We drive north for about two hours on the road to Atbara. Seeing how quickly the complexity and prosperity of the city fall away, as if from the edge of a flat earth, I’m reminded of Kabul, where the surroundings beyond the capital return to almost prehistoric simplicity after only a few miles.
At a small settlement called Bagrawiya on the east bank of the Nile we turn off the main road and bounce along an unsurfaced track. It’s oppressively hot. Then the pyramids loom up, some pointed and others broken, reaching like ragged sets of teeth out of the orange sand. There’s about a hundred of them, much smaller than their Egyptian relatives and much less well known, fashioned from black stone nearly two and a half thousand years ago as tombs for the kings and queens of ancient Nubia. There is no one else there except a solitary local who wants us to ride his camel for an outrageous sum, and we send him guiltily away.
‘Quite a place,’ I say to Jameela, ‘for your ancestors to be buried.’
‘Do you know anything of the history?’ she asks.
‘Only that Meroe was the southern capital of the kingdom of the Kushites, who ruled Nubia for a thousand years, invaded Egypt and ruled as the pharaohs of the twenty-fifth dynasty. They traded with India and China, and their warrior queen Candace, riding a war elephant, confronted Alexander the Great himself, who withdrew rather than fight her magnificent warriors.’
‘You’re funny,’ she says.
‘I read it in the guidebook last night. I wanted to impress you. Did you know the gods were so jealous of the beauty of the queens of Nubia that they struck the tops of the pyramids with lightning to humble them?’
‘Good try.’ She smiles. ‘The tops were destroyed with dynamite by an Italian explorer in 1820. He was looking for gold. There wasn’t any.’
We walk among the ruins in wonder at the lost civilisation that created them, ducking into the coolness of the few tombs that are open. As we enter one of them, Jameela reaches behind her for my hand and guides me gently inside. On the walls we can make out carved stone panels with Egyptian-looking winged gods. I run my hands over them and turn my head towards Jameela to see an expression of worry on her face, which I haven’t seen before but which disappears as my eyes meet hers. Outside again, under the stone gateway to the entrance we lean against the walls, facing each other in the silence. I’m just looking at her, and she’s returning the look, because we have somehow reached the end of the words we want to say to each other. The sun is low and the golden light catches the perspiration on her upper chest, and for a moment it’s as if her dark skin is glowing.
I’m not sure what would have happened had the elderly guardian of the place not emerged from his nearby hut, and waved to us with a shout to let us know it was his time to clock off.
‘We should go,’ she says.
It’s hot in the car. We drive for a long while in silence, as if the spell of the place is still on us. We pass trucks piled precariously high with cargoes, as well as passengers clinging to sacks of food and supplies, who wave and smile at us above the billowing fumes and dust.
‘Sometimes,’ says Jameela suddenly, ‘I miss the sea. I want to swim in the sea. I want to go to a desert island and feel the sand instead of this dust, and feel the water instead of this heat.’
‘Then let’s go to the sea,’ I say.
‘It would take too long.’ She sighs. ‘Several days just to get there and back. It’s impossible to get to the islands in any case.’ She changes the subject. ‘Do you know anyone in Khartoum?’
‘Not yet,’ I tell her. ‘I haven’t done much socialising.’
‘Listen,’ she says. ‘I’m having dinner with a cousin and his family tomorrow. They’re nice people. You could come and impress them. With your knowledge of history, perhaps.’ She throws me an ironic smile.
‘I don’t want to impose,’ I say.
‘It’s fine,’ she says. ‘My cousin can be a real pain sometimes but his wife is a good friend of mine. They’re quite traditional. Religious. Can you handle that, Englishman? I’ll call them to say you’re coming.’
I am suspicious of him from the start. Jameela’s cousin is an Arab and his features are Mediterranean. His skin is fair. He is tall and lean and has an angular face with a sharp nose and chin. The most disturbing thing about him is his eyes, which are grey and lizard-like, and settle with a faint look of disdain wherever his head is turned, as if they are fixed in their sockets. His gestures are slowed by an affected piety.
It’s an untypical configuration. I know that in Sudan only family or the closest of friends are invited to the traditional family home. Something is different here. An accommodation has obviously been made for their foreign guest, and a table and chairs have been put together in the room, which is the equivalent of an English family deciding to eat on a carpet on the floor. They have also invited a Sudanese man and his wife who have lived abroad for a few years and whose family connection I never catch. I suspect that their presence is intended to be a bridge between the traditional environment and the strange ways of a foreigner, which is me. Jameela is family but thoroughly westernised in her ways, and is accepted like a foreign film on television.
Her cousin sits opposite me at the table with Jameela to one side. His wife, a young Sudanese woman with big soulful brown eyes, ferries the dishes to and from the kitchen, settling from time to time at the end of the table like a young deer drinking warily from a stream. Her eyes never meet those of her guests. They all speak in Arabic for most of the meal, until our host fixes on me and reveals that he does in fact speak nearly perfect English.
‘It is to be commended that you speak Arabic,’ he says to me with a sinister smile. ‘Insha’allah you will one day read the Holy Qu’ran.’ His teeth are perfect white.
Jameela rolls her eyes.
‘My cousin has said you were in Afghanistan.’
‘My work took me there for a while,’ I say.
‘You were not there at the time of the jihad?’
‘For a short visit. It’s a long time ago now.’
‘You are not a Muslim,’ he says, as if this disqualifies me from travel. ‘What did you do there?’
‘I did what my friends did. Just lived.’
‘Did you fight?’ he persists.
‘There was fighting. It was wartime.’
‘It is an honourable thing to participate in jihad. Did you participate?’
I don’t like where he’s trying to lead me. I don’t like his curiosity. I think of the grace and dignity of the old man at the shrine, who wouldn’t have dreamed of prying into the private life of a visitor. My host, it seems, links the idea of going to Afghanistan with fighting the jihad and nothing else. It’s impossible to explain to him that my sympathy for the Afghans at the time wasn’t anything to do with religion or its decrees, but simply because I liked the people I met.
‘I believe the Prophet – sala Allah alaeihu wa aleihu as-salaam – said that the greatest jihad is the struggle with one’s own personal weaknesses, and that the jihad against the worldly enemy is the lesser struggle – the jihad as-saghir.’
I glance at Jameela while my host’s head is turned, and she shoots me a look of fond disapproval. But her cousin isn’t impressed.
‘How do you know such a thing?’ He ignores the implication of the question. ‘Did you fight or not?’
‘I lived as my friends lived. So I lived with them, ate with them, fought with them, prayed with them.’
‘You prayed with them?’ His hands settle deliberately on the edge of the table, as if he’s about to get up.
‘Omar,’ says Jameela, ‘let him eat.’ The conversation is making us both feel uncomfortable.
‘Yes,’ I say, recalling those serene moments at dusk when the men would lay their weapons quietly aside and turn their minds to God before resuming their worldly preoccupations. ‘Sometimes. Not always. It would have been strange not to.’