Dark Star Safari

4. The Dervishes of Omdurman

Even while I had been entering Sudanese air space, Ihab in the seat beside me was telling me it was a country he frankly hated. I was reading the US State Department unclassified travel advisory for the Sudan, an amazing document:

Travel in all parts of Sudan, particularly outside Khartoum, is potentially hazardous … [American] travelers in Sudan have been subjected to delays and detention by Sudan’s security forces, especially when traveling outside Khartoum … unpredictable local driving habits … roadblocks … In addition to the ongoing civil war, heavy rains and above normal Nile River levels have caused extensive flooding throughout Sudan. Nile floods have affected Khartoum … Water-related diseases such as malaria, typhoid and gastroenteritis will threaten many … The government of Sudan’s control over its police and soldiers may be limited …

My favorite phrase was In addition to the ongoing civil war. I glanced beside me. ‘You were saying?’

Being Egyptian, Ihab mocked the Sudan with affectionate gusto, in the same spirit that he jeered at Egypt. His main objection was simple: ‘Because beeble no free!’

‘In America, beeble can kiss girl on street — no broblem. But in Egypt, in Sudan, I kiss girl and bolice come! They take me!’ He sulked, thinking about it. ‘They make a bad bosition for me!’

‘For kissing a girl?’

‘Is illegal. But not in America.’

‘You can’t kiss strangers, though,’ I said.

He wasn’t listening. ‘I want go to New Jersey! I want to be New Jersey man!’

A pretty Egyptian woman, traveling with an old woman who might have been her mother, sat in the seat just across the aisle.

‘Egyptian woman very sexy,’ Ihab said, in a confiding whisper, his mouth full of saliva. He shifted, canting his body towards me so that the woman would not hear and said, ‘She cut.’

I had a good idea of what he meant but pretended I didn’t, so that he would have to explain. This he did, first making a specific hand gesture, inserting a clitoral thumb between two labial fingers.

‘She cut here,’ he said, slicing at his thumb with his free hand.

‘Painful,’ I said. And what was the point?

‘No bain! She small — leetle. One week, one month maximum, she cut.’

Infant clitoridectomies were new to me but much on the minds of feminists in the West and the women’s movement in Egypt, as well. I asked the obvious question: What was the point?

‘Better for her — make her more sexy,’ Ihab said. ‘If she cut, she like sex all day.’

This conceit, echoed by some other men I met on my trip, went against all medical evidence, and was a bit like saying sex for a man was more fun if his goolies had been snipped off. I also heard the opposite and more believable reason: that it dulled the woman’s pleasure and made her faithful. Ihab was so rhapsodic on the subject he had begun to raise his voice, and I feared the woman might hear and be offended,

‘A woman who cut like this — you touch her’ — he grazed my leg with his knuckles — ‘she get so excited.’

‘Imagine that.’

‘American woman, no. But in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Saudi — woman who cut, they get so excited if you just touch something.’ He smiled at me. ‘Touch feenga. Touch skeen.’

He showed me his hand and made the gesture again with his fingers.

‘When you blay in zees blace,’ he said, emphasizing his thumb, ‘she go crazy.’

Whispering the Arabic word for the procedure, he compressed himself and breathed into my ear, lest anyone hear this forbidden term, which was khitan.

And on leaving the plane his eyes bugged out as we followed the attractive woman and her mother, addressing the woman’s secret, roused and frisky, picturing in his fevered brain the thing he could not see, saying, ‘Woman with khitan, she more sexy.’

Coming from Hurghada, he knew a thing or two about women, especially foreign women. In his business, which was sales and marketing, he had many sexual proposals from visiting women — all Egyptians did. Visitors found them attractive. Well, I could vouch for that: the embankments of the Nile rang with the shrieks of Europeans being pleasured on board feluccas, indeed, the very name felucca had a sexual ring to it.

Ihab had had marriage proposals, too, from Russian women.

‘Give me an example.’

‘One woman. She want to make marry with me. But I marry already. I like my wife, I like my two kids. So why marry?’

‘I agree.’

‘But my wife so jealous.’

‘Mine too, sometimes.’

‘Yah?’ He seemed somewhat shocked. ‘Yours? Mine? So woman are all the same?’

‘I don’t think so.’

Almost the first man I met in Khartoum refuted everything Ihab said. He was a small thin man named Haroun, whom I met at the Acropole Hotel. From the outside, the Acropole was just another seedy building on a dusty back street of the hot city of broken streets and deep potholes. But the hotel had been recommended. Inside, the Acropole was clean and pleasant, marble floors and tidy rooms, run by a courteous Greek, George Pagoulatos, whose heart was in his ancestral Cephalonia but who had been born in Khartoum. Tell me what you want to do in the Sudan, he said, and perhaps I can arrange it. He kept his word. Because of George, all journalists and aid workers stayed at the Acropole. He was the helpful manager of the exotic hotel in the classic movie, and for much of the time I stayed there, life at the Acropole seemed like Casablanca without the alcohol. Not George’s fault: sharia law meant that alcohol was banned in the Sudan. There were no restaurants to speak of in Khartoum, so all meals were taken in the Acropole dining room, supervised by George’s cheerful Sicilian wife.

‘Take it from me,’ Haroun said, speaking of female circumcision. ‘I can tell you from experience that such women feel nothing.’

‘But they submit?’

‘They lie there. They have no idea what is happening. You feel a little silly if you are a man. And if you are a woman, I don’t know.’

‘So what’s in it for them?’

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Well, children.’

‘Egyptians are pretty jolly, though.’

‘They laugh, yes. Nasser said, “Our lives are terrible but at least we know how to laugh.” ’

‘They seem friendly.’

‘You think Egyptians are friendly?’ He looked at me as though I was off my head. ‘Their friendliness is fake.’

Haroun was as skeptical of the Palestinians as he was of the Israelis. He wasn’t fond of the Iraqis, but he didn’t like the Iranians either. ‘And the Saudis are just one big corrupt family.’

‘Arabs,’ he said, and showed his yellow teeth in a cynical smile and shrugged his skinny shoulders.

‘What would you call yourself?’

‘I am a Catholic,’ he said.

He was Jordanian, with a business in Amman, and didn’t have much time for the Jordanian royal family, either. One group of people had his total approval — the Sudanese.

‘Look how they greet each other,’ he said. ‘They embrace, they slap each other on the back, they hug and kiss. No other Arabs do that. They like each other, they are good people.’

‘Have you had any problems here?’

‘None.’

Khartoum, a city of tall white-robed men with thickly wrapped Aladdin-like turbans, and tall veiled women in bright gowns and black gloves, was a city without rain, wide and brown like its set of intersecting rivers. Khartoum’s tallest structures were the pencil-like minarets of its many mosques. The lanky shrouded inhabitants looked spectral, as people often do in glarey sun-dazzled places. There was no shade except the slanting shadows of the Sudanese. Their ghostliness was made emphatic by their shrouds and cloaks, even their heads loosely wrapped against the sun and heat, nothing showing except brown beaky faces.

The city lay at the confluence of two wide rivers, the Blue Nile and the White Nile, both of them very muddy, bearing silt from the south, coursing past earthen banks that were cut straight up and down because they had been chunked away by rushing water. The bushes beside both Niles were hung with rags and plastic bags, snared by branches in the flood. To the west, across an old British iron bridge, was Omdurman, where over a century ago General Gordon had been killed and decapitated by the Mahdi, whose great-grandson, Sadig el Mahdi, still lived in the family mansion by the river. Here the river was both Niles combined in a wide gurgling mud current, flowing north towards Cairo. To the northeast, in the industrial district of North Khartoum, Clinton’s rockets had fallen in 1998.

‘Five rockets — very sudden,’ a student in a group told me, pointing it out across the river.

Passing this squatting group of three young men, two things caught my attention. They were speaking English among each other, and one was carrying the Penguin paperback of Lady Windermere’s Fan. So I said hello and soon we were talking about the rocket attack.

‘The factory made pharmaceuticals, not weapons. But it was empty. There was no night shift on Thursdays. We think the Americans knew that.’

They were university students, in their early twenties. I obliquely asked how they felt about Americans as a result of the bombing.

‘We like Americans. It was your government that did it, not you.’

This distinction between politics and people was to be made quite often by people I met on my trip. Africans in general disliked their governments so intensely, and saw them as so unrepresentative of themselves, that they were happy to give me the benefit of the doubt.

‘We want to be friends,’ one of the others said.

That was Hassan. The others were Abd-allah and Saif-Din.

‘Saif means sword and Din is faith.’

I made a slashing gesture. ‘ “The Sword of Islam” — meaning jihad?’

‘Yes, yes, exactly!’

‘Not much of that stuff in this book,’ I said, tapping the cover of Lady Windermere’s Fan.

‘I am reading for my English. To learn better. Very important.’

Hassan said, ‘Very, very important.’

‘Crucial,’ I said.

They didn’t know the word. We sat down on the Nile bank, across from Tuti Island. I taught them ‘crucial’ and ‘vital.’ It is important to learn English. It is vital that we understand what is happening. It is crucial that we act quickly.

‘But let me interrupt you, sir,’ Abd-allah said. ‘What you think about Afghanistan?’

‘It is vital that we understand what is happening,’ I said. ‘It is tribal warfare.’

‘What do Americans think about Israel and Palestine?’

‘That’s tribal warfare, too.’

Hassan said, ‘You see, sir, if you kill Afghans and Palestinians, they have families and they have children and they will always hate Americans and try to kill them.’

This was incontestable, but I said, ‘The Sudanese military is dropping bombs on Dinkas and the SPLA in the south. Won’t they always hate you?’

Muslims in the north, Christians in the south, in this the largest country in Africa, Forty years of war in the southern region. A Sudanese lecturing anyone on terror was drawing a very long bow. I think they realized this. They changed the subject.

Saif-Din said, ‘How can we go to America?’

‘Can I work and study?’ Abd-allah said. ‘Get a job to support myself while I am going to university?’

‘Where can we work in America?’ Hassan said. ‘What work can we do?’

I asked them what work they were skilled at. They said, very little. Where had they been? Just here, they said. They had been brought up in Khartoum. They had never left Khartoum — never seen their country, the south which was oil-rich and swampy, the north which was desert and filled with temples and pyramids of Kush, the western mountains of Kordofan and the Nuba people. But these students were not unusual in wishing to travel, or emigrate. American cities were full of people from African cities, who had never seen their own hinterland.

In Khartoum I would not have known there was a war in the south except for the presence of so many southerners — Shilluks, Dinkas, Nuer, the tall tribal Christians who had come north to escape the fighting. Some lived in refugee camps and survived on food aid distributed by the various foreign agencies who operated in Khartoum. In the mid-1960s, I had been invited by Sudanese guerrillas to write about ‘liberated areas.’ I had then been living in Uganda, which was full of Sudanese refugees, who spoke of burned villages and a blighted countryside. Forty years on, this was still apparently the case.

‘Whole sections of the south are uninhabited because of landmines,’ a landmine expert told me in Khartoum. ‘You go there and you don’t see anyone at all.’

Eighteen years in the British Army had sharpened Rae McGrath’s knowledge of landmine removal. On their retirement, most ex-soldiers moved to an English village and ran the local pub, Rae said. But that usually meant they became drunks, in debt to the brewery which financed them. Rae, who was forty-five and stocky, used the skills he had learned in the military in Landmine Action, an organization committed to the removal of these wicked devices, which are numerous in many parts of Africa. They were simple, lethal and long-lived: a landmine remained dangerous for about fifty years.

‘They’re mainly in the countryside, because armies in Africa always fight in agricultural areas,’ he told me.

Having written a book on the subject of landmine removal, he was quick to reply and sometimes epigrammatic (‘Mine finding is a bit like Zen gardening’). Not much has been written effectively on the subject of landmines and their simple deadly technology. Landmines were usually made of plastic and nearly undetectable. Dogs could smell explosive — so they helped; but Rae’s method was probing the earth, inch by inch, with a metal rod pushed into the soil at thirty degrees. It was pretty safe, he said. You had to stand right on top of the mine to detonate it.

Areas of the south were full of mines, and donors were urging him to find them and get rid of them, so that they could resettle people. But removal was a slow business and sometimes the locals were not helpful.

‘This woman in Malakal says to me, “No one was blown up by a landmine here.” But then one of the neighbors said that the woman’s cow had stepped on a mine and been blown up. The woman said, “Oh, yeah. My cow.” In a war, a cow being killed is no big deal.’

Rae would be in the Sudan for a year or two, dealing with landmines. At the moment, he was in a top-floor room at the Acropole, surrounded by pictures of his family. He was not alone in his charitable work. Duncan from Save the Children was in the hotel, and so was Issa from Unicef, and Rick (microfinance, small business loans), and the stout Ugandan from UNESCO, and the Dutch team who could usually be seen conferring over maps, and the Bangladeshi (‘But I’m an American now’) who was ‘supervising some UN projects.’

They were all aid experts, and they ranged from selfless idealists to the laziest boon-dogglers cashing in on a crisis. At an earlier time they would have been businessmen or soldiers or visiting politicians or academics. But this was the era of charity in Africa, where the business of philanthropy was paramount, studied as closely as the coffee harvest or a hydroelectric scheme. Now a complex infrastructure was devoted to what had become ineradicable miseries: famine, displacement, poverty, illiteracy, AIDS, the ravages of war. Name an African problem and there was an agency or a charity to deal with it, but that did not mean a solution was produced. Charities and aid programs seemed to turn African problems into permanent conditions that were bigger and messier.

The heat in Khartoum with its sky-specks of rotating hawks left me gasping; and the sun burning in cloudless blue on to the whitewashed buildings and the streets dazzled my eyes, for the streets were all chalky dust — just as fine, just as bright. I walked in slow motion, tramping in heavy shoes. I would have been happy with a turban and a white robe, like everyone else in this begowned population. I settled on a pair of sandals, and went to the souk to buy some, muttering to remember the Arabic for the request, Ana awiz shapath aleila, I need some sandals now.

On the way, glancing at people’s sandals to see what styles were available I saw a man and woman heading to the mosque — it was Friday — he was clutching a Koran, they were both dressed up for the occasion. There was no question they were husband and wife, for she was decorated with henna — a blue-black lacy pattern picked out on her feet and ankles — the privilege of a married woman.

The woman was very attractive anyway, tall and black and slender, in a gold-colored gossamer veil which she parted with a toss of her head, giving me a glimpse of her face. Her figure was apparent in the sinuous movement of her gown, and she wore black high-heeled shoes. Part of her gown became entangled in one stiletto heel and as she stooped to disengage the wisp of silken cloth from the heel point with a gloved hand, lifting her gown a bit higher, I saw the filigree of dark henna all over her foot and her ankle and reaching up her leg, delicately painted, as though she were wearing the sexiest French tights. In addition to the pretty shoe and the naked foot, the principal fascination of this lovely painted leg was that it belonged to a woman who was veiled. The explicit fetishism of her feet, her only exposed flesh, left her hidden charms to the imagination. Nothing to me was more erotic.

That sight made the day seem hotter. I bought my sandals — Souri, the seller said, Syrian ones — and spent the rest of the day breaking them in.

Travel is wonderful for the way it gives access to the past: markets in Africa show us how we once lived and traded. The market in Khartoum was medieval, a meeting place of hawkers and travelers, street performers, hustlers, city slickers in suits, more pious ones in robes, country folk from the southern regions — and if you knew even a little of their customs you could name them; spotting the slash marks on one tribal face, the tattoos and scarification on others, the knocked-out lower teeth or lip plugs of yet others. Many urchins snatched at passersby or sold soap and cigarettes. The Khartoum market was the heart and soul of the city, as markets have been in history. The bus depot was nearby, so was the street of gold and silver merchants, the street of sandal sellers (and illegal leopard skins and snakeskin purses and slippers), the vegetable barrows, the meat stalls, and at the center the country’s largest mosque. Because of this mosque and the Koran’s specific injunction, ‘Repulse not the beggar’ (95:10) every panhandler and cripple in town jostled the faithful as they strode to prayers.

Groups of gowned and veiled women sat in the goldsmiths’ shops choosing dangling earrings, and bracelets as wide as shirt cuffs, and meshlike necklaces and snake bangles. Gold was the only luxury. Some of these shops were no more than small booths but you knew them by their twinkling gold and their mirrors and air-conditioning.

Mahmoud Almansour was selling gold and spoke English reasonably well.

‘Is because I live New York City,’ Mahmoud said.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Just visiting family, and this’ — he gestured to the gold objects in a disdainful way.

‘You don’t like the Sudan?’

‘Sudan is nice. Beeble are kind’ — he clawed his shaven head and yanked his beard — ‘but …’

His emigration story was interesting and perhaps typical. In 1985, aged twenty-five, he flew to Mexico City, entered on a tourist visa, and vanished. He surfaced near Tijuana and paid a man $500 to take him across the border. He was sealed into a refrigerator truck that was loaded with fish — Mahmoud was standing behind boxes of fish with three Mexicans. At the border crossing the truck driver gave them mittens and hats and turned the thermostat very low, so that when US Customs opened the doors frozen air billowed out in clouds.

Mahmoud was dumped outside San Diego but did not linger there. In those days no ID was needed to buy an airplane ticket. He flew to Atlanta where — having spent all his money — he picked peaches until the season ended. Then he took a bus to Virginia.

‘More bicking. Bicking, bicking. I bick anything.’

Living in migrant workers’ quarters, eating frugally, he saved enough money to move to New York City, where he knew some Sudanese. And he continued to do menial work. He applied for and was granted a green card, and he continued to save until he gained the confidence of a man who, for a fee, fixed him up with a job driving a yellow cab, which became his livelihood.

‘I am married to an American — black American,’ he specified. ‘But she think, Africa — dangerous! Sudan — not safe! I don’t care. I love New York. America is Baradise.’

He was leaving the Sudan in a few months to return to Brooklyn. He said he felt stifled by the laws in the Sudan — well, he was a hard worker but fundamentally and, like many emigrants to the US, no respecter of laws, so that was easy to understand. Yet it was amazing how even here in the market, Khartoum’s traditional souk, there were upstairs rooms where men and women gathered. Most of the larger coffee shops had a stairway to a hidden room, heavily curtained, fans whirring, a bit stuffy and dark, where young men and women sat at tables, whispering. No kissing, no hand holding, but anyone could see that these whispers were freighted with endearments, and it was all furtive enough to seem rather pleasant.

But groups of men met in such places too. In one of these ateliers I met two men, a doctor and a lawyer, and — this being the Sudan — they invited me to join them for a cup of coffee. Dr Sheikh ad Din was a medical doctor, his friend, Dr Faiz Eisa, was a lawyer.

‘This is not a strict country like some others,’ Dr Faiz said. ‘There are only five aspects of sharia law here. Against adultery. Against alcohol. Against stealing. Against defamation. And traitors — declaring war against your own country. That is forbidden.’

‘But people behave,’ Dr Sheikh said. ‘As you see.’

‘We don’t cut people’s hands off,’ Dr Faiz said. ‘And no stoning to death.’

‘Hey, that’s pretty enlightened,’ I said.

The next day, I walked to the Blue Nile Sailing Club, dating from the early 1920s. This British club by the river had been established for river-related activities — sailing, rowing, sculling — with plaques displayed and the engraved names of winners of the various trophies and competitions. ‘1927 Blue Nile Trophy — S. L. Milligan,’ ‘43–44 Ladies Race — Mrs W. L. Marjoribanks,’ and so forth.

The clubhouse was an old steel gunboat, the Malik, sitting in a ditch high on the riverbank. The last surviving British gunboat from the three involved in the Battle of Omdurman, the Malik, had first come down the Nile in many boxes in 1898 to be assembled in Khartoum and used by the attacking Lord Kitchener (‘We hate him here,’ a Sudanese told me). The Malik was commanded by General Gordon’s nephew, a major known by his nickname, ‘Monkey,’ who had come to the Sudan to avenge his uncle’s murder and to desecrate the Mahdi’s tomb. Seeing these slow hard-to-maneuver gunboats the soldiers’ gibe was to call the fleet ‘Monkey Gordon’s Greyhounds.’ The boats were well armed, though — the Malik had a howitzer, two Maxim guns, two Nordenfeldt guns, and a cannon on board. These guns were used with devastating effect at Omdurman, which was not just a battle to wrest control of the Sudan but also a punitive mission against the Sudanese, as revenge for the death of Gordon and the expulsion of the British thirteen years earlier.

From the wheelhouse of the Malik, toiling upstream, Monkey Gordon saw the Mahdi’s tomb, the army’s first glimpse of Omdurman. Later, in the thick of battle, the Malik was the gunboat that decisively cut off the dervishes who were successfully harrying the Camel Corps. In the end, more than 8000 Sudanese were killed, and wounded men were shot where they lay bleeding. This heartlessness on the part of the British shocked the young Winston Churchill, who was in the Sudan working as a journalist.

At the close of the battle, the Malik was chosen to fire the victorious twenty-one gun salute (with live ammo, no blanks were available). Then, Monkey Gordon, on Kitchener’s orders, took charge of demolishing the Mahdi’s tomb, disinterring the corpse, desecrating it by tossing it in the river but not before hacking off the head. A historian of the battle wrote how Lord Kitchener ‘toyed with the idea of mounting it in silver to serve as an inkwell or a drinking cup.’ Some people believe he followed through, though I was told that the head is buried in a cemetery in Wadi Haifa.

The Malik was made of riveted steel plates, and so it was almost indestructible. But it was beat up, with broken portholes and twisted rails, and scruffy, littered decks and cabins full of smashed planks. Some working sailboats and motorboats were moored at the pier nearby, but even so this club — this broken boat — had seen its better days. The Mahdi’s mud forts still stood on the Nile banks at Omdurman, much eroded and smoothed by high water but still showing the musket holes in the battlements.

The Sudanese are so proud of their military prowess that they can quote lines from the Kipling poem ‘Fuzzy Wuzzy,’ written in praise of the Sudanese warriors — ‘the Fuzzy was the finest o’ the lot’ and ‘We sloshed you with Martinis, an’ it wasn’t ’ardly fair.’ When it came to left-handed compliments, Kipling was a born southpaw. Still, the Sudanese are proud of,

An’ ’ere’s to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, with your ’ayrick ’ead of ’air –

You big black boundin’ beggar — for you broke a British square!

In the house of the Mahdi’s successor in Omdurman, there is a room amounting to a shrine to General Osman Abu Baker Nigna. This turbaned saintly looking old man was the soldier who had impressed Kipling, for he had fought nineteen battles against the British and distinguished himself by leading charges that successfully broke the troop formation known as the ‘square.’ No one, neither the Indians nor the Zulus nor Napoleon’s troops, had ever managed that military feat.

Later that day, with a man named Khalifa, who was a history buff, I went to the Khartoum Museum, which was full of pharaonic statuary — and it is obvious that the border of Egypt is arbitrary, and that what we take to be Egyptian gods and temples reached deep into Africa, deeper than Nubia, more southerly than Dongola, almost to Khartoum.

Khalifa said, ‘The kings of Kush were forced out of Egypt by the Assyrian invasions and they ruled at Meroe and the various towns of the Dongola Reach.’

‘How far is Meroe?’

‘You could go there in a day.’

He went on to say that as late as the sixth century the statue of Isis from Philae was carried up the Nile to bless the crops.

There were Christians nosing around the Nile Valley at that time too, Khalifa said, sent from the Eastern Roman Empire to convert the Nubians, who were still (to the horror of the Christians) worshiping Isis and Osiris. Thus it can be said that Christian missionaries have been peregrinating and proselytizing in Africa for upwards of 1400 years — and fighting a rearguard action in places like the Sudan which was Islamized in the sixteenth century.

‘Islam spread in the Sudan through the Sufis,’ Khalifa said.

I had a nodding acquaintance with Sufism, the mystical form of Islam. Khalifa said there were many Sufis in the Sudan. The authority on Sufism in the Sudan, Yusef Fadal Hasan, lived in Khartoum. He told me that there were all sorts of Sufi devotees, according to the mosque — some danced and drummed, others didn’t drum at all, while at certain mosques the Sufis performed unique musical compositions.

And there are dervishes,’ Khalifa said.

Towards the end of a very hot afternoon, the sun lowering into the dust cloud raised by the day, the orb growing larger and redder as it descended, we were hurrying through the low stone-piled graves in the vast necropolis of the Hamad el Nil Mosque in Omdurman, to see the dervishes.

I could hear the chanting as we approached, and coming upon the spectacle I knew that I had never seen anything like it. A crowd of several thousand stood in a great dense circle in the courtyard of a mosque that was at the edge of the cemetery — somehow the dereliction of this mute nearby field of corpses added to the frenzy of what I was witnessing. At the center of the circle were stamping men, some in green robes, some in white, some in green sashes and green skullcaps; about six or seven were dressed in motley — multicolored patched robes and red capes and red dunce caps and carried sticks, some spinning on one leg others dancing or slowly whirling.

The musicians stood in a group of twenty or so, with drums and cymbals, nearer the mosque, and played loudly, in a syncopated way, while everyone chanted — dervishes, green and white robed priests, and the crowd, too.

‘No God but Allah! No God but Allah!’

The robed men in the center began a deliberate promenade in a great circle, led by a huge black man in green — green turban, green robe — and surrounded by the dervishes, some spinning, some hopping or dancing. Nearly everyone had a stick of some sort and some of their gestures seemed to mimic swordplay.

The robed women had been shoved into one corner, where they chanted less demonstratively. The watching crowd of thousands danced in place, and chanted and made a continuous motion of pulling an invisible rope. This slow motion tug-of-war was both graceful and weird and the tuggers’ faces shone with sweat as they mimicked this yanking.

It was the whooping and hollering that I associated with a revivalist prayer meeting, the same goofy smiles, the same hysteria. It was a prayer meeting in every respect. They were chanting ‘God is great’ now, faster and faster, and with this speeded up chanting, the men were walking more quickly in the great circle, raising dust.

Now I noticed the crippled Sufis, men with all sorts of twisted and gimpy legs, spinal curvatures, crutches and canes, and two men scrabbled on all fours. They too approximated dance steps, and fumbled and stumbled in the sacred circle, to the tattoo of the drums and the smashing of the tin cymbals that had the sound of pot lids.

There was at once a slower beat and I thought the dance was ending, but still the thirty or so priests and dervishes made their eccentric way in the circle, now uttering a new chant.

‘Allah al haiyu! Allah al haiyu!’ — God is alive!

The dervishes with matted locked hair and pointed cloth caps and wild patched clothes looked like court jesters or fools — and they even had that self-mocking conceit in their movements. They continued circling, spinning, as a man passed the perimeter of the crowd wafting incense with a thurible, directing the thin smoke into the gleaming faces of the chanting mob.

And now with the red sun lower, and the smell of dust and incense, and the heavy stamping that reminded me of the stamping in some village exorcism, the spinning cripples, the marching priests, the ratatat of the drums and ululations that grew to a shrill yodeling — the pace quickened again — accelerated to a frenzy.

It was, I could see, essentially a sing-song, but when one of the dervishes snaked out a leather coach whip and began cracking it and spinning as the mob clapped and chanted — the sunset on the mosque making a long shadow of the cemetery — the drums had never been louder, nor the cymbals so insistent. I was both worried and energized, for the mob had become frenzied in its ecstatic chanting, ‘God is alive.’ There is a point at which hysteria is indistinguishable from belief.

As an unbeliever, the only one among those thousands, I had reason to be alarmed.

‘But they are not political,’ Khalifa said. ‘They are Sufis. They bother no one. They dance. They are mystical. They are good people.’

Perhaps so, but in any case this was the lovely weird essence that I looked for in travel — both baffling and familiar, in the sunset and the rising dust beaten into the air by all those feet, dervishes and spectators alike. Everyone was part of it. And this was not some spectacle put on for photographers and tourists but rather a weekly rite, done for the pure joy of it.

In the gold and gore of the desert sunset the whole thing ended in exhaustion, the men embracing, the women peeping out of their veils, and then they got to their knees and prayed in the gathering darkness, in this odd spot, between the river and the desert.