The Shadow of the Sun

The Well

Someone is waking me up; I feel a light, careful touch. The face that leans over me is dark, and above it I see a white turban, so bright it glows, as if it were phosphorescent. It is still night, but there is movement all around. Women are dismantling shelters, boys are placing brushwood on the fire. There is haste in this bustle, a race against time: one must accomplish as much as possible, i.e., break camp and get on the road, before the sun rises and the heat starts. These people feel no connection to the place in which they happen to be. They will soon depart, leaving no trace. In their ballads, which they sing in the evenings, is a constantly repeated refrain: “My country? My country is where the rain falls.”

But it is a long way till evening. First, one must prepare oneself for the road. Most important, the camels must be watered at the well. This lasts a long time, because they are capable of swallowing great quantities, laying in reserves, as it were, something neither man nor any other beast can do. That completed, the boys milk them, filling flat, leather skins with the acidic, somewhat tart milk. Then the sheep and goats drink. There are perhaps two hundred of them. The herds are tended by women. Finally, people drink — men first, then women and children.

Now the first streak of light colors the horizon — a portent of day, and the call to morning prayer. It is the men who pray, first washing their faces with a handful of water, a ritual that requires the same concentration as prayer: not a single drop of the precious liquid, just as not a single word of God, can be wasted.

The women now offer each man a bowl of tea. The tea has been boiled with sugar and mint and is thick as honey and fortifying; in the dry season, when there is a shortage of food, it must sustain them all day, until the next bowlful — dinner.

The sun appears, it grows light, and it is high time to be on the road. First, the herd of camels, led by the men and the boys. Next, the sheep and goats mill about in clouds of dust. Immediately after them, the women and children. That is the order in which a group of animals and people customarily travels; this time, however, at the very end, walk Hamed and his donkey, and I. Hamed is a merchant from Berbera, in whose little hotel I had spent a night. When he told me that he was setting off with his cousin to visit his brother in Laascaanood, I asked if he would take me along.

But where is Berbera? Where is Laascaanood? Both lie in northern Somalia, Berbera on the Gulf of Aden, Laascaanood on the Hawd Plateau. At dawn, my companions prayed toward Mecca facing north, with the sun to their right. The geography of this region is intricate, entangled, and god forbid you go astray: in this desert climate, a mistake means death. Whoever has been here knows that these are the hottest places on earth. But only someone who has come to know them well can fully comprehend what I am saying. Daytime hours during the dry season, especially around noon, are a hell almost impossible to bear. All around, everything is burning. Even the shade is hot, even the wind is ablaze. As if a meteorite were passing in the vicinity, its thermal radiation reducing everything to ashes. People, animals, and plants grow still, stiff. Silence descends, a lifeless, overwhelming quiet.

We are at this very moment advancing across the empty trackless expanse toward that blinding phenomenon, the fiery peak of day, toward the torture of scorching heat and exhaustion, from which, moreover, there is no adequate shelter or escape. No one speaks, as if the march itself required all one’s attention and energy, although it is, after all, an everyday activity, a monotonous routine, a way of life. From time to time only one can hear the sound of a stick beating the back of a lazy camel, or women shouting at the unruly goats.

Eleven o’clock approaches; the column slows, then stops and scatters. Everyone tries to hide from the sun. The only way to do so is to get beneath one of the wide, branching acacias that grow here and there, whose shallow, tattered canopies are shaped like umbrellas: there is shade there, a smidgen of hidden coolness. Aside from those trees, it’s just sand and more sand, everywhere. Maybe some thorny shrubs. Bunches of burned, coarse grass. Strips of gray, brittle moss. And, very occasionally, a protruding stone or two, some weathered boulders, heaps of stony rubble.

“Wouldn’t it have been better to stay there, by the well?” I ask Hamed, dead tired. We are barely on the third day of our journey, and aIready I feel that I cannot go on. We sit leaning against a gnarled tree trunk, in a narrow band of shade, so skimpy that in addition to us, only the donkey’s head can fit, while the rest of his body broils in the sun.

“No,” he replied, “because the Ogaden are approaching from the west, and we do not have the strength to resist them.”

I realized in that instant that our peregrination was no mere wandering from place to place, but that as we walked we were participating in a struggle, in ceaseless and dangerous maneuvers, in collisions and clashes, which could at any moment end badly.

The Somalis are a single nation, several million strong. They share a common language, history, culture, territory, and religion: Islam. About one quarter of the population live in the south and an engaged in farming, growing sorghum, corn, beans, and bananas. But the majority are owners of herds, nomads. It is they with whom I am traveling now, on the great expanse of semidesert somewhere between Berbera and Laascaanood. The Somalis are divided into several large clans (such as Isaaq, Daarood, Dir, Hawiye), which are each in turn subdivided into smaller clans, of which there are dozens, and further still into kinship groups, of which there are hundreds, even thousands. The arrangements, alliances, and conflicts within these familial associations and constellations make up the history of Somali society.

The Somali is born somewhere on the road, in a shack-tent or directly under the open sky. He will not know his place of birth; it will not have been written down. Like his parents, he will have no village or town he calls home. He has but a single identity — it is determined by his ties to family, to the kinship group, to the clan. When two strangers meet, they start by asking, “Who are you?” “I am Soba,” the first one begins, “from the family of Ahmad Abdullah, which belongs to the Mussa Arraye group, which is from the clan of Hasean Said, which is part of the larger Isaaq clan,” etc. After this recitation, the second stranger gives the particulars of his lineage, his roots. The exchange lasts a long time and is immensely important, because both individuals are trying to determine whether something unites them or divides them, whether they should embrace or attack each other with knives. Their personal rapport, their mutual sympathy or antipathy, have no meaning; their relationship, be it friendly or hostile, depends on the current state of affairs between their two clans. The human being, the singular, distinct person, does not exist — or he matters only as part of this or that bloodline.

When a boy turns eight, a great honor is bestowed upon him: with his friends, he will henceforth take care of a herd of camels, the greatest treasure of Somali nomads. To them, camels are the measure of all things — wealth, power, life. Above all, life. If Ahmed kills someone from another clan, his family must pay the damages. One hundred camels if he killed a man, fifty camels if the victim was a woman. Otherwise — war! Man is nourished by the camel’s milk. He transports his house on its back. He cannot start a family without a camel: acquiring a wife requires compensating her clan — in camels.

The herd of each kinship group consists of camels, sheep, and goats. The land here cannot be cultivated. It is dry, hot sand, which brings forth nothing. The herd, therefore, is the sole source of sustenance. But the animals need water and pasturelands, both of which are scarce even in the rainy season; in the dry season, most pastures disappear entirely, and pools and wells become shallow or dry up altogether. If the drought persists, hunger ensues, animals perish, many people die.

The young Somali starts getting to know his world. He studies it. Those individual acacias, those torn-up clumps of sod, those lonely, elephantine baobabs are signals telling him where he is and which way he should go. Those tall rocks, those steep, stony faultlines, the protruding cliff edges, instruct him, indicate directions, keep him from losing his way. But just as he feels he has learned this landscape, as it starts to seem legible and familiar, it destroys his self-confidence. For he discovers that the places he thought he knew, the labyrinths and compositions of signs that surround him, look one way when scorched by a drought, and another when they are covered by lush vegetation during the rainy season; those crevices and rocky outcroppings have one shape, depth, and color in the horizontal rays of the morning sun, and altogether different ones at noon, when the rays fall perpendicularly. The youngster will then comprehend that the features of the landscape are varied and changeable, and that one must know the order of their permutations, their significance, what they are telling him, what they are warning him of.

That is his first lesson: that the world speaks, and that it speaks in many languages, which one must always continue learning. But with the passage of time, the boy is also taught another lesson: about the paths and roads traced upon the earth, their course, design, and direction. For although there is seemingly nothing about, just empty, uninhabited wilderness, in reality these lands are traversed by numerous trails and tracks, footpaths and highways, admittedly invisible against the sand and the rocks, yet nevertheless deeply etched in the memory of the people who have wandered these regions for centuries. It is here that begins the great Somali game, the game of survival, of life. For these trails lead from well to well, from pasture to pasture. As a result of age-old wars, conflicts, and negotiations, each clan, kinship group, and family has its own traditionally recognized trails, wells, and pastures. The situation is more or less ideal in a year of abundant rains and lush grasses, when the herds are not too numerous and the human population has not increased unduly. But just let there be a drought, which occurs frequently, let the grasses disappear and the wells run dry! Then the fine web of footpaths and roadways, so painstakingly woven over the years to ensure that the clans are able to pass one another comfortably, avoiding unnecessary contact and conflict, all at once loses its significance, gets tangled, loosens, and tears. A desperate search begins for wells still containing water; death-defying attempts are made to reach them at all cost. Herds are driven from everywhere toward those few places where some green still remains. The dry season becomes a time of fever, tension, fury, and wars. People’s worst traits surface: distrust, deceit, greed, hatred.

Hamed tells me that their poetry often recounts the drama and destruction of clans who, walking across the desert, were ultimately unable to reach a well. Such a tragic journey lasts days, even weeks. First, the sheep and goats perish. They can go only several days without water. “Then the children,” he says, adding nothing more. Neither the reactions of the mothers and fathers, nor what the funerals are like. “Then the children,” he repeats, and again falls silent. It is so hot now that even talking is difficult. It is just past noon, and there is nothing to breathe. “Then the women die,” he continues after a while. “Those who have survived cannot stop for long. If they were to stop after each death, they would never reach the well. One death would cause another, and then another. The clan would disappear somewhere along its route.” I was now meant to imagine this trail that does not exist, meaning, that is invisible, and on it a band of people and animals, ever dwindling, smaller and smaller. “The men and the camels live for a while still. The camel can survive without drinking for three weeks. And it can walk a long distance — five hundred kilometers or more. The whole way, the female will have a tiny bit of milk.” Those three weeks are the upper limit of life for the man and the camel, if they are all alone on the earth. “Alone on the earth!” Hamed cries out, and there is a note of terror in his voice, for that is the one thing a Somali cannot imagine: finding himself alone in the world. The man and the camel continue on in their search for a well and water. They walk more and more slowly, with greater and greater effort, because the ground over which they are moving is aflame, there is heat everywhere, everything all around is blazing, burning — the stones, the sand, the air. “The man and the camel die together,” Hamed says. “It occurs when the man can no longer find milk — the camel’s udders are empty, dry and cracked. Usually, the nomad and the beast still have enough strength to drag themselves to a bit of shade. They are found later lying lifeless in that shade — or where it had seemed to the man that there was shade.”

“I know about this,” I interrupted Hamed. “I saw it with my own eyes in the Ogaden.” We were driving around the desert in trucks, trying to find dying nomads and take them to the camp in Godē. I was shocked that whenever we found dying Somalis and their camels, they refused to be parted from the animals, even though certain death awaited them. I was accompanying a group of young volunteers from the humanitarian organization Save. They would have to forcibly tear a shepherd away from his camel — one skeleton from another — the man cursing at them all the way to camp. But he never remained there for long. These people received three liters of water daily, for everything: drinking, cooking, washing. And daily rations of a half kilogram of corn. Plus, once a week, a small sack of sugar and a piece of soap. The Somalis knew how to set even some of this aside, selling the corn and sugar to dealers hanging around the camp, putting away the money to buy a new camel, and running off into the desert again.

They were unable to live any other way.

Hamed is not surprised at this. “That is our nature,” he says, without resignation, with a touch of pride even. Nature is something one cannot oppose, attempt to improve, or free oneself from. Nature is decreed by God, and is therefore perfect. Droughts, heat waves, empty wells, and death on the road also partake of that perfection. Without them, man would be unable later to appreciate the true delight of rain, the heavenly taste of water, and the life-giving sweetness of milk. A beast would not be able to rejoice in the succulent grass, or relish the smell of a meadow. Man would not know what it is to stand in a stream of cold, crystal-clear water. It would not even occur to him that this is simply to be in heaven.

It is three o’clock, the heat is beginning to subside. Hamed raises himself, wipes the sweat from his face, straightens his turban. He will go take part in a meeting of all adult men, called a shir. The Somalis have no hierarchical structure of governance. All decisions are made during this meeting, at which everyone can speak. The first order of business: listening to reports from children’s reconnaissance missions. The children do not rest. Since morning they have been ferreting about, investigating the surrounding area: Is there a large and hostile clan nearby? Where might there be the closest well to which we have a chance of getting first? Can we continue on our way, confident that nothing threatens us? All these matters will be discussed in turn. The shir is all bustle, quarrels, shouts, confusion. Finally, however, the most important decision will be made: how should we proceed. Then, we will take our places in the order established centuries ago, and we will be on our way.