A Desert Dies

by Michael Asher

  ‘Why did you slaughter him?’ I asked the Arab. It was rare for the Kababish to butcher a camel. ‘He was about to die,’ the Rahli said. ‘He would never have made it to the wadi. He was too hungry and tired. When the spirit has gone, the camel will never live, even if you feed him. He is beyond the limit. It is the same with all things, even the sons of Adam. This has been a bad year for the Arabs. There is no grazing anywhere. Grain is too expensive to buy. If this goes on, we shall soon lose everything!’

  Sannat and I caught up with the herd just after sunset. They had camped in the lee of some bare, rocky hills. For supper that night, we ate fresh camel meat—the gift of the Rahli and his son.

  It was eight days before we came out of the lava plains and sighted the Wadi al Milik. We made camp one afternoon under the flinty blue oval of Jabal Ruweiba, across the wadi from the merchant at Affan, where Fadlal Mula and I had bought provisions the previous October. Our camels fell greedily upon the siyaal trees, amongst which stood a tiny cabin. An old crone came hobbling out of it followed by a snappy little dog, and tried to drive the camels away, complaining bitterly that the trees were hers. By Arab law, the trees in the vicinity of a camp, especially siyaal, belonged to the owner. The siyaal were particularly valuable in summer, for at that time, their seeds provided the sole grazing for goats. The guide told us to drive the camels a bit further up the wadi. I shook hands with the old lady, now a little soothed, and she told me that she had seen me here previously with Fadlal Mula.

  The next day, we moved the dabuuka across the wadi, where it twisted west to east and emerged into the rippling sands on the east bank. From there, we could see the bluish glow of the Sumi’yaat hills on the skyline. As the herd moved through the day, Bakheit, Musa Adam, and I rode to the wells at Al Ku’. Some Sarajab were watering their little herds of camels there and greeted us with rather cold, fearful glances. I asked for details of Fadlal Mula and his people and heard that they had moved south into their damar at Umm Gurfa. There were some Ribaygat washing their red sheep, forcing the animals’ heads between a forked stake and dousing them with water. Bakheit had decided to invest some of his savings in buying two camels, which he could sell at a profit in Egypt. He purchased two small she-camels from the Sarajab. One was a very wild little beast that scrambled off into the trees as soon as we tried to bridle her. She raced backwards and forwards, whining in a shrill voice. Eventually, it took five Arabs to restrain her. I tried to catch her by the nostrils as I had seen the Arabs do, but as I approached, she dropped about four litres of her disgusting bile in my face. I was completely soaked in it, and the smell remained with me for days afterwards. Old Bakheit told me, ‘Next time you try to catch a camel, approach him from the side. If you come from the front, you will always get the cud in your face!’

  ‘By God, but she is a wild one!’ Musa Adam commented.

  ‘She is like her owners,’ Bakheit replied. ‘Let us be careful tonight. I should not be surprised if these Sarajab come and tell me that I have not paid for her!’

  That evening, we made camp on the flat shelf of the desert north of the Sumi’yaat hills. A freezing squall blew across from the north, and the margin of the wadi was a dark line to the west. ‘We must not sleep tonight,’ Bakheit said. ‘I do not trust those Sarajab. Only a few months ago, they attacked a dabuuka near here. It was after sunset and the herd was travelling outside the wadi, just as we are. The Sarajab opened fire from hidden places in the trees and shot the guide and two others. Then they drove off plenty of the stock.’

  We took turns to stay awake, sitting wrapped in our blankets and gazing out across the dark desert. I was very tired and found it almost impossible to stay awake when my turn came. I tried forcing my eyes open, knitting my brows in determination, but within moments I was seeing strange apparitions—men in white medical overalls and frightening insect creatures gliding across the sand in front of me. I realised that I was dreaming with my eyes open and shook my head violently to get rid of these visions. For a few minutes, my head would remain clear, then the apparitions would begin again. I was very glad when Sannat touched my arm and told me to get some sleep.

  The day after, we walked for three hours, moving slowly north, still keeping the wadi on our left. I walked barefoot, feeling the cold sand refreshing my feet, on and on through yellow desert, through stones, sand, camel tracks, camel droppings, camels’ shadows on the earth. Time was an undivided stream mixed in with the cries of the drivers, the unflinching green line of the wadi, the markh bushes like enormous feathers, the blue mystic mountains, and the grey sky.

  That night, we camped at the wells at Umm Grayn with some Hamdab, hoping to water the herd there the next day. The Arabs were small men with foxy faces. They shared our kisri with relish, complaining that the hunting was no good these days. ‘Where is the meat of yesteryear?’ one of them said, so mournfully that I almost laughed. The hunt is not what it was! My father kept two salukis just for hunting. They could outrun any gazelle, by God!’

  Bakheit was anxious for news of other dabuukas, most of which were obliged to water here or at lided Ahmad a little further north. These were virtually the only accessible watering places before the open desert, which stretched from here to the Nile. The last dabuuka watered here days ago,’ the Hamdab said. ‘There is no competition unless there is anything close behind you. You will have the market to yourselves.’

  Just after dawn, we watered the herds from a mud basin between two hand-dug wells. The Hamdab filled the basin with leather buckets while we drove the camels up in small groups. The work was over quickly, for the cold prevented the camels from drinking. We breakfasted on kisri and the Hamdab talked about the grazing. ‘It is terrible this year,’ they said. ‘Camels have died as well as sheep and goats. There is no grass at all in the wadi now, and only a few patches outside.’

  ‘Why don’t you move south?’ I asked them.

  ‘Is the south any better?’ one of them said. ‘We are better off here, at least we are near the salt.’ I realised that this was an excuse. The Hamdab had lived in this remote part of the wadi for generations. Before that, they had ranged far into the deserts beyond. They had been moving south for decades and they would not move any further. Yet I knew that if the rains failed this year, then they would have little choice. It had not rained properly at Umm Grayn for five years.

  Before we set off, Bakheit examined Wad at Tafashan and said, ‘It would be wrong to ride him further. See, he has grown weak. His legs are affected by zabata.’ He pointed to the telltale scars on the inside of the camel’s forelegs, near the elbow pad. I had always thought that this defect, caused by the rubbing of the legs against the pedestal chest pad, was congenital. ‘Any camel can be affected by zabata when it grows weak,’ the guide told me. He singled out for me a strong bull-camel, ideal for the long, dry trek to Egypt, and Wad at Tafashan was allowed to run with the herd. When the Arabs were ready, we moved out through the swath of markh bushes and into the open desert. All day, we travelled around the foot of the sweeping black downs of Jabal Abu Fas. The line of the wadi faded behind us and dissolved into the desert. We were going northeast towards the Al ’Ain plateau, which was still below the skyline. The desert to the north was dimmed by a scurry of dust that grew thicker towards evening. At the end of the afternoon, we found some clumps of hadd and let the camels graze as they moved. The sun had cooled and become a silver disc, scored by blue muslin streaks. As I walked behind the herd in the half-light, I felt as if I could go on forever. Nothing seemed to matter; neither the past nor the future, not even the Arabs of the desert. The vastness of the landscape and the unreal aura of twilight dwarfed all emotions. After dark, a savage sandstorm punched into us with hammer force. We made camp at once by a single bush, a tiny island in the void. As we piled up our equipment, the wind screamed past us, pouring liquid sand into everything. The storm was as thick as a blizzard. It was a struggle to cook up our kisri, to build up a fortress of Saddlebags around the fire, which flicke
red and trembled in the wind. The porridge was covered with sand as soon as we tried to eat it. After we had eaten what we could, we had no alternative but to disappear under our blankets. Sand piled up into drifts around us, and as the night grew colder and the wind more icy, we shivered at the base of our lone bush.

  In the morning, we were half buried in a drift of sand. The wind was still so bitterly cold that we huddled close to the fire, wrapped up tightly, until the sun came up. We watched its pale glow turning the desert luminescent, the horizons fuzzy and insubstantial. The flat plain, embossed with the shining lumps of low dunes, was licked by slipstreams of sand that streaked across the surface like currents of electricity.

  We drove the herd out into the eye of the wind, all of us walking in the shelter of the great animal bodies. The wind showed no sign of dropping, and all day, the storm raged over us, whiteout on all sides. The camels were reluctant to travel into the squall and we had to force them on with our whips.

  Often, we came upon tall clumps of nissa grass and tangled masses of tundub trees, and the hungry camels broke formation to graze, disappearing into the veil of dust. When this happened, it took many minutes to reassemble them. The entire day, we moved in short bursts with little progress. ‘We are going badly!’ Musa Adam shouted at me through his furled headcloth. ‘At this rate it will be another twenty-six days to Isna. I don’t know what the guide is doing. We keep turning and circling, but we should go on straight. Moving is better than grazing for these camels now!’ I thought the comment unfair, and I checked the compass-bearing I had taken the previous day at Umm Grayn. It was no more than two degrees out.

  At midmorning, we stopped amongst some rocks and made porridge, our faces still covered in our headcloths. As Sannat and I lay in the shelter of the rocks, he told me, ‘The Arabs hate sandstorms more than anything. How many people have lost their way in them and died! Even experienced desert men can die in a storm like this. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you anything different. There is no Arab alive who can navigate in these storms unless he has travelled the route scores of times. Only last year, a guide was taking a dabuuka past Jabal al ’Ain when he ran out of water in a storm like this. He tried to make for the spring in Al ’Ain, but he lost the way and all his men died. It is a good thing old Bakheit and I know the way!’

  That afternoon, the desert was at its wildest. We lapped ourselves around with blankets and headcloths and bent forward into the wind as we walked, plodding on in the soft sand. We wound through great fields of boulders that channelled the streams of dust into flying eddies, and after them came more patches of sand, red and amber, hard dunes littered with basalt, and a narrow pass that was converted by the dust into a long tunnel with neither entrance nor exit.

  The storm went on for three days. It was a grim time, yet solid old Bakheit never wavered. He was a silent man, not given to bursts of excitement, as most Arabs were. He rarely walked like the rest of us, but rode his gigantic camel on and on, unperturbed by the wind or the sand, the cold or the heat; never irritated by the nagging stoppages nor the criticisms of the others. He and Sannat belonged to a different breed from the Sarajab I had travelled with. They were certainly of slave stock, yet they were huge, massively powerful men, who seemed to be hewn from the granite of the desert itself.

  On the evening of the third day, the storm dropped suddenly. The sky cleared, and the golden beams of the dwindling sun spread out across it like the arms of a giant starfish. The sea-spray hiss of the wind stopped abruptly; there was silence. Far to the north, we saw the solid sandstone citadel of Jabal al ’Ain springing up from the void of orange sand.

  We spent a peaceful night, and in the morning, drove the camels across the almost featureless sand sheet, smoothed and rolled flat by the storm. Sannat was walking on the right flank of the herd, a bulky black figure with a whip in his hand. Suddenly, he stopped and shouted, ‘Hey, brothers, look at this!’ Several of us ran over to where he stood and saw a broad swath of camel tracks, thousands upon thousands of them swelling over each other and spreading out thirty metres across the sand.

  ‘It is a dabuuka,’ he said. ‘And it is not far ahead. They must have passed us in the night. Now they will be before us to market in Cairo.’

  ‘Not if we catch them first!’ Bakkour said.

  For the rest of the day, we drove the herd on with ferocious determination, but though we strained our eyes to the distant horizon, we saw nothing ahead but rocks, sand, and the occasional tree. We worked together as a close team, covering the flanks and the rear and whipping the animals into line like janissaries. Bakheit followed the tracks of the other herd and we rode fast across patches of rippling sand, its smooth skin shattered by cairns of rock and high sugarloaf hills that reared up like toothless gums. The next day passed in the same way, and the day after that, we came to the undulating terrain beyond Al ’Ain-Aw Dun pass, where the rocky hammada made it impossible to find tracks. In any case, my companions were diverted by watching out for tribesmen of the Umm Mattu Kababish, who inhabited this part of the desert. ‘They are in resistance to the government,’ Sannat told me. ‘They refused to pay their taxes. The government sent police down from Dongola, but the Umm Mattu shot them. They are as wild as the Sarajab. No dabuuka is safe from them. Either they will stop a herd and demand a number of animals, or they will attack you at night. Two years ago, there was a dabuuka that ran out of water here. The guide and one of the herdsmen went off to the nearest well to get water. There were some Umm Mattu there, and they asked them for help. The Umm Mattu shot them both. Then they rode out to the herd and helped themselves to any camel they wanted!’

  Two days later we were watering at the wells of Ma’atul in the Wadi al Milik. There were some Umm Mattu living there in squat cabins of straw and brushwood amongst the great dunes topped with groves of thick thorn trees. They seemed harmless enough to me, earning a little money by helping to water dabuukas bound for Egypt. Ed Debba was only two days’ journey to the east, and the Umm Mattu had a ready market for their animals there.

  Umm Mattu were Kababish but were not traditionally under the authority of the nazir, though they acknowledged him as their titular overlord. There had always been Kababish in the Northern Province of the Sudan, though in past centuries, many of them had forsaken the wandering life and become date farmers. These tribes included the Gungonab and the Bayudab, whom the desert Arabs despised and refused to acknowledge as true Kababish. The Umm Mattu, though, were still largely nomadic, and their number included some famous desert guides.

  After we had watered, Bakheit asked them for news of other dabuukas. ‘There is a herd in front of you,’ one of the Arabs told us. ‘There are six men and about 150 camels. They are Kawahla, and they are almost a day ahead.’

  The knowledge that our rivals were Kawahla gave fuel to the sense of competition my companions felt. The Kawahla had been rivals of the Kababish for centuries. The second most powerful nomads in Kordofan, they had fought on the side of the Khalifa Abdallahi at the battle of Omdurman and many had been killed by the British. After the Kababish renaissance, Sir Ali Wad at Tom’s men had pillaged the Kawahla herds and driven them further south. ‘We will catch them and no doubt!’ Bakheit commented.

  We collected a load of firewood and set out that evening into the gravel plains north of the wadi. The next morning, quite early, we came on the remains of a camp. The sand had been churned and scattered by scores of camels and was thick with their droppings. We saw the places where men had lain down to sleep, and the remains of a fire that was still warm. ‘There are six of them,’ Sannat said. ‘And they must be close now. They would not set off before dawn.’ Sunrise had been about six. Presuming they had left at that time, they could not be more than three hours ahead. The Arabs at once grew very excited and pushed the herd on fiercely all day, pausing only briefly for a meal at midday. ‘We will have them, by Almighty God!’ Sannat declared regularly.

  It was just after sunset, and we had begun to give up
all hope, when we saw ahead of us and to the east a sprawling dark spot on the sand. ‘That’s it!’ Sannat yelled at once, and as we moved closer, I made out the faint yet familiar shape of massed camels. ‘Come on, brothers!’ someone shouted, but no exhortation was needed. Already, the air resounded with our cries and the crack of our whips. The dabuuka moved faster and faster, but seemed to gain no ground. We shouted until we were hoarse, twisting our riding beasts left and right along the herd so that none of the camels could fall behind. But still, it seemed that we were making no progress. I guessed that the other herdsmen had seen us and had no intention of letting us pass. I was suddenly and irrepressibly reminded of the Oxford and Cambridge boat race. Gradually, we drew abreast of the other herd. After what seemed like ages, we pulled ahead. Suddenly, we were a length ahead, then two lengths and pulling away. Sannat let out a whoop of glee, and we all cheered instinctively. As we drew further away, the light faded, hiding the Kawahla from our sight. After we had made camp later, however, we heard the growl of camels from far across the sands and saw the blinking orange eye of a fire somewhere to the south.

  As soon as the first rays of light were in the sky next morning, the Arabs were anxious to be off. Our watering place at Khileiwa on the Nile was only a day’s journey away, and we were determined to be the first there. Old Bakheit, less excitable than the others, tried to calm them down, saying that everything was in the hands of God. We saw nothing of the other herd during the day, although we looked back constantly. ‘They’re finished!’ Sannat decided complacently. We halted for the night on the gravel spits near Khileiwa, intending to water the herd there the following morning. It was a silent evening. Far to the east, electric lights, yellow and sickly green, marked the Nubian villages along the Nile. We had hobbled the camels and were preparing to eat, when someone said, ‘Listen!’ We all stopped what we were doing and strained our ears. Out of the darkness came the faint but distinct sound of camel cries and the cracking of whips. Seconds later, we heard the ominous shuffle of camels’ hooves on the gravel. The sounds grew gradually louder, then suddenly the whole great black apparition of the herd seemed to float out of the night, shrouded in dust, and halted not a dozen yards away.