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