A Desert Dies

by Michael Asher

‘It is not a disgrace,’ he said. ‘But an Arab without animals is nothing. He cannot be a nomad, because without animals, he cannot survive in the desert. To lose your animals is not a disgrace, but it is a great misfortune, by God! But—praise be to God—that is life! We cannot make the rain come. As soon as there is grazing in the desert, the Arabs will return.’

  ‘What if all the camels are dead by then?’

  ‘God is generous. God will provide.’

  As we lay down to sleep, a sense of peace descended on me. The camels shuffled at their hobbles, wedging themselves closer together in the sand. The last embers of the fire sparkled orange in the hearth. The aurora of Ed Debba cast a coronet of light over the eastern sky, and to the west, the star-bejewelled night hid the fathomless expanse of the greatest desert on earth.

  The next day, we rose before dawn. We saddled and loaded the camels, tying up their headropes and letting them wander before us. The desert was a gently undulating sea of hard-packed pebbles, like cobblestones. Here and there were the stunted remains of tundub and sarh trees, but there was nothing for the camels to eat. It was cool, and swarms of flies buzzed around their heads, making them sneeze and splutter and rub their muzzles against each other. The flies were parasites that could not live in the desert but travelled on the backs of men and animals for hundreds of miles. Worst of all were the horseflies that laid their eggs in the camels’ nostrils and occasionally plagued them with their powerful sting. Every so often, a plump white maggot would drop from the animal’s snout and wriggle across the sand. The Arabs believed that these maggots were formed in the camel’s brain, and saw no connection between them and the horseflies.

  The rocky hammada gradually gave way to a plain of sand. The sun came up, casting our shadows before us: gigantic shapes rippling across the surface. The sand looked fresh and pristine, as if no other foot had ever trodden there. There were stumps of dead trees and little heaps of deadwood that crumbled to powder at the touch. ‘Look at these trees!’ Jibrin said. ‘This was the famous Sallaym pastures. A few years ago all the Kababish in the north used to collect here. There were sallam trees and tundub and siyaal. The sands were green with grasses. You could not move for camels, and there was as much game as you could hunt. There was gazelle, oryx, even ostrich. I know men that saw herds of them, twenty at a time.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘The grazing got less every year, and the rains failed. There was never much rain here, but enough to bring grazing along the wadis. Then the trees died and the Arabs of the Nile came and chopped up the rest for firewood.’

  ‘Will it bloom again?’

  ‘Only God knows, but I don’t think it will bloom here. If they had left something, the tops of the trees, and just collected the fallen wood, it would have been better. I have seen sallam trees go for years without water. You think they are dead, but the spirit is still in them. It just needs a shower of rain and shushsh! They are green again. But this place is a dead place. They have left nothing.’

  I tried to imagine how it had been: tall grasses, thick trees, alive with movement. I imagined clusters of tents pitched in the grass, women carrying their infants in decorated litters, the camels bulging with milk and fat with grazing, a galaxy of campfires in the twilight, the herds gliding through the sheen of dusk to be hobbled by the tents. And this had been recently, well within my own lifetime. For hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, this plain that seemed so pristine had teemed with life. The traveller Linant de Bellefonds passed through Ed Debba in 1821 and commented in his journal on the wooded nature of the country around. He had heard a lion roaring outside the town. Now, the nearest lions were to be found below latitude 10°—over 300 miles south of here.

  By midmorning, the heat had become intense, and we mounted our camels. On the horizon, I could see a wall of dunes that looked white and insubstantial in the sunlight. By noon, we had reached them, and we halted for a drink and a brief rest. During our journey, we moved without debate or discussion, stopping as conditions dictated. Each day followed a similar pattern. Our movement was controlled by the natural cycle of the hours, the need of our bodies for food, and drink, rest, and the needs of the camels. In the cool of the morning, we would drift along behind the animals, our whips across our shoulders, taking in the minutiae of the desert surface: the trail of a lizard or insect, the three stones of an old campfire, the powdered droppings of a camel. Each object had its own story, made more intriguing by the barrenness of the environment. When the sun rose higher, we would mount as the urge took us, riding on for hour after hour in the shimmering haze of the sun and sand. Jibrin was a man of great silences. His eyes were focused far into the distance, sweeping across the horizon. He would suddenly look down, casting his gaze like a fisherman casting a net from side to side around the camels’ feet. This was the way of the desert Arabs. They never daydreamed. Their thoughts were always firmly in the present, reading the ground like a code, missing none of the messages that the desert had in store for them. To miss something might spell disaster.

  On my first journeys in the desert, the vast empty hours had forced me in upon myself. My mind had wandered out of control, drifting from subject to subject, daydream to daydream, along the meaningless void of the day, as the camels rocked gently to and fro. The desert had been an alien and baffling place for me then, and I had been like a blind man wandering in its vastness. Experience had trained me to control my thoughts as the Arabs did, to focus them on a single object. That object was survival; the successful transport of one’s body and possessions from water to water. Far from being dull, this concentration kept the mind intensely alive and resilient, and the hours passed with amazing speed. It created a sense of mounting harmony that climaxed in the feeling that everything—men, camels, insects, animals, plants, birds, sand, gravel, dust, even the rocks themselves—had fused into a single harmonious whole. In this state, life and death seemed but two sides of the process of continual and eternal change.

  Occasionally, we would talk, pointing out to each other objects of interest. Jibrin showed me the tiny corpses of desert larks and sparrows, still feathered and half buried in dust. ‘They just drop out of the sky,’ he said. ‘They used to rest in the trees at Sullaym. Now, there is nothing for them to eat or drink, nowhere for them to hide from the afternoon sun. They are dying, like the Arabs.’

  On the first afternoon, we came across a wide lane of camel tracks—tens of thousands of footprints cut into the firm sand. ‘This is the route to Egypt,’ my companion told me. ‘Some of these camels passed only three days ago.’ As I looked at the tracks, I thought of the several occasions on which I had come by this route, and of my very first desert journey here with Abu Sara and his Rizayqat.

  We came to a place where the herdsmen had made camp for the night. Each small event of their stay was stamped on the desert surface: the remains of the fire, the places where they had hobbled their riding camels, the depressions where men had slept, the few grains of sorghum where an Arab had hand-fed his mount, the footprints where someone had left the camp at night to relieve himself. The desert sands recorded everything for those who had eyes to see, but the record rarely endured. Soon, the wind and drifting sand would wash over the tracks and spoor, creating once again the illusion of a pristine wilderness.

  Once, as my eyes swept over the desert floor, I spotted a neolithic hand axe and stopped to pick it up. It was a smooth boulder of blue basalt, which had been given an edge by some Stone Age craftsman. It was smaller and more finely polished than the diorite axes I had found near Tagaru. It gave me a thrill to imagine that my hand was the first to touch it since it was discarded by its owner millennia before. As I searched around for more objects, I noticed minute fragments of white bone, pieces of pottery with a striated pattern, and several large grindstones of the kind still used by the nomads. The axe was of the type belonging to the so-called ‘C’-group peoples, who had herded cattle in this area thousands of years ago. They were amongst the first nom
ads to inhabit this desert; they and related races had driven their long-horned cows all over the Sahara. Their way of life had been little different from that of the Kababish who eventually succeeded them. They had lived in temporary shelters that could be easily dismantled for life on the move, carrying all their possessions on the backs of animals, transporting water in sealed skins, and spending their lives in search of grazing. Life in the desert had perhaps been a little easier then, the temperature a few degrees lower, the rainfall a few inches higher. But over the millennia, the ranges became increasingly arid and the vegetation dwindled, until the nomads were forced to move nearer and nearer to sources of water. Around 2000 BC, their way of life ceased. Their cattle could no longer bear the arid conditions, and within a thousand years, their culture had been superseded by that of camel-rearing men whose herds were better suited to the new environment.

  What fascinated me was the parallel between that time and the present. The cattle people had been destroyed by desiccation and overgrazing. Now, centuries later, those same processes were destroying the Arab nomads who had inherited the land from that earlier race. Only ten or fifteen years previously, the very desert in which we were now travelling had been crowded with nomads and their herds. In colonial times, the Kababish had ranged hundreds of miles from where we now were, far north across the plateau of Jabal Abyad. Almost within my own lifetime, the vegetation retreated south, taking the herds with it and leaving only a few stragglers like the families we hoped to find in Abu Tabara. The herds moved more and more into the semidesert, until the failure of the rains came like a coup de grace. Now, there were no substantial herds further north than the twelfth parallel, over 400 miles away. Clearly, the process of desiccation had not ended with the cattle people, but had continued almost imperceptibly over the generations, pushing a little further each year.

  When I showed the axe to Jibrin, he just said, ‘It probably belonged to the Anaj. They were giants in those days. It was long ago before the English came.’ He did not mention it again.

  In the cool of the first evening, we dismounted once again, anxious to spare the camels, and moved on foot for three hours across the erg. The sunset came with dramatic splendour, as if some giant hand had pulled the plug out of the day, letting the colours drain away like liquid. The deep blue of the sky poured into the bottleneck on the horizon, and as the surface shades ran off, the undertones of ultramarine, violet, and yellow were exposed. A froth of grey cloud bubbled at its edges, and wisps of smoky white drifted across it. Soon, there was nothing left but a spark of gold on the edge of the plain, and the black basin of the night, across which tumbled the vibrant organisms of the stars.

  Not long after sunset, we halted. As soon as we unloaded our baggage, the camels flopped down and rolled over in the soft sand, spraying themselves with dust. After we ate, we sat and watched the stars. Jibrin pointed out the planet Venus and told me, ‘See, it is the brightest star in the firmament, but it is different from the others. It is the only one that does not cross the sky, apart from the North Star, which stays where it is. They say that it does everything in nines. Once, it did not appear for nine days, but that was long ago.’ I thought, as so many times before, how closely these nomads were in tune with nature. I wondered how many people in my own country would even have recognised the planet Venus. The nomads were a practical people. They did not speculate about the meaning of the stars and the planets, but merely accepted that they were part of the beautiful and mysterious workings of the universe. Yet they observed them closely, knowing that their movements imparted knowledge that was useful. Jibrin went on to tell me about the rising and setting of various constellations and their significance in relation to the temperature, the winds, and the rainfall. It was complex; I could not follow it all. Yet I was convinced that these desert men had a core of intricate knowledge that more advanced technological societies had lost.

  The next morning, the sun came up like fire, and the desert vibrated with heat. ‘We will need shade when we rest today!’ Jibrin said. I could see that he was worried; it was the middle of winter, and such a surge in temperature was totally unexpected. We had only one full skin of water, one half full, and the jerrycan. There were still six days of travel ahead. Abu Tabara was the sale source of water in this part of the desert.

  By midday, we were in rocky country that had become an inferno of heat. At the halt, we built a tent, slinging my canvas over the wooden support, from which we also slung our waterskins. We threw ourselves down, exhausted, into the shade. ‘This is like summer, by God!’ Jibrin exclaimed. ‘What happened to the winter? If it stays like this, our water will never last us!’ I knew that he was right, and I was more troubled than I cared to admit. Water against energy, energy against water—it was the equation with which a desert traveller always had to juggle. In the desert, water was life. But to carry too much was as great a mistake as carrying too little, for it exhausted the camels and reduced the distance they could cover.

  I unfolded my map. It was a map of the 1940 survey made by Captains Coningham and Whittingham. The map showed a vast, flat area, relieved by a sea of sand dunes that was somewhere in front of us, and after that three or four mountain peaks. Because other relief was not shown, the map gave the impression that before us lay a continuous flat plain of sand, upon which the few landmarks should have been clearly visible. This was not the case. In front of me, I saw very broken country of scattered basalt ridges and shattered rock walls like the backs of half-buried amphibians. None of the landmarks was visible. To cap it all, they had improbable names, of which Jibrin had never heard. I wondered whether the good Captain’s informant, whoever he was, had merely made them up. In Ed Debba, I had taken a compass bearing on the northern edge of the dune sea, intending to traverse it from that side, but because of the rocky country we had continually turned off-course and there were no features now on which I could reset it.

  I asked Jibrin what he remembered of his previous journey, sixteen years previously. ‘We came from El ’Atrun with fifteen camels carrying salt,’ he said. ‘Of course, I was only a boy then. I don’t remember any of this landscape. I think we came much farther to the south. I remember that the desert was full of Arabs, and almost every night, we camped with a different family and drank milk and ate meat. It took us eight days from Abu Tabara to the Nile, but we spent one whole day in a wadi full of tundub. It was a forest, by God! There was some grass there, too.’

  ‘Did you ask your relations who had come from Rahib?’

  ‘Yes, but you said we should follow that instrument of yours. Now, we are too far from the route they described!’ I looked at the waterskins. They hung above my head like a pair of black testicles. Neither of them was completely full. I tried to make some mental calculations, but all depended on the temperature. On a cool winter’s day, we might get away with a quart at the very least, but on a steaming hot day like this one, a gallon would hardly suffice. We also needed water for cooking. I found myself thinking, ‘Is this all we have between ourselves and the desert?’ I knew that I could have made the decision to turn back at this point, yet I remembered the disappointment I had felt when Juma’ and I returned from Nukheila the previous year. We should go on in spite of everything. I said to Jibrin, ‘We shall have to ration the water.’

  ‘God is generous!’ he said.

  Before we set off that afternoon, I scouted around the camp and found the woody stems of some plants, spread out like stars and hugging the surface of the sand. Jibrin told me they were ’umayyi plants. It seemed to me that they were the last souvenirs of a time when this plain had rumbled with the movement of migrating herds, when a traveller could find company every night. I knew how quickly the desert could change, how a single shower could bring to life the ephemeral seeds that had lain dormant for years, painting the matchwood trees with green leaf and nurturing brilliant growths of flowers along the wadi bottoms. Jibrin snapped off a bit of plant and said, ‘The spirit is still in them. You would say the
y were just wood, but if it rained tomorrow, you would see a change.’ Both of us stood for a moment in awe at the hardiness of this flora; somewhere, hidden deep within their roots, was a tiny reservoir of liquid in which the spirit still pulsed with life. When nature produced such wonders, there was always hope.

  In the next two days, the temperature did not drop, and we moved through a blinding agony of heat. Both of us were perturbed by these freak conditions, and we rationed out the water carefully. Early on the fourth day of the journey, we ran into the chain of dunes that stretched north and south across our path. As we approached, I saw that the dunes were crescent-shaped, with steep leeward faces on the south side, so that they presented us with the transverse face. They were linked together and joined by ridges sculpted by the wind into all manner of configurations, seeming to make an impenetrable wall. About their bases, I noticed the ripples of loose sand that the Arabs called hayil, in which we might sink up to our calves. I knew that if the dunes extended for any distance, crossing them would be exhausting for ourselves and the camels. We were thirsty, and the day promised no let-up in the powerful radiation of the sun. As we got nearer, we saw a belt of hallif grass. From a distance, it looked promising, but when closer, we found that the stalks were dry and useless. A little further on, though, we discovered two hadd bushes like prickly toadstools. While the camels fed, Jibrin walked forward to inspect the dunes. I watched him struggling through the deep sand. Once, he was forced to steady himself from falling. I wondered how we should get the camels through it. Jibrin climbed the side of the dune and disappeared over its lip. He reappeared, and I watched him racing down towards me, kicking up spurts of amber sand. As he came up, he said, ‘We have come right into the middle of it. If we try to go round, we might lose a day. Our water cannot stand that. We have to go over.’ I asked him how far it extended. ‘As far as Ican see,’ he answered. ‘But there are flat spaces between.’ Then he grabbed his camel’s headrope. ‘Come on!’ he said.