A Desert Dies Read online

  To my mother and my father

  The parched eviscerate soil,

  Gapes at the vanity of toil,

  Laughs without mirth,

  This is the death of earth.

  T. S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, Four Quartets

  Contents

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  Part 1: The Kababish

  Heart of the Herdsman

  Good Things in Humble Guises

  Lord of the Drums

  Lost Worlds of Dar Kababish

  Legendary Pastures

  Arabs of the Wadi

  Part 2: The Journey to El ’Atrun

  A Small Salt Caravan

  Bringing Back the Salt

  Legend of the Drums

  Part 3: The Trek to Egypt

  Interlude in the Damar

  A Camel Race to Egypt

  Part 4: The Search for the Lost Oasis

  Hidden Pearls

  The Last of the Desert Arabs

  Nearing Zazura

  Part 5: The Death of Earth

  The Desert Dies

  Journey through a Dead Land

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  My Companions

  List of Tribes

  Glossary

  List of Botanical Species

  About the Publisher

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  THIS BOOK IS A WINDOW into the forgotten life of the Sahara as seen firsthand by Michael Asher in the 1980s. It is a throwback to the time before the southern part of Sudan split into an independent nation, before the culture of nomads in the Sahara was overtaken by the march of technology, before regional conflicts made such travel as is described by Asher virtually impossible today. It had long gone out of print, but we are now privileged to publish this e-book version.

  From the start, readers are thrown into a world they are unfamiliar with, and together with the protagonist Omar, they learn the ways of the Kababish people in Sudan. It takes a poignant tone as the author reveals the degeneration of their culture by nature and urbanisation. A prolonged drought dries their oases, causing them to fight each other for resources. They are eventually forced to move into towns or else perish.

  To quote the author, “Men wandered the ranges hungry and desperate. Women took the children to the cities. For the first time, the urban population saw proud Arab nomads begging in the streets. For the first time, they could no longer rely on their innate toughness and their ability to endure.”

  For the digital edition, we have retained the original language, although certain elements of it may not apply to today’s politically correct landscape. We believe, however, that they are important to keep as part of that particular historical milieu. We did not include the print version’s photo section and index due to technical issues that we intend to address in a subsequent edition. Other than this exclusion and minimal editing (to conform to our in-house style), we have remained true to the original published by Penguin Books in 1988.

  We hope you will enjoy the book as we have because Asher is a brilliant storyteller, a keen observer of the nuances and idiosyncrasies of his subject.

  Agatha Verdadero

  Publisher, Master Publishing

  December 2012

  Part 1

  The Kababish

  A desert is not uninhabitable through lack of wells, but through lack of grazing, which in turn depends on the sterility of the ground as well as upon rainfall.

  Ralph Bagnold, Libyan Sands, 1935

  _____1._____

  Heart of the Herdsman

  Strong is the Sheikh of the Arab in the season of the rains.

  Arab saying

  FIVE MINUTES AFTER MY PLANE touched down at El Fasher airport, I knew that something was wrong.

  The rains had been due weeks ago, but the air outside the plane was dusty and dry, and the trees that stood on the edge of the runway were as stark as scarecrows. There was no water in the wadi that plunged down to the camel market, and the thorn bush that lined it was brittle and dead.

  The feeling of desolation increased as I looked out of the Toyota truck that took me into the town. Nowhere was there a fleck of green grass or a tree in leaf. As we pulled into the road that led to the market, I noticed with surprise that the rainwater fula was empty. It was normally brimming at this time of year, the great siyaal trees around it pulsing with the cries of ten thousand water birds. Now its bed was a carapace of cracked earth on which some men were making bricks. The trees around were empty.

  I turned to the driver and asked, ‘What happened to the water?’

  ‘The rains did not come. They are later than ever.’

  ‘I have never seen the fula empty at this season:

  ‘Neither have I,’ he told me, ‘and I was born here!’

  I was to remember that scene many times over the next three years. It reminded me that from the moment I had arrived in the west of the Sudan to fulfil my ambition of living amongst the Kababish nomads, there had been signs of the powerful changes that were already in motion.

  El Fasher was already a place of many associations for me. It was from there in 1980 that I had set out with a guide called Abu Sara and six other nomads on a five-hundred-mile camel trek to Dongola in the Northern Province. That experience had been my first taste of life in the desert. At the end of it, exhausted and a stone lighter, I had realised that here was the environment that offered the challenges I craved. Amongst these nomadic herdsmen, I had discovered comradeship that could overcome even the deeply rooted barriers of culture and race.

  While working as a teacher in the Sudan for three years, I had spent almost all my spare time travelling and living in the harsh world of the nomads. I had ridden across the rolling savannah of Central Kordofan and explored the then little-known country along the Chad border. I had journeyed with tribesmen of the Zaghawa and the notorious Bedayatt. I had suffered many setbacks: once, my camel had been taken, and on another occasion, I had been arrested by the police under suspicion of being a Cuban mercenary. Undeterred, I had set out again across the country of the Bani Hussayn between Gineina and Kutum, and from there had ridden through the Tegabo hills and penetrated into the narrow chasms of Jabal Meidob. I had travelled with nomads of the Mahamid as they drove their camel herds on their annual migrations through the acacia forests and across the plains of West Darfur, and visited families of the Baggara, the cattle Arabs, who planted their winter crops on the hills outside Gineina. I had stayed with nomads of the Awlad Zayid and Awlad Janub as they wintered with their herds in Wadi Habila, and crossed the Fur country of Jabal Kawra, where I had watched half-naked Fur women hunting porcupines in the thickets. I had been into the desert and felt its vastness. I had seen the great ergs spreading out before me to every horizon, day after day, without a blade of grass or a tree, seeing no one but my companions, until it seemed that there was nothing in the world but this huge emptiness and this handful of men who were with me.

  These brief tastes of life in the vast ranges only served to whet my appetite. My time was always limited. I always had to return to my classroom, where I felt suffocated and inactive. This was not the fault of my students: they were gracious, affectionate, and on the whole, eager to learn. But all my life, I had felt the need for a challenge that would tax both my mind and body to extremity. Some men had found the answer to that challenge in the high mountains and the seas, others in the jungles, the uncharted rivers and the poles. I found it in the desert.

  This time, I had come to El Fasher to resign my job as a teacher, and to take on the challenge that life amongst the nomads offered me. I had decided to live and travel amongst the nomadic Kababish.

  The Kababish were the nomads who inhabited the deser
ts and desert steppes in the northern third of the Sudan, west of the Nile. They called themselves Arabs and spoke Arabic, yet their origins were many and varied, and almost certainly included non-Arabic elements. I chose them because they were the heirs of the thousands of generations of nomads, African and Arab, who had occupied this most arid of regions.

  The tribes I had travelled with previously were peoples of the Sahel and the desert fringes. They ventured into the desert wastes as outsiders, and were never totally at ease in a hostile world. Nothing could change the affection I felt for those like Abu Sara, for the men who had been early companions. But to live with the Kababish represented an even more exacting test. I went amongst them to live the life of the desert and to understand the demands made by one of the most desolate places on earth.

  The day after my arrival in El Fasher, I handed in my letter of resignation to the Province Education Office. The same evening, I visited my friend, Mohyal Din Abu Satita, in the Brinjiyya district of the town.

  I had met Mohyal Din the previous year. He was a camel merchant. His family, the Abu Safitas, were people of Libyan and Mauritanian extraction, with the blood of half the races of the Sahara in their veins. They were the richest merchants in Darfur, but their wealth was founded on the camel trade. They had contacts amongst all the camel-rearing tribes of the west, and I hoped that Mohyal Din would be able to give me a letter of introduction to the nazir of Kababish, Hassan Wad at Tom.

  Mohyal Din was a well-built, imposing figure, with an uncompromising manner and a face that was grained with the toughness that comes of countless transactions. Although a prosperous merchant, he was no stranger to the desert. His ancestors had come to the Sudan by camel and he maintained the tradition, travelling with the herds and riding and hunting like a nomad. There was little he did not know about camels and the tribes that bred them, and he and his brothers owned some of the finest racing dromedaries in Darfur.

  As I sat in the courtyard of his house on that day, he mulled over my project with a thoughtful face. ‘I can easily give you a letter to Hassan Wad at Tom,’ he told me. ‘He is my friend. I have entertained him here at my house. But if you visit him now, you will not find any camels. All of his camel herds are moving to South Darfur because the rains have not fallen in their own lands.’

  He explained that some rain had fallen on the pastures around the city of Nyala, and that the nomads of many tribes had been gathering there for some weeks. He thought a little more, then he said, ‘I am going to visit my herd in a few days. It is being grazed near Ghubaysh in the region of Nyala. You can bring your luggage and ride in my truck, then I can introduce you to any Kababish that we find in the area. You can buy a camel and travel with them until they move back north. That way, you can learn their customs before you go into the desert.’

  I knew that South Darfur was Sahel savannah, and hardly the environment I had envisaged for my first meeting with the nomads of the desert. Nevertheless, it would be greatly to my advantage to have Mohyal Din introduce me to these Arabs, and to spend time learning about their ways before moving into the harsher world of the north.

  ‘Are you sure they will accept me?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course they will accept you,’ he replied. ‘They are Arabs. Arabs never turn away a guest!’

  As I left the house that night, I was electric with anticipation. I wondered with excitement what awaited me amongst the Kababish, and what I should discover over the next years of my life. In the soft moonlight, the fula gaped, dark and empty.

  When we arrived in South Darfur several days later, the grass was thick and tall, and the thorn trees were burgeoning with green leaf. There were seams of grey cloud across the azure sky, and the air was cool and full of moisture.

  We arrived at the village of Ghubaysh in the afternoon. Mohyal Din had already sent word to some Kababish of the Nas Wad Haydar tribe to meet us there, and their two camels were couched outside one of the compounds of broken cane that made up the village. Otherwise the village was deserted. There were a few grass huts on the verge of collapse, their thatched walls and roofs eaten by creepers that had burst into purple flower.

  Mohyal Din hooted violently, and almost at once, two men came out of the compound. One was a striking if unhandsome figure. He was short and stout, with a bulging black face and a protuberant belly: it was this, I learned later, that had earned him the nickname ‘Oagalol’, which meant ‘little pot’. He stopped and waited for us to get out of the truck, his feet planted firmly apart. A Kalashnikov rifle was slung from his shoulder and a bandolier of bullets sagged across his stomach. His woollen cap was tilted over one thick eyebrow.

  Oagalol’s companion, Mohammid Wad Habjur, was taller and slimmer, with a square, solemn face marked with smallpox scars. Like Oagalol, he wore a cotton shirt yellow with age, with the addition of a dirty rag of cloth twisted across his forehead like a bandage. He carried a heavy Belgian rifle cradled against his elbow.

  The Arabs greeted us warmly, clasping our hands and releasing them again and again, and repeating, ‘God’s blessing on you! God give you peace! Welcome in peace!’ At first they met my gaze with averted eyes, which was the custom amongst nomads, but after a while I noticed Oagalol peering at me appraisingly through the greetings; his small, intense eyes held me for an instant in their powerful glare. When the greetings finally fizzled out, Oagalol invited us to sit in the shade of the compound wall. I squatted down, and Mohyal Din sat with the Arabs a few yards away. The servants who had been riding on the back of the truck jumped down and leaned against the wheels, smoking cigarettes.

  The Arabs spoke with Mohyal Din in low voices and in an unfamiliar dialect of which I could pick up only odd words. Occasionally one of them shot me a questioning glance. I had no doubt they were discussing my future, and I felt awkward and conspicuous in the new white jibba, cotton sirwal, and headcloth that I had put on for the occasion.

  It seemed a long time before Mohyal Din called me over and said, ‘It is all arranged. You can travel with these men until they move north. They are Kababish of the Nas Wad Haydar, and their camp in Kordofan is near the camp of Hassan Wad at Tom.’ Then he turned to the Arabs and told them, ‘His name is Omar. He can speak Arabic and he knows how to ride a camel. You can sell him one—a good one, not a camel of fools.’

  ‘Very well,’ Dagalol said, speaking in a slurred, harsh accent. ‘But does he know that the life of the Arabs is very hard? There are no beds to sleep on, no bread, and no vegetables. We move every day and we wait for no one.’

  ‘He will survive,’ Mohyal Din answered, shrugging. ‘God is generous.’ Then he took a clip of ten Kalashnikov rounds from his pocket and gave it to Dagalol. The Arab did not smile or thank him, but I could see from the way he quickly put the gift away in the folds of his shirt that it was much appreciated. ‘He could not be in better hands than ours,’ he said.

  ‘That is good,’ Mohyal Din commented, ‘for I shall be listening for news of him.’

  Then he wished me good luck and told me, ‘Come and see me in El Fasher when you return.’ I agreed to do this and thanked him. We shook hands and he told the servants to dump my equipment in the grass.

  In a few moments, the truck stuttered into life and was off, cruising into the bush. I watched it until the landscape swallowed it up and only the angry buzz of its engine remained. Then that too disappeared and there was silence. The men standing a few feet away seemed to belong to an alien world. For a split second, loneliness engulfed me. The landscape seemed to come alive with a sudden shock of sensation. I saw the sunlight glittering on the sea of grasses and smelt the peppery scent of the acacias in bloom. There was a whiff of petrol lingering in the air from the truck, and from somewhere else came the richer fumes of wood smoke. I saw my equipment in the grass around me as if under a microscope: the saddle and the leather saddlebags, the new waterskins smelling of tar, the canvas, blankets, and sheepskin. I felt the taut restriction of the money belt under my jibba, which contained 1,00
0 Sudanese pounds.

  Then Dagalol held up a bowl of water and said, ‘Come and drink. There is no fresh water on the ranges.’ I took the bowl and hunkered down to drink. As I passed it back, he said, ‘I do not know why you have come here, Omar, but this land is a hard land, a dangerous land. There are men here who would kill you for nothing. Keep your wits about you always. You understand?’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘God is generous.’

  It was a short ride from the village to Dagalol’s camp, but for me the journey represented far more than the distance covered. Once again I was crossing the divide between the world of the town, where the international culture of motor vehicles and mass communications reigned, and the timeless dimension of the nomad.

  I rode Dagalol’s camel, while the Arabs shared the other. The camels were both magnificent animals, moving gracefully through the bush, flowing with that suppressed power that had become familiar to me on my many journeys. We rode across a carpet of tribulus decorated by millions of yellow flowers. Here and there were patches of sand bright orange in colour; there were seams of taller grasses, some with ripe ears white and bobbing, and others with waxy, bulbous leaves and purplish flowers. Everywhere the thorn trees wore a mantle of rich green, and occasionally we saw vast grey baobabs rising like monuments above the lesser shrubs. We saw no other men. Once or twice, Dagalol pointed out the movements of camels, no more than furry white blots on the rolling plain.

  It was almost sunset when we came to a grove of acacias, where a man and a boy sat twisting ropes out of bark. They stood up as we approached shouting, ‘Welcome! Welcome in peace!’ and ‘Your return is blessed!’ We made our camels kneel by them, and they shook hands with me. The man had a pleasant face, nut-brown and oval as an egg, and hair shaved down to the skull. The boy was about twelve years old, and much darker; his face was lopsided, with an ungainly and irrepressible grin. Both were dressed in the same mould-yellow shirts rent with tatters that had been stitched and restitched. The brown-faced man was called Ahmad Wad Ballal, and the boy was Dagalol’s younger son, Hassan. They took our camels and led them over to a place where saddles and gear had been piled into neat little pyramids. In the midst of it stood a V-shaped support of wood, from which were draped five or six bulging goatskins of various sizes. Wad Ballal and Hassan untied my equipment and helped me to arrange it in a place that Dagalol chose with great deliberation. Then Mohammid Wad Habjur mounted his camel, saying that he was going to his father’s camp, and rode away.