Bayuda Desert, Sudan, May – June 2014
The town of Atbarah, home to more than a hundred thousand people, straddled the river two days north of the Pyramids of Meroe. A grey, industrial town, Atbarah was brought to life by only two things: the seasonal confluence of the Nile and the River Atbarah, the Nile’s most northerly tributary; and the two men who tumbled out of a taxi on the highway running into town.
We had been tramping for more than forty kilometres under unrelenting sun. Caked in dirt, eyes to the ground, all I heard was the revving of an engine and a screeching of tyres. It was the camels who spooked first. Loping nervously to the side of the dusty highway, they craned to look back. Too late, I did the same. A taxi overtook us in a cloud of sand and slowed to a stop just ahead.
Out of the door tumbled Will Charlton. As I had known he would, he was here to keep his promise.
‘And look who I found,’ said Will as the second door opened.
Another figure staggered into the dust, all teeth and smiles. In a second, I was being smothered in its arms.
‘Ash!’ I began. ‘What the . . .’
Ash Bhardwaj was as old a friend as Will – I’d known both of them since university. Ash enjoyed the finer things in life – a modern-day dandy roaming the coffee shops of East London in tweed jackets and skinny jeans, I’d often thought of him as an Indian Oscar Wilde. When I’d left the army, Ash had invited me to help him run a luxury ski lodge in Switzerland – and, on the day I turned up in Verbier to join him, I’d discovered him standing outside the chalet wearing nothing but a bath robe and flat cap. ‘Brandy?’ he’d bellowed, with the biggest grin I’d ever seen. ‘It’s 9am!’ I’d said, but Ash had only rolled his eyes in disgust. ‘I know. We’re behind schedule.’ I still don’t remember the rest of the month.
By the time Ash had released me from his bear hug, Will had reached into his pack and produced a small gift. When he opened his hand, a single pack of condoms was sitting in his palm. ‘Emergency water carriers,’ he declared. ‘That’s the only use they’ll get out here. Well, you did say you wanted some company crossing the desert, didn’t you?’
I’d lived with Will at university in Nottingham years before and we’d travelled the world together ever since we’d both joined the army. Will had become a doctor and, when he wasn’t on operations with his unit, or on exercise in some far-flung part of the world, he was always on the lookout for another adventure, so it was hardly surprising that he’d used up his annual-leave allowance to come and keep me company.
‘Can’t have you crossing the Sahara on your own!’ he said with his usual dark humour. ‘You need me here in case you pile in . . .’
At a canteen in Atbarah, I introduced Will and Ash to Moez. Awad and Ahmad were content to camp outside the town, but we decided to make the best of what Atbarah had to offer before the long desert crossing would begin. Atbarah is a major centre for railway manufacture in the Sudan, and has the air of an industrial town – but it served the best chicken and liver I had tasted in weeks. As we ate, Moez got to explaining the way ahead.
‘The river bends west, but then it reaches the Meroe Dam, and the reservoir behind it. We have to avoid it at all costs.’
‘Why?’ asked Ash. Ash was a travel writer, with a knack for getting ridiculous assignments, and the urge to quiz Moez a little further was instinctive. ‘I thought we had to stick to the river. Aren’t those the rules of your expedition, Lev?’
‘They are, but . . .’
‘Listen,’ said Moez, ‘it isn’t that simple. The Meroe Dam’s only five years old, but they’ve been talking of damming the river here, at the fourth cataract, for decades.’ The Nile traditionally has six cataracts – places where the river is noticeably more shallow, broken by rocks and giving rise to white-water rapids – between Khartoum and Aswan in Egypt. ‘It’s the most powerful dam in the country, and also the most destructive. Almost fifty thousand people were displaced to build it – that’s as many as the High Dam in Egypt.’ Moez’s face was tightening in anger at what the government had done. ‘Nobody in the government listened to those people. They’d rather not have had the electricity than be forced from their homes . . .’
I could tell he was about to say something he’d later regret, so I decided to interject. ‘The importance of that dam to Sudan can’t be overestimated. It practically doubled the amount of power in Sudan. And that means . . .’
Finally, Ash understood: ‘You mean there’ll be army there?’
‘Everywhere,’ said Moez, calmer at last. ‘It’s a prime piece of national infrastructure, so it’s guarded to the hilt. If we try and go near it, they’ll think we’re spies or foreign agents. Saboteurs. They’ll shoot us on sight.’
‘So what’s the plan?’ asked Will, skewering another piece of liver with his fork.
I produced a crumpled map and spread it out before us. ‘We’re going to leave the river, and cut across the Bayuda Desert instead. We’ll follow one of the old camel-caravan routes, and bypass the dam altogether. There won’t be soldiers out in the desert. Anyway, I figure, dressed as we are, we’ll pass for roving Bedouin. Speaking of which . . .’ It was time for me to produce my own welcome gift for Will and Ash: two new jellabiyas in perfect white. ‘We have turbans, too,’ I said grinning.
Will and Ash took theirs and spent an age trying to wrap them around their heads.
‘And your camel handlers out there,’ Ash began, ‘they know where we’re going?’
Bala had said they knew the Bayuda like the backs of their hands, that they had made the crossing many times before, droving camels along the old caravan routes. ‘I trust them,’ I said – because I did. Awad and Ahmad seemed a step out of time with modern Sudan, but above all else, they knew the ways of the desert. ‘Boys,’ I said, ‘you can’t back out on me now . . .’
North of Atbarah, the Nile was flanked by farms of verdant green. Along its banks, a procession of pylons marched down from the Meroe Dam, taking electricity to the masses of Khartoum. For a day, we walked through plantations of cotton and sorghum, orchards of date palm – but, on the edges of the farmland, the bleak, lunar plain stretched out for as far as the eye could see.
The Bayuda is a vast volcanic desert, over one hundred thousand square kilometres of open plain, jagged mountains, sand dunes and black volcanoes. This eastern extension of the Sahara was formed several million years ago by the Earth’s crust pushing up, spewing out lava and diverting the Nile on a three-hundred-mile detour. For the last few thousand years, the Bayuda has formed an inconvenient barrier to those travelling along the Nile, whether it be adventurous Romans in search of its source, or entrepreneurial Nubians extending the trade of their city states. For all those travellers, as for me, the choice was stark: stick to the river and add hundreds of miles to your journey, or risk a perilous desert crossing. Many preferred to take the shortcut – and, over time, a caravan route was established. Much later, the Bedouin Arabs dug a series of wells along the way, features that still exist and that have saved hundreds of lives across the generations. When General Gordon was besieged in Khartoum and the British sent troops to relieve him, they hedged their bets by sending one column of troops by boat up the Nile, and establishing the elite ‘Camel Corps’ to charge across the Bayuda and reach Khartoum fastest. It was the fact that this new camel cavalry had to spend ten days re-watering their beasts at one of the Bedouin wells that meant they arrived at Khartoum two days late to save poor Gordon. Nevertheless, the British used the same tactic thirteen years later, when Kitchener was sent to reconquer Khartoum, with the two columns rendezvousing outside Omdurman for the final confrontation. The rest of that is, as we know, history.
The village of Kadabas was to be our last stop before entering the desert. Forced away from the riverbank by irrigation ditches and pipelines, we returned to the desert road, marching north with the pylons through miles of acacia scrub. By fall of night, we had reached Kadabas, one of a succession of adobe villages along the road. Stark and lonely, it must have been too trivial to be tapped into the electricity flowing down the wires, because not a single light shone among the shacks, except an eerie green glow from the minaret that rose from the mosque.
In the village, an old man emerged from his hut to greet us. ‘You must be Pakistani Dhawas?’ he asked.
Stumped, I looked at Moez. ‘Teachers,’ he began. ‘They’re quite common in these parts. Some preach jihad but they’re mostly harmless.’ Then he turned to the stranger. ‘Not teachers. Explorers. These men are walking the Nile.’
‘Of course,’ the old man said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. ‘But first, you must stay in our village.’
I began to tell Will and Ash how hospitable the villagers had been in every part of Sudan, all the way from the border, to Khartoum and beyond – but the man continued to chatter, and Moez continued to translate.
‘No, not only tonight,’ the man went on. ‘For always. We will feed you. A house will be provided at no cost to yourselves. Please, come this way . . .’
As the man returned to the huts, beckoning us to follow, Ash muttered, ‘Do you think this is a good idea?’ I only shrugged and tramped after the old man. ‘We need to stay somewhere, Ash. One last night before you sleep under the stars for a week.’ I hesitated. ‘Or you could always stay out here with the camels . . .’
Eventually, resisting the overtures of the old man to forever make this our home, we made camp behind one of the adobe huts. As the old man from the village brought us food, insisting we share what he had, Will produced a stack of old Russian maps he had somehow procured. What we were looking at were out-dated charts of the interior of the Nile’s great bend. At a scale of one to five-hundred-thousand, they showed all the trails marked between the contours, and small blue dots scattered across the sand.
‘The Bedouin wells?’ Ash asked, tracing the blue dots with his finger.
We could only assume that was the case; none of us had the faintest grasp of the Russian language.
‘What if they’re not?’ Ash went on. ‘What then?’
‘We’ve got water,’ I said. ‘Enough for six litres each a day. The crossing should take eight days. If it’s any longer, well . . .’ I paused. ‘Awad and Ahmad travel this way all the time. They know the desert like the backs of their hands. That’s why they’re coming with me. The camel trader Bala promised it.’
‘Oh well,’ said Ash, ‘if he promised it . . .’
‘Do you know,’ Moez began, ‘if we make this crossing, we’ll be the first to cross the Bayuda by foot at the height of summer. That would be a miraculous thing.’
‘You see, Lev,’ Will chipped in, ‘there might be a world-first for you in this expedition after all . . .’
‘Wait a minute,’ said Ash. ‘Why has nobody done it before?’
The thought had dawned on me too.
‘Oh,’ said Moez, ‘the Bedouin know the desert too well to risk such a thing . . .’
Long into the night, we sat staring into the blackness over the desert. Only when our fire had finally flickered out did we turn in ourselves. I barely slept that night, lost in thoughts of the desert to come.
In the morning, Awad and Ahmad were waiting for us on the outskirts of Kadabas; Gordon, Speke and Burton already saddled and laden down with the packs and jerry cans we would be dragging into the desert as supplies. On the outskirts of the village, we said our goodbyes to the old man, who still insisted we return. As the village gradually dwindled and disappeared behind us, masked by a mirage of heat and knolls of sand, the sun was flooding the desert with a golden sheen. This land we were walking into looked solemn and quiet, as alien to man as the stars above. We hesitated before going on. It is only natural, I suppose, to hesitate on the threshold of stepping into the unknown. So, on the edge of the desert, three white men stood in nervous anticipation, unused to the emptiness of the horizon. Moez, Nubian to his core, and Awad and Ahmad, Bedouin through and through, strode off without a second thought.
‘Come on, Ingleez!’ shouted Awad, from his saddle atop Burton. ‘You’ll be blacker than a Beja if you stand around in the sun all day. Get walking!’
‘Gentlemen,’ said Ash, ‘we’re about to walk across a small, but not insignificant, chunk of the Sahara Desert. We don’t know where the wells are, we’ve only got enough food for eight days, and there is a bloody great volcano in the way. Do we really know what we’re doing?’
Will looked at Ash, and then at me. I guessed it was my turn to do the comforting: ‘It’s fine, mate. We’ve both been to Afghanistan. It’s . . . the same sort of thing.’ Even I could tell I didn’t sound sure. To save my blushes, I pointed after Gordon, the spare camel, who was loping over a sandy hillock, tied by a length of rope to the back of Speke’s saddle. ‘And, look, if you get tired, you can always ride him . . .’
‘I may well do that . . .’
‘Same for you, Will.’ I grinned, and waited for him to bite.
‘Fuck off!’ he said, as I had known he would; and together, we strode off into the West.
‘Ancient Bedouin tomb,’ said Moez, crouching at a series of unnatural mounds, where stones had been placed in a circle and still pierced the sand. Awad had tipped his turban respectfully at them as we had passed, but the camels didn’t seem to have any compunction about munching on the bits of thorn scrub growing from the graves.
We had been walking through the punishing heat for eight hours and, though the day was getting old, the sun was just as fierce. Pausing to rest in the tiny shade of an acacia tree, I drank greedily from my canteen, only to realise that I had, long ago, drunk my day’s fill. According to our thermometer, it had been 56 degrees in the sun, and almost 50 in the shade. ‘We’ll have to be cannier tomorrow,’ I said.
‘Wouldn’t it be better to walk at night?’ asked Ash.
From up on Burton’s back, Ahmad snorted. ‘The camels would break their legs. No,’ he went on, Moez translating, ‘we should walk early, from six till eleven. Then again from four until sunset.’
Will grimaced. ‘Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun . . .’
‘We can still cover 40km a day,’ said Ahmad and, singing to his camel, continued to walk.
We tramped on. Now that the day was fading to dusk, the edge was coming off the heat. The dunes, soft underfoot, gave way with each step; no amount of walking, not even the two thousand miles since the source of the river, could prepare a body for how difficult it was to walk here. Every time the sand touched my feet, my body glistened with new sweat. I seemed to be losing as much water in perspiration as I was drinking.
‘You know,’ said Moez, ‘it’s hard to imagine now, but once, only a few thousand years ago, this was all lush and fertile savannah – and before that, a swamp, or maybe even a vast lake, long before the desert started to form. It isn’t just your footsteps in the sand that fade away – it’s the land itself, changing all the time. This was where the agricultural revolution happened. It was here people started farming for the very first time. There were cattle cults that looked after huge herds, all grazing on rich grasses for as far as the eye can see. Now – only this . . .’
By fall of the first night, we had covered 40km, but drunk twice as much water as we had planned. Our bodies hungered for it. Making camp beside an outcrop of jagged sandstone, we broke open the army ration packs Will had brought along and refuelled. On the edge of camp, Ahmad and Awad began their prayers, then sang to the camels as they fed them sorghum and massaged their necks to aid the digestion.
We ate in silence, so drained by the day that even idle conversation seemed too much. The only sound to disturb the silence of the desert was Ahmad’s song, then the chatter as he and Awad began to play a kind of backgammon using nothing but lines in the sand and camel droppings.
‘Are you listening to this, Lev?’
Moez inclined his head towards the camel handlers, but they were speaking in Arabic, so quickly that I could not perceive a word.
‘What is it?’
‘They’re saying . . .’ He smiled nervously. ‘They’re saying they’ve never been to this part of the Bayuda . . .’
I almost choked on my words. ‘What? But Bala said . . .’
‘Yes, yes, I know – but it seems they always go the same way, along an old caravan route some way south of here. It’s the same way General Gordon took between Metemma and Korti.’
I moved closer to Moez eager that Will and Ash would not hear. ‘But what about the wells?’ I asked, in disbelief. ‘We drank more water than we rationed today. It’s hotter than we thought . . .’
‘They only know Jakdul,’ Moez explained, ‘and the wells south of the volcanic plateau. Up here, well, they can guess, but . . .’
I was about to launch into some tirade when I felt movement on my shoulder; Ash, sensing something was wrong, had joined us.
‘Did I hear that right? Awad and Ahmad have never been this way? They don’t even know where the wells are?’ Aghast, he turned over his shoulder. ‘Are you listening to this, Will?’
Always one to get stuck into a bit of controversy, Will left his ration pack and strode over. ‘What’s going on? Wait, let me guess . . . Lev is lost?’
‘Worse!’ spat Ash. ‘The camel guides haven’t a clue where they’re going.’
Will’s face changed; where once he had been keen to poke fun, now he looked sombre. ‘That’s . . . not good, Lev,’ he said, in earnest. ‘Are we being incredibly arrogant here? Three men who’ve never crossed deserts before, and two guides who don’t know the way . . .’
It was Will’s concern that, finally, made me pause. Will was usually game for any ridiculous idea; if he was questioning the sanity of a project, there had to be a good reason. I stared into the blackness of the desert, where the light of a million stars lit only rolling dunes and outcrops of thorn. The prospect of not finding a well out here was unthinkable. The old adage of ‘three days without water, three weeks without food’ didn’t apply in a land as inhospitable as this. In the heat we had walked through today, we wouldn’t last twelve hours without water; we’d be as dead as the shrivelled donkey carcasses we’d seen outside Kadabas before the day was through.
‘Look,’ I said, half to convince myself, ‘it’ll be okay. We have enough water for three, maybe four days – that should get us almost half way. And, if the worst happens, well, the river’s never more than 40km away. That’s only a day’s walk. If things get low, that’s what we do – we head for the river.’
‘Yes,’ said Moez, with a hint of cynicism, ‘and hope the soldiers from the dam don’t notice when we drop our heads to drink.’
Though Will seemed pacified, the look on Ash’s face had only hardened. He stared at me, mortified. ‘I don’t really have a choice, do I?’ he said. ‘Lev, I’m just going to have to trust that you won’t kill me . . .’
As Will and Ash settled back down, I stared at Awad and Ahmad. In the starlight, they looked particularly roguish, spreading out their camp. Neither one of them seemed the least bit perturbed; perhaps there was a lesson to learn from that.
‘They must be confident they’ll find a well,’ I said, reassured by their calmness.
‘No.’ Moez grinned. ‘They’re just confident they can be the first to jump on a camel and get to the river . . .’
‘But, Moez, there are only three camels.’
‘And six of us.’ He grinned. ‘Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, right?’
We were up with the dawn but, by 6.30am, the temperature was already 28 degrees, and quickly getting worse. By the time we had covered our first three kilometres, it was inching towards 40; then it exploded, past 40, 45 and 50. When we broke for water, Moez pressed the thermometer to the sand and recorded a high of 62.
It was our second day and we had already used almost half of our water.
We made a midday camp, stretching the tarpaulin over thorny acacia for shade, and resigned ourselves to waiting out the worst of the day’s heat – but by the time the camp was established and we were closing our eyes, desperate to conserve what energy we had, the camels began to grow skittish. When I looked round, Moez was stripping off his turban and rebinding it around his face. That was the first signal that something bad was coming; the second was the wall of brown hardening on the horizon.
I turned to Will and Ash. ‘Haboob,’ I said. ‘Look, do what Moez does, and try not to panic. We just have to wait it out.’
The brown line on the horizon seemed small, but what we were seeing was only the first wave of a tide of dust and sand rampaging our way. I had seen haboobs before, but only from the comfort of a camp along the roadside, where adobe walls could shelter us from the onslaught. What we were looking at was none other than a land tsunami – a vicious maelstrom that tore up everything in its path, gathering up sand, earth, grit, and moulding it into a single, unstoppable wave. In the time it had taken me to explain it to Will and Ash, the line had already darkened. As it grew closer, it seemed to swell, more and more distinct from the desert floor. Now it was a vast phalanx of filth, stark against the clear blue sky.
The wind was already picking up. Unwrapping my turban, I bound it around my mouth, covering my nostrils. This, I knew, would be the only way to breathe once the storm arrived. Moez had unearthed pairs of sand goggles and was handing them round – but, no sooner had I donned them than the first dust devils, tiny whirling dervishes of grit, hurtled into the camp, like heralds of the storm. Awad and Ahmad rushed to rope the camels together, while Will, Ash and I gathered our packs.
Sudden sprays of grit arced up from the floor, slicing across my face. As I turned away and cowered, the dust devil flurried up from the ground, clawing at the tarpaulin strung in the acacia. There was already sand inside my goggles, sand inside my turban, riming my lips. I waited for the barrage to die down, and then looked up. The roiling wall that had seemed so many miles away was now almost upon us, bearing down. The desert was being plunged into premature night, as the storm blocked out the sun.
‘How long is this going to last?’ cried Ash.
I stole a look at Ahmad and Awad. As ever, they seemed completely unperturbed, finding a way to stake the camels down. Yet again, it was their calmness that gave me confidence.
‘Try and get some rest,’ I said. ‘It’s going to be a long one.’
In that same moment, the wall of dust cascaded over us, drawing a veil between me, Will and Ash. All around, the world was a frenzy of yellow and brown. I could see no more than a few paces in every direction, locked into a raging bubble in the middle of the storm. Now, with my eyes burning, my throat rasping, there was nothing to do but wait.
By the time the haboob had passed, the day was old. In the relative cool of evening, we walked west, until darkness returned. In camp that night, we took inventory of our supplies: enough food to last all the way across the Bayuda; water for only another two days. Perhaps we could make it for three if we rationed it, but the memory of Matt Power still lived with me, and the thought of rationing water in this heat did not fill me with confidence. There were at least six days between here and the end of the desert. Somehow – whether Awad and Ahmad could lead us there or not – we would have to find a well.
The next day felt hotter than the last, even though the thermometer showed the same temperature. It was the burgeoning fear that made it feel so much more intense. Every time I lifted the water to my lips, every time I saw Will or Ash sate themselves, the thought blossomed in the back of my head: that was another gulp, another sip, closer to our supplies running dry.
And still, all around, only the same featureless land.
By mid-afternoon, the sky was darkening again. In an instant, the wind picked up. Instinctively, we reached for our turbans, anticipating the worst. Behind sand goggles, I shied from the raking wind. For twenty minutes, the dust devil lashed at us – but when, at last, it subsided, what remained were not clouds of dust. They were simply clouds. Swollen, grey reefs hung over the desert, giving this barren landscape an even more ethereal appearance. Moments later, the temperature plummeted; a soothing cool breeze floated down from the north. Moez and I exchanged a curious look. Awad and Ahmad looked to the sky and smiled.
A great crash tore the silence apart, and sheet lightning lit up our surrounds. Thunder reverberated in the vaults above, rolling over distant mountaintops. On the horizon, the sky was black. ‘It’s rain,’ said Moez, ‘and it’s coming this way . . .’
Torrents of water were drenching the parched horizon, sweeping inexorably towards us. We watched in wonder. It was Ash who felt it first: a cold, fat globule of rain fell from the shifting clouds, to land on his upturned hand. Here, in the middle of the Sahara, we let the rain wash over us and opened up our mouths to the skies.
Fifteen minutes later, as suddenly as it had come, the rain was gone. The sun, fierce as ever, reappeared from behind retreating clouds, bathing the desert in its merciless light. Wondering if this had been a strange mirage, we tramped on – but there was no illusion in how those brief rains had transformed the desert. Flash floods demarked the depressions where ancient waterways used to flow, the dry riverbeds given a brief, second chance at life. Water gushed along tiny tributaries. The acacia bushes, normally so brown, had in an instant become green. Flowers sprouted and shoots opened on bushes and desert melon. Lizards lapped up droplets from rocky outcrops and – as if out of nowhere – a plethora of rabbits had appeared.
The camels, fluttering their eyelashes, drank from puddles and grazed on the sudden flourishes of green. And, for a time, there was more spring to our steps, more buoyancy as we followed the trail into the west.
Only hours later, the water had all been sucked into the greedy sands. Gone were the fledgling rivers, back the ancient riverbeds. Gone, the flocks of rabbits come up to gorge on the new greenery; back the cracked feeling in the back of my throat, and nervous looks at the jerry cans hanging from Burton’s saddle. For a brief moment, we had danced in the rain of a Saharan thunderstorm – but, like everything in this inhospitable land, it had only been the gods of the desert taunting us with the promise of water.
Thirst is a terrible thing. It destroys you from the inside out.
Throughout the next day, I watched our supplies dwindling. When you have water, you take it for granted – but when you don’t, not only does it ruin your body; it ruins your mind, planting ugly thoughts, poisoning every corner of your being. To begin with, you try to comprehend what it might be like to die of thirst. That’s when the panic sets in. Your mouth gets dry, your tongue refuses to move, your gums grow numb. Your lips, already cracked and peeling, stick together, sealing your words within. In silence, you look at your companions – old friends, new friends, trusted guides – and begin to wonder if they feel the same. I found myself jealously watching the water bottle in Moez’s hand. Was he as desperate as me? Did he have more water? Was Ash keeping some of his secretly hidden away, a salve against the end? Was Will? Would any of them share with me if I was dry, if I begged them? Would I do the same for them? Such are the thoughts that were taking root in me as, by the end of our fourth day, we drank down to our last few litres.
It is a myth that camels can go weeks without water. In the heat of the Sahara, they can barely survive more than four days. We’d watered Burton, Speke and Gordon well before embarking, and watered them every evening since – but, tonight, there was nothing for our camel friends. What little we had left had to sustain us humans until we could find a well.
‘We need those camels,’ said Ash as we ate rations beneath the brilliant silver light of the moon. ‘They’re carrying everything. Food, medical kit, all the technical gear. Without them, we’re shafted.’
As I did every time nerves threatened to overwhelm me, I looked to Awad and Ahmad – but even they seemed subdued tonight. There was no gleam in their eyes, no ribald joke or song. ‘If we don’t find a well tomorrow,’ I said, ‘that’s it. Soldiers or no soldiers, we have to head for the river.’
In silence, our column of men marched across the desert.
I paused, lifting my canteen to my lips, thought better of it, and hung it at my side again. Moments later, Ash and Will had caught up. They were staring, bewildered, at Moez, who – as ever, walked contentedly to our rear.
‘How does he do it?’ Will asked.
‘The man’s a machine,’ muttered Ash.
As he passed, Moez only smiled, looking at the burnt-lobster faces around him. I had not seen Moez take a drink in long hours and – in contrast to Will and Ash – not a bead of sweat glistened on his face.
Awad and Ahmad had re-joined the procession, along with the camels, an hour before. Late last night, Will had pored over his Russian maps and, highlighting a blue dot not far from where we camped, had sent the Bedouin out in search of a well. But when they returned, their faces told the story: there was no water here; if there had ever been a well at all, it had long been dry and subsumed by the sand.
‘They don’t seem to give a shit,’ said Will. Perversely, he seemed to be relishing the thought of a close call with death.
‘We’d better not die, Wood,’ said Ash.
I wanted to tell him we wouldn’t, but I had seen death already on this voyage.
By midday, the sand dunes had ebbed away and we marched across a plain of grey and black. Jagged black stone stretched out before us, capturing the heat of the sun and searing the soles of our shoes. In the distance, a line of gleaming purple mountains marked the heart of the desert. These, Moez told us, were the volcanoes of the Bayuda. Innumerable peaks rose up, shimmering in the haze. All in all, there were ninety volcanoes of differing sizes across the plateau, fifteen rising taller than the rest to claw at the sky.
‘Are we going to get burnt to death, too?’ asked Ash.
‘They’re dormant,’ said Moez. ‘In fact . . .’
‘In fact, what?’
I stopped dead. The same thing had occurred to me as to Moez. ‘If we head straight for the highest peak, there ought to be a gorge down into the volcano itself.’
‘And?’ said Ash.
‘It’s our best chance at finding natural water.’
The mountains, in their enormity, took an age to reach, the wavering heat obscuring their true size and range. One mile turned into two, then three into four, and it was not until twenty miles of silence had passed that we stood in their shadows. Even Awad and Ahmad had ceased to sing today.
Behind a sheer cliff of black basalt, a small trail wound into a narrow gully. We snaked along its length, emerging again onto the plain west of the volcanoes.
I stared into the distance. At first, all I saw was the same unyielding black and grey, the plateau extending into the west. Then, my eyes lit on a passage in the rock another mile away, a place where the volcanic mounds rose up, and a ravine was the only way through.
At the other end of the passage, there was green.
‘There!’ I shouted out, with the last of my remaining energy.
‘You’re not bloody wrong,’ said Will, climbing to a gravel mound to see for himself.
‘Trees!’ screamed Moez.
‘Water?’ asked Ash, in utter disbelief.
Awad rode level with Will and, high up on Burton, stared into the distant tree-line.
‘Moya,’ he said, with sheer relief. ‘Water.’
With renewed vigour, we made for the cleft in the rock, emerging onto a small cluster of acacia bushes clinging to the base of the pitch-black mountainside. Pillars of rock rose like ancient monoliths out of the scree and there, to my utter disbelief, stood two boys.
By the looks of them they were Arab, Bedouin like Awad and Ahmad, dressed in simple jellabiyas with beads around their necks. At our sudden appearance, they started, exchanging a panicked look. The first tightened his hold around the rope by which they were leading a diminutive donkey. It took me a moment to realise what I was seeing in their eyes. It wasn’t quite fear, and it wasn’t quite shock; they were bewildered, staring at a collection of rough, sand-blasted vagabonds who seemed to have stepped straight out of some desert past.
Ahmad was the first to speak. From up on Burton, he cried out, ‘You, lads! We are Bedouin of the Hawawir tribe. We come in peace. Now tell us . . .’ He leaned forward, half mischievous, half menacing: ‘Is there a well near?’
In silence, the boys exchanged a look, their faces transforming from nervous horror to relief. The first lifted his hand and pointed towards a crevice, only a few hundred metres to our west. Raising his whip in thanks, Ahmad reined Burton around and took off.
Summoning what vestiges of energy we had left, we hurried into the valley. For the first time in a hundred miles, the desert plain opened up with trees and bushes, tall and green, growing thicker and more verdant with every step. Between the trees stood crudely constructed stone corrals, seasonal pens for whatever nomadic herders used this route through the desert. We rounded the corrals, dropped into a crevice between the rocks – and there, surrounded by stones carved in intricate design, stood the well. A rope trailed out of its open mouth, a single bucket beckoning us to come and drink our fill.
Ash and Moez hurtled forward. The camels, too, must have smelt water – for suddenly there was no stopping them as they charged towards it. Dumping our bags under the shade of an acacia, Will and I dragged the jerry cans to the lip of the well. My entire body was telling me to dive into its sweet depths and never come up again, but Moez, Awad and Ahmad were already praying and we waited for them to finish.
After that: we drank, and drank, and drank.
For the first time that day, I felt human, my tongue no longer numb and shrivelled. Just a few seconds was all it took for the water to touch every corner of my body. I was alive again.
‘Well done, Wood.’ Ash winked, finishing his second litre. ‘I never doubted you.’
Alongside us, Awad was digging a small pit, laying a tarpaulin inside and filling it with water for the camels to drink their fill. Burton, Speke and Gordon – in that order – hustled each other to the pit and I watched as the water brought life back to their eyes.
Once I had regained my senses, I turned to the well. Here we were, miles and miles away from the Nile, in the middle of the desert – and yet, somehow, someone, hundreds of years ago, had known to dig here and provide water for the generations to come. We, very simply, owed them our lives.
‘But where does it come from?’ I asked, turning to Moez.
‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘Let me ask.’ Turning to Ahmad, he posed the question in Arabic. Ahmad smiled, busy smoking one of his cigarettes in triumph; and when he replied, I did not need a translator to understand the answer:
‘Allah.’
For three days, we followed the trails west. Though our water had been replenished, by the final day, our food was running low; with all ration packs spent, we kept hunger at bay with dried dates and tins of pineapple. The sight of the distant Nile was like a mirage, appearing on the horizon as a ribbon of emerald green. The mountain of Jebel Barkal rose from the plain and, in its shadow, stood the remnants of yet more pyramids, like the ones we had seen at Meroe. As we drew close, heading into the agricultural land flanking the Nile, the head of a sandstone cobra could just be seen poking out from the cliff – the crown on the head of the old god Amun, sculpted from the rock two-and-a-half-thousand years ago.
The farmland bounding the Nile was a surreal place of sorghum fields and irrigation channels. We saw people tending to their crops. We trudged along paths between undulating waves of grain, and no longer did the air taste of sand and grit; no longer did we keep our eyes half shut against the reflected glare of the sun.
We had not yet reached the banks of the river when a farmer hailed us from his field. Waving for us to slow down, he careened through the grain to catch us.
‘You!’ he cried, in disbelief. ‘Where have you come from?’
‘We came across the desert,’ said Moez, wearied.
The farmer tried to take this in, gazing back east, as if he could see the enormity of the expanse. Shaking his head, he began to laugh. ‘No, no one could do that . . .’ He paused. ‘Where are these from?’ he asked, gesturing at Will, Ash and myself. ‘Pakistan?’
‘No,’ said Moez, ‘they’re from England.’
Something close to realisation settled across the farmer’s face. He nodded, sagely. ‘England? Like the English who were here before?’
At first, I thought he meant other travellers, but of course, he was referring to the British administration that had ruled Sudan until 1956. It had been fifty-eight years since Sudan had gained independence, but he spoke about it as if was yesterday.
‘Yes,’ said Moez, solemnly.
‘Well,’ the farmer went on, ‘that’s different. Of course I believe you, now. The English can do anything, my friend, even cross the desert.’ Earnestly, he looked to me. ‘Please, sir,’ he began, ‘tell your Queen she must return. The Sudan has gone to ruin since you left . . .’
Sometime later, we reached the bank of the Nile. Here the river, continuing its bend around the Bayuda, swung south-west, before curling north again.
‘What did he mean, that man?’ I asked.
‘It is not an uncommon thing to hear. Since Sudan gained independence, there have been thirty-nine years of civil wars. That’s less than twenty years of peace. And . . .’
What Moez wasn’t saying was that even those years of peace had hardly been peaceful. Sudan may have been famous for its hospitality, but I hadn’t forgotten the story of the woman condemned to death for converting from Islam, nor Moez’s own stories of thousands of Nubian people continually being displaced by a government extending its infrastructure and power. This was a world in which a strict code of hospitality sat side by side with daily human-rights’ abuse.
‘Don’t get used to it, Lev,’ said Will as we tramped, one final mile, down the river. ‘It isn’t every day you’ll hear an African begging for the British to come back . . .’
The town of Karima stretched out in front of us, surrounded on all sides by date plantations. Through the trees ran a single railway track – still plied by Sudanese trains, but yet another relic left behind by the British. I realised, then, that we had been seeing it everywhere, the stamp the British had left on this land – and not only in the railways and roads, the decaying barracks buildings or the brass plaques in the towns that harked back to the English companies who had once worked here: SHEFFIELD STEEL, STOKE-ON-TRENT CERAMIC, WATERWORKS OF BIRMINGHAM. We were seeing it in the hearts and minds of the people as well, the memories of those old enough to have been there then, and the stories handed down to those who had not.
Old British tractors rotted in fields and old British steam engines lay overgrown with weeds. By the Nile old English water pumps formed a rusting metal memorial to a bygone age. It had been the Golden Age for Sudan. In spite of defeat at the hands of Kitchener, the Sudan had become a breadbasket for North Africa, producing wheat and a seemingly endless supply of cotton for a needy Empire. Here the Nile looked verdant, especially after three hundred miles of barren desert. I’d fallen in love with the river once more, and with, I hoped, only a fortnight of walking to reach the Egyptian border, I was doubly excited.
Still sand-blasted and bedraggled, we followed the tracks into town. It was time for another snatch at civilisation before we followed the river onwards.