In the afternoon, I came to some tents of another branch of the nazir’s family. They belonged to one of Sir Ali at Tom’s widows, and I was welcomed by a powerful-looking man called Faraj, whom I had once met in Umm Sunta. Inside the tent, the old lady sat on her rug, looking stately and aristocratic. She told the servants to bring me tea and mutton. As I ate, Faraj told me, ‘These tents are permanent. The lady cannot ride in a litter any more. So the herds move and she stays here.’
‘But we are affected by it,’ said the old duchess. ‘We are used to the milk and meat and having a change of air.’ I guessed that it was the last that affected her the most. It was difficult for a nomad to get used to the settled life after years of perpetual motion. I wondered how old she was. She had almost certainly been born in the age of Salih al Bey, the age before the engine, when camels were everything and when her husband, Ali Wad at Tom, had been the brightest rising star in the Kababish firmament. Now she was old and feeble, unable to stand the rigours of the migrations. I saw in the corner of the tent the frame of her litter. It was no ordinary litter. Its carefully carved and decorated laths of black wood were still brightly polished, a tribute to those far-off times when she had taken her place in the caravan of the nazir.
Faraj suggested that he should ride with me to the camp of Abdal Karim, and I agreed. He rode a white donkey and together we crossed a wasteland where the sand lay as clean as if it had been brushed, and only a thin rash of siyaal trees stood as sentinels of the changing environment. Two hours later, we came upon a camp of five tents. Their thick roofs of camel hair grey, white, and brown blended in the pastel hues of the winter desert. As I couched my camel, a woman came out to welcome us. She was Abdal Karim’s ‘number-one wife’, deep bronze with flowing braids of black hair, wrapped in layers of colourful cloth. As I shook hands with her, I saw that though not young, she had impressive poise and dignity. Life in these deserts had matured but not marred her beauty. Behind her hid a troupe of shaven-headed little boys and a strikingly beautiful girl, as slim as a camel whip. The woman called to some herdsmen, who dragged rope beds alit of the tent and showed us a place to sleep, sheltered from the winds by a wooden tukul. The men hobbled Wad at Tafashan for me and led him off to pasture with the household animals. The woman said that Abdal Karim would not be back until late, and would meet us in the morning.
At dawn, I was woken by the shouts of the little boys who came tumbling out of the tent and staged a noisy mock battle outside. They were all very alike, almost naked, and wearing the traditional curry combs that showed them to be uncircumcised. The house camels, which had crept into the shelter of the tukul by night, were already on their feet and shambling off towards the nearest grazing, accompanied only by their gigantic shadows. A nest of goats was curled up under my bed, and behind me, through the bars of the tukul, I saw an old slave woman lighting a fire. One of the herdsmen brought in a superb, off-white riding camel from the eastern side of the camp and covered its snout with a nose bag of grain. The animal tossed the bag impatiently as it munched the stuff. Another Arab climbed into the branches of a tree and brought down a sheaf of hay for the donkeys tethered beneath. All over the dar at this hour, the scene would be the same, as the immemorial life of the nomads went on.
After we had drunk tea, Abdal Karim came out to greet us. He was a big man with a face both young and old, shrouded in a white tobe against the cold. His hooked nose and curving moustache, and the copper skin braised by years of desert sun, gave him the look of a veteran camel man. ‘I received a message from Salim Wad Musa,’ he told me. ‘He said that you wish to travel to Egypt with my herd.’
I replied that I had once ridden as far as Dongola with a dabuuka. ‘Have you got permission to enter Egypt?’ he inquired. I shook my head.
Then you will have to be very careful,’ he said. The Egyptians are not very welcoming to strangers.’
After we had eaten our breakfast of kisri, Abdal Karim introduced me to a thin, sick-looking negro who wore a red cap and faded blue overalls; his name was Khamis. ‘I am building a deep well here,’ my host said proudly. ‘And Khamis is the engineer who is helping me. Come over and look at it.’ The well had been sunk into the bed of a wadi nearby and was about fifteen metres deep. The Kababish measured wells in ‘men’—the height of a man with one arm held vertically above his head. Khamis told me that this well measured about five ‘men’. Several of Abdal Karim’s herdsmen were working inside it, scraping earth into leather pouches that were hoisted up from above. I remembered the hardship of the Sarajab with their tiny, unproductive wells. There would be no such hardship for these Barara. ‘When the well is ready I will never use the borewell at Umm Batatikha,’ Abdal Karim told me. ‘I will water all the herds here. There is no talk of fuel shortage with a deep well. This place will be my damar then, and I might even put up some mud buildings:
Later, Abdal Karim rode off to the village of Umm Batatikha and did not return till sunset. He told me then that the dabuuka was complete and ready to leave, but that the guide had not yet arrived from Umm Badr. As soon as he came, we would depart. He had a good look at Wad at Tafashan and commented, ‘That camel is very weak. You have driven him too far. It takes a camel six months to recover from a long journey. He will have difficulty on the road to Egypt.’
As we sat talking outside the tents, he explained that he had first travelled to Egypt as a young herdsboy. ‘I went there twice when I was just a boy,’ he said. ‘We crossed the Jabal Abyad rather than going up the river as they do now. It was easier then because there was grazing in the desert and you would always find Kababish herds. Now it is clean desert, and you will find nothing. After my first two trips, I went as guide. I would take thirty or forty camels, and for each 100 pounds they made, I got ten. It was not much, but I made a profit by bringing back guns. I would buy them in the market at Isna. There were British rifles, ‘Mother of Ten Shots’, and F N pistols, and sometimes those old Martini carbines. We would load them on our camels and disappear into the desert. We crossed a mountain called Abu Sinn and brought them down to the Ga’ab oasis near Dongola. Often, the Egyptian police would come after us in their trucks. We would stop and fight them until we drove them off. It was kill or be killed then! The Egyptians had no guts. They would not stand up to the Arabs, by God! I have been to Egypt many times and I know the desert well. I was taking camels there long before you could load them on to the trains at Isna. We took them all the way to the market at Umm Baba in Giza. It was a hard route, though. Later, the gun-running got more difficult and the borders were carefully watched. We started to come back on the steamer then and brought ordinary goods instead. You know, I have not been to Egypt for twenty years, but I still know it better than most!’
Egypt was the main market for camels raised in Kordofan and Darfur. The Egyptians ate a great deal of camel meat, which was generally unpopular in the Sudan. For centuries, the Egyptians obtained their camel meat from the bedouin tribes of Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and the Arabian Peninsula, but during the past fifty years, import of camels from those sources had virtually dried up. Instead, Egypt imported almost all her camels from the Sudan. The number of camels in the Middle East had declined drastically during that time. In Syria alone, the camel population had decreased by 90 percent. The ancient masters of camel breeding—the Arabian bedouins—could no longer compete with the African countries in their traditional expertise. Many of them had left the wandering life and settled in or near cities. Even those who stayed in the desert used lorries to bring water and grass to their herds. The Saudi Arabian government paid its nomads a subsidy for their livestock, but this made little difference when the Saudis themselves could afford to import camels from the Sudan and Somalia. It was the persistence of the old ways in these countries that had, until now, made them the most efficient producers of camels.
It was another five days before the guide arrived. I spent much of that time exploring the area, talking to the herdsmen, and visiting the camps of other Barara.
I found one family living in a tent of camel hair that was grey and threadbare with age. They possessed nothing but a broken rope bed, a thin donkey, and some much-patched waterskins. The old man and his wife who lived there were friendly and would not hear of me parting without eating porridge with them. ‘As the house gets bigger, the herds get smaller. That is what the Arabs say,’ the old man told me. ‘I used to have two good herds of camels. We had cows and even horses. The cows died of disease and the camels stopped giving birth when the grazing failed. We ate the remainder one by one. Now, I have nothing but this old donkey and a few goats. I have a son in Omdurman who is doing well. Every year, I mean to go there, but somehow, I never manage it.’ I watched his wife as she tipped out a sackful of sorghum bit by bit into a metal sieve. The grain is always full of dirt these days!’ she complained. ‘And at fifty pounds a sack too!’
Once, I rode with Abdal Karim to inspect the herd at Umm Batatikha. We trotted across a tableland of parched bush with deadfall lying broken in the sand. The trees were as grey as corpses, though climbing up a gentle rise, we came to a spiky mass of tundub that was still green. ‘My brother lies buried under those trees,’ my companion told me. ‘He was a better guide than me. He was one of the Arabs who first opened up the modern trade route to Egypt.’ Not long afterwards, the settlement appeared suddenly out of the wasteland. It was a ramshackle camel town of grass huts and cabins of the usual deadfall, grey and termite-infested. Like other dammering centres in the dar, it was peopled by small traders of the Berti and Mirna tribes.
The sky over the borewell was full of dust. Groups of Abdal Karim’s camels pressed themselves to the troughs and were held in place by fierce black men armed with whips. Abdal Karim and I dismounted, and two of the men came over to greet us. One was an Arab of the ’Awajda called Sannat. He had protuberant yellow teeth and curious, menacing slit-like eyes. The second man was even more piratical. His left eye was grey with a slick of trachoma and he had no teeth except a single wedge-shaped gold incisor. After greeting me, he asked, ‘Did I not see you in Omdurman prison?’ which did not bode well for the future. As Abdal Karim walked away, the one-eyed man said, ‘I will go as guide on this journey. You will see!’
As we rode back to the camp, I said to Abdal Karim, ‘I thought the guide was still to come.’
‘He is,’ the Bari answered. ‘In fact, I have just sent that man Sannat off with a camel and a rifle to escort him here. He is carrying the money from the sale of the last dabuuka he took: 50,000 pounds.’
‘Then what about the one-eyed man?’
Abdal Karim laughed uproariously. ‘You mean Kurkur!’ he grinned. ‘It is true, he was going to be guide, but I couldn’t employ him after what he did. I had to get rid of him!’
‘What did he do?’
The Arab burst out laughing again. ‘He had intercourse with a she-donkey!’ he said. ‘Yes, it is true, by God! One day, he got drunk on ’aragi and he found a she-donkey hobbled near the hut. He started to have intercourse with it. Then the owner came out and caught him and hit him a whack with his stick. He dragged him off to the police. The magistrate fined him 200 pounds. It was very funny in court. When the judge announced the fine, someone shouted, ‘‘Two hundred pounds! He could have bought it for that!” and another Arab answered, “What do you mean bought it? He could have married it!” Anyway, he had no money, so I paid the fine for him. But I could not have him as a guide after that!’
I laughed with him, but a year later, I heard the story of Kurkur’s tragedy, which began that very day. While Abdal Karim and I were riding back to camp, Kurkur was busy stealing a waterskin from the gear. He sold the skin and with the money bought a lorry ticket to Omdurman, where he found work as a herdsman with another herd being taken to Egypt. On his way back, he had been aboard the ill-fated Nile steamer, Ramadan ’Ashara, which had sunk in Lake Nasser with the loss of 300 Sudanese. Like most Arabs, Kurkur could not swim.
Back in camp, we found that two Zaghawa gunsmiths had arrived. They were father and son, and they travelled by camel with their mobile workshop of vices and anvils. The father told me that his ancestor had been the gunsmith of Ali Dinar, the last of the independent Darfur sultans. Abdal Karim brought out his small arsenal of weapons: a five-shot Churchill rifle, a revolver, and a Soviet-made shotgun. The smiths began work at once. It was fascinating to see how this trade had become traditional and esoteric within a few generations. The Zaghawa were renowned as potters and smiths, though the Arabs considered such work beneath them and had few smiths of their own. Throughout Africa, those who worked with metal and fire were considered unclean, and even amongst the Zaghawa, they formed a distinct caste and were unable to marry outside their own group. I often wondered why this was so. In medieval Europe, smiths were almost an aristocracy, whereas in Africa, they were feared and isolated. Perhaps this was due to their control over the production of weapons, and was connected with superstitions about fire.
The smithy’s son was a mercurial lad with a broad grin and intelligent eyes. ‘We can repair any firearms, even the modern ones,’ he told me. ‘In fact, the modern ones are easier, because they are built to a pattern. The homemade ones are all different and are more difficult to fix.’ The smiths also made weapons of their own. ‘Ours are better than most,’ the boy said. ‘We can make them even here in the desert. Only the barrels are imported. We can even make pump-action shotguns. We charge about 200 pounds.’
During the next morning, Sannat arrived with the guide. He was far more impressive than Kurkur. He was a bear of a man, as powerful as a rhino. His face was basalt-black and his eyes shaded with pickled folds of skin. He wore an old check overcoat and walked with the ambling stride of a camel, his feet split and calloused like oxhide. His name was Bakheit, and he belonged to the Duwayih.
When he heard that I was to travel with him, he looked me up and down and said, ‘I hope you are strong. It needs a strong man to ride to Egypt.’
‘How many days’ journey is it?’ I asked.
‘As far as Isna, where we load the camels on to lorries, it is thirty-five days. It is twenty-five to the border of Egypt.’
‘Are there police patrols on the border?’
‘Yes, but if we have no permission, we go by the hidden ways of the desert and avoid them. Still, we may run into a patrol whichever way we go.’
‘Do they look at your papers?’
‘Yes, and they often search the camels, looking for hashish or ostrich feathers. They say that only the Sudanese are allowed to cross the border.’
‘Then you must tell them you are Sudanese!’
That evening, Abdal Karim slaughtered a goat in our honour, and after we had eaten, we sat quietly together, enjoying the last chance of repose before the long journey. It was a world of animals and simple men, close to the rhythms of nature. Above us, the stars and planets ticked by in their own eternal rhythms. The night was crisp with cold and a chill wind battered the tents, shivering the wooden frames. We draped ourselves in blankets and huddled up by the cheering warmth of the fire. Beyond the firelight and the brave little city of tents, the night hid the bleak, savage mystery of the desert.
_____11._____
A Camel Race to Egypt
In the rough wastes of northwest
Kordofan are the two strongest and
richest camel-owning tribes of the Sudan:
the Kababish and the Kawahla, age-long
rivals, who graze their herds over an
area extending west to Darfur.
C. G. Seligman, Races of Africa, 1930
NEXT MORNING, WE RODE OUT to the herd as it grazed in the bush east of Umm Batatikha. The camels were a superb sight, moving in open order through the sparse acacias. All of them were fat beasts in prime condition, including rutting bulls, she-camels with finlike humps, and heavy, castrated males. Beyond them, the landscape extended to the north, unbelievably vast and arid, its flatness interrupted only by the blue ridge of Jabal Azraq stretching across the hor
izon.
Two more herdsmen rode out to meet us as we arrived. One was a black youth called Musa, a Meidobi who had been raised by the Kababish. The other was a man bordering on old age, with a lick of grey whisker and a stringy body. He was a freeman of the Bani Jarrar named Mohammid. After we had saluted them, Bakheit gave the order to draw in the flanks of the herd. He took up the familiar guide’s position on the left forward side, while the rest of us trotted around the grazing camels, gradually forcing them into tight formation. Wad at Tafashan was still fresh and moved easily beneath me. I was filled with a new confidence that came from the knowledge that I was no longer an ignorant outsider. The doubt I had felt after my return from El ’Atrun had somehow evaporated, and I began to understand how much I had learned from that ordeal. I knew these men. I understood their customs and their language. I knew how to ride and how to herd camels. It gave me a thrill of pleasure to know that I could perform the simple tasks of the herdsman. At its most basic level, this was what nomadic life was about.
All day, we pushed the camels on through the dead brush towards Umm Sunta. The sunlight played across the rippling backs of the great beasts, which pounded on, brimming with power and oozing vitality. We passed the tents of the nazir’s people, brown and dirty-white along the wadis. There were lumps of humanity around the deep wells, where camels hoisted up the great buckets from far below, the rawhide cables creaking audibly with the strain. Below us, the sand was blemished by the patterns of a million tracks: the thick, elliptical pads of running camels winding through the thorn trees, the scuffled drag marks where an armada of sheep had been brought down to the wells, the neat hoof clips of a donkey, the flowerlike pads of a hunting saluki, the almost invisible filigree patterns of a lizard, the double hop marks of a gerbil. By evening, we had reached the wadi of Umm Sunta, crossed the wall of trees, and couched our camels in the marrow of white sand within. The lowering sun cast gilt fingers across the smooth surface. We set up our camp under a siyaal tree and turned the camels into the wadi to browse for the night.
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