A Desert Dies

by Michael Asher

  We awoke to the roar of the wind and arose in a blizzard of dust. It was so powerful, we could scarcely stand; it was a struggle to strap on our gear. Kalklayt unhitched his riding beast, saying that he would ride back into the plateau to search for his missing camel. I thought him mad to try in this blizzard, but Juma’ made no comment.

  It was the most violent sandstorm I had experienced. Visibility was down to a few metres; the great cliffs to the east dissolved into the dust, reappearing occasionally as disjointed humps or tumuli of rock. We plodded on into the wind, winding our headcloths tight around our faces. The camels blinked the sand out of their eyes with their long windscreen-wiper eyelids. There is no animal on earth so well adapted to such storms. Since the heaviest granules of sand moved within six feet of the desert surface, the camel managed to keep its head out of the main blast, and its slit nostrils could be sealed to prevent the dust entering. We crossed over an elbow of broken detritus and descended into a flat, sandy plain bordered by interlocking sayf dunes that were sometimes just visible through the swirling dust. I knew that Juma’ could not navigate in this turmoil, and my Silva compass was constantly in my hand. It was as comforting as a brother. It had probably saved my life on at least one occasion.

  At noon, we found ourselves amongst some stunted sallam and tried to rest. The wind lashed us like a cat-o’-nine-tails, ripping down the shelter we tried to erect and baffling all efforts to make a fire. The violence of the wind shocked me. The camels turned their backs to it and waited patiently for the storm to drop. We had no choice but to do the same, lying in the shelter of their great bodies while our clothes filled with sand.

  Towards the end of the afternoon, the wind dropped mercifully. I was exhausted. Juma’ kindled a fire and made tea—hot, thick, and tasting of tar. We saddled quickly and moved over a great sand sheet of orange, as flat as paper and decorated with nodules of grit, like gazelle droppings. There was the occasional sarh tree, leaning over at an acute angle or tilting out of the land like a drunken scarecrow. The sky was white with dust and there was no sound but the rhythmic percussion of the camel’s feet, ker sho, ker sho, ker sho, on the sand.

  For the first time all day, we were able to talk again. ‘I wonder if Kalklayt found his camel,’ was the first thing Juma’ said.

  ‘He was crazy to try it in this!’

  ‘There was something odd about that youth,’ Juma’ declared. ‘He said that he had lost his baggage camel, yet did you notice—he was carrying twelve hobbles on his riding beast.’

  ‘He said that he had lost some of his hobbles.’

  ‘Why should he be carrying more than he needed? He had his saddlebag and his kabaros—what more does a herdsman carry? What Arab leaves his money on his baggage camel? I do not believe a word he said. I swear, by God, that those tracks came from Khitimai, not from inside the mountain. His camels did not look thirsty to me, yet he said they had not drunk for nearly a month. Those Sarajab are bad ones, by Almighty God! There is not an honest man amongst them!’

  ‘Why should he lie?’

  ‘Only God knows! But there is a reason. You can be sure he is hiding something. Perhaps we will find out in Wadi Howar.’

  Ras Tagaru was already in sight. Here, the cliff wall broke up into a ragged edge and finally degenerated into disconnected lumps of sandstone. We crossed the broken country beyond until the sun sank into the immense sand sea on our left, and the last thing we saw behind us was the red cliff of Tagaru glowing like molten copper.

  It took us five hours next morning to reach Wadi Howar. The wadi was thought to be an ancient drainage system that had carried water from the foot of the Chadian highlands far out into the desert, but no one had ever seen water running in it. It was famous for its game and for its arak trees that grew nowhere else in the desert. In good years, there was some grass here too, including ’agul, and hadd bushes. The Kababish had sunk many wells along its length. Although the trees were only shadows of their former selves, many families of the Sulayman, the ’Atawiyya, and the Awlad Huwal remained here, adamantly refusing to move south. Many of them had spent their entire lives in the desert and knew little of the world outside. To them, the nazir was little more than a name and the Sudan was a country that lay somewhere to the south and east.

  In Wadi Howar, we turned west and picked our way through the bars of sand. I remembered reading of the famous Bedayatt guide, Bidi Awdi, who had led a caravan through this way on his trek to Kufra in 1915. He had been instructed by the Darfur Sultan, Ali Dinar, to take slaves as presents to the Senussi brethren who then occupied the oasis. They had run out of water in Wadi Howar, and the guide had ridden fast to El ’Atrun with two of his men and filled up twelve waterskins. On their return, they had found four people dead from thirst and the rest lying on the sands, jibbering with madness and fear. The camels had scattered into the desert. Such tragedies still happened. Juma’ told me of a truck returning from Libya that had run out of petrol south of the wadi only a few years earlier. Some of the passengers had walked off into the sands, while others had remained with the vehicle. One of those who left had eventually been picked up by some nomads who had carried him to the police post in Wakhaym on their camels. The police had set out in a Land Rover and found the truck. A few men were still alive, sheltering in the shade of its chassis. All those who had wandered into the desert were found dead.

  At Jabarona, there were a number of ’Atawiyya families camping around a well. We were welcomed by Ahmad Wad Fadil, an ’Atawi who had been born in the wadi and had lived there all his life. His tent was pitched in a hollow, where the sand had been swept off the surface by the wind. It was made of four shuggas in the usual way but was completely open on one side. There was no furniture but a palm-stalk bed that was laid flat in the sand rather than being raised on pegs. One side of the tent was screened by a sheet of gazelle skin, and on the other side was a tiny storehouse that the Arabs called a khun. Opposite the tent was a tukul of light wood, in which a set of time-blackened cooking pots were hanging.

  Ahmad Wad Fadil received us with great dignity, standing outside his tent as we approached. He was a small, tight-muscled man with a face so fair, it was almost red. He had the blue-glazed eyes of the desert Arabs and wore a shirt that looked as if it had been deliberately matured for years in the desert sand. He shook hands with us like a lord, saying, ‘You grace my house! Welcome in peace!’ He called to his herdsman, a tall, slim, black youth who belonged to the Gur’an to take our camels and make a small place for us about twenty metres from the tent. Once our gear was unloaded, it was covered with a canvas sheet to protect it from the sun. Then Ahmad invited us to his tent and we made ourselves comfortable. He summoned an attractive girl with long, plaited hair, telling her to make tea. She busied herself in the tukul, lighting a fire and setting a black kettle on it.

  ‘This is how all the Kababish tents used to be,’ Juma’ commented. ‘One side for the storehouse and one for the people. The tents in the dikka have become too large now, because we hardly ever move.’

  I asked Wad Fadil how often his people moved. ‘We have no shogara like the Arabs in the south,’ he explained. ‘We are desert Arabs. In the rainy season, we water at Khitimai, but we rarely go further south than that.’ He told me that the desert Arabs had more connection with the Nile than with North Kordofan. Their supplies came from the market in Ed Debba, which was twelve days’ ride to the east. If they needed to sell camels, they would take them to one of the markets on the river since there, they would fetch a better price than in the south.

  Soon, the girl brought tea and Wad Fadil served it with ceremony, lacing it with a sprig of cinnamon. As we were drinking, a crowd of Arabs arrived from the other tents. They had seen us arrive and were anxious for news from the outside. News is a luxury that the Arabs crave, and they will travel long distances to hear it. They were as lean and healthy as salukis, sharp little men with eyes keen as knife blades, little beards, and tousled mops of hair. They carried daggers
with ornate ivory hilts, and their shirts were very short, ending a foot above the knee. All of them carried rifles. The only black face amongst them was that of the Gur’ani herdsman, whose long, drawn features were almost oriental.

  Wad Fadil told us that we were not the first and by no means the most impressive visitors they had seen that year. ‘The Prince of the Arabs was here!’ he said. ‘He had with him nine vehicles as big as mountains. He had an army of slaves and the biggest tents I have ever seen. There were men of every colour, white, black, and brown. Even yellow.’ At first, I could hardly believe the story, but as he went on, I gathered that there had been an expedition here, led by a Saudi prince. ‘They came looking for game,’ the ’Atawi said. They did not want to shoot it, but only to catch it. They wanted to take the animals alive back to their country. They made camp not far from here, and the Prince sent a lorry to fetch me. When I arrived, he was sitting in his tent with all his men around him. He said, “Are you the Arab who knows where the game is?” I told him that I could find them addax and addra and gazelle and oryx. I said that the game had gone west because of the dryness, and he would find little in the wadi.’

  ‘Were you afraid of him?’ I asked.

  ‘Why should I be afraid? He was just an Arab like me!’

  ‘Did you go with them?’

  ‘Yes, we drove west towards the mountains and we found some addax and some oryx and plenty of gazelle. They caught some of them with ropes, and the others they shot with little arrows. The arrows knocked them out and when they woke, they had been tied up. But some of them could not stand it. They died before we got them back here.’

  ‘How was the Prince?’

  ‘He was a very generous man, but you could tell he knew nothing about the desert. He was a city man.’

  The ’Atawiyya were excellent hunters and renowned as the best trackers amongst the Kababish. Almost all the Arabs would recognise the tracks of their own animals, but the ’Atawiyya knew those of every animal they had seen, and could memorise any track after seeing it only once. They knew which tracks belonged to the camels of which tribe, and could tell at a glance the camels of an outsider. No one could pass through their territory without them being aware of it. They did not need to see the travellers: they could form an extremely accurate picture from the tracks alone. Wad Fadil told me how one of his relatives had been travelling in the jizzu and had come across the tracks of scores of camels. Amongst them, he had recognised the mark of a camel he thought belonged to him. He followed the spoor as far as the Wadi al Milik and caught up with the herd, which was being driven by some Barara. ‘Have you a strange camel amongst your herd?’ he asked them.

  ‘No, they are all ours,’ came the reply.

  The ’Atawi examined the camels one by one, and singled out the one he thought was his. He brought it to the Barara and said, ‘Can you swear by God that this camel is yours?’

  One of the others answered. ‘To say the truth, I found that camel some years ago in the jizzu. I came upon a she-camel one day and she had just given birth. She was dying, but the calf was alive, so I took it. I reared it with my herd—and here it is.’ The two men conferred and the ’Atawi proved that one of his she-camels had been lost in the jizzu at the very same time. The camel was returned to him, but he paid a small sum to the Barara in compensation.

  Recognising the track of a camel one had seen many times seemed to be child’s play to the ’Atawiyya; the real test was to recognise the track of a camel one had never seen.

  The ’Atawiyya could also identify people from their footprints, with or without shoes. The prints revealed a great deal of information. To demonstrate this, Wad Fadil later called attention to my own prints in the sand outside. ‘These are not the tracks of an Arab,’ he told me. ‘I should know them anywhere. They are the tracks of a determined man, but not a cautious one. See how straight they are!’ Then he pointed to the tracks of Juma’ nearby. ‘Now those are an Arab’s prints. See how the soles are turned outwards as he looks around him while he walks. They belong to a wary man. Everything you do is written in the tracks!’ Wad Fadil went on to say that he could easily distinguish a man’s tracks from a woman’s, and could even tell if the woman was married or pregnant.

  Although the conditions in the inner desert were extreme, the ’Atawiyya and the other desert families lived there out of choice. The wadis provided their camels and goats with grazing, and the very remoteness of their pastures meant that little work was involved in herding for most of the year. They would let the camels graze unattended, knowing that they would never leave the wadi, and that they would turn up at the watering place whenever they were thirsty. During the hot season, the only work the Arabs did was watering. I asked Wad Fadil if he was ever afraid of raiders. ‘Never!’ he replied. ‘No bandits would get away with our camels. Someone would pick up their tracks within a very short time. How could they escape? It is a long way to the nearest watering place, and no one can survive in the desert without visiting the watering places. Once you see a man’s tracks, you can tell where he is going. A man driving stolen camels moves slowly. We should catch up with him long before he reached safety.’ This reminded me of the Sarajabi, Kalklayt, whom we had met near Tagaru, and I asked Wad Fadil about him.

  ‘Hah!’ the ’Atawi said. ‘He arrived here yesterday, saying that he lost his baggage camel in Tagaru. That camel happened to be carrying some money that did not belong to him. It was eighty pounds that someone gave him for a Sulayman woman at El ’Atrun.’ I learned several lessons from this incident. The Arab grapevine was thorough and perceptive: the area was enormous and the population minute, yet the nomads missed nothing. This great wilderness probed delicately into everyone’s weaknesses.

  In the late afternoon, I walked out into the dunes to bring my camels back. The low sun, reflected in the myriad particles of silicon and quartz, created an unreal aura beside the soft, feminine undulations of the sand and the unadorned bareness of the trees. I watched a woman in a black robe who balanced a can of water on her head while driving a knot of camels back from the well. Six small boys tore about amongst the dunes. There was a large mob of camels at the well, glittering red and white against the amber sand. Wad Fadil’s daughter and the Gur’an herdsman were pulling up water in small buckets. I waited there as evening drifted over the desert. One of the ’Atawiyya boys began to play the zambara, a pipe of tubular steel about fourteen inches long with four holes drilled in it. Its music was reedy and oddly surreal, in perfect harmony with the spirit of the land.

  As the darkness came, the smell of burning arak wood rose from the camps. Each tent was pitched in its own space, some distance from the others, but this night, the men gathered around Wad Fadil’s tent. He slaughtered a goat for us and brought a dish of flat, unleavened loaves with seasoning. The Arabs called this garasa. It was made of wheat flour that they obtained from the Nubian towns along the river. They supplemented their diet with hunting. There was still plenty of game in the wadi, especially gazelles. The ’Atawiyya would hunt on foot in the early morning, seeking out fresh tracks around the vegetation, stalking the animals, and shooting them at close quarters. They had some salukis—trim hunting dogs as fast as greyhounds, quite different from the belligerent guard dogs the Kababish used to protect their tents. A saluki had wide paws that enabled it to run on sand, and it could outpace a hare or a gazelle. The ’Atawiyya reared their dogs carefully, letting them run everywhere with them, hand-feeding them with lumps of dough and morsels of meat. When hunting with salukis, they would ride their camels, casting the dogs after the gazelle. The saluki would chase the quarry for miles. When the gazelle collapsed with exhaustion, the dog would seize and hold it until the Arab appeared on his camel to slit its throat. I never saw the ’Atawiyya using gazelle traps as the Sarajab did.

  The ’Atawiyya ate gazelle meat both fresh and dried. They staked the carcass out flat, slicing up the flesh and hanging it to dry in the sun from a tent or bush. The meat was much prized by the
desert Arabs.

  Often, I spoke to Wad Fadil’s Gur’ani herdsman, whose name I found unpronounceable. He told me that he came from the Ennedi hills, the stronghold of the Gur’an. It was from these hills and those of Mourdi, further north, that the Gur’an had launched their raids on the Nile for centuries. They would appear out of the night and attack a caravan or a quiet village, stealing women and camels. The river dwellers thought of them as evil spirits. They said that their camels made no tracks in the sand, that they lived on snakes and scorpions and the water from their camels’ stomachs.

  On the morning of the third day, Juma’ called me over and said, ‘Omar, your camel will not eat the arak leaves. The big camel was reared in this wadi and is accustomed to them, but Hambati is going hungry. It is better to move on.’ He explained that this was the furthest extent of his previous knowledge, and I told him that I should navigate by compass from now on. At night, we should travel by the Pole Star, for our way was a few degrees off north. I set a compass bearing on El ’Atrun and estimated that it would take us twenty hours to get there, which was two days of hard riding.

  The ’Atawiyya helped us load and Wad Fadil gave us a hunk of goat. We climbed out of the wadi and into the great sand sea beyond.

  _____14._____

  Nearing Zazura

  We were now entering a no man’s land

  where the shadow of governments

  hardly falls, and where, when a party of

  Arabs espy strange camel men on the

  horizon, they shoot first and inquire