid cut its throat and hung the carcass from a pole outside the tent. A host of uncles and cousins came to join us and to ask about our journey. ‘What did Omar do?’ was the question they always asked. ‘Omar did plenty,’ Mohammid said. ‘He dug out the salt for all the camels almost single-handed.’ Then I warmed to my companion, and felt ashamed for some of the differences we had had. The meat did not go far, but for once, I was satisfied. After the meal, Fadlal Mula called Mohammid and said, ‘The camels need watering, and we need water for the tent. You had better go to the wells. Take your blanket because they are almost dry. You will be there all night.’ Mohammid took a skin and went off without a word.

  I watched Mohammid as he collected the camels. This was his welcome home, after the most arduous of journeys. For the Arabs, the necessity of survival never ceased. The life they lived was one of bitter hardship: digging through twelve feet of clay to find water, killing one of the last goats to feed a stranger, staying up all the freezing night to water camels, travelling 400 miles through cold, heat, and burning hunger to bring back salt. It meant living in these squalid conditions, with no shade, no room, no privacy, only lice and dirt and discomfort. It was this that produced the whip scars and the talk of killing, the surreptitious sex and the refusal to make a single sound of pain.

  Yet the Kababish lived this life out of choice. At almost any time in their history, they could have moved to the palm groves of the Nile and become river farmers. They could have dispossessed the cultivators in the green belt and settled there. They preferred the harsher world of the desert because it defined them and gave them a unique identity. They did not hate the desert. To them it was everything.

  _____9._____

  Legend of the Drums

  These Kababish are the perfect devil.

  British military staff officer, personal letter, 1902

  FOR THE SECOND TIME IN the Sarajab camp, I was woken up roughly, this time by someone shouting, ‘Gam! See the gam!’ I opened my eyes lazily and saw Fadlal Mula standing at the gap of his tent with his old rifle in one hand, gesticulating towards the desert. As I staggered to my feet, bleary-eyed, I saw that the landscape was full of camels and camel riders. There were at least 200 of them, seeming to straddle the desert, winding back towards the southern skyline. They marched doggedly forwards like soldier ants intent on our tiny island of green.

  ‘Meidob!’ shouted Mohammid’s cousin, running up from his tent. ‘They mean to put an end to us, by God Almighty!’

  ‘No,’ Fadlal Mula said. ‘They are Dar Hamid.’

  Mohammid came bounding across the tribulus from the direction of the wells. Five or six Arabs ran after him, all carrying their rifles. I watched them as they scattered into the thorn trees along the edge of the oasis. One of them raised his rifle as if to fire at the men tramping towards us on their camels. ‘Stop!’ Fadlal Mula shouted. ‘Let us see who they are!’ The three of us trotted down to join the other Sarajab.

  The leading riders were about 200 metres away when suddenly, a rider detached himself from the multitude and rode towards us at a trot. The camels following him stopped. As he came into easy range, I saw the Arabs stiffen, facing the horde like grim little hornets defending their nest. Within forty metres, the man swung down from his saddle and crossed the rest of the distance on foot. He was a weedy black man who wore a pair of spectacles and what looked like a ragged tweed jacket over his jibba. He carried no weapon except a camel whip.

  ‘Peace be on you!’ he shouted.

  ‘And on you be peace!’ Fadlal Mula replied. ‘Come forward.’

  The men shook hands and exchanged a greeting. ‘What is your family and where are you going?’ the Sarajabi demanded in the imperative Arab manner.

  ‘My family is Dar Hamid, and I am guide for these men. They are mostly from El Obeid—Dar Hamid, Jawa’ama, Bedariyya—and I am taking them to Libya. This oasis has the only decent grazing south of Wadi Howar. You would not refuse to receive travellers in your land?’

  ‘Grazing is one thing,’ Fadlal Mula growled. ‘But we have ripe millet. You will find good grass on the north side of the oasis, but if a single camel gets into th
e millet there will be trouble!’

  The man smiled and beckoned to his followers. Within moments they were passing us in a great procession. The riders were broad-faced city men, like those I had met at El ’Atrun. Their eyes were full of fatigue and many of them clung to their camels awkwardly, obviously unaccustomed to riding. Their camels were big, healthy animals carrying brand-new pack saddles, bulging waterskins, and nylon sacks of flour. None of them had any proper saddle gear. After the riders came the infantry—more than a hundred men on foot. They staggered rather than walked, drumming onwards with nervous, spasmodic movements. They passed us looking neither right nor left, following the men in front as if they were blind or mesmerised.

  Soon, they had unloaded their camels on the outer rim of the oasis. The camels were hobbled and shuffled about, cropping the grass, while some of the men began to fill net baskets with the taller grasses. Moments later, cooking fires had been lit, and the camp was full of smoke and the babble of voices. The men had divided themselves into messes for feeding, and the guide called myself and Fadlal Mula over to join them. We ate the porridge they presented, and I looked at the black faces around me, which seemed as incongruous in this arid environment as my own must have done. One of them asked if I was a Libyan, and his question showed just how remote these people thought themselves to be: to them, this place was beyond the borders of the known world. For them, as for me, this was not the Sudan, but the wild and incomprehensible no man’s land of the desert.