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.