Another cluster of pyramids stood on a more southerly ridge, another citadel of reddish wind-scarred sandstone, dating from about 295–250 BC. The landscape was either this weathered stone or else smooth sand, some of it like brown sugar, the rest flat and yellow. No trees, no greenery, nothing growing, not even grass. I hiked to these other pyramids and examined them and drew some sketches in my notebook of the lions and the bulls.
While I was doing this, three tall white-robed Sudanese appeared — impressed and gratified that I was taking the trouble to draw pictures. They were pilgrims of a sort, the leader an older man named Kamal Mohammed Khier.
He said by way of introduction, ‘I am not an Arab.’ He said this as a challenge and a boast.
‘But you speak Arabic.’
‘Yes, but it is not my language.’ Saying so, he sounded like Salih Mashamoun, the Sudanese diplomat I had met in Cairo. ‘I am a Nubian. I speak Nubian. My family is Nubian. I am from Dongola in Nubia. We were kings in this country. We ruled Egypt. We built these pyramids.’
It was quite a speech and perfect for the place, the visitation by this proud son of the land. He introduced the others, his son Hassan and another man, Hamid.
‘This man, Hamid, is a real Nubian, too,’ Kamal said. ‘Not an Arab.’
Kamal frowned at the pyramids. He was looking at Ferlini’s damage. He said, ‘Look at the condition of them. The government doesn’t take care of them. These are great things!’
It was true that the Sudanese government did very little to preserve these ancient sites but in almost every case the site had been adopted by a foreign university — German, British, American — and was in the process of restoration. A philanthropic Englishwoman was waging a single-handed battle against neglect and erosion at a temple complex just to the west of the pyramids, and an elderly German named Hinkel, a self-financed enthusiast apparently, visited here once a year in his long-term project of piecing together the Temple of the Sun.
I accompanied Kamal and the others around the rest of the pyramids. They asked how I happened to be here. I pointed out my little blue tent in the dune.
‘Yes, you can be safe here,’ Kamal said. ‘In Egypt, no. In other countries people will trouble you — and this and that’ — he was hacking at his head with his hand. ‘But here, no one will bother you. You are safe in Sudan. We are all your friends.’
We broke camp and drove through the dunes and the gravely sand to the Temple of the Sun. An old man ran over and made me sign a logbook. He saluted me. He showed me the temple. Sand had almost covered the foundations but that was a help, for the packed sand preserved the carvings on the friezes.
The old man sat on a rock and said it was a throne for the priest. He put his hands together and mimicked the priest greeting the sun god, ‘Allah!’
Ramadan teased the old man and said he didn’t know what he was talking about.
The old man laughed. ‘No, but Hinkel does!’
‘How old are you?’
‘Fifty-six or fifty-seven,’ the old man said doubtfully.
‘No — much older! Sixty-something.’
‘How am I supposed to know that? I can’t read,’ the old man said. He was laughing, because there was a lot of affection in Ramadan’s teasing.
Ramadan was laughing with him now. ‘Where did you get that nice wristwatch?’ and he made as if to snatch it.
‘Hinkel,’ the old man said.
‘This place is a mess,’ Ramadan said.
‘Yes!’ the old man said.
‘You should fix it.’
‘It is not my place. It belongs to the government. Let the government fix it.’
We drove north after that, to Atbara, the end of the paved road, where there were no temples, but there was a cement factory and a ferry across the Nile and the last bridge — it was just ferries from here to the Egyptian border. Here we camped again, at the edge of the Nubian Desert. The next town was Dongola and after that Wadi Halfa, the border. And so I spent another night, this one by the Nile, where I had seen so few fishermen. I asked Ramadan why. He said that the Sudanese in the north were not great fish eaters. Fish didn’t keep in the heat, it was not smoked, it was regarded as a snack, not much more. Lamb and camel and goat were tastier.
The next day, seeing torn rubber all over the road, Ramadan spun the steering wheel and headed into the desert, where he spied a car which had skidded there from the effect of a blown tire. No one got a simple puncture in such hot places: the tires just exploded in a mass of shredded rubber.
Three men stood by the old car in the hot bright desert, the only features in the landscape. Ramadan conferred with them and the men explained their dilemma — which was obvious: a blow-out, no spare tire, no traffic on the road; they needed a new tire. They got into our truck and we drove them down the road about fifty miles and dropped them at a repair shop in a small town off the road. This lengthy detour of an hour and a half was considered normal courtesy, like the rule of the sea that necessitates one ship helping another in trouble, no matter the inconvenience. And here the desert much resembled a wide sea.
The men were grateful but not effusive. They saluted us, and off we went.
‘They had a problem. This is what we do. We help,’ Ramadan said.
We picked up more fresh food — tomatoes, onions, limes, herbs, fruit and bread — and drove west to a set of high, dry, brown mountains of rock and rubble. Ramadan found a valley through them, where there was a village surrounded by fertile green fields, irrigated by water from the Nile. They were growing wheat, corn, sorghum and beans. We traveled on something less than a road, a goat track, a path-notion, an idea of a trail. We kept going along it, past screeching children (‘Awaya!’ White man!) to the Sixth Cataract.
The trees were thicker here and the green grass was long. The cataract was a misnomer, though. All I saw was a set of muddy rapids that were easily navigable in a small boat. We made camp in a grove of trees where there was a set of rope beds under an arbor. We ate salad and bread, while swallows and sparrows and yellow-breasted finches flew in and out of the tree boughs. Ramadan took a bath in the river. I was going to do the same, but was too tired and fell asleep on a rope bed, on the bank of the river, to the sound of the thrashing rapids.
I was listening to the radio the next morning in this idyllic spot — Japan is in its most severe recession ever, with high unemployment. The world economy is expected to be in its deepest recession since World War Two — and thinking: None of this will affect a village like this in the slightest, for such a place is both so marginalized and so self-sufficient that nothing will change it.
As though to emphasize this an old man approached and began babbling at me.
Ramadan said, ‘He is telling you he has three wives. He has fifteen babies.’
He was just a grizzled figure hanging around. He had discovered that such an announcement might get a rise out of a stranger, especially a masihi. He explained his conjugal arrangements. Each wife had a separate room. The man alternated. He grinned at me.
‘Tell him I am happy for him.’
Another figure, apparently a small skinny child of about seven or eight, came over.
Ramadan said, ‘How old is he?’
I looked more closely and saw a small pinched face — chinless but dwarflike rather than young.
‘He is twenty-seven,’ Ramadan said. ‘His name is Abd-allah Magid.’
He was tiny, with a small head and skinny arms and a small boy’s body, wearing a little gown about half the size of a flour sack. He was hardly four feet tall and could not have weighed more than fifty pounds. Ramadan questioned him and Abd-allah Magid replied in a strange duck-like voice. He shook my hand and then marched like a soldier up and down, as he had been taught to do, to be cute and to earn baksheesh. But Ramadan was kind to him and gave him half a grapefruit, and when he stopped performing he seemed a sweet and melancholy little fellow, whose life in this harsh climate would be short. He was the smallest man I had ever seen.