A Desert Dies

by Michael Asher

  There were belches and roars from the camels, and the crash of their knees as they were couched in the gravel. A voice called out, ‘As salaam ’alaykum!’ and my companions answered, ‘Welcome! Come and rest!’ We heard the sounds of saddles being unloaded, the clink of hobbles, and the shouts of herdsmen as we sat and waited. One by one, the muffled figures of the Kawahla appeared out of the shadows, each man carrying his camel whip in his left hand. They greeted us rather stiffly, shaking hands as we stood up to receive them. Then, as they were now formally our guests, we pressed them to eat. After moments, they accepted, sitting down gravely by the fire and eating the kisri we offered them.

  After everyone had eaten and drunk tea, and the introductions were complete, the Kawahla guide settled down to discuss the situation. He was as big as Bakheit, but much more Arab-looking with bronze-coloured skin. For a moment, they sat facing each other across the fire like the captains of rival teams. Then the Kahli said, ‘By Almighty God, brothers, there is no profit in racing from here. We shall only kill the camels!’

  Bakheit agreed, saying, ‘We should travel together from here, at least until we get to Isna.’ There followed a long discussion, but the good sense of the guides prevailed. It was decided that we should travel together, keeping the herds separate. Each herd would take the lead, day about, until we reached Isna. ‘After that, it is every man for himself!’ said Sannat with a grin.

  We watered at Khileiwa the next day. We spent ten days travelling at a leisurely pace along the narrow corridor between the river and the Nubian villages. It was pleasant to move through the drapery of the palm groves and the green gardens after the austerity of the desert. At Dongola, we were met by a camel merchant who agreed to buy Wad at Tafashan. He gave me far less than the camel was worth, though I knew that anything was preferable to allowing him to die on the way. As the man led him off, I felt glad that he would not end up on a butcher’s block in Cairo.

  We left the river again at Lamulay and travelled through a rocky desert broken by tall granite peaks. Here, the way was marked by the bones of thousands of dead camels that had expired on the trek to Egypt. Bakheit occasionally pointed to the twisted husks, saying, ‘We lost that one three years ago!’ and ‘That one died suddenly, we had no idea that it was going!’ as if these skeletons were old friends.

  We crossed featureless ergs of hardpan sand, climbed over steep walls of gravel, and through stony shelves, where the rock lay in sharp flakes that stood up at angles from the desert floor. The drivers of previous herds had erected tiny cairns in this stretch of desert; they consisted of a few flat stones over the bones of a dead animal that marked the route as clearly as if it had been a highway.

  The Egyptian border was no more than a few days away, and I was apprehensive about border patrols. Bakheit said that the army would change the situating of their posts continually so that no one could tell where they would be.

  ‘Just talk to them as if you are an Arab and say that you know nothing,’ Sannat told me. ‘Pretend you are Sudanese.’

  ‘I think I am a little too light-skinned for that!’

  ‘Nonsense, some of the Kababish are as fair as you!’

  ‘It is the eyes,’ Musa Adam cut in. ‘No Kabbashi has green eyes!’

  We watered for the last time in Lake Nasser and passed into a massif of broken hills weathered into fantastic shapes by the wind and the blown sand. We travelled through them for two days, and on the morning of the third came over a rise to see, exactly in our path, a military tent with three Egyptian soldiers standing nearby. ‘Just keep quiet and let us do the talking,’ Sannat said.

  We halted the dabuuka near the tent and couched our camels. One of the soldiers came directly towards us, carrying an automatic rifle. He was a corporal in untidy khaki with a peaked field cap and unlaced boots. I pulled my headcloth more tightly over my face, hoping that it would disguise my features. The soldier shuffled around lazily, and for a moment, I thought that he would tell us to carry on. Then he looked directly at me and snapped, ‘Where is your passport?’ I knew then that I should never get away with a deception. I showed him my passport and explained that I was British. Instead of answering me, he shouted, ‘Which one is the guide—you?’ Old Bakheit admitted with great dignity that the responsibility of the herd was his. ‘You should know better than bringing strangers with you!’ The soldier went on acidly, ‘I am going to arrest you both!’

  ‘The guide is not to blame,’ I said. ‘He did not know that foreigners are not allowed through the desert.’

  ‘I will take you both to Abu Simbel, by God!’ the guard said. Then Sannat stepped forward. ‘If you take anyone, you must take us all,’ he declared. ‘We are companions.’

  ‘If that is what you want.’ said the guard, grinning nastily, ‘it can be arranged. But Abu Simbel is a long way, and you will not be able to take your camels there.’

  ‘The camels will die.’ I said. ‘It is my fault and no one else’s. Just take me.’

  ‘Very well,’ the corporal said. ‘You collect your things and come with me. And get those filthy clothes off. You put some European clothes on so we can see who you are.’

  It took me only a a few moments to collect my saddle and saddlebags. I carried them up to the tent, where a Toyota truck was parked. Then I walked back to my companions. The corporal stood looking at me, but did not try to interfere.

  ‘Say the word, and we shall all come with you,’ Bakkour said. ‘No,’ I replied. ‘You cannot leave the camels. Anyway, I shall be all right. They cannot harm me.’

  ‘Get on with it!’ the corporal ordered from the tent. ‘You Arabs get moving or I will arrest you all, and damn your camels!’ I embraced my companions one by one. Sannat was last. ‘God protect you, Omar,’ he said.

  ‘God protect us all,’ I replied.

  I had no heart to watch the dabuuka as it moved on into the desert. Instead, I went behind the tent and changed into jeans and a shirt, so that the Egyptians should know who I was. A change of clothes meant nothing now; the things I had seen, the things I had learned, could not be changed so easily. When I emerged, the herd and my companions had gone.

  I was taken to Abu Simbel, where I was held for two days. The soldiers who detained me were conscripts who had no desire to be stuck here on Egypt’s remotest border. They were friendly, especially when they found out I could speak Arabic. Many times they assured me, guiltily, ‘We are only doing our job.’ I was then escorted to Aswan and taken before the immigration authorities. I was told that not only had I entered the country illegally, I was also in breach of the currency regulations. I was given five days to go back to Britain.

  I emerged from the office a free man, and plunged into the city. Aswan hit me like a wave. There followed a dazed two hours in which I tried to adjust to the new environment. I was confused by the rush of vehicles, the traffic lights, and the tourists, my own barbarian race, looking ridiculous and undressed in their shorts and sunhats, with their rucksacks and sleeping bags. The beautiful Egyptian girls with their black, shining hair, the gleaming Nile, the white sails of the feloukas, the smart hotels, the glass-fronted gift shops, American Express, electric lights, ice cream—I asked myself how all this could exist so near to the world I had left in the desert.

  I caught the first train to Cairo, and two days later, I had borrowed some money and was flying back to Britain. As the British Airways Trident took off, I had a quick glimpse of the Libyan desert, stretching away west beyond the pyramids. Already, my mind was filled with new journeys and new projects.

  Part 4

  The Search for the Lost Oasis

  _____12._____

  Hidden Pearls

  The desert is terrible and it is merciless,

  but to the desert all those who have

  once known it must return.

  Ahmad Mohammid Hassanein Bey,

  ‘The Lost Oases’

  I SPENT A RESTLESS TIME in Britain. I was trapped in a flat in London with no money
and no chance of returning to the Sudan. I longed to be out of this prison of concrete and glass and back in the desert, where the horizons stretched unblemished on all sides and where the works of men left little mark on the landscape.

  I filled my empty days scouring the libraries of the Royal Geographical Society and the School of Oriental and African Studies, seeking vicariously what I could not obtain in reality. I pursued the legend of the lost oasis of Zarzura with an avidity born of frustration. Through the plethora of legends and travellers’ tales, with their confusing and conflicting reports, I caught a glimpse of the desert as it had appeared to explorers of the past: mysterious, alien, and wonderful. There were lost cities and treasure troves, buried rivers and hidden caves. There were stories of lost tribes of black warriors who came out of the sandmist suddenly, falling like vultures on the people of some sleepy oasis.

  The most substantial reference to Zarzura was to be found in an Arabic manuscript of the fifteenth century, The Book of Hidden Pearls:

  From this last wadi starts a road which will lead you to the city of Zarzura, of which you will find the door closed; the city is white like a pigeon, and on the door is carved the effigy of a bird. Take with your hand the key in the beak of the bird, then open the door to the city. Enter and there, you will find great riches, also the king and queen asleep in their castle. Do not approach them, but take the treasure.

  At first, the passage sounded far-fetched, an echo of a fairy tale. Then I thought of the fabulous discoveries that had been made in Upper Egypt in the early years of the twentieth century. In 1926, the Pharaoh Tutankhamun had been found ‘asleep’ in his tomb behind a sealed door, surrounded by ‘great riches’ in gold and jewels. It was not unthinkable, certainly to explorers like Hassanein, Kamal ad Din Hussein, Douglas Newbold, and William Shaw, that similar legendary sites might be found buried in the desert sands. Newbold and Shaw had led their expedition in search of Zarzura in 1927, only one year after Howard Carter discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun.

  Throughout the nineteenth century, there were a number of references to Zarzura, and the name cropped up continually in travellers’ tales. The general location of the lost oasis was thought to be somewhere in the vast sand sea to the south of Egypt’s Dakhla oasis. These tales were corroborated by reports of medieval Arab geographers such as Al Bakri, who in 1068 wrote of a lost oasis in this region. He told the story of a black giantess from there who was caught stealing dates in the Dakhla oasis. She spoke no known language, and after being released, was tracked by her captors, though she outran them in the desert. He tied the story in with a more ancient legend, that of AI Jaza’ir—mystical glades of palm trees concealed in the desert sands, running with water and echoing with the eerie whistling of the jinn.

  In the twelfth century, another Arab writer, Alldrisi, told of many deserted oases stretching across the Libyan desert. He quoted reports of a pagan race called the Taguitae, whose capital may have been at El ’Atrun. Vague and insubstantial as these reports seemed, references such as these led to the eventual discovery of oases such as Nukheila and ’Uwaynat in the 1920s.

  It was Dr John Bell, the Director of Desert Survey in Cairo, who made the first scientific attempt to solve the riddle of Zarzura. He reckoned that if an oasis existed at all, it must be in a place where the surface was within 100 metres of the sub-surface water level. From a number of surface-height readings and water-level readings that had been made, he worked out that there were only two areas in the region indicated by the legends where an oasis might possibly be found. One of them lay north of Nukheila oasis, in the region beyond El ’Atrun.

  Acting on such information, Douglas Newbold and William Shaw set off in 1927 with a squadron of tribesmen of the Hawawir, not only to discover the lost oasis but also to make the first detailed exploration of the south Libyan desert. After marching with their camels for thirty-nine days, through El ’Atrun and Nukheila, where they made the first proper survey, they halted in the unknown country to the north. They climbed a steep ridge and gazed over the landscape ahead. If an oasis was likely to be found, then the relief should have fallen sharply. Instead, it continued to rise. The two explorers reluctantly gave up their quest for Zarzura at this point. Later, Newbold said, ‘If it exists, it is very probably to be found within a forty-mile radius of this point.’

  As I followed the blow by blow accounts of the Zarzura controversy, I became fired with the desire to discover this desert grail. All the accounts indicated that if the oasis existed, it lay behind a barrier of dunes. I had seen the desert as far as El ’Atrun, and I knew that in places, it was still as wild and uncharted as it had been in Newbold’s day. By the end of summer 1983, I had a new goal. If the oasis of Zarzura was to be found, then I should find it. And I should find it with the help of my Kababish.

  Still, I needed money. I was offered a job by ARAMCO, the Arabian-American Oil Company, teaching English to Saudi employees in one of their training centres. I accepted the job and flew to Dhahran.

  I was sent to the training centre at Hofuf in the Hasa oasis in the middle of the Ghawar oil field, the largest reservoir of oil on earth. I taught English to students who shared ancestry with the Kababish. They belonged to famous bedouin tribes, the Harb and the ’Ajman, the Murrah, the ’Utayba, and perhaps most ancient of all, the Bani Qahtan. Yet these young men were a new generation of bedouin who dressed in spotless white shirts and red-speckled headcloths. They raced away from class revving the engines of their brand-new Chevrolets and Cadillacs. I never found one amongst them who had ridden a camel.

  In the evenings, I returned to my Portakabin in Udhailiyya. It was a desert camp, surrounded by barbed wire and entered through checkpoints guarded by armed security men. At weekends, I would scale the perimeter fence and walk out in the desert carrying a small rucksack. But the thrill of being outside soon palled. The desert of Arabia was not the wild mysterious place I had known in Africa. Everywhere, there were the tracks of bulldozers and excavators, rusty pipelines, and derelict gas plants. At night, the stars were misted by the blear of oil flares and the sheen of arc lights, and the smell of petrol hung constantly on the breeze. It was more like a gigantic building site than a pristine wilderness.

  Once, I drove down with a friend to Jibrin on the edge of the Empty Quarter. I remembered reading Wilfred Thesiger’s account of his desperate journey here with the Rashid in 1948. We saw the desert marked with oil drums and littered with the carcasses of burned-out vehicles, abandoned by their owners. Camel herds were being driven by men who did not even bother to get out of their trucks, but just hooted wildly as the beasts ran before them. It seemed ironic that Thesiger should have said: ‘Although I had travelled in the deserts of the Sudan and the Sahara, others had been there before me and the mystery was gone … The Empty Quarter became for me the Promised Land.’ It was strange that less than a quarter of a century later, I should be standing on the edge of that ‘Promised Land’, feeling exactly the opposite emotion. I could hardly bear to look on the desecration that had taken place in this land. I yearned for the unspoiled deserts of the Sudan.

  Only ten years before, the Murrah—the so-called ‘nomads of the nomads’—still herded their camels in these sands that were almost untouched by the outside world. Now, the old life of Arabia was gone forever. There were prospecting teams working inside the Empty Quarter, and the Murrah carried their camels to Hofuf market in the back of pick-ups, with cranes to lift and lower them. There were still black tents by the roadside, but they were supplied by mobile generators and furnished with TVs and refrigerators. A few Murrah women in black tobes and veils still sat in a corner of Hofuf market, selling waterskins and balls of goat’s wool that were bought by American and British ARAMCO employees, who carried them back to their homes abroad as mementoes of a forgotten world.

  I spent only three and a half months in Arabia, and flew back to the Sudan after a short stay in Kenya. I travelled to El Fasher and, in the camel market there, bought a superb asha
b called Wad al Hambati (‘Son of the Bandit’). I re-crossed Zayadiyya country alone, staying off the track and camping each night in a concealed place. After only seven days, I was back in the dikka at Umm Sunta.

  There was a new order in the camp of the Kababish nazir. Sheikh Hassan had died quietly and was buried in Omdurman. At Tom was the new nazir, and his relative At Tom Wad al Murr was deputy. Of the old sheikhs, the sons of Sir Ali Wad at Tom, only Sheikh Ibrahim was a power to be reckoned with. I saw to my dismay that At Tom’s first act had been to build a house of mud and thatch in the centre of the camp. He talked avidly of reform and of selling camels to buy motor vehicles. I thought of the Murrah and of the burned-out cars at Jibrin and kept quiet.

  Many of my old friends were still in the dikka. Salim Wad Musa had heard news of me from Sannat on his return from Egypt. Juma’ Wad Siniin had just returned from Dongola, where he had been arrested for selling camels stolen from the Zayadiyya. He told me that Wad az Ziyadi was dead from an unknown illness. Adam Wad ash Shaharn had also been ill and was too weak to ride, and Hamid had committed some peccadillo and was no longer a ghaffir. Wad Fadul and Wad Tarabish were still going strong.