Nubia, Sudan, June 2014
‘We Nubians love the river,’ said Moez. ‘We are not like those Bedouin. Nubians are the truest people of the Nile. Those Bedouin are Arabs, only ever at home in the desert.’
We made camp at the edge of the river, close to the village of Korti. Since Karima, we had followed the river on its curve south, past the ruins of the Ancient Nubian city of Napata and tonight we were to rest here too – for this was to be Will and Ash’s last night.
We watched Awad and Ahmad tramp away, muttering darkly, with the camels. ‘Leave them.’ Moez grinned. ‘Those Bedouin can’t bear to be near the river at night. Do you know what a Bedouin hates worse than the thought of dying of thirst in the desert?’ He shook his head, laughing. ‘A mosquito. They can’t bear the insects down by the water . . .’
In Korti, a local man had offered us the use of his house for the night – but, tonight, more than ever, we wanted to be close to the river. As we broke open ration packs and listened to the water’s constant flow, the man reappeared out of the darkness, carrying in each arm string beds, a package of dates, fresh water and chai.
‘If you dishonour me by not being my guests, you must, at least, have my beds!’ he declared, before retreating into the night.
Will, Ash and I looked at each other, still bewildered. The strangest thing was, this wasn’t even the most extreme hospitality we had seen since leaving the desert two days before. In one dusty little shanty, where we had stopped to buy soda and water the camels, a shopkeeper – within ten minutes of discovering I was English – had offered to give me some land, build me a house, and find me a wife. One man actually threatened to divorce his wife if we refused to stay for lunch, and I swear that a Sudanese host would rather die than drink before a guest. The fact that virtually every household sees it as their duty to provide a ceramic urn full of water for passing travellers is testament to the national pride in revering guests.
‘Why do the people here treat foreigners so well?’ I asked, turning to Moez.
‘Oh,’ he said, half dismissive, ‘I’m sure it would be the same in your country.’
I wondered what the folk in my home town would do if a group of Sudanese came tramping down the street, and politely declined to answer.
In the morning, Will and Ash disappeared the same way they had come: in a cloud of dust and a taxi, taking them all the way back to Khartoum. It was bittersweet to see them go, but the river beckoned – and, with the Egyptian border only three weeks to our north, it did not seem so long until I would see them again.
After they had gone, we continued our trek along the bend in the Nile, walking through the date plantations and – after our sojourn in the desert – refusing to let the river out of sight. After another two days the Nile turned north again, plunging straight into the enormity of the Nubian desert, itself part of the Sahara. Two more, and we had reached the town of Dongola, the capital of Sudan’s Northern State and the scene of one of Kitchener’s most notable victories against the Mahdists in 1896.
North of Dongola, the Nile truly collided with the desert. Here, agriculture no longer flourished on its banks; sand dunes tumbled straight into the water, forming sheer cliffs of gold – a stark contrast to the glittering, clear blue waters. The Nile had a clarity here like never before: this was a scene straight out of The Arabian Nights, the crystal blue broken only by an occasional palm tree growing on the banks.
Two days north, Moez bent down and plucked something from the sand. When he handed it to me, I saw what looked like a long, twisted tube of rock.
‘What is it?’
‘Coral,’ said Moez, smiling like a wise old professor. I recalled the various pieces of stone that had decorated his office back in Khartoum. ‘Proof, Lev, that the Sahara was not always a sea of sand. What you’re holding, there, is two hundred million years old.’
Further along the sandbank, Ahmad and Awad trailing behind with complete uninterest, Moez pointed out more of the stuff – some thin, some thick, some gnarled like the branches of a tree, some full of holes. In the middle of the coral field, he bent down again and picked something else up. Holding it at eye level, he asked, ‘Well, Lev? What do you think this one is?’
Undoubtedly, it was a piece of wood; I could even see the grain and bark on the outside. Yet, when he put it into my hand, it was hot to the touch. I couldn’t quite believe the sensation. Wood doesn’t get that hot. What I was holding could only be stone.
‘Petrified driftwood,’ said Moez, rather too smugly. ‘Once there was a sea here, and then there was forest . . .’
What we were walking through, I realised, was nothing less than the history of the world – not just the history of Sudan or its peoples, the Ancient Nubians, or even the prehistoric people who had come before. Everywhere we looked, there were reminders of how recent mankind’s appearance on this planet has been – and of how the earth has been transformed and transformed again across its lifetime. The further north we went, the more artefacts we collected: more fragments of petrified wood and coral, small balls of lava that harked back to the region’s violent, volcanic past. Between them – a jumble of different time periods, all thrown together – lay shards of pottery. ‘Three thousand years old,’ said Moez as he picked up, then flung away, a beautifully painted piece of Nubian art. ‘Two thousand,’ he said, kicking the remains of a bowl. ‘Egyptian,’ he said, with mock disgust.
Then, he paused. ‘Ah! This is more like it . . .’ Bending over, he scooped up a rough square of pottery, black on one side and dyed red on the other. ‘This is from the Deffufas at Kerma,’ he said. ‘Five thousand years old.’
Kerma was one of the earliest Sudanese states, emerging almost five thousand years ago. What Moez was holding was a fragment of that distant, unknowable past. The historian in me screamed out to touch it.
‘This belongs in a museum,’ I said, in disbelief.
But Moez simply tossed it back to the sand, where it lay among yet more piles of relics. ‘There’s loads of it!’ He grinned. ‘Tell the British Museum they can come and get some if they want it.’
A short walk upriver lay the site of the ancient city of Kerma itself, millennia older than Old Dongola. Surrounding the bare ruins lay petrified gazelle bones, Palaeolithic hand tools made from flint, and yet more mountains of pottery. Moez barely flinched as we passed it all. At last, north of the ruin, his eyes sought out an old camel track leading into the dunes, and he beckoned me to follow. There was new light in his eyes, giddy at being in tour-guide mode once again. ‘Let me show you something, Lev. I haven’t brought anyone here – only some scientists who came five years ago . . .’
Along the trail, the desert was pocked with large boulders. According to Moez, these rocks had once been underwater mountains, eroded over millions of years until they had gained the appearance of giant, polished marbles. Moez picked his way between the piles until, over the top of a procession of steep dunes, we stood in the shadow of one boulder as big as a car.
‘Can you make it out?’ he asked.
I stared at the sandstone but, at first, could see nothing. Then, gradually, it came alive. Lines scratched into the surface began to join together and, though I questioned my sanity, soon I began to pick out the giant picture of an elephant.
‘But . . .’
‘Wait,’ said Moez. ‘There’s more.’
We walked a circuit through the boulder field. All around were more rock carvings: a lion, larger than life; an unmistakeable giraffe; horses, antelopes, and stick figures of men bearing spears.
‘Six, maybe seven thousand years old,’ said Moez.
Behind us had been proof that the Sahara Desert was once the bottom of an ocean. Now, all around us, was proof that it was once a vast, lush savannah, home to primitive man and big game. In the last few days, we seemed to have tramped from one aeon to the next, covering not only a hundred miles but a million years. We had watched the sea recede, the forests flourish, primitive man living in hunter-gatherer tribes, then civilisations – like the Ancient Nubians – rising and falling. All of it leaving its mark on the land.
‘It’s even more than that,’ said Moez. ‘Think about it, Lev. It’s simple. All this – what would we call it, climate change? – is how civilisation started.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Imagine when there were forests here, and savannah, and all these hunter tribes lived independently, foraging the land, just living for the day. Then imagine how the forests start to wither and the savannah dries up and, five thousand years ago, all of this turns into desert. The game dies away, or migrates, and the only place left for those tribesmen to go is to the big river they all know, the one that goes north. The Nile valley was the only place left with water, or any greenery at all . . .’
I began to understand what Moez was saying. ‘So, suddenly, all those disparate tribes have to live in the same thin strip of land. They have to start relying on the same resources, coming into contact with each other daily. They have to start living in communities.’
‘And stop fighting,’ said Moez. ‘And, after they’ve hunted all the big animals into local extinction, they have to start farming, too. Farming together. Which means the first villages grow up, and then the first towns and, eventually, cities themselves. That, Lev, is how Ancient Egypt was born – and it was the same down here, for the Nubians like me.’
For the longest time, we stayed staring at the etchings on the rock, before making the trudge back to the river. Where the sandstone cliffs tumbled into the water, Awad and Ahmad were waiting. Rolling their eyes at what they thought our indulgent foray into the desert, they reined the camels around and, again, we set off along the river.
‘Mr Lev . . .’ said Ahmad, with the air of a pirate, as we sat down to our lunch of fried goat’s liver and refried beans. We were on the outskirts of a village called Sorry, named because the English governor who had once ruled here had barely understood Arabic – so, when passing travellers asked him for directions, it was all he could say. ‘We would like to renegotiate our contract.’
My eyes flitted between Ahmad and Moez, who was doing his usual best at keeping a straight face while he translated this wily Bedouin’s words.
‘You see,’ Ahmad went on, ‘we are quite tired of riding now. We would like to go home.’
‘Home?’ I said. ‘But there are more than four hundred kilometres until we reach Lake Nasser . . .’
Beside me, Moez coughed. ‘Lake Nubia,’ he corrected.
Four hundred kilometres north, the mighty Nile entered the third largest man-made lake in the world. Between 1958 and 1971, the Egyptian government had dedicated themselves to damming the River Nile at their southern city of Aswan – providing electricity for great swathes of North Africa, and creating an enormous reservoir in the process. The reservoir now straddles the border between Egypt and Sudan – called Nasser in the north, and Lake Nubia in the south. It was at the town of Wadi Halfa, sitting on the lake, that I planned to cross the border.
In English, so that they would not understand, I asked Moez, ‘What do they want?’
‘Money, of course. What else do these Arabs want?’
We had seen so much hospitality on the Sudanese part of our trek that, for a few weeks, I had forgotten the sullen malcontents who had sometimes accompanied me in Uganda and further south. Boston would not have been surprised by Awad and Ahmad’s sudden request; I supposed I should not have been either.
‘They’ve worked hard,’ I said. ‘They’ve been invaluable. Business is business. I respect that. Why don’t you ask them what they want?’
Moez chattered with them in Arabic, his face growing more confused. When he was finally done, he reverted to English and said, ‘It isn’t money, Lev. It’s Ramadan.’
‘Ramadan?’
‘Ramadan begins on the 28th June,’ said Awad, as Moez translated. ‘We want to be done by the 25th, so we can go to our families.’
‘I have to tend my goats,’ said Ahmad.
‘And my wives will never let me hear the end of it if I don’t get back.’
I didn’t need to check my diary to know that 25 June was only ten days away. The spectre of Ramadan had been looming over me as well; I still didn’t have the requisite permits to cross the border into Egypt, and if I turned up in Wadi Halfa at the start of the month of Ramadan, there was a big chance I’d have to wait until it was over.
‘It’s impossible,’ I said to Moez. ‘It’s like doing a marathon, every day, for ten days straight – and in this temperature as well . . .’ I did not like to say the other thing that would hinder us: the Sudanese had been so hospitable that we had already lost endless afternoons accepting water and chai and food from the overly friendly villagers we met – unable to refuse their overtures for fear of dishonouring them.
‘I don’t think we have a choice, Lev. These men are going home . . .’
We set off in earnest the next morning, pounding along the highway close to the river. The water was beautiful here. We’d reached the Nile’s third cataract, the river pouring gloriously over boulders to form crests of perfect white. Sai Island sat in the rapids, with crocodiles basking on its banks – and, all along the riverbank, stood beautiful, colourful Nubian villages with their unique walled vaults, dome roofs and brightly painted gates: pink, green and blue formed a stark contrast to the yellow desert around.
Our task was simple but punishing: six kilometres an hour, eight hours a day, missing out only the sun’s most vicious hours. The further north we came, the fewer habitations we passed. The land grew wilder, the cliffs increasingly jagged – every day, the same as the last. By the time we came within a hundred miles of Wadi Halfa, Moez began to know people in the few settlements on whose outskirts we camped. In Wadi Halfa itself, his brother Mazar waited for us, eagerly working on the papers that would get us over the border.
‘Wait until you see it!’ he kept exclaiming. ‘Halfa is green and beautiful, and full of wonderful Nubians . . .’
Three days away from our destination, we left the river’s immediate bank and joined the main highway, ten kilometres inland. In our dash to the border, we gazed on the great Nile from afar, its glistening waters obscured by a fringe of verdant palms.
On 24 June, we stopped to rest by the roadside. As the camel boys brewed chai, a lorry ground to a halt and a friendly face bawled out: ‘What are you doing walking? Has your car broken down?’ We had heard as much all day, everyone eager to stop and ferry us to the border – and everyone unable to comprehend that walking was what we’d set out to do. I was finding it hard to believe myself. My feet were swollen so badly that my boots barely fit, blisters were forming beneath my calloused skin, Moez was limping – and even Ahmad and Awad had begun to complain about saddle sores.
‘There are still fifty kilometres to go,’ I said, kneading my feet. ‘What do you think?’
‘They’re going home tomorrow,’ Moez replied, shrugging.
We forced ourselves on: ten kilometres, twenty, then thirty and more. By the time evening loomed, a great expanse of blue glimmered on the horizon. ‘Lake Nasser,’ I whispered – before quickly correcting myself: ‘Lake Nubia . . .’
Just two miles distant lay Wadi Halfa. There has been a settlement at Wadi Halfa for millennia. Once an Egyptian outpost, and an important stop-off for armies heading into the Sudan, it is now the end of the railway from Khartoum, the gateway to Egypt. Before we had reached the outskirts of town, a crowd had gathered underneath the sign that welcomed visitors. A throng of men in military and police uniforms were waiting and, in the middle of them, the town governor, mayor and several journalists stood with none other than Moez’s brother, Mazar, and their mother. It had been years since I had last seen Mazar. Between them, they held a hand-painted banner aloft. In block capitals, the banner proclaimed: ‘WALKING THE NILE’.
Bewildered – and not a little numb from the pain still searing through my feet – we entered the crowd. In a second, Moez’s mother had thrown her arms around him. Mazar reached out and pumped my hand, before embracing me himself.
‘Well done!’ he said with a dry smile. ‘You dragged my brother home. He’s usually too busy to come and visit . . .’
‘We didn’t get it, Lev. The authorities shut down on us.’
We had spent the night in Moez’s family home, in the centre of the dusty town, with Awad and Ahmad camping outside with the camels. Now, we stood on the roadside, watching them disappear into the south – two old pirates who I’d miss enormously.
I turned to Mazar, who looked chagrined. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You don’t have permission to walk over the border. They wouldn’t agree to it. No foreigner’s ever walked from Sudan into Egypt. It just isn’t done. Not even the Sudanese do it. We’re forbidden from doing anything more than taking the ferry from here, all the way up to Aswan.’
Aswan lay 375km across the border, at the very head of the lake, deep inside Egypt. The Wadi Halfa ferry famously carried passengers all the way, but that had never been my intent. I cursed, inwardly. There is nothing more problematic in Africa than a border crossing.
‘Normally,’ I said, ‘I’d try and sneak across at night, or . . . pay somebody off. Only, I risked a sneaky crossing three years ago – when I was driving the ambulances to Malawi. I ended up in an Egyptian jail. They deported me after that.’
‘Things are different in Egypt now, Lev. You do things by the book, or not at all.’
Mazar was right. Since the last time I had been to Egypt, the country had been transformed by the revolutions of 2011 and 2013, both of which had removed presidents from power. The nation I was about to enter was not one I knew, nor one I understood – not yet. The consequences of appearing to be a risk to national security by making an illegal border crossing didn’t bear thinking about.
‘What are the options?’
Moez said, ‘It’s Ramadan in two days . . . but there’s a boat that leaves tomorrow afternoon. After that, nobody knows when the next one will go. There may not be another one until after Eid, and that’s more than a month.’
‘So it’s take the ferry, or sit it out, and hope something changes . . .’
‘You’re welcome to stay, Lev.’
I knew I was; I had been welcome to stay in almost every village we had passed on the way north. But Egypt was right there, so close I could almost touch it – the final country on my way back home.
I wandered out into the dusty street, turning in the direction of the lake. The border was tantalisingly near. I wanted to put my feet on Egyptian soil, wanted to know I was walking the final furlong, wanted to leave the contradictions of Sudan for something altogether different.
My mind was made up. If the ferry was the only way I could cross, I would take the ferry to Aswan, then find a way to negotiate the security pitfalls, backtrack to the border and continue the walk from there.
‘Moez,’ I said at last, ‘I’m going to need a ticket for that ferry.’