‘Something is wrong?’
‘I have to go. I have to get in touch with my office.’
‘And I must go too,’ she says, looking at her watch.
The unexpected intimacy has robbed of us our sense of time. Now we both want to make light of it, as if it hasn’t happened, and neither of us really knows what to do next.
‘I hope we’ll meet again,’ I say.
She nods casually. ‘Insha’allah.’
But I just can’t leave it at that. ‘Perhaps… perhaps one day you’d be kind enough to be my guide. Or you could advise me where to go. It would be a pity to waste time. Life is so short.’
‘You’re right,’ she says. ‘We should not spend time on things which have no purpose.’ She says this in a way that charges the words with meaning, but I don’t know if it’s a warning or something else. Perhaps she doesn’t know herself.
‘I’d like to see the Souq Arabi. The wrestling in Omdurman. And there used to be a statue of General Gordon on his camel somewhere, but I think it went back to England.’
‘It is better that the English keep it.’
‘Yes, I know, but there’s a funny story about it. One day a little English boy goes with his grandmother to see it, and they stand under it and look up and the grandmother, whose father fought in the Sudan, says, “My boy, that is the great hero General Gordon, who fought the Mahdi in the Sudan.” So the little boy says, ‘‘Gosh, Grandma, that’s amazing. But why is there an old man sitting on his back?” ’
‘I would be happy to be your guide,’ she says. The full intensity of her dark gaze is on me, but she’s smiling now.
Two days later I hear the honk of Jameela’s Daihatsu outside the gate, and leap aboard with my little backpack feeling like a schoolboy on his first day of school. She drives us across the river to Omdurman, where the life of the city, although poorer than the centre of Khartoum to the south, becomes infinitely more colourful and intense.
We leave her car and wander through the spectacle of the open-air markets. The dust-laden streets are lined with mud-walled homes, and shared with camels and donkeys, and the air is heavy with the scent of spices and smoke. There are piles of fruits and vegetables I’ve never seen before, and everywhere there are tall and sometimes strikingly handsome men in long white jellabiyas. Their teeth flash in gleaming smiles. The women wear the brightly coloured tobe, a long swathe of loose fabric worn like an Indian sari, and there are just as many who are as tall and handsome as the men. We are offered food by a hundred strangers in turn, and after numerous refusals of raw diced camel’s liver with onion and hot shatta spice I succumb at last to a plate of foul and gallons of sweet tea. In a jewellery market I bargain hard for a tiny silver casket and joke with the owner of the stall about being British, to which he responds by pulling out a large dagger from behind the counter and brandishing it theatrically above my head.
We take an old ferry to Tuti island, an undeveloped enclave of peace in the chaos and bustle of the city, and we stroll by the Nile, where women are washing vegetables for market in the muddy water, and we sit in the shade of a lemon grove to share a watermelon and take turns brushing the flies off each other’s piece. A few laid-back locals try out their English on me, and chuckle at my half-remembered Arabic. Jameela is looking at me with a faint and affectionate smile.
‘You seem at home in such a poor country. It is rare. You are not a typical Englishman.’
‘I don’t know what a typical Englishman is.’
‘An Englishman does not show his feelings.’
‘Perhaps there are feelings I am not showing you.’
Then she says thoughtfully, as if she’s been wondering about it, ‘We should visit the tomb of the Mahdi.’
It’s the most revered site in the city and probably the whole of the Sudan. At the end of the nineteenth century the Mahdi, hated by the British but much loved in the Sudan as a saintly warrior, led his tribesmen to repeated victories against their imperial overlords in battles of stupendous bloodshed. The charismatic champion of Sudanese independence became the most celebrated Muslim leader in the world, and formulated a unique version of Islam which was distinctly upsetting to other Muslim powers of the day. He considered the Turkish rulers of neighbouring Egypt infidels, and claimed to be preparing the world for the second coming of Christ.
His most famous victory resulted in the slaughter and humiliation of the British and their Egyptian allies after the ten-month-long siege of Khartoum, where General Gordon waited hopefully and in vain for reinforcements from Egypt. Gordon’s command and life ended on the point of a Mahdist spear. The Mahdi himself is said to have respected Gordon greatly, but was mystified by his refusal to accept Islam, choosing instead a humiliating death. The Mahdi died of typhoid a year later, and a shrine was built over his body in Omdurman.
The Sudanese paid a heavy price for their defiance. Thirteen years later, under no-nonsense imperialist General Kitchener, an Anglo-Egyptian force returned to avenge Gordon’s death and reclaim the Sudan. They were heavily armed with the latest weapons. On the outskirts of Omdurman 50,000 tribesmen threw themselves at the British Maxim guns and were decimated by waves of dumdum bullets. The white jellabiyas of the slaughtered warriors were said to resemble a thick carpet of snow across the battlefield. Twenty thousand wounded were executed where they lay, and their bodies thrown into the Nile. Moored in the water beyond the town, British gunboats took range on the Mahdi’s shrine and reduced it to rubble with volleys of fifty-pound explosive shells, the cruise missiles of the era. Kitchener had the Mahdi’s body burned, but was discouraged by fellow officers from presenting the skull as an inkwell to Queen Victoria.
The silver dome of the tomb rises from a palm-filled enclosure like the nose of a rocket. Jameela greets the old guardian with affectionate respect, and calls him uncle. We walk barefoot around the custard-coloured walls of the octagonal shrine while the old man rubs the steel-grey stubble on his chin and recounts the more famous exploits of the Mahdi and his ill-fated warriors.
‘I said you were a Muslim brother from Britaniyyah,’ whispers Jameela mischieviously as we enter the shrine, savouring its cool stillness for a few minutes before emerging blinking into the sunlight.
The old man asks if we will be his guests, and insists on tea. He leads us past the accommodation for pilgrims and dervishes adjacent to the shrine, and we settle at a table under a tall acacia tree. By both tradition and law, he tells us, the grounds of the shrine are a place of sanctuary, an ancient version of diplomatic immunity. When it’s time to leave, he heaps blessings on our families, and we promise to return.
We drive back to the city as the sun is setting. The temperature has dropped to a comfortable thirty-five degrees celsius. It’s also Thursday evening, so I suggest we go to the Pickwick Club, where Halliday has put me on the guest list. We are shown straight in and head for the bar, close to the swimming pool. On the far wall Pickwick is written in lights. There’s a plastic parrot at the bar, and I’m reminded Halliday has told me that the club takes its name from the late embassy parrot, which is buried inside the wall.
After the intensity of life on the streets of Omdurman, we feel out of place among the clientele of mostly lonely and bored-looking foreigners, and I suggest we go somewhere more real. Jameela agrees gratefully. We walk to an Ethiopian restaurant. There are no knives and forks, so she takes my hand gently in hers and shows me how to fold the food into the traditional pancake-like bread called injera. It’s the first time we’ve touched since we shook hands, and this tiny act of closeness feels like a landmark to me, as if I’ve discovered the source of the Nile.
The pyramids are her suggestion. I’ve heard of the enigmatic site at Meroe, two hours north of Khartoum, but never imagined I might actually go there, much less in the company of a woman I’m struggling not to fall in love with. She lets me pick her up the next morning, and I’m shown into her home by her Sudanese housekeeper, who, judging from the twinkle in her eye when I appear, knows what’s afoot.