A Desert Dies Read online

  All day, we moved slowly, letting the camels go at their own pace and allowing them to browse wherever there was a little grass or a few trees in leaf. We passed through miles of waist-high la’at trees, their reddish branches spreading out from ground level, and groves of gafal, whose thick and tuberous limbs curled around the central trunk in a claw-like cage. There were few Arabs about. One night, we halted by the campfire of some Nurab and called out a greeting. At once, the answer came back, ‘Welcome! Come and rest! Welcome to the guests!’ We couched our camels some yards away and set up our taya methodically, piling up the saddles and saddlebags as a shelter against the prevailing wind, and laying out our canvas and sheepskins behind them. Wad az Zayadi couched the baggage camel downwind in a place suitable for the cooking fire. Ibrahim set up the camp bed for At Tom and later unsaddled his camel, neatly arranging his saddlebags and his two rifles. Juma’ was in charge of the camels and saw to it that they were all hobbled by the forelegs and turned into the grazing. As we were making the final touches, two little Arabs came out of the darkness to welcome us. They greeted us with an intensity that was almost obsequious, taking our hands in both of theirs and repeating, ‘Welcome! Welcome to the guests!’ When they had shaken hands with each one of us, they ran back into the night and reappeared dragging a fat sheep. One of the Arabs slit its throat, and at once, my companions lined up and began to step over the carcass one by one, chanting ‘Karama! Karama!’ I hung back, not knowing what to do, but At Tom called out, ‘Come on, Omar! You must honour the hospitality of our hosts!’ Soon, a fire was leaping up in the hearth as Wad az Zayadi and Hamid began to cook the meat. When it was almost ready, the two Arabs appeared, carrying huge platters of porridge swimming in buttermilk. When the feast was laid out before us, Hamid poured water over our hands and we began, eating first the raw liver and lights mixed with onion and hot pepper. Then we moved on to the roasted meat and finally to the kisri. The food was always eaten in this order and, as if to justify it, the Arabs would sing out, ‘He who is weak of brain leaves the meat and eats the grain!’ Our hosts ate with us, continually pressing us to eat more and declaring, ‘By God, you eat nothing!’ as one by one we sat back, replete.

  To the Kababish, hospitality was a solemn duty; to refuse to honour a guest was a great disgrace. Although I knew this, it was a long time before I could accept such lavish hospitality without a pang of guilt. I knew that often our hosts were poor; that while they gave us of their best, they might go hungry for a week. The Arabs associated meanness and avarice with slaves because they considered that a slave had nothing to give. The words for a freeman and a generous man were the same: hurr, which literally meant ‘free’. It was the adjective applied to everything that was of the best quality, especially their thoroughbred livestock.

  After the meal, At Tom sat on his camp bed and the others gathered around his feet and talked for hours. Now that he was out of his father’s camp, he showed himself to be a powerful and authoritarian figure, already clothed in the mantle of the nazirate that he would one day inherit. The Arabs treated him with great respect despite his age. His brother Salim was more abstemious and Spartan by nature, though he had a sharp tongue and was often tactless. He was more at ease in this environment than At Tom and could ride and shoot as well as any of the more experienced Arabs. At times, it seemed to me that both brothers were worlds apart from the others. They were educated and had travelled. They knew the machinations of the great universe outside their own dar. They were interested in cars, aircraft, and radios, and they laced their conversation with English expressions that they had learned in school. At Tom talked proudly of the truck he intended to buy and how many camels he would sell to obtain it. Meanwhile, the Arabs at his feet talked of the things that they had always talked of: grazing, the camels, the rain.

  They were excellent storytellers. That night, to please our hosts, Mahmoud recounted his adventures in the jizzu. He told us how he had once been dying of thirst and had come across the carcass of a dead oryx, and how he had slit open its stomach and drunk its water, which had saved him. He told us that once, after four days without food, he had found an ostrich egg, which had provided so much food that he had been unable to eat it all. Afterwards, old Adam took the floor, saying that he had once been responsible for tracking all the lost camels belonging to the Nurab. He told us the story of ten she-camels belonging to Sheikh Ali Wad Salim, which had been lost in the jizzu yet had turned up at the gap of Sheikh Ali’s tent months later, having crossed two hundred miles of desert. He related the tale of the renegade bull-camel that had killed its owner and run wild in the hills, returning to the place of the killing on the same day of each year.

  As I listened to these stories, I felt proud to be amongst such men, yet the feeling was soured by a note of sadness. I knew that the world they spoke of, the jizzu and the old patterns of migrations, was a world of the past. It was men like At Tom and Salim who spoke for the future.

  The next night, we made camp in a dry wash near the foot of Jabal Hattan. At Tom wanted to press on to the mountain, but Wad Fadul argued that the pass was dangerous at night. There had been no rain here for more than a year and the ground was bone-dry, with clumps of stark thorn trees along the wadi sides.

  As we ate, there were flashes of lightning across the horizon, though no one took much notice of them. Juma’ and Mura’fib brought the camels in later and hobbled them by the knee and the foreleg for extra security. There had been many tales of Zayadiyya and Meidob bandits roaming in the hills.

  I was woken by a clap of thunder that shook the air like an explosion. Streaks of lightning forked down to the earth, and a second later, rain came surging out of the night sky, spattering across the dust in enormous droplets. Within minutes, the wadi was inches deep in water and, before we could move it, was up to our calves. Still heavy with sleep, we tried desperately to shift our gear, but the water rose second by second. ‘Hold on to your things!’ someone shouted. The water was pouring into the wash from all sides, and for a moment, I wondered if we might drown. I stayed where I was and held on grimly to my saddlebags, praying that my camera and film would survive. Soon, the water was up to my thighs, and I crouched there, trying to keep my balance as the soft sand under my feet began to melt away. I had often heard of Arabs being drowned in wadis by flash floods and had found it difficult to believe that the water level could rise so rapidly. I tensed my muscles and stayed without shifting for what seemed like hours as the rain slopped down the back of my shirt. Pieces of twig and tufts of grass nudged against me as they floated downstream in the torrent. I hardly noticed the rain easing off until it had become no more than a light drizzle. Gradually, the water began to subside. By morning, it had disappeared completely.

  The sickly grey light of dawn crept over the world to reveal a landscape transformed. Everywhere, the thorn trees glinted and dripped with moisture, and the grey dust had turned into a rippled carpet of ochre mud that was plastered over the tree trunks. Masses of woody debris and uprooted bushes were piled up along the sides of the wadi. Some of the camels had been half buried in the slime, unable to move because of their hobbles. They sat there, uncomplaining, silently waiting to be released. Many of my things had been carried away. I had lost my sandals, whip, pipe, books, and saddle cushions. My camera and lenses were full of muddy water and most of my film was wet. My maps looked like pâpier maché and my tobacco was a pulpy mess. I watched my companions dragging their gear out of the mud, looking miserable and bedraggled. It was an irony that when rain fell in this thirsty land, it almost always brought greater hardship. None of us was in any mood to celebrate. Wad az Zayadi announced that the flour was soaked and the seasoning ruined. All our leather equipment was waterlogged and our saddles splattered with mud:

  ‘Come on, let’s pull the camels out!’ At Tom said and we went to inspect the animals. Some of them were stuck tight, where the wadi floor had melted under their weight. We had to go down on our hands and knees in the slime to unf
asten their hobbles then slither about trying to fix their headropes. In places, the mud was up to our calves, and we slipped and staggered as we tried to heave the animals out of the quagmire. I hauled on Wad al ’Atiga’s rope as Hamid pushed him from the rear. The beast roared and whined in confusion, and suddenly jerked back on the rope so that I plummeted into the mud slick. Hamid began to laugh uproariously, until he too lost his footing and was sitting up to his waist in the ooze. After that, he gave up and started to crawl out of the morass on his hands and knees. It took us more than an hour to drag the slime-sodden animals on to drier ground. They looked a sorry sight, their buff hide covered in slicks of red muck. Afterwards, we laid our sheepskins and blankets out to dry, and Wad az Zayadi emptied the flour and seasoning on to plastic sheets. Then we began to hunt for our lost possessions. Most of them were found stuck between the split roots of bushes or covered in mud on the wadi bed. After another hour, I had found all but my pipe. I had begun to despair when Wad Fadul held it up, grinning. I knocked a pellet of muck out of its bowl and found that it was still smokable.

  We began to load the camels but our equipment was still greasy, and as we tried to tighten our saddle girths, the saddles slipped out of position maddeningly again and again. Before long, though, the sun emerged from its membrane of cloud and started to dry us out. There was a fresh, almost spicy smell in the air. The plateau reared up before us like a colossal fortress, and as the sun climbed higher, its layered orange walls shimmered in the sunlight.

  The going was painfully slow that morning. The camels could not grip on the slippery surface; they tottered like drunken men. For a few metres, Wad al ’Atiga walked solidly, then he would suddenly lurch forward sickeningly as he lost his grip. For a second, my heart would beat wildly as I experienced the dreamlike sensation of uncontrollable falling. Each time, the camel managed to jerk upright at the crucial moment, and I would look behind to see the telltale smear of his sliding pads across the mud slick. As he watched me, Salim burst out laughing, yelling, ‘Hold his head up, or you will go down!’ Just then, his own camel lurched and staggered, and his grin was replaced by a grimace of instinctive fear. The others laughed loudly, but I saw that all of them were having the same problem. We inched across the wet land, alternately slipping and roaring with laughter, as the camels’ feet wove a pattern of curving skid marks across the ochre surface.

  It took more than two hours to reach the hard lava base at the foot of the plateau wall. Wad Fadul told us to dismount, and we scrambled over layers of broken black detritus until we came to the entrance to the pass. On either side, the cliffs rose like hand-worked masonry. As we climbed the narrow path in single file, a deep chasm opened beneath us in which a slim ribbon of water flowed down from the mountain between ranks of siyaal trees. The camels hated the smooth boulders that lay in our track and began to stagger backwards, threatening to push us into the ravine. We shouted at them hoarsely and used our whips to force them onwards. We climbed on and on as the track grew steeper, and the chasm below deepened. Suddenly, it levelled out and opened into a patch of bronze-coloured gravel, beyond which was some thorn scrub and the most gigantic baobab tree I had ever seen. Its massive canopy was in full royal leaf, and it had an enormous trunk around which thirty men might have stood shoulder to shoulder. The mountain beyond looked dim and mysterious, and the great tree stood at the very apex of the pass like the guardian of a lost world.

  We couched our camels under the vast canopy and sat down to drink water. ‘This is where Sheikh al Murr used to hold court,’ At Tom told me. ‘He would camp here for days and the Arabs would visit him from miles around.’

  ‘But the mountain was different then,’ Mahmoud added. ‘There was game, even lions and giraffes, and running water with wild duck and guineafowl. The trees were as thick as a forest. We used to hunt on our horses, looking for hyenas and wolves. Where are those days now? The people wiped the game out and the rest ran away, by God!’

  Later, I examined Wad al ’Atiga’s back and found to my annoyance that the greasy saddle had rubbed against his skin, causing the beginning of a painful gall on the withers. I showed it to Juma’ and he said, ‘You will have to alter the shape of your saddle cushion or the animal will be finished.’ Wad Fadul took my cushion and cut a piece off with his sharp knife, restitching it skilfully so that the leather would not press against the tender surface of the camel’s mound.

  In the afternoon, we crossed the face of the plateau, riding on a hard cuticle of rock and gravel broken by the occasional thicket of acacias. There were Arabs everywhere, moving north with flocks of sheep and goats and small mobs of scrawny camels. We went on until sunset came, as grey as the sunrise that morning, the wall of cloud pierced by beams of blue light that striated the rocky desert beneath. We made camp near some Nurab, who killed a goat for us, slinging the carcass in a thorn tree and butchering the animal quickly. The Nurab told us that there were rumours of Meidob raiding parties in the mountain and advised us to stay alert during the night. The Meidob hills were only forty miles west of Hattan, and the lack of rain in their own country had sent them foraging deeper than usual into Kababish territory.

  As we crossed the mountain during the next three days, the landscape seemed suddenly full of life. Green shoots were already pressing through the mud slicks, and the air was alive with the drone of insects. Black beetles scurried underfoot, and at night, we were assailed by moths, flies, and mosquitoes. Twice, I discovered pale-green scorpions that had crept into my equipment, and often, large solifugid camel spiders wheeled around our fire and scuttled off again into the shadows. There was water in the depressions that lay at intervals across the plateau, and there were nomads with sheep and goats in every thicket. For a moment, the ephemeral life of the desert had flowered.

  One morning, we moved through a barrier of rocky crags and came to a depression, where a pool of water glittered like mercury. In the hollow, hundreds of camels were moving shoulder-tight like a many-legged centipede, marshalled by two Arabs, who looked familiar. As we rode up to them, I recognised Ahmad Wad Ballal and Abboud. They greeted me warmly, and I noticed that Wad Ballal was carrying Dagalol’s Kalashnikov. We couched our camels and sat with them for a few moments, while Abboud milked a she-camel and brought us halib, still warm and covered in froth. They told me that Dagalol was still in his camp at Umm Qozayn and had left Wad Ballal and the boys to bring the herd north. Wad Ballal warned us, ‘We saw a party of Meidob riding west yesterday. They were carrying rifles and driving five camels with them. Watch out as you make camp tonight. The Meidob hills are very near, and the Meidob are brave near home!’

  In the afternoon, we crossed another treacherous mud slick about fifteen metres wide. The mud came up to our knees. We had to dismount and haul the camels across. As they sank into the slough, they snarled and kicked, dragging us backwards through the slime. Again and again, we moved forwards, helping each other to goad them on. At last, the fourteen riding camels had staggered to the other side and we were waiting for the baggage animal. Wad az Zayadi led the beast and Wad Fadul prodded it from the rear. The camel took two or three faltering steps, picking his feet up high, with an expression of what looked like utter distaste. Then he rebelled, squirming back and jerking on the headrope. Wad az Zayadi tried to brace himself, but he lost his footing and went down into the mud, letting go of the headrope, which flew out of his hand. The camel tried to slither back to dry land, but his flat feet slipped sideways. His legs trembled, and for a moment, he teetered uncertainly. We watched for a frozen second as he slowly keeled over into the mire, dropping sacks of flour and sugar around him. At once, the Arabs plunged into the fray, shouting wildly and waving their whips. They kicked and prodded at the beast until he was upright, then heaved together on the rope until he found himself on the other side.

  We made camp just before sunset in a high place overlooking the western rim of the mountain. I went with Adam and Wad Fadul to climb an escarpment littered with blue granite boulders
, from the top of which Adam pointed out the misty blue hump of Jabal Meidob to the west. Behind us, the familiar herds of Nas Wad Haydar were moving in their hundreds across the face of the mountain. ‘We’d better keep our weapons close tonight,’ Adam said. ‘If these Meidob come back, there will be trouble, and no doubt!’ I asked him why the Kababish hated the Meidob so much. ‘They have no honour,’ he said. They will kill a man first, then steal his camels. If they find you asleep, they will bash your head in with a club or strangle you, or they will shoot you from far off. That is not bravery! If I was riding in Meidob country, I should never sleep next to my camel. I would take my rifle and lay in the bushes beyond. These people are dogs! The Arabs may steal camels, but they do it by stealth. If they cannot find a way to do so, they will leave you alone. If they are caught, they will fight, but they do not murder to steal.’

  In the time of Ali Wad at Tom, the Kababish had often fought with the Meidob and had even been reprimanded by the government for a raid on the Meidob hills. Sir Ali had occupied the Meidob hills in 1916 but had withdrawn the following year. Although the Kababish had been officially excluded from the hills in 1922, many sections continued to water at Malha and Ain Bissarro, and I had found herds of the ’Awajda in the crater at Malha when I had visited it with Donald Friend in 1981.

  I remembered how we had ridden for days through the gorges and the narrow chasms of the hills, searching for the wells at Ain Bissarro, on their eastern side. We eventually ran out of water. Then, one afternoon, we suddenly came on a tiny well under an overhanging rock in the middle of a ravine. Some Meidob girls were there, watering their goats. They spoke only a few words of Arabic, so we settled down to wait until they finished their work. It was agonisingly slow, for the well only yielded a bowl of water every five minutes, and it was almost sunset before they drove their animals away. I jumped into the hole, ready to fill our skins, when an old Meidobi suddenly sprang out of the bushes with a shotgun in his hands and ordered me to get out. He said that the well belonged to his family and refused to let us use it. Expecting a fight, Don quickly seized our pistols, knowing that our lives depended on this water. Fortunately, after a long discussion, the old man agreed to give us water in return for a meal from the millet flour we were carrying. He said that he had had nothing but goat’s milk for months. After he ate, he told us that the last white man he remembered seeing here was Wilfred Thesiger, who had come to shoot Barbary sheep in the 1930s.