Dark Star Safari

5. The Osama Road to Nubia

On my first night sleeping in the desert, a traveler in an antique land, stifling in my tent, thirsting for a drink, lying naked because of the heat, I looked through the mosquito net ceiling and saw flies gathering on the seams, their fussing twitching bodies lit by the moon and the crumbs of starlight. Yet I was happy, in spite of the dire warnings: Travel in all parts of Sudan, particularly outside Khartoum, is potentially hazardous.

‘The mere animal pleasure of traveling in a wild unexplored country is very great,’ David Livingstone wrote in similar circumstances. Then the flies were gone and so was the moon, as the sky was darkened by a raveled skein of clouds that grew woollier and blacker until the whole night was black, starless, and thick with hot motionless air. I breathed with difficulty, feeling that odd sense of levitation that comes from being naked, flat on one’s back on a hot summer night. But I was just a white worm in the vastness of a dark desert.

There came a trotting sound, not one animal but lots of tiny hooves, like a multitude of gazelle fawns, so soft in their approach they were less like hoofbeats than the sounds of expelled breaths, pah-pah-pah. They advanced on me, then up and over my tent, tapping at the loose fabric.

It was rain. Rain? I sat up sweating. Yes, and now it came down hard, pelting into the netting and dropping on to me. In seconds I was sluiced and soaked. I had dragged my bag into the tent so as not to attract the snakes that were numerous here. My bag was wet, and so were my folded clothes, and it was still raining.

I zipped myself out of the tent and saw Ramadan crouching with his hands on his head. He yelled when he saw me. He was a dim vision. No stars, no moon, just straight down rain clattering in the blackness.

I stood in the downpour like a monkey, licking the raindrops from my lips, wondering whether to make for the truck. And as I considered this, the rain stopped and a chewed pie of moon appeared.

‘What was that?’

‘It never rains here,’ Ramadan said.

‘That was rain.’

‘Just sometimes,’ Ramadan said.

The night was so hot, even with this cloudburst that after I wiped out my tent and stuck my bag in the sand, I was dry in minutes and so was my tent. It was midnight. I went back to sleep. A few hours later I heard the approaching footfalls, the pattering, the lisping, then the pelted tent and there was another downpour, as fierce as the first. I lay and let the rain hit me and when it stopped I was so tired I turned over and went back to sleep in the evaporating puddle inside my tent.

Dawn was cool. I woke sneezing and dragged on my clothes, but the sun stoked the heat again. We made coffee, ate some grapefruit we had bought at a market the previous day, and kept going up the road north.

‘You know who made this road?’

‘Tell me.’

‘Osama.’

‘He used to live in Khartoum, right?’

‘The Sudan government tell him to go away.’

In spite of his hasty exit Osama bin Laden was not reviled in the Sudan. ‘He is a good man, a holy man, we think he is not wrong,’ a group of Sudanese told me in Khartoum, challenging me to disagree with them. And I did, saying, ‘Osama decreed that all Americans are legitimate targets and can be killed by mujahideen. Therefore — as a target — I disagree with you.’

As is well known now, Osama had gone to Afghanistan in the early 1980s, a multi-millionaire of twenty-two, and had used his fortune to buy arms to oppose the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He had come to the Sudan in 1992 after the Saudis withdrew his passport and cancelled his citizenship. He lived with his multiple wives and children in Riyadh, an upscale suburb of Khartoum, in a compound of three-story houses behind a high wall, started his construction business, building the road to Shendi as well as the Port Sudan Airport on the Red Sea. He had also, people said, carried out good works — dispensed money, charity, advice — as well as continuing to recruit Muslim zealots for Al Quaeda, the organization he had started in the 1980s.

In the Sudan, Osama had financed Somali opposition to the Americans in Mogadishu and was as successful, and as destructive, as he had been in Afghanistan. Finding him an irritant, the Sudanese government expelled him in May 1996 and he returned with his entourage to Afghanistan, where he went on hatching plots, including the US Embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam as well as mayhem worldwide.

Officially he had been banished from the Sudan, yet he was still in the thoughts of the Sudanese, a gangling figure — noticeably tall, even in a country of very tall people — pious and austere, full of maxims, giving alms, defending the faith, his skinny six-five frame trembling with belief, the living embodiment of the Sword of Islam. The Muslim Brotherhood was strong in the Sudan, if passive on the subject of jihad, and so was the much more militant Al-Gama’ah el-Islamiya, which carried out multiple murders in Egypt, including the killing of tourists.

The Khartoum papers printed reminiscences of Osama. Even his old household chef, an Egyptian named Mohammed el-Faki, gushingly recalled for a Khartoum newspaper how his boss had liked fruit juice, and preferred boiled black cumin to tea, and kabsa, lamb, on a huge platter of rice. He was abstemious, and respectful, and always carried a religious chaplet in his right hand, and a cane in his left hand, sometimes using it to clout his children.

‘This is a good road.’

‘Osama road,’ Ramadan said. And he laughed. He also said that he had a mind to go to Afghanistan, kill Osama and collect the multimillion-dollar reward. ‘But then I cannot come back to the Sudan. Sudan people will be angry with me for killing this man. Ha!’

We kept driving, and every so often Ramadan without slowing down would spin the wheel and drive off the Osama road, lurching over the roadside berms and up and down the ditches, and heading fifty miles into the desert, off road, in search of a temple or some noseless, armless statuary, the remnants of yet another hubristic Ozymandias.

I liked the look of the Sudanese desert — vast, browny-bright, unpeopled, lots of off-road tracks — reputedly full of beautiful ruins and rocky ridges and extensive wadis full of herons, and oases with deep wells. ‘Not as hot as Khartoum,’ someone at the Acropole said. George found me a truck and a driver. The driver had a tent for me. What about his tent? This my country! These my dunes! This my sand! I sleep in the sand dunes.’ He actually did, on the gritty sand, in his clothes, like a cat on a mat. He was named for Ramadan, the period of fasting, and his home was in the west, Kordofan, in the Nub Mountains.

Meeting him and his vehicle on a back street in Khartoum I had been reassured by the sight of plastic chairs roped to the truck. They were just cheap molded things but usable. A man with the foresight to bring chairs on a camping trip in the desert could be counted on to have brought the rest of the necessaries — and this assessment proved true, for even though I didn’t taste them he also brought a jar of jam, some cans of tuna fish, and a haunch of goat.

We set off through Khartoum, crossed the bridge to North Khartoum and he showed me the pharmaceutical factory in the industrial area that had been blown up in 1998: still derelict, because the owner had a lawsuit pending. Then we swung back on to the main road, the Osama road to the north, and were soon in the desert, but peculiarly Sudanese desert — gravelly and flat but also strewn with hills formed like enormous rockpiles. About thirty miles north we came upon a squatter settlement in the middle of nowhere — people camped in mean shacks and lean-tos, fighting the heat and the wind — no trees or bush, just a few skinny goats. Ramadan called them Jaaliyeh, a clan that had come here and squatted in the hope that they would be seen as a nuisance and an obstruction and told to move.

‘Because when the government wants them to move they will ask for money.’

The Sudanese government in an expansion mode had become well-known for compensating people whom they were compelled to resettle.

Farther up the road, the boulder piles were even higher and some could have passed for mountains, or stone skeletons of mountains, while others were perfectly pyramidal. Here and there a mirage-like strip of green, low in the west, indicated the north-flowing Nile. I assumed that all the settlements would be near the Nile, but I was wrong. Some villages were a whole day’s donkey ride from the Nile, so that it was two days there and back; and the same distances from some villages to the nearest town — longer on foot than by donkey. It was true that there were Sudanese here who enjoyed the congeniality of living on a grid of streets in a good-sized town with a market by the river, but there seemed to me even more people who chose to live in the middle of nowhere, huddled in huts by a few boulders, a longish walk from a water source.

A little way off the road we stopped at Wadi ben Naggar, just a tiny village of goat herds and farmers but also the birthplace of Omer al Bashir, the current president of the Sudan, who had come to power in a coup.

A toothless man in a ragged turban howled at me and to neutralize his hostility I gave him the conventional greeting, ‘Salaam aleikum’ — Peace be upon you.

‘You are American?’

I caught the word, Ameriki, though Ramadan was translating, and Ramadan answered for me. The man had a grubby gown and a falling-apart turban and five days’ growth of beard.

I even understood this man’s next howl.

‘Bush ma kwais!’ Bush is no good.

‘How do I say, “I don’t know”?’

‘Ana ma’arif.’

I smiled at the man and said, ‘Ana ma’ arif.’

The man laughed and clutched at his turban, disentangling it some more.

‘Clinton Shaytaan.’

That was pretty clear: Clinton is Satan.

‘A lot of Americans would agree with you,’ I said.

He shook his head and smiled goofily, and gabbled a little: What was I saying? Then he said, ‘Bush blah-di-blah.’

‘He is saying you look like Bush.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said to Ramadan and to the man, still practicing my new phrase, ‘Ana ma’ arif.’

‘Not big Bush but small Bush,’ Ramadan translated.

‘Ask him if he wants a Stim.’ It was the local version of 7-Up.

The man said, Yes, indeed, he wanted one.

Giving it to him, I said, ‘Please stop talking about Bush.’

He smiled at me — still no clue — and toasted, clinking Stim bottles, ‘Clinton is Satan.’

We left his boisterous abuse and his unfriendly smile, looked around the village, and then drove a little way up the road and off it, straight across the soft sand and deep ditches for about forty miles. There was no road to speak of, only hard-packed desert gravel and now and then powder-soft dunes. Up ahead I would see greenery and think there was a wooded glade but this would be ridiculous misapprehension as the glade turned out to be a hot patch of desert with a few stands of thornbushes and the wriggly marks of snakes.

‘There was a school here once,’ Ramadan said.

‘I want to see it.’

The place was ruined and deserted, just a cluster of empty buildings in the desert — perhaps an aid donor’s idea in the first place, one of those good-hearted misguided efforts to elevate Africans in a western way.

‘What happened?’

‘No water, no food, no teachers — nothing.’

Sand blew through the roofless classroom and the place looked as useless and broken as a Kushitic ruin, but without any of the art or grace. Some hobbled tortured-looking camels tottered near the school, their forelegs tied together so that they would not stray.

Then I saw the forgotten scholars and potential school kiddies: they were at the well, helping their elders, watering their goats, and the smallest of the children — no more than eight or nine — was running next to a roped donkey, hitting his hindquarters with a sharp stick and running beside him. The donkey was pulling a rope, and watching him I was surprised to see how far he pulled it, more than half the length of a football field down a well-worn path, zipping an immense length of frayed rope out of the well.

The well was ancient, the place was ancient: a Meroitic temple complex dating from the first century AD still stood near here, and such temples, so far from the Nile, could be sustained only by deep and reliable wells. This one was 175 feet deep. The opening at the top was about four feet in diameter. I was spooked contemplating its deepness. Men threw the goatskin hide pails into the depths of the well and then jerked the rope, bobbing it and filling it; and then they hoisted it a few feet and satisfied that it was full, they knotted the rope to a donkey and a little boy would chase the donkey into the desert, belaboring it with a stick. There was not a shred of clothing or any item of apparatus here that was any more modern than the first-century temple of Al Naggar (‘Carpenter’) on the other side of the dune. The school must have seemed a nice idea, but nothing here could have seemed more superfluous than those classrooms.

‘So you’re American?’ one of the men said to me in Arabic, because Ramadan had tipped him off.

‘Peace be upon you.’

‘And peace be upon you,’ he replied.

‘Bush is no good,’ another man said: the Arabic was simple enough.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Why is he saying he doesn’t know?’ one of the men at the well said.

Ramadan said, ‘Does everyone in the Sudan love President Omer?’

Yes, yes, they understood this, and laughed angrily and stamped on their little hillock for emphasis. And I thought of the lovely lines of Joyce, The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant’s heart on the hillside. For them the earth is not exploitable ground but the living mother. They loved their well. They explained the well to me, how deep it was. It had been dug many years ago. Sometimes they had to rope up and descend into its darkness to retrieve a lost pail, not a happy task.

‘There are snakes in the well,’ one man explained. To my next obvious questions they said, ‘Yes, the snakes are a meter long and they bite with poison.’

I walked around, looked at the goats, the camels, the toiling men and women, the children who were standing in the sun, performing this necessary and never-ending task. Then I said goodbye.

‘Tell Bush we want a pump!’ one man screamed in Arabic, Ramadan helpfully translating.

No, I don’t think so: a pump would need gasoline, spare parts, regular maintenance. Ultimately the contraption would fail them. They were better off hauling water the ancient way, with donkeys, goatskin pails, and goatskin water containers which when filled looked like little fat goat corpses.

But I said, ‘The next time I see President Bush I will mention it,’ which when translated brought forth a howl of derision.

Two thousand years ago, Al Naggar, this dune-haunted ruin in the desert, was a city, with cisterns and tanks, roads and houses, sophisticated agriculture and a high degree of prosperity, artisans everywhere, and priests and devotees. It was the center of a cult of the lion god Apademak, chief god of the Meroites, probably with good reason. There must have been many lions roaming in the central Sudan then — there were plenty in the south even now — and it is human nature to worship what we fear.

In form and ornament the temple complex at Al Naggar was Egyptian, resembling many others farther down the Nile. This temple in the middle of the Sudan sited more southerly even than Nubia, was like a copy of the temple at Edfu. The walls even had the same symbolic figures of the king and queen holding enemy prisoners by their hair, and lions preparing to eat them. On the sides of one pylon a coiled python with a lion’s head — Apademak again — was rising from a lotus flower, the symbol of everlasting life. On the other pylon, King Natakamani was shown worshiping the lion god.

On every surface there were bas-reliefs, some of ram-headed Amun, and Khnum, and many lion heads, beautifully sculpted and uprisen, their paws extended to snatch and gobble prisoners. The north wall showed symbols of peace and prosperity, the south wall images of chaos and war. A crocodile with its jaws tied tightly symbolized peace; armored battle elephants dragging captives depicted war.

Inside the kiosk of the temple were old pieces of graffiti (‘Holroyd 1837’) and pharaonic scenes too, delicately cut into the sandstone that had been quarried from the nearby stone hills that surrounded this ancient settlement. The place was known by its Arabic name, Musarrawat al Sofra, ‘Yellow Drawings.’

‘But why these people here?’ Ramadan said dismissively, meaning the Sudanese peasants at the well. ‘A few huts. A few goats. Two days by donkey to Shendi if they want to buy something.’

A handful of Sudanese toiled with donkeys, drawing water from another well half a mile away — a well that probably dated from this Kushitic site. But what seemed like the middle of nowhere had once been a trade route. It must have been, because there was a way south in the wadi here that had produced the prizes from deeper in Africa: wood, honey, gold, and slaves. And ivory: it was said that many tusks had been dug out of the ancient store rooms on this site.

Here we camped, in the dune near the temple, just the two of us, like a pair of nineteenth-century travelers who had happened upon an ancient ruin in the desert. No fences, no signs, no commercial activity, no touts, no postcards. The locked-up quarters of the German archeologists who were cataloguing this site were over the next hill.

When we started cooking, some local men drifted over and squatted with us and shared our food. You couldn’t blame them — in the odorless desert the aroma of shish-kebab must have stirred appetites in the distant huts. We talked awhile, and then I sat in a plastic chair in the dark and in this peaceful place listened to bad news from the larger world on my shortwave radio.

That was the night Ramadan said, ‘This my country! This my desert! I sleep here on the sand!’ That was the night the moon was clouded over; the night in the hot darkness I heard the pitter-pat of tiny feet which turned out to be raindrops, the prelude to a violent downpour, and another later. In the morning I woke up sneezing, surrounded by these glorious temples, reddish-gold in the sunrise.

Part of that next day I spent at another temple on a nearby hill, an Amun temple, with a ramp, a walkway flanked by recumbent rams (a dozen altogether, their faces broken). Khnum was the ram god, ‘God of the Kings, and King of the Gods.’ The king and queen who had had this temple built were shown on the bas-reliefs with ram heads. But Egyptology seemed a discipline based largely on conjecture, assigning names to eroded faces of royalty and deities and animals. So much was speculation, for the Kingdom of Kush, the Napatan and Merotic periods had lasted for a thousand years, until the fourth century AD. What was known was piddling compared to what was not known. A quarter of a mile away was the Great Enclosure. It was lovely but enigmatic: carved pillars, lions, elephant sculptures, feet, legs, torsos, with the implied self-mocking command: ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

Was this a center for training elephants for warfare — the battle elephants depicted on the temple at Al Naggar? Some archeologists thought so. Others thought it was perhaps a religious center. But it might have been used for coronation rites. Or some sort of royal arena: ‘The ruler might have had to renew publicly his or her show of strength in order to retain the throne.’

The experts didn’t know, so how should I? I was just a wanderer, heading to Cape Town, wearing a faded shirt and flapping pants, sunburned toes showing in my Syrian sandals, and with a head cold from having been rained on: a traveler in an antique land.

The greatest part of my satisfaction was animal pleasure: the remoteness of the site, the grandeur of the surrounding mesa-like mountains and rock cliffs, the sunlight and scrub, the pale camels in the distance, the big sky, the utter emptiness and silence, for round the decay of these colossal wrecks the lone and level sands stretched far away.

It was necessary in the remote provinces of the Sudan for foreigners to report to the local security police within twenty-four hours of arrival. These were the same police who had interrogated one American man for days before they performed a mock execution on him. The same police, of which the State Department advisory had warned: The government of Sudan’s control of its police and soldiers may be limited.

True, I might be interrogated when I showed up; but if I didn’t show up the consequences could have been dire. There were worse things than a mock execution; there were real executions, for example.

Shendi was the nearest town. We drove across the desert to it and entered. The place was biscuit-colored and dusty, a low settlement of poor huts and small shops, the streets overrun with goats and camels. The largest house in town, a conspicuous villa, belonged to the president’s brother. There were some beat-up vans and old trucks and a fleet of battered blue taxis, which Ramadan said were all Russian-built, jalopies from long ago, called Volgas. This was the only town in the Sudan where you would see such vehicles, but the engines had been replaced with newer Japanese ones, purloined from other cars. There were no trees anywhere, and not much shade.

The security office was at the edge of town on a side street, the officer a stern skull-capped man with a visible prayer bump on his forehead, a facial feature I always took to be a warning sign. He was with three other men who, Sudanese style, sat on chairs with their feet tucked under them. They were all watching a small TV set — more worry, a black-and-white set showing a howling placard-carrying mob, some of the slogans readable in English. They were angry Palestinians. The sound was turned up, and so the only voices audible in this security office were those of outraged Philistines.

I had a very bad moment just then, for in my passport were two Israeli stamps, one from the checkpoint at Allenby Bridge where I entered from Jordan, the other at Haifa, where I departed Israel on a ferry. The instructions from the Sudanese Embassy said that any passport ‘with Israeli markings’ would be rejected. Yet I had handed in my passport and been granted the visa. If any Sudanese had seen the ‘Israeli markings’ he had not mentioned it.

But a scowling man with a prayer bump in the desert town of Shendi might find them, and might object. He took my passport and laid it flat, and smoothed it with the heel of his hand and began scrutinizing it. Perhaps the stamps from Kiribati, Ecuador, Albania, Malaysia, India, Hong Kong, Gibraltar, and Brazil dazzled him. Some were colorful. He glanced from time to time at the television. He wiped his mouth. I sat rigid, expecting the worst. Then, without a word, he gave me back my passport and dismissed me, and went on watching the Middle Eastern mob scene.

We walked through the market, choosing tomatoes and basil for lunch.

‘Awaya,’ children called out often, and less often, Aferingi. White man. For I was a novelty The only other foreigners they saw were the occasional Chinese who manned the oil refinery up the road. The market was full of vegetables and fruit, spices and herbs. Lots of plump grapefruit, lots of bananas. Not many buyers circulated among the stalls, and so people hectored me and thrust melons in my face and tried to sell me baskets of limes, because as an awaya — even better as a masihi, a Christian, a believer in the messiah — I was likely to have lots of Sudanese dinars.

Ramadan and I ended up at the Shendi ferry ramp, drinking coffee with a distinctive taste.

It wasn’t really coffee but rather an unusual brew called jebana, coffee husks steeped in water, with sugar and, Ramadan said, a certain dawa — I recognized the Swahili word for medicine — zinjabil, powdered ginger. It was a cultural link with the Horn of Africa, of which Sudan has many. That same drink in Yemen and the Emirates is called qashar.

A few miles up the riverbank was the Royal Palace, hot, muddy, fly-blown and mosquito-ridden, but at least with a tree or two. I could not make head nor tail of the place. There were friezes showing animals and gods, and cartouches enclosing hieroglyphics, but this complex of crumbled foundations spoke of nothing except the visible fact that once upon a time the site had been a populous town with many buildings and avenues — and perhaps a Romanesque bath. Had the Romans come here?

Mohammed the resident watchman and guide was not much use.

‘American?’ he said in Arabic, an unmistakable word, accusing me with a brown twisted forefinger.

‘American,’ I said.

‘Bush is Satan.’

‘Ana ma’ arif.’ I said.

‘Clinton is Satan,’ Mohammed said.

‘Ana ma’ arif.’

‘Why you say you don’t know?’

I just smiled at him.

‘American soldiers no good. Kill people!’

We were walking from the broken steps to the broken wall, and along it, treading on Kushitic bricks. Mohammed looked tired and disgruntled. He said he had three daughters, no sons. He had no money. His grandfather had been the caretaker and guide here, so had his father. But if Mohammed knew anything technical or historical about this place he did not reveal it to me.

Suddenly he said in halting English, ‘I want to go America.’

‘America ma kwais,’ I said, mimicking what he had said.

‘Yes, but no work here.’

‘You want to work in America?’

‘Yes. Get job. Get dollars.’

‘Bush Shaytaan,’ I said, teasing him again.

‘How I can go America?’ Mohammed said, kicking at the ancient bricks.

‘Ana ma’ arif,’ I said: I dunno.

In the most atmospheric of nineteenth-century exotic scenes, the essence of Orientalism, explorers camp at the foot of dramatic ruins — the tent beside the Sphinx’s paw, the canvas shelter at the base of the pyramids, the campfire glowing near the Temple of Isis. Ideally, the whole thing is moonlit, and there are some hobbled camels nearby, looking luminous in the moonshine. No one else around, just this tableau: hardy campers, lovely ruins, big-eyed camels, a cooking fire.

This was precisely my experience that night. We camped by the pyramids, and I felt as those old travelers must have — lucky, humbled, uplifted by being alone in this sacred place, a solitary meditation among marvels. These Sudanese pyramids, remnants of burials of the Kingdom of Kush, were numerous — about thirty-five of them on a sandstone ridge. They were smaller and steeper than the ones at Gizeh, like a mass of art deco salt shakers up close, and from a little distance like a row of fangs in the jawbone of the ossified ridge. The ribbed drifts of golden brown sand were heaped against the pyramids and their chapels. The sand glowed beautifully at sunset, the great dunes of it piled up and scooped out at the corners, the way snow blows and stays in improbable forms, in sculpted shapes and overhangs.

There wasn’t time to look around; the sun was setting. We cooked some potatoes we had bought at Shendi and made tomato and cucumber salad. I put up my tent and Ramadan the romantic (‘The sand is my pillow!’) chose a sandy crease in a dune. The night was clear but the wind came up, blew sand against my tent and covered Ramadan. The moon passed overhead and when it dropped into the west the dark stars shone with such power their intense light pierced the nylon of my tent and the rest of the sky was blacker without the bright pollution of the moon.

The wind died at dawn, when it became so chilly I had to wear a jacket, and in this pure light, under a clear sky, the pyramids were uncluttered and smooth-sided, standing among the rubble of stones and fallen bricks. Nearly all the tops of the pyramids had been destroyed and all had been torn open and robbed. Several of them, just broken tumbled blocks, had been dynamited. You could see the effect of the explosions which had shattered the bricks in the beheading of the pyramids.

The tomb raider who carried out this destruction was an obscure Italian adventurer and treasure hunter named Giuseppe Ferlini. Just a few facts are known of this man, who vandalized the pyramids and the tombs in 1834, though his name is notorious in the Nubian Desert. He was born in Bologna in 1800, qualified as a medical doctor, and after a spell in Albania and Egypt as a soldier of fortune, he sailed up the Nile to Khartoum. On the way he visited the more obvious ancient sites and conceived the idea that they were full of gold. Records show that he received permission from the ruler of the Sudan, Ali Kurshid Pasha, to excavate sites in Merowe. Ali Kurshid was a slaver, who, trading in humans (he hauled Dinka and Azande from the south, to sell on the coast), could hardly have scrupled to preserve a jumble of old stones and dented bronzes.

With a large gang of Sudanese laborers Ferlini began digging and very soon found a gold statue. This trophy inspired him to keep digging. He also used explosives. Ferlini missed some treasures — we are certain of this, because when the Germans began their careful reconstruction of these sites in 1960 they found a gilded statue of Hathor, a beautiful bronze of Dionysius and many other bronzes. But Ferlini must have found many similar objects. He sold them for ‘a small fortune,’ according to one historian and did violence to the pyramids. He left the Sudan soon after his destruction of the sites. He simply disappeared down the Nile with crates of treasures. He wrote nothing. He lived like a prince in Italy on the proceeds of his tomb raiding. ‘He gave no coherent account of what happened to the treasures.’

What had he taken away? Pots and chairs, carvings, little idols in black stone, mummified cats and alabaster falcons, the contents of the burial chambers, bronzes, gold statues and the gilded heads of gods and goddesses. What he had not taken, for they were impossible to remove, were the incised murals, the processions of lion-headed kings, the queens in horned headdresses, the lotuses, cobras, elephants and sacred bulls. The cattle in those 1000-year-old bas-reliefs had the twisted horns that were seen in today’s Dinka herds, in the south of the Sudan.

As I was wandering from one blasted-and-rebuilt pyramid to another, some children from a nearby village showed up with trinkets — amulets and carvings — they claimed they had dug out of the rubble and some clay models of the pyramids. I gave them each a banana and off they went.

Another cluster of pyramids stood on a more southerly ridge, another citadel of reddish wind-scarred sandstone, dating from about 295–250 BC. The landscape was either this weathered stone or else smooth sand, some of it like brown sugar, the rest flat and yellow. No trees, no greenery, nothing growing, not even grass. I hiked to these other pyramids and examined them and drew some sketches in my notebook of the lions and the bulls.

While I was doing this, three tall white-robed Sudanese appeared — impressed and gratified that I was taking the trouble to draw pictures. They were pilgrims of a sort, the leader an older man named Kamal Mohammed Khier.

He said by way of introduction, ‘I am not an Arab.’ He said this as a challenge and a boast.

‘But you speak Arabic.’

‘Yes, but it is not my language.’ Saying so, he sounded like Salih Mashamoun, the Sudanese diplomat I had met in Cairo. ‘I am a Nubian. I speak Nubian. My family is Nubian. I am from Dongola in Nubia. We were kings in this country. We ruled Egypt. We built these pyramids.’

It was quite a speech and perfect for the place, the visitation by this proud son of the land. He introduced the others, his son Hassan and another man, Hamid.

‘This man, Hamid, is a real Nubian, too,’ Kamal said. ‘Not an Arab.’

Kamal frowned at the pyramids. He was looking at Ferlini’s damage. He said, ‘Look at the condition of them. The government doesn’t take care of them. These are great things!’

It was true that the Sudanese government did very little to preserve these ancient sites but in almost every case the site had been adopted by a foreign university — German, British, American — and was in the process of restoration. A philanthropic Englishwoman was waging a single-handed battle against neglect and erosion at a temple complex just to the west of the pyramids, and an elderly German named Hinkel, a self-financed enthusiast apparently, visited here once a year in his long-term project of piecing together the Temple of the Sun.

I accompanied Kamal and the others around the rest of the pyramids. They asked how I happened to be here. I pointed out my little blue tent in the dune.

‘Yes, you can be safe here,’ Kamal said. ‘In Egypt, no. In other countries people will trouble you — and this and that’ — he was hacking at his head with his hand. ‘But here, no one will bother you. You are safe in Sudan. We are all your friends.’

We broke camp and drove through the dunes and the gravely sand to the Temple of the Sun. An old man ran over and made me sign a logbook. He saluted me. He showed me the temple. Sand had almost covered the foundations but that was a help, for the packed sand preserved the carvings on the friezes.

The old man sat on a rock and said it was a throne for the priest. He put his hands together and mimicked the priest greeting the sun god, ‘Allah!’

Ramadan teased the old man and said he didn’t know what he was talking about.

The old man laughed. ‘No, but Hinkel does!’

‘How old are you?’

‘Fifty-six or fifty-seven,’ the old man said doubtfully.

‘No — much older! Sixty-something.’

‘How am I supposed to know that? I can’t read,’ the old man said. He was laughing, because there was a lot of affection in Ramadan’s teasing.

Ramadan was laughing with him now. ‘Where did you get that nice wristwatch?’ and he made as if to snatch it.

‘Hinkel,’ the old man said.

‘This place is a mess,’ Ramadan said.

‘Yes!’ the old man said.

‘You should fix it.’

‘It is not my place. It belongs to the government. Let the government fix it.’

We drove north after that, to Atbara, the end of the paved road, where there were no temples, but there was a cement factory and a ferry across the Nile and the last bridge — it was just ferries from here to the Egyptian border. Here we camped again, at the edge of the Nubian Desert. The next town was Dongola and after that Wadi Halfa, the border. And so I spent another night, this one by the Nile, where I had seen so few fishermen. I asked Ramadan why. He said that the Sudanese in the north were not great fish eaters. Fish didn’t keep in the heat, it was not smoked, it was regarded as a snack, not much more. Lamb and camel and goat were tastier.

The next day, seeing torn rubber all over the road, Ramadan spun the steering wheel and headed into the desert, where he spied a car which had skidded there from the effect of a blown tire. No one got a simple puncture in such hot places: the tires just exploded in a mass of shredded rubber.

Three men stood by the old car in the hot bright desert, the only features in the landscape. Ramadan conferred with them and the men explained their dilemma — which was obvious: a blow-out, no spare tire, no traffic on the road; they needed a new tire. They got into our truck and we drove them down the road about fifty miles and dropped them at a repair shop in a small town off the road. This lengthy detour of an hour and a half was considered normal courtesy, like the rule of the sea that necessitates one ship helping another in trouble, no matter the inconvenience. And here the desert much resembled a wide sea.

The men were grateful but not effusive. They saluted us, and off we went.

‘They had a problem. This is what we do. We help,’ Ramadan said.

We picked up more fresh food — tomatoes, onions, limes, herbs, fruit and bread — and drove west to a set of high, dry, brown mountains of rock and rubble. Ramadan found a valley through them, where there was a village surrounded by fertile green fields, irrigated by water from the Nile. They were growing wheat, corn, sorghum and beans. We traveled on something less than a road, a goat track, a path-notion, an idea of a trail. We kept going along it, past screeching children (‘Awaya!’ White man!) to the Sixth Cataract.

The trees were thicker here and the green grass was long. The cataract was a misnomer, though. All I saw was a set of muddy rapids that were easily navigable in a small boat. We made camp in a grove of trees where there was a set of rope beds under an arbor. We ate salad and bread, while swallows and sparrows and yellow-breasted finches flew in and out of the tree boughs. Ramadan took a bath in the river. I was going to do the same, but was too tired and fell asleep on a rope bed, on the bank of the river, to the sound of the thrashing rapids.

I was listening to the radio the next morning in this idyllic spot — Japan is in its most severe recession ever, with high unemployment. The world economy is expected to be in its deepest recession since World War Two — and thinking: None of this will affect a village like this in the slightest, for such a place is both so marginalized and so self-sufficient that nothing will change it.

As though to emphasize this an old man approached and began babbling at me.

Ramadan said, ‘He is telling you he has three wives. He has fifteen babies.’

He was just a grizzled figure hanging around. He had discovered that such an announcement might get a rise out of a stranger, especially a masihi. He explained his conjugal arrangements. Each wife had a separate room. The man alternated. He grinned at me.

‘Tell him I am happy for him.’

Another figure, apparently a small skinny child of about seven or eight, came over.

Ramadan said, ‘How old is he?’

I looked more closely and saw a small pinched face — chinless but dwarflike rather than young.

‘He is twenty-seven,’ Ramadan said. ‘His name is Abd-allah Magid.’

He was tiny, with a small head and skinny arms and a small boy’s body, wearing a little gown about half the size of a flour sack. He was hardly four feet tall and could not have weighed more than fifty pounds. Ramadan questioned him and Abd-allah Magid replied in a strange duck-like voice. He shook my hand and then marched like a soldier up and down, as he had been taught to do, to be cute and to earn baksheesh. But Ramadan was kind to him and gave him half a grapefruit, and when he stopped performing he seemed a sweet and melancholy little fellow, whose life in this harsh climate would be short. He was the smallest man I had ever seen.

‘He lives here. His mother died the day he was born. I am asking him why he doesn’t get married.’

Abd-allah Magid said in Arabic, ‘The girls don’t like me. I can’t get married. What can I give them?’

Ramadan said, ‘He has nothing.’

The dwarf Abd-allah Magid, looked after by his grandparents, was friendly and kind. He sat on the edge of a rope bed and kicked his feet. He was too small to work, to weak to do much of anything. But he was not bullied or mocked as vulnerable physical types are in some parts of Africa. It was obvious in the kindly behavior of the villagers that he was regarded as special, unique, perhaps even blessed.

‘The criterion is how you treat the weak,’ a man told me back in Khartoum. ‘The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.’

The speaker was Sadig el Mahdi, great-grandson of El Mahdi (‘The Rightly Guided One’), who had dispatched Gordon. I had not wanted to go back to the city. I would have been happy to spend another week camping — the wind, the sandstorms, the cloudbursts at night only made the experience more vivid and memorable. But I had been granted an interview with Sadig el Mahdi, at his Omdurman mansion.

This opportunity arose because a man on the Secretariat for Peace in the Sudan, another guest at the Acropole, had mentioned my name to the former prime minister. The man claimed that it had rung a bell — a small bell, I suspected, just a tinkle, but that was enough motivation in the hospitable Sudan for someone to make a pot of jebana coffee and strew the cushions and put out the welcome mat.

‘He is a good man, a very smart man,’ a trader in the Khartoum market told me. ‘He is head of the Umma Party.’

The trader’s friend said, ‘His father was Siddig. His grandfather was Abdelrahman. His great-grandfather — well, you know.’

The meeting was fixed for 9:30 at night, an odd time, it seemed to me. I was usually in bed by nine or ten: in Africa, daytime was for roaming, nighttime for hunkering down — predators came out at dark. But a Sudanese explained that this late hour was a sign of respect, the last meeting of the day, a conversation without interruption. I was still weary from my camping trip, but I was pleased to be able to meet this eminent man. A battered taxi came for me at 8:30, Abd-allah the driver cursing when he could not restart it, and cursing much more after he started it and we were stuck in heavy unmoving traffic on the Nile bridge: ‘It is old. It was built by the British. The British! No one ever fixes anything here.’

Glare-lighted dust in the headlights, the loud impatient car horns, the night heat, the smell of diesel fumes. Abd-allah complained the whole way about the inefficiency and dereliction.

Abd-allah said he knew the house. He took side roads to the riverbank and after a few turns there were men in old clothes squatting in the middle of the road — the security detail; and farther on a crude roadblock. Abd-allah shouted to them. We were waved on and soon came to a high wall with a lighted archway. Abd-allah parked, and crawled into the back seat to sleep, and I was escorted through the narrow door.

The garden beyond it was thick with palms and night-blooming jasmine. I was led past the lighted villa and down a gravel path to a sort of summer house woven entirely of wicker but as big as a bungalow, with walls open to the night air. Some men and women rose to greet me — Sadig’s daughter Rabah and another, Hamida, both of them very pretty and married. But modesty was encouraged and staring was rude in this culture, and so I wrung my hands and told them how grateful I was to be there.

Coughing, I explained that I had caught a cold in the desert.

‘Kafara,’ the novelist Issa said, a Sudanese expression of commiseration, the equivalent of ‘God bless you.’

‘To delete your sin and make a better relation with Allah,’ Issa said.

Then with a flourish of his full creamy robes, like a conjurer at a fancy dress party, Sadig el Mahdi appeared — tall, dark, hawk-nosed, with a Van Dyke beard and wearing a pale turban. Waving his wide sleeves he urged us to be seated again. He was both imposing and at once charismatic, because he was so responsive, an attentive listener and a great talker. His manner of holding court was to solicit opinions, and to listen, and at last to say his piece. He gave the impression of huge strength, of humor as well as a sort of ferocity that I took to be passion.

‘You have been in the Sudan a little while,’ he said to me, ‘but there are some things you must know. Just some points I would like to mention.’

The Sudan, largest country in Africa, was a microcosm of Africa, he said. All the African races were represented in the Sudan, all the religions, too; and three of the four major African languages were spoken here. The Sudan was the meeting point of all the countries in the Nile basin, and shared a border with eight countries.

‘Sudanese civilization preceded Egyptian civilization,’ Sadig said. Our history is not a branch of Egyptology, but something else entirely — Sudanology, one could say.’

He asked what I had seen in the north. I explained my camping trip and specifically how I had been impressed by the manner in which Ramadan my driver had helped the stranded men on the road, much to our inconvenience but the rescue of the men.

‘A stranger is not a stranger here. He is someone you know. And this, coming to the aid of a weak person, is chivalry,’ he said.

‘That holds the society together, I suppose.’

‘Yes, Sudan society is stronger than the state,’ he said. ‘Sudanese people have toppled two regimes by popular uprising. Even this present regime is being chipped away.’

‘How is this happening?’ I asked.

‘Through the strong social ties. Social ties are deeper than politics,’ he said. ‘This can be a burden but it helps us. If we had not had such social ties we would have disintegrated.’

A violent overthrow was not the Sudanese way, he said. ‘This country has had no political assassinations. We have a high degree of tolerance, a high degree of idealism — more than the rest of Africa. In the Sudan, enemies socialize!’

Coffee was poured, glasses of juice passed around, cakes and cookies were distributed. A fan whirred in a corner but the heat was oppressive and the aroma of the river overcame the jasmine in the garden.

‘We have had the bloodiest encounters with foreigners,’ Sadig said. ‘But, as a foreigner, you will be helped. We have no anti-foreign feelings.’

True, he said, the present government of the Sudan had tried to cultivate anti-foreign sentiment — ‘a very Islamized view of the world’ — but they had failed.

‘That ideological agenda has faded,’ he said. ‘Slogans have had a field day here. We’ve tried all the systems in the book — socialism, democracy, Islamic rule, military rule.’

I asked, ‘What do you think of the present government?’

‘The present regime has been very intolerant and repressive. This unrepresentative nature is now very conspicuous. But we have had thugs in government for eighty percent of our independent existence.’ Laughing, he said, ‘Before 1996, I was arrested myself!’ Then he grew serious again and added, ‘This government declared a jihad and abused human rights in the south.’

‘What will happen to the war in the south?’

‘We have the greatest potential for change through peaceful means,’ he said. ‘We Sudanese are war-fatigued and dictator-fatigued. Southerners don’t want to fight. They are running away from the war. Even the Comboni Fathers denounced the war,’ he said, referring to the Italian priests whose missions were in the south and west. ‘The Sudanese are fed up with war.’

I mentioned that I had seen the ruins left by the American bombing. I wondered aloud how he felt about relations with the United States. After all, although we had an embassy residence and a big embassy building we had no ambassador, no American staff here, and only the most tenuous diplomatic relations carried out in whispers by officers who came for the day, some from Cairo and others from Nairobi.

‘Clinton had something like ideological blinkers about the Sudan,’ Sadig said. ‘He thought it should be part of the Horn of Africa, so that America could be in charge, using the Horn as a springboard.’

‘Somalia is not much of a springboard,’ I said.

Somalia was famously a fragmented clan-ridden country we had tried to pacify and control, but one we had fled after our first casualties were inflicted by a howling populace, who hated foreigners much more than they hated each other. It was a country without a government, without a head of state, without any of the institutions of society, no courts, no police, no schools; a country of embattled warlords and clan chiefs, and in the hinterland little more than opportunistic banditry.

‘We prefer Bush’s ignorance to Clinton’s wrong thinking and know-it-all attitude,’ Sadig said.

The talk went on until after midnight — the writers talking about their favorite Sudanese novels — one, Dongola, by Idris Ali, had been translated by my brother Peter. They told me about memorable trips they had taken in the country — to the south, to the west, and by train north to Wadi Halfa and Egypt. How people had been kind, taken pity on them, and how the women in the countryside had protected them and preserved their modesty.

That was when Sadig said, ‘The criterion is how you treat the weak. The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.’

A Sudanese basket and a clay coffee pot were brought out and presented to me.

‘When you drink, you remember us,’ Sadig said.

Abd-allah the taxi driver complained most of the way back through Omdurman and over the bridge. But I was smiling, vitalized by the talk and bewitched by the Nile, which was coursing from the heart of Africa, and the sight of the moon shining on it, filling its surface with shattered oblongs of light in brilliant puddles.