A Desert Dies Page 3

  I asked how much, and he told me, ‘1,000 pounds!’

  I gulped. This was all the money I had in the world. I offered him 400. The Arab shook his head, pityingly. ‘You know I would not sell him except for your sake, and because of Abu Safita. He is an excellent animal. I have reared him from a calf. His mother was sick with the mange and recovered. That is why I called him Wad al ’Atiga—it means “The Son of the One that was Sick and Recovered”.’ I knew that the Arabs hated to sell their camels, but that they were also masters at sales talk. We were opponents, and I was obliged to strike the best bargain I could. I offered 450. ‘May God open!’ he said in the traditional way. We argued about half an hour. At the end of that time, I had managed to bring the price down to 600. I suspected that Dalgol would not shift any lower, so I said, ‘Very well, 600.’

  ‘It is a very good bargain for you,’ he told me, clasping my hand. ‘Wad al ’Atiga will bring you luck.’

  ‘Do all your camels have names?’ I inquired.

  ‘Of course. How else would we know them?’ he replied.

  By the time we returned to Dagalol’s camp, the sun had risen and clean golden light was flooding across the ranges. The boys had released most of the herd from their hobbles and already the camels had spread out into the wedges of thorn bush, browsing amongst the prickly leaves or tearing up the thick grasses. Far across the plain I could see the sunlight reflected on the massed bodies of other herds, tiny islands in the immense ocean of grass.

  Now the meditative mood of the early morning was gone and the camp was in uproar. Half a dozen camels were being loaded and the boys were running about with saddlebags and goatskins, shouting and swearing. I saw Abboud and Hassan stop to wrestle over the headrope of a camel that seemed too young for riding. ‘He is mine!’ Hassan wailed, ‘I am training him!’

  ‘You!’ Abboud snorted. ‘How can you train him? You are not trained yourself yet!’

  They pushed and pulled at each other in a miniature tug-of-war until the little animal, roaring and trying to back away, gurgled up a mess of green vomit. Most of it fell on Hassan. I could smell the nauseating stench from where I stood. The boy let go of the rope at once and shivered in disgust. Dagalol rumbled with laughter. That camel knows what is best for him,’ he chuckled. ‘You will never be a man while you give up so easily!’

  As the loading continued, Dagalol called me over to him. He opened a long, narrow, tightly clasped saddlebag and took out the pieces of an old shotgun, which he assembled. It was an unusual but handsome-looking weapon, made by the travelling gunsmiths of the Zaghawa tribe. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘this is what you need. It will not be much use at long-range, but if anyone tries to steal your camel in the night, you can blast him, by God! He will not escape!’

  ‘Is it really necessary?’

  ‘I told you that the land is full of bandits. The tribes have gone mad. Only a few weeks ago, we had seven camels stolen. This is not a place for games. What will you do if someone steals your camel in the desert? You may as well ask God to save you, for there will be no other chance. Take the gun and do as I say. This place is a land of men and not for the shade dwellers. This gun is old, but it is better than nothing!’

  I realised that I was up against sales talk again. But I knew from my previous travels that there was much in what he said. The desert and the Sahel were more disturbed than they had been for decades. The tribes were at each other’s throats in a way unheard of since before colonial times. The British had succeeded in keeping tribal competition to a minimum by the Native Administration Ordinance, which had concentrated power into the hands of nazirs and omdas. The system had worked well, but the present government had removed it, placing power in the persons of local officials who often knew little of the tribes and cared even less. Old rivalries, still smouldering during colonial times, had erupted into flames once more. The violence grew worse.

  I parted with another sixty pounds for the gun, then went quickly about preparing Wad al ‘Atiga for riding. I was anxious to demonstrate to these nomads that I was well versed in the ways of camels.

  I adjusted the girth of my saddle to fit him. As I began to saddle, Dagalol shouted, ‘Hey! That is not the way to do it!’

  I protested that I had been riding camels for several years, and certainly knew how to saddle, but he brushed my objections aside, saying, ‘You hang the waterskins on first, one each side for balance.’ He generously allowed me to take two of the fullest skins, which we loaded together. They did not hang properly, so we lengthened the loops with hobbling ropes. Then he told me to fit my two saddlebags, one over each skin. ‘Now fold up your canvas carefully and lay it over the saddle,’ he said. ‘Yes, that is the way. Now your sheepskin, with the head pointing towards you as you mount. Now the blankets, you fold them and lay them over the sheepskin. Then the saddle cushion. Good. Your water bottle comes next. Hang it over the saddle horn, then hang your shotgun on the right side so that you can grab it if there is trouble. You understand? If you fit the camel like that always, there will be no problems.’ All this luggage made the saddle very high and hard to mount. It was necessary to step on the camel’s withers, with the right hand gripping the rear saddle horn. As soon as the beast began to stand up, the rider would hook his knee around the front horn and swing into the saddle as the camel reached full height. Trained camels tended to rise as soon as they felt the rider rest the slightest weight on them, and I had once seen an inexperienced rider break his arm when the camel rose suddenly in this way. The trick was to leap quickly and without hesitation, at the same time holding the headrope taut in the left hand so that the animal could not rise more than a few inches prematurely. It was a simple matter of timing.

  The Kababish used the double-horned riding saddle that originated in North Arabia. It had probably come to the Sudan with their Bani Hillal ancestors. The main problem of camel saddle design was to find a way of accommodating the rider on the beast’s back in spite of the protruding hump. In South Arabia they had solved the problem by seating the rider behind the hump, whereas the Tuareg had saddles that placed the riders on the withers in front of it. The Somalis, who had probably been the first to bring camels to Africa, had never solved the problem, and their crossed slats of wood only served for carrying baggage. For this reason they never rode their camels.

  The North Arabian saddle design placed the rider above the hump. Its four ‘feet’ rested on pads of leather filled with goat hair, which protected the animal’s back, and the two wings of the seat were separated by a gap that allowed the top of the hump to press through. A good saddle had its wings inclined in such a way that the rider was never in contact with the hump. The Kababish also had a pack saddle, the hawiyya, which was much cruder but of the same basic design. It was supported by pads of sacking or straw, though the Kababish of the north used palm fibre. The riding saddles were made by the Kababish men and were often ornate.

  It took no more than half an hour to load everything and clear the camp. As I watched the Arabs strapping on saddlebags, fitting their pack saddles and lapping them around with rope, folding blankets and canvas sheets and draping on waterskins, I marvelled how everything they had fitted life on the move. There was no dross, and almost everything was adaptable. The canvas sheet was a relatively new item, imported from Libya or Egypt, yet it was one of the most useful. It was a groundsheet and a tent; it could be used as a trough for watering animals, or as a sling for carrying heavy items or loads of hay. The Kababish had little use for rugs in these latitudes, since they could be eaten by termites. Before the arrival of canvas sheets, they had used thick sheets of cowskin. The leather saddle cushions, oblong and about two feet long, were used as seats and pillows, and the sheepskin served as a mattress or an extra blanket in extreme cold.

  Almost all Kababish men carried rifles or shotguns. These weapons were symbols of their freedom in their vast, wild land, where a man’s security depended on himself. Many Arabs, like Dagalol, carried modern weapons: Kalashnik
ovs, FNs, and Heckler-Kochs. However, the bolt-action Lee-Enfield .303, known as Umm ’Ashara (‘Mother of Ten Shots’), was still a favoured rifle. I saw many Kababish with Martini-Henri breechloaders, some stamped ‘Sudan Government 1899’ yet still in perfect condition. Rifles and shotguns like the one I had bought were made by travelling gunsmiths of the Zaghawa tribe, who carried their workshops by camel and followed the nomads from camp to camp.

  A Kabbashi was not dressed without his dagger, which was never worn in the belt but always on the left arm. It was a straight-bladed, double-edged weapon carried in a leather sheath, usually decorated with geometric patterns and coloured patches. In the same sheath, the Arab would carry a pair of tweezers for removing thorns and a curved packing needle, always useful for mending equipment. Many Kababish carried swords, most of them long-bladed weapons imported from the east. All these steel weapons were made for the Arabs by settled blacksmiths, for the Kababish considered the practice of metalworking a disgrace. I only ever heard of one Kababish family who had taken up the trade.

  When everything was lashed on the baggage camels and the riding animals were saddled, Dagalol fetched his own ashab and mounted. A few hundred metres to the east, old Habjur, his son, and herdsmen were already in the saddle, pushing their herd out in long columns. Beyond them were two or three herds belonging to other members of the clan, trickling slowly towards the northern horizon. One by one, the Arabs who were with me mounted, flicking their camels with sticks and whips. I picked up my own whip and climbed aboard Wad al ’Atiga. Within moments, we were half a kilometre from the camp that had been home for a night, the place where my life with the Kababish had started.

  As I rode, all the familiar feelings came back to me in the slow, lumbering gait of the herd and the sharp cries of the herdsmen. We moved very slowly, so that the camels could graze as they went, in and out of the thorn thickets and along the sandy banks, bursting with grasses. It was deliciously peaceful in the cool of the morning, moving gradually north across the vast panorama of Darfur. The savannah undulated gently, a soft sheen of lush grass scattered with beds of flowers where insects hovered in sparkling colours. There were acacias of many shapes, with trunks bulbous and delicate, silver-grey, lime-green and red. There were trees with nests of orange berries, and waxy-leafed mukhayyit with ivory fruit, like bunches of pearls. The sky was full of birds. Hornbills ducked and pitched on their uncertain trajectory between the trees, and I saw the deep blue of Abyssinian Rollers in the bushes. There were kites and lanner falcons circling high above us. The red sand between the patches of grass was littered with the tracks of ground-squirrels and gerbils, and there were many craterlike pustules of ants’ nests. Amongst the thorn brake rose the amber sculptures of great termitaries.

  Four thousand years ago, a man might have ridden north from this place for more than a thousand miles, as far as the coast of the Mediterranean, and found the land everywhere as rich as this. He might have seen herds of elephants in the middle of what is today the Sahara, and found tribes of nomads herding the ancestors of today’s cattle. He might have skirted lakes that brimmed with fish, and wandered over mountainsides covered in cedar trees. Now, no more than thirty kilometres north of these savannahs, the vegetation began to dwindle, and the rich carpet of grasses gave way to parched earth.

  All morning, the herds seemed to drift on at their own volition, scattering into loose formation on the richer pastures and drawing up tight again where the grazing was sparse. There was no sense of hurry. All the world moved at the measured pace of the camel, minute after minute, hour after hour, as the sun changed shape from a bloated globe of orange to a tight yellow fireball. It was a pleasure to meander along, taking in the details of the landscape, the richness of the trees and herbs, the telltale signs of previous migrations. In one place, there were piles of black droppings that indicated an overnight camp, and pieces of blackened wood beside the white bones of a bustard picked clean by the ants. In another, there were a few fragments of bark where a man had twisted a rope, and five neat hollows in the earth where a camel had been couched.

  By midday, we had come to a concave bowl where the siyaal trees grew thick and low, and where silver boulders peeked out of the covering of grass. Dagalol told me to couch Wad al ’Atiga, and all around me, the others began to make their animals kneel. ‘This will be our taya,’ Dagalol declared. ‘This is where we stay the night.’ We untied our saddles and laid our equipment in the grass, and Dagalol told me to hobble my camel with the foreleg-hobble, or gayd. This was a thick rope of cowskin with a knot at one end. It was looped around the camel’s hocks and fastened so that he could shuffle about grazing, but could not walk normally. Only the riding animals were hobbled in this way, so that they were able to graze, yet would be easy to find if needed quickly. Putting on the gayd was a dangerous operation. The rider held the headrope in his teeth in case the animal tried to bolt, and then bent down near the camel’s forelegs. Camels were often bothered by flies under their chests, and would raise their legs and stamp down hard to disperse them just as the rider was about to fix the hobble. The beast’s legs were as powerful as pistons and could easily crush a man’s arm. I soon learned that the job should be done at arm’s length, and as quickly as possible.

  After hobbling, the boys went off to watch the herd and I joined Wad Ballal, clearing the ground of deadwood and droppings and laying out saddles and bedding in a neat line. The wooden support, which had been cut from an inderab tree, was firmly planted in a hole and we slung the heavy skins from it before covering them with canvas against the heat. They could not be left on the ground, for the liquid would seep out or they might be ruined by termites.

  It was already very hot. Beyond the forest of acacias that stretched for miles north and south, I could make out the flat, red ledge of a mountain wall. Not far away to the east were knots of gargantuan baobab trees, their trunks stripped and raw. The Arabs used their supple bark for rope-making. The tribulus beneath my feet was full of silver centipedes about six inches long, whose segmented bodies reflected the light brilliantly. There was plenty of shade around us, and I wondered why Dagalol had chosen to make camp in the open. This is uncertain country,’ he told me. ‘It is better to stay away from trees so that bandits cannot use them for cover after dark.’

  A few minutes later Wad Ballal drew a massive bowl of sour milk from one of the skins. The cheesy-tasting liquid was cool and very refreshing, and I began to understand why the Arabs cherished it. There were several points of etiquette to remember when drinking milk. Like water it was supposed to be drunk squatting down, not standing. It was very impolite to allow the nose to dip into it, and the generous proportions of mine gave me a disadvantage in this. It happened several times that I withdrew it with milk dripping from the end, and I received withering glances from the Arabs.

  After the milk had been drunk, we moved away from the taya and into the shade of the nearby trees. In Kababish country, the Arabs would have no qualms about leaving their taya all day and even overnight. The taya was almost like a sacred sanctuary, and to steal from one was an utter disgrace. If travellers discovered a taya unattended, though, it was quite acceptable for them to help themselves to the milk, for they were considered the guests of whoever owned it. But in this savannah country, there were many tribes who had no respect for Arab customs and who could not be trusted.

  Wad Ballal took out some long strands of bark that he had stripped that morning from a baobab tree and placed them in a bowl of water to soak. Later I watched him as he anchored several of them amongst his toes and began plaiting them together with a twisting motion of the palms. ‘In our country, we make ropes out of wool,’ he told me, ‘because there are no baobabs in the desert. But here, we use bark, while we can get it.’ It took about twenty minutes to make an ’uqal.

  When it was finished, the loop was fixed around a peg of wood that the Arab cut from a bush nearby.

  In midafternoon, five camel riders appeared suddenly out of the b
rush and couched their mounts near our camp. They were all muscular, heavy-set men with broad black faces and tufts of spiral hair, bearing a family resemblance, like a stamp. Few of the Nas Wad Haydar looked like Arabs; their features reminded me more of the Beja tribesmen from the east of the Sudan, whom I had seen in Omdurman. Their clothes were filthy and in tatters, yet their riding saddles were immaculate, carefully greased, and polished. Most of them carried automatic rifles that they braced on tripods of wood when they sat down.

  As they approached the camp, Dagalol called out, ‘Welcome! Welcome in peace!’ and we lined up to greet them. The greeting consisted of the repeated hand-shaking and releasing, and the reciting of the rhythmic formulas over and over again. These formulas were meant to be question and response—‘I hope you are well?’ and ‘Thanks be to God, I am well!’—but in practice, the Arabs just rattled them off without particular order and without waiting for a reply. Some of them jerked out the phrases at the speed of a machinegun with hardly a pause for breath. Often the exchanges struck me as unbelievably comical, a contest to see who could rattle loudest and longest; I once timed a series of greetings between two Kababish at fifteen minutes. Eventually, though, the custom grew on me, and I began to view the brief greetings of townsmen as brusque and rude.

  Our guests sat down in the shade with great dignity, each one laying his rifle on its tripod before him. One of them was a tall man with a distinguished bearing whom I discovered was Dagalol’s elder brother, Haj Hassan. Another was a curious, gnomelike little man with a frail body and an overlarge head covered with a quiff of hair. His appearance was so childlike that I was surprised to learn that he was Ali Wad Hassan, the chief scout of Nas Wad Haydar. The Arabs began to ask Dagalol about me: where was I from? What tribe did I belong to? My host began to recite my story, repeating things I had told him the previous night, and embroidering here and there to give the tale extra weight. In his mouth it sounded like an epic, and I realised that it was an expression of the Kababish love of storytelling for its own sake.