Sudan continued...

When I walked among the acacias the soil was black and richlooking for all its fissures. I could see how you might be taken by the notion of turning this part of Sudan into Africa's breadbasket by diverting water from the Blue Nile. Patra wore a bikinitop as we lunched and I tried to sit so that any view of her from the Bin Laden-built road was blocked. Back on the road, we passed into a landscape devoid of any relief or feature other than the fields and the rude, boxy or standard African rondavel-style dwellings of their tenders. The interspersal of African village huts with low-budget Arab desert architecture continued nearly the whole way to Wad Medani where we camped that evening.

Sometime after Qadarif, the flatness was punctuated by rocky formations that reminded me of New Mexico's Ship Rock, though smaller and crumblier, as if some indolent creator had set out to make a mountain but had flagged in the heat or despaired at the pointlessness of it. Between the ambient heat and the furnace waves coming off the engine, my trance continued. Before we reached the canals, I had almost managed to convince myself that off in the distance, just yon side of any horizon, lay the utter limit past which cellular life could not cross. I remember that on that drive I also had a very keen feeling about the distinctiveness of the landscape, that it was so Sudanese, so itself, as to defy all comparison. I tried thinking to myself that it looked like some droughtseized corner of the great plains, or maybe like some forsaken stretch of Mongolia glimped in pictures, but none of the comparisons hit their mark.

Come nightfall our vehicle was seized by an irresoluteness. We wanted to camp, but the development was thick on either side now that the road tracked the curves of the river. Our vehicle wavered in the face of oncoming headlights, and our eyes failed to penetrate the margins. Sometimes we flinched at the sudden appearance of a ghostrider who spurned the luxury of lights for his car. At length we conceded defeat. Ian pulled off the road and onto a strip of pastureland between two sections of village. Soon after we parked, a man in a white robe rode out on a donkey to see who we were and what we were doing. Satisfied by the exchange of salaams, he gave a tacit blessing for us to overnight there.

It was far from ideal. At first there was the yipeeyayayayaing of some celebration or ritual. The jollity later gave way to the yaps and snarls of the tolerated but little-loved vilage dogs contesting scraps. And throughout the night we listened to the incessant rumble of traffic bound for Khartoum. Sudan may be inhabited mostly by mudhouse-dwelling pastoralists (and persecuted refugees), but it is manifestly open for business. War wants revenue.

That night I relieved myself on the stubbleland. In the morning I became embarrassed by our proximity to the villagers and went to cover my dropping with the sandscoured remnants of a goatcarcass, recognizable as such by a dangling hoof. Leaving with the light was much to my relief--though by the time we left just about half the village had come by to introduce themselves. As they did so I kept looking over at that tattered goatskin, thinking they might change their minds about these nice and curious foreigners once they saw what I'd left.

We reached Khartoum three or four hours later. The prelude to the capital was a sudden convulsion of industrial activity on fenced and trashblown plots. There were aluminum factories, scrapyards, railyards, a fancy hedgetrimmed gate giving out onto nothing save the same baglittered sandwaste we'd seen the whole way up. At some point I imagined that I was seeing the bombed out remnants of a pharmaceutical factory.

The Arab city is a medieval city in conception, and it likes gates to delimit it. Khartoum may be a new city, but it is also Arab, and therefore gated. We enter the city-province through a large and trellised steel archway where we pay a toll for use of the Bin Laden road. The officials ask questions--they like to demand your passport and pretend to scrutinize a script they cannot read--and then release us.

As written above, the city is a welter of half-executed developments. I feel tempted to postpone esthetic comment on Khartoum now in favor of a more factual summary. Driving in, the traffic was bad. We sat in it for nearly half an hour before we were able to get of the gridlock and onto Nile Street where we'd be staying. I saw Chinese and Indians sitting behind the wheels of their cars. I saw the Canadian ambassador being shuttled somewhere (you can always tell Canadian ambassadors by the prominent maple leaf sewn to their backpacks). While stuck on traffic I also ended up buying a socket strip from a kid selling them to the idle motorists.

We stayed at a place called the Blue Nile Boat Club, an aquatic pleasure center that had clearly seen better days. An old and beached ironsided steamer was originally intended to serve as the clubhouse, I think, but it had been abandoned in favor of a large tin-roofed shelter that let the wind through where you could hang out and watch the river or al-Jazeera on the big screen. On the grounds were also a mosque with a roof like a geodesic dome, and an attached hammam where I took a wonderfully cold shower later that evening.

We took lunch at a local restaurant in Omdurman. A return to foul and ta'amiyya, with good pickles and an orange juice slushie on the side. The Sudanese are another people that do juice well--as they had better be given the climate and the perverse lack of frosty beers. After lunch the, Souq ish-Shaab (people's market). When we parked at the police station, one officer tried to hassle us, but his colleague waved us off with a mish mushkela (no problem). At the market, first welders and other metalworkers whose furnaces and torches pushed the heat that much closer to the unbearable. Next the garment section, where we wandered under shadegiving tarps and amid the cries of 'yes' and 'welcome' and 'tafadhal.' At some point I returned to Ian and Patra's side from chatting with a merchant to whom I reported that my Arabic was at 42% robustness, that Sudan was 95%, but that it still couldn't beat Yemen, which came in at 99%.

When I rejoined them I found that Ian had been cottoned onto by a large man with the look of a zealot. His forehead was bruised from hard genuflection and his eyes shone with a light that made me want to get away. His English was quite decent, and he spoke very loudly so that everybody would know it. He was quizzing Ian on his opinion of Sudan. My suspicion that he was trying to bait him was confirmed when the zealot steered the conversation toward Darfur and "the battles of my country." Ian, consummate Englishman that he is, navigated the conversation back to neutral ground. The zealot left, but not really. He orbited us for awhile, awaiting an opportune moment for his next pass. When it came, he approached me to ask if I was a Muslim (because of the beard, I think, which in these parts gives me the look of a white sheikh). When I answered that I was Christian (as one must for decorum's sake), he responded with the usual bullshit litany about Christian fallacies. How unfortunate that your average Muslim zealot cannot be exposed to the fact of nonbelief in any of the desert monotheisms--then we would have had a conversation! I'd probably react with similar mendacious delicacy in the Bible belt in the interest of self-preservation. What is it that makes fools so prone to claim for themselves a monopoly on truth? At last, as we were haggling over some tomatoes, the zealot shot past us on his inscrutable and no doubt divinely guided orbit.

We went on to buy some produce and a tub of honey. Every time I began haggling with a shopkeep in Arabic there would be much amused elbowing and gaping. The Omdurman market must not get a lot of folks like me speaking the desert tongue.

That evening we pulled a 3 point turn into a street just off the main road. Mid-maneuver a bunch of Sudanese poured out of the woodwork and told us to wait! wait! One of them wore a uniform, but things did not seem right, so Ian did the opposite of waiting. The men banged on the sides of the car and tried to block our progress, but Ian would not be stopped, and we made it back out. One of them gave feeble chase on a Vespa, but we soon lost the amateur brigand in traffic.

The following day we drove north to Shendi and the pyramids at Marawi, getting out of town after lunch. In my 8 hours of wakefulness prior to that, I did a bit of writing, managed some morning calisthenics, transferred a few pictures onto my computer, and walked into town to check my e-mail and my fantasy football results. I am pleased with fantasy football as a sort of release mechanism for my handicapping urges, and I esteem it a good thing that I cannot resist managing my team from so far afield. I was pleased to read that I had beaten my opponent handily, with admirable performances out of nearly everyone on my roster.

The final thing I should mention is that I met a fellow at the Blue Nile Boat Club who served as an inspiration for a short story I have written recently about a hyperactive and aggressive traveler who ends up running into a pack of praying Sudanese mendicants at night and creating an inadvertent bloodbath. Fine—I will post that story here.

~

For three days we have been driving through long stretches of desert, intermittently encountering the Nile. On the first night out of Khartoum we pulled off the road around sunset and tucked the vehicle in behind a formation of jumbled boulders. Our shadows grew impossibly long, as if the sunset were filling them with dreams of pulling away to circumnavigate the earth. As the day flickered out we snapped silhouette pictures of one another standing on the rock formations. We had no more than a banana or two for dinner, and turned in early. The stars were spectacular. I wrote in my journal for a while in the tent while listening to music. Occasionally I would pause the music to listen to the wind, the insects beating their wings against the tent fabric to get at the light inside, the highway. The Khartoum-Atbara traffic continued into the night.

The next morning we left before 7, and were soon at the site of Sudan's largest collection of pyramids. We paid our money and had the pyramids to ourselves. Many of the glyphs in the stone had been defaced by previous visitors: Italians, Frenchmen, the English, Arabs. And every one of the pyramids had been decapitated by a 19th-century Italian looter operating under the sanction of the Egyptian Khedive. Even now the site is largely unguarded--an unscrupulous tourist could easily pilfer some of Sudan's pharaonic heritage.

The sand at the site was fine and red, and was strewn with broken black shale that I guessed was volcanic. For a while I wandered among the crumbling pyramids alone. We I joined up with my traveling companions, we played for awhile at throwing stones at targets (other stones). Some of our projectiles were almost certainly the detritus of disintegrated pyramids. The others tired after a few minutes, but in my pursuit of parabolic perfection I threw until my shoulder was sore.

On the way out I bought a couple of amulets meant to protect their wearers against the bites of snakes and scorpions, respectively. The vendors the grizzled and blackened people of the desert, yet they were also aggressive, probably due to dearth of custom, or custom that was at once too much and too little, and no doubt due also in some measure to the indiscriminate profligacy of some of the temple visitors. A young illbehaved one touched Patra and she swore at him. It was a day of cursing the Sudanese, actually, albeit silently in my case. We drove away and smoothed things over amongst ourselves. Before very long it was time to do our first ferry crossing of the Nile. It was at a town called Atbara.

There was no sign for the crossing on the road, so we drove into town and tried to navigate toward a GPS coordinate that we had for the landing. The trouble with GPS coordinates of course is that they tempt you into the straightest way to a given place, which can often be a good way to ensure that you never get there. But it is still a strategy we should have seen through to its conclusion by zigzagging, because I went on to make the mistake of asking directions of the locals, who all replied enthusiastically but often conflictingly in an Arabic that had thus far left me grasping at straws. Typical of these interactions was the instruction from one man to turn back up the road for 150 meters and take a left. When we did this, the next man I asked told me to go another 150 meters. The real turning, it turned out, was more than a kilometer away. Maybe the fellow meant to say 150 rods. That would be more like it. Once we did get to the ferry, it was exactly the sort of nightmare you might expect of a Sudanese ferry crossing. There were two landings and two ferries in operation. I asked around and was told to get our vehicle in line at one of them. While we waited I went to buy two grapefruits. The vendor mocked my formal Arabic, nor would he let me have the second large grapefruit I wanted, so I had to settle for one. I guess that second one was a 'money grapefruit' that he just couldn't let go of. The one I did buy was delicious, we all shared it out in the high heat of noon.

Suddenly after thirty minutes there was a clamoring and all the parked vehicles started their engines and stampeded for the other landing. But the ferry that clumsily beached its lip on the mudbank there was very slow in taking on passengers. It was unclear what the crew was doing, but they were not taking on passengers, that much was clear. When it finally did allow boarding, it would only let on big trucks and the donkeycarts driven by the majority of the waiting customers. We waiting in angst. After some time there was another confused migration back to the original landing, then much jostling and finger-wagging at those we were convinced were trying to steal our place in line. Were they really...don't be daft, of course they were! But none of this mattered, since it ended up being the other landing anyway when after nearly an hour the first ferry had made its trip with the big trucks and the donkeys. Once we were finally on, we were surrounded by donkeycarts and somewhat elegant-looking men in jellabiyyahs. They appeared to pay nothing at all for their passage, but because I speak a smattering of the desert tongue and will not allow myself to be made fodder of for the enterprising sometime shakedown artist, we were at least not horribly swindled, as I gather other more witless overland travelers have been. A little bit of acculturation and sensitivity goes a long way almost anywhere. And upon you be peace.

Despite the silver lining of not being ripped off, the experience was very frustrating. Not necessarily because of the waiting itself--of course I had time to wait, I had fucked off and gone to the Sudan--but because of all the inefficient clamoring and needless commotion. We could not understand why, if this was an enterprise that had been shuttling between the banks of this portion of the Nile for many years, they had not come any closer to perfecting the logistics of the thing. Too much shouting, and too little action. Fortunately for future khawajah wayfarers or Chinese engineers and oil consultants, the Nile at Atbara is very close to being spanned by a bridge. In fact, within just a couple of years it will be possible to drive from the Ethiopian border and into Egypt (bypassing the Nasser ferry) in just a day or two, once the paroxysm of spending and expansion has run its course. Once across, we gave each other high fives. The crossing itself had lasted all of five minutes. That brief interlude (though I suppose it was the game itself) had been quiet, tranquil, cooled by a fragrant Nile breeze. We then followed our GPS navigator onto a newly tarred road that plunged west into the White Desert. After an hour and a half or so, it was sundown and time to camp. We tucked the Rover in behind a mass of sand and rock left over from the recent roadworks, about 500 m from the road.

When night fell, it was the greatest silence I'd ever heard. Because the wind gusted at our backs, the occasional truck on the road made no sound. We filled the immensity of that silence with the domestic sounds of food preparation, tent pitching, etc. I made us some burgers with meat we'd kept in the refrigerator. Being the first meat I'd had in a while, they were absolutely delicious. On the side was a pasta salad with just the right ratio of mayonnaise to lime juice. Not bad for bush dining.
As we dined, two cars traveling west as we had been stopped on the road just forward of where we had turned off onto the hard pan. They swept the terrain with their headlights. It reminded me of a scene in McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, and I was briefly but definitely terrified. We turned off our headlamps and waited. After 5 inconclusive minutes, one drove off across the pan parallel to the way we had come in though further on, and disappeared. The other turned around and motored back the way he had come, shifting hard. Maybe they were roadwork supervisors. I think what jarred me was the sudden rupture of the huge silent emptiness that had been my first impression of that night's camp. It was as if the headlights were cutting through some other fabric, more delicate and precious than the night.

I will never apologize—you have one day

Ah. Readers. Yes. Been remiss I'm afraid, sorely remiss! Frightfully
sorry too. Especially given my solemn promise that it would be
otherwise. Do you remember the covenant I solemnly whispered to you
two months ago while on my pit stop in The Stamboul, when I said that
I my briefings would be earnest and consistent and faithful? Ha!
Wherever you see bluster, ladies and gentlemen, just look underneath
and you will find deceit. Never trust a promise given in the false
intoxication of dawn. Especially never trust words that fall
glistening from a silvered tongue. They are counterfeit specie that
only captivate at the moment of utterance—the twinkling pageant you
see is the coins spinning their way to the floor, which is where all
dawn promises inevitably end up. On the floor the light quits them,
and they gather dust, losing all value in cash and kind. Think of the
promise I minted that misty October dawn overlooking the Bosporus as a
ploy akin to that of a government desperate to buoy consumer
confidence, but lacking the means to back the glut of promissory
notes. Of course, consistency never has been the chief virtue of this
humble blog. You don't read it as a predictable and harmless tonic to
go with your morning coffee; you don't come to it seeking the
considered counsel of a level-headed man. Far from it. You pay your
subsciption fee to my corporate backers because you secretly want to
chug a gleaming shard of glass with your morning coffee, and because
there is nothing as boring as a level-headed man. Most of all, you
want the mystery of a man secretly on the move. I think my kind of
currency is still good here, don't you?
Let me begin by assuring you—no, promising—that you have not been
waiting in vain. Your correspondent, you see, has been busy following
a course of self-improvement. While you were fearing for my life these
past weeks, worrying about the hazards that lurk in whatever
godblasted place I might have washed up in—while you thrilled to the
vicarious prospect of stormtossed seas and spindrift and bullet-singed
badlands, I was in fact safely at my anchorage here in Istanbul. Far
from adventuring, I have been firmly rooted to the same spot for most
of the last three weeks. Some days I've hardly managed to leave the
house. I'm again staying with my friend Darren, whose apartment and
view are as lovely as ever.
What of these works of self-improvement, then? Well, other than
reading, which is always edifying (you may access my reading list via
ftp for $12.99 plus shipping and handling), I've been busy studying
Turkish. About a week after getting back here it occurred to me that I
was unable to do so much as introduce myself, or ask the all-important
question how much? That needed to change. I picked up Darren's hefty
book of beginner's Turkish and set to work. Fast forward ten days or
so, and I am having a flesh and blood conversation with a store owner
saying that no, you don't need to open that bottle of wine for me
here—what was he going to do, share a glass with me there?—no, Sir, I
can open it at my house. That happened earlier this evening, and I
still haven't come down from the high of having surprised myself with
how much I'd learned. Not that I'm any great shakes at it. It just
feels nice to have shed the feeling of God I hope this person doesn't
try talking to me that haunted me for the first weeks. There is also a
shedload (to borrow an Dorset usage) of Arabic in Turkish, which makes
it easy for me to guess at the meanings of many a word. It's a
pleasing language to learn.
Other than that, it's been more of the usual. Writing. Which I
consider to be an act of self-betterment, even if it gets me nowhere.
Tomorrow I fly to Sweden to spend Christmas with relatives. I am
looking forward to another gander at Istanbul's impressive duty free
shops on the way there. Sweden should also be nice, of course—provided
that there is some snow on the ground. I know our age is globally
warmed, but it's Sweden for God's sake! The least the weather gods
could do is to grace the lightstarved days with a bit of snow, don't
you think?
After my 8 days or so in Sweden—where I hope I'll be able to fight
off distractions to keep up at least my study of Turkish—it's back to
the Stamboul. Darren is leaving for Montana shortly after the new
year, and the plan is to ask his landlord to let the apartment to me
in his place. I would like to continue the anonymous productivity I've
been experiencing here for a bit. Then, in February, my erstwhile
traveling companions are going to roll through Turkey. I am thinking
about joining them so that I can see more of the country than just the
metropolis. So you see I'll be taking my time in getting back to
Africa, and that suits me just fine.
Apropos of very little, did you know that the Turkish army is
conducting an operation in northern Iraq? My strong impression is that
Americans are not very popular here. I usually fall back on my spare
Swedish identity if I get into a discussion that feels like it might
have a concealed political or religious edge to it, but I've been
thinking of trading the Swede in me in for something a bit more
exotic. Darren, for instance, goes around Istanbul passing himself off
as a Mexican when the situation demands it. Turks don't know a damn
thing about Mexicans, he says. I like that.
Maybe a Christmas item is in order, it being the season. All my life,
there have been certain Swedish people whom I've only seen around
Christmas, or on other occasions of note. I'd long viewed these people
as existing in a sort of vacuum of carefree jollity. It was the
ritualized merriment of my meetings with them that did it, of course,
but for the longest time I had this idea that Swedes were by nature a
festive, carefree bunch. At some point I started reading Swedish books
and watching Swedish films, and the illusion dissolved. And I learned
from personal experience about the cycle of papering over misery with
drink. Foreigners who come to Sweden either around Christmas or
midsummer can be forgiven for coming away with the impression of
Swedes as a jovial folk. I know better. But however deep my
disillusionment, here I am, convincingly in my adult years,
entertaining a Christmas fantasy about schnapps and Swedish ham and
the bliss of kin—I confess it. I will let you know how it is.

From Bahir Dar to Khartoum

Following is the first of a series of installments about the journey through Sudan, which I now have time to reflect on and summarize during a pit stop in Cairo. Sorry for the silence while in Sudan. There will be much coming to compensate for it, rest assured. Ahem:

November 5, Khartoum

I've been reading a bit about Sudan's wars, Sudan's tribes. Scarcity and ferocity. Riches and rapacity. Theories of superiority propounded with a sly what me smugness of a cat with feathers and bones clinging to its whiskers. Khartoum is like this cat, the blood of its conquests and extractions feeding the growth of a city convulsed by cranes and scaffolds to truss gaudy dreams.

The riotousness is belied by a tranquillity, maybe a languorousness, that is inherent in the heat. There may be bandsaws and piledrivers and pneumatic drills and generators running apace, but all of this is submerged by the thick waves of heat and in the languid streaming of the Nile that has outlasted every civilizational fever that has ever gripped its banks. It is an atmosphere, I think, that lends itself to delusions, visions, fancies and fallacies. Which may take the form of an 'Oriental contentment' or the harsh precepts of shari'a law.

A quick jog through the way here from Bahir Dar. Just after the All Saints Day post, we got on the road and made north for Gonder. We detoured into a little farming valley to see if we could take the waters of a hot spring featured in the guide. When we arrived it was into the slavering maw of Ethiopian parasitism. Passing though the village before the spring, our wake filled with sprinters hoping to vie for custom when we stopped. We pulled into a little clearing and were thronged by young Ethiopians crying out various different admission prices. After seeing that the pools ran to no more than a foot in depth and that they were filled to capacity with local bathers, and after discovering that the waters were tepid, we left. As usual, every child who spotted us on the way burst into a wild litany of 'you! you! you! give me money!', their hands extended in full mendicant articulation. The Ethiopian impulse to beggardom is astounding.

One phrase has it that the Ethiopians look like aristocrats who have pawned the family silver. But the fallen Abyssinian noblesse exists side by side with an 'other half'--the one that never had silver and which is content to mortgage its last scrap of dignity at the merest glimpse of a white face. The impulse among children is near universal. The country is a confusing and shocking mix of great superficial beauty and deep spiritual crisis. The fact that it continues to sell itself with some success on the strength of the former and in the face of the latter should tell you how confused the typical western tourist is when it comes to matters of human dignity.

After the attempt on the spring we drove five hours through majestic and strongly relieved green scenery to get to Gonder, site of a medieval castle and little else. Once within the courtyard of our new and well-run hotel, we ate. As we did there was a portly Polish tourist regarding us from his doorframe with a towel around his shoulders and his man parts on prominent display in a banana hammock, or Speedo. The night was chilly. I wanted to beg a moment's confidential business with him, to inquire about the meaning of his attire, but settled for a giggle. Pippa and Florent, the frog and the kiwi we had driven up with, let us sample their dinner of ceviche prepared using Tana tilapia, lime, onions, tomatoes and coconut milk. This was the fish we had bought together a few days before in Bahir Dar, when we had walked to a place listed in the guide as the fish market at the end of several kilometers of neglected red dirt track. On the way there we had passed a group of women engaged in various stages of cabinet assembly by the side of the road. Some to fit, some to sand, some to paint. The day was hot, and they were overseen by a small man in an orange shirt who was not sweating. We asked a few times if we were on track to reach the fish market, and the answer was yes each time. At the end of the road we were greeted by a sign announcing the Lake Tana Aquatic Research Center, where at first we were prevented almost bodily from entering a tinwalled warehouse where we could see the catch laid out on tables. Crossing the grounds, we peered in through the window of a cement block building and saw some men in official garb in the middle of a film shoot. Once the film stopped rolling one of them came out to sell us a kilogram of filleted tilapia out of an icebox in a back room. Whole fish, he said, would be available the next day.

Cut back to Gonder. After dinner we went out and had some delicious avocado and pineapple juices. The Ethiopians really know how to make juice. I grew tired early and walked back alone to the hotel, and on my way some inherent sketchiness of mine made me the target of an impromptu sales pitch from a kindly vendor of hashish thinking he saw in me a need for his wares.

The next day we drove over a rough road to within 20 km of the Sudanese border. Over the course of the 6-hr drive, the land dropped from 2,220 meters to just over 700, and by mid-afternoon it was scorching. We pulled in under a stand of trees just off the road and waited out the lunch hour. Then we went to the customs office, where the official in charge had almost no idea what to do with the paperwork Ian handed him. He just sort of looked at the carnet, the scribbled a few things on a page I suspected was bound for the trash. Ian had to prompt him twice to stamp the form and add his signature.

Soon after I began to enter the heat trance in which I've spent good portions of the past few days. Over the next few hours it was all I could do to keep my thoughts straight and attend to campsite responsibilities like pitching my tent and doing dishes. I went to bed no later than 8 and was fast asleep halfway through the first page of the book I was trying to read. The next day we rose with the sun and drove to the border at Metemma.

~

Dozens of women were walking toward us up the road bearing rude chairs and what appeared to be pans for cooking njera, the fermented flapjack and cornerstone of Ethiopian cuisine. The women were darker than any Ethiopian I'd seen. Sudan--land of the blacks--felt near. The border town was chaotic, hot and muddy, but the entry process was fairly straightforward.

The officials at the Sudanese border post were, for the most part, black Africans. Some had Arab features, but there was no one I would have picked out as an Arab in a neutral context. But I digress into ethnography when what I should be talking about are the nuts and bolts. They made us pay more than twice what we had expected for our security registration, but there was little to be done when they had our passports and all the power, so we ponied up. I saw some of the Ethiopians I had waited with in the embassy in Addis, all well-dressed and apparently very happy to be headed to Khartoum. What were their lives like? I was happy too, but I guess my contentment was of an altogether different sort, at once more esthetic and more trivial.

As my travelling companions quibbled about how much we had to pay for our registration (tasjeel), and whether we couldn't perhaps pay in Kartoum, as our demiscient guide advised, I suddenly realized that I could be of use, and interceded with the official to see if it was really as they had said. Indeed it was. But he assured me that the registrations would be honored in Khartoum, and that they would even indicate that they had been issued in Khartoum. Even though my Arabic confab hadn't changed a thing, it brought the illusion of progress and amity, and we were able to pay without too much grumbling.

Stamps and stickers received, we filed off to clear customs formalities, and then to have our documentation inspected by a variety of officials in a succession of different buildings, each officer solemnly executing his duties before sending us to the next building down the line. Two of these officers required a color photograph, which I just happened to have. I shudder to think of how long I might have been in that town chasing down a photo had it been otherwise.

And then we were on the road. In the Sudan. Heading from Gallabat to Qadarif. There were few vehicles on the road. Just a few large trucks and some pickups whose beds overflowed with standing passengers waving at us with a kind of reserve. The landscape flattened and browned quickly. It seemed entirely natural that this hot, flat place should be a different country. At first things remained quite green, probably from water flowing down from the Ethiopian highlands we had left behind; but gradually, as the land lost relief, the dusty green turned to dust entire. Once we got to arounf Qadarif we saw that the land was increasingly given over to agriculture, with large industrialsized plots of cotton or sorghum receding toward the heatbleared horizon on either side of the road. We were supposed to meet Florent and Pippa somewhere in town for lunch, but the road bypassed it to link up with the Bin Laden-group built Port Sudan to Khartoum highway. We nearly hit an errant child passing through the outskirts of town. From what we could see of the town proper, it had been well-irrigated (viz. 'well' as a noun) into a concentration of green. There was a moque or two, but most of the buildings were boxy, single-room dwellings of mud bricks similar to the kind seen in Yemen's Hadramawt. There were also gigantic grain storage silos of the kind you might see in a place like Wichita, Omaha, Duluth or Des Moines. The eyes of black men in Arab garb followed us from where they sat under awnings at tea, dimly discerned in the tremlbing heat. I wondered what the place must be like in July.

The Khartoum highway was quite busy. As we sat pulled by to wait out the hottest hour at the edge of a thorny acacia thicket, we were passed by a long stampede of vehicles hauling grain and cotton and petroleum and people. The busses were gleaming and airconditioned modern coaches, sharply at variance with what you would see in any country bordering Sudan bar Egypt. Many of the tractor trailers still bore the company names of their original German or Dutch owners across the windshield.

through!

Hello readers,

This is to report that we have completed the journey through the
Sudan, and have crossed Lake Nasser into Aswan, Egypt.

Due to the 2-week limit on our transit visas, the majority of the time
in the Sudan was spent in rapid transit through the desert and up the
Nile, and then in a harried logistical exercise to get the vehicle
aboard a pontoon barge bound for Aswan.

We got in two days ago. The contrast between Egypt and Sudan could not
be greater. Even this Egyptian outpost has a feeling of
cosmopolitanism compared to the end-of-the-earth veneer to every place
in Sudan but Khartoum.

I will be in Cairo soon. From there I will be able to gather the
experience of transit into a few comprehensive posts. Till then.

The Sudan!

Hello all.
This is to say I made it in. The border was bureaucratic, but
friendly. The land between there and Khartoum was hot and flat and
dusty but the road was well paved and our view off it was checkered by
irrigation projects and fields of cotton and sorghum. Khartoum is all
abustle with oil money and its physical proofs of shiny just finished
and not yet finished building projects. The weather is scorching, but
there are good juices and the people know how to keep cool. We are
sleeping in tents by the banks of the Blue Nile at a place called the
Blue Nile Boating Club, the briefest of homes to many a thoroughfaring
mzungu. Or khawaja, as they call my kind here. More later, the call to
prayer is my call to eat.

Happy Halloween

Halloween 2007 – Bahir Dar, Ethiopia

And what could a child know of the darkness of God's plan? Or how
flesh is so frail it is hardly more than a dream.
-From Suttree, by Cormac McCarthy

I was getting feeling as of hauntedness or spectrality when I
realized it was Halloween. Of course the day is not marked in this
part of the world, but maybe I carry its annual occurrence within me
by dint of long programming, a dozen odd evenings spent knocking on
genteel doors, a gaudy lunatic among many. There is something about
Lake Tana that gives me the creeps. Out of place that there should be
a lake vast enough to suggest the curvature of the earth on its
horizon in the middle of the Ethiopian highlands. Its muddiness also
gives it the look of a river suddenly stilled and septic, or one of
those ghastly gravelbedded ponds you see in latterday housing
developments. Not just that general otherworldliness, but much
specific strangeness as well. The schoolchildren who on seeing a white
face will dare each other to approach and turn a sudden beggar's
trick; real beggars looking like Halloween caricatures of squalor and
maimed depravity. The fact of having been here before, at this precise
hotel in this unlikely faraway place a quarter of a decade ago in a
different season with a different companion and with different
expectations. I am thinking back, to salvage some part of myself as I
was then...what was I exactly?

It is more than fitting that the staff should fail to recognize me,
but that they know how to deal easily and congenially with my kind--we
replaceable transients, often with no inkling of our own
expendability, fungible dollar-wielders with an unaccountable and
inflated notion of self, pretenders to the throne of wholeness moving
flotsamlike through these wastes where (as everywhere) what is human
is not whole; and that I should have no more than a dim and
tendentious recognition of any of the staff, though I might recognize
a certain gargantuan fig leaning into the lake, and the grim
grottolike bedrooms, and that carbuncular shower where on that long
ago and so immediate occasion my companion stood shivering and crying under the cold stream and rinsed herself of the city's human waste in which she had stood up to her neck after a misstep in the dark. What else in the way of specific hauntedness? The buzzards this morning glimpsed circling in the blinding infinite overhead, plumage flashing with black brightness as they wheeled on their stacked isobars of updraft. The cackling of other birds in the canopy over my tent, one of them with a mocking chimp's howl. The dark and deathly beauty of the grounds with their thousands of man-high irises swaying like muted red and yellow flames; beds of bloodshot growth like prehistoric radicchios; papayas and palms twisting and shooting to escape occlusion by the canopies of giant overspreading figs--a riot of green carrying the taint of humus and rot, a walk among which suggests all the slavering predatory forms of an original forest, as if there were a very thin line between tended grounds and a cemetery featuring the friable ruins of what you would never know had ever been a hotel, everything from concrete foundation to sapling's bark to human expression reticulate with the spreading chaos that will claim us all. After which Lake Tana will still be there, ineffably lapping at the shore where stand its new harvest of uneasy beholders. On some Halloween, perhaps, long hence, when we shall have passed and left the way open for new tracks to be made for whatever purpose across these spectral highlands and down into the searing pan below. Happy Halloween.

The Road Ahead

November 1, 2007 – Bahir Dar

If you look at a map of Ethiopia, you will gather that I have successfully obtained the Sudanese transit visa by the fact that I am in Bahir Dar, the city in the northwest whence we will be making our Sudan foray. I flew here yesterday to join the gang after having picked up my visa the day prior. As you might expect, there were shenanigans. They called us in and had us wait uselessly for half an hour. Then they started handing out passports--to everyone but us, the lone wzungu. Ours were among the remaindered items taken back into the office, and I had to run after jean jacket man to ask what the hell was going on. The officials seemed shocked by the notion that our passports might actually be among those in the pile they had not handed out, even more so by the idea that they might contain valid visas. It was high incompetence, and it was not exercised without a certain officious pride. I have since concluded that it was a matter of my passport having no discernible English text, and of my companion-in-waiting having a Chinese face that Africans are simply unable to reconcile with a western passport. But we got them in the end, and other than noting that we were briefly locked inside the embassy gates and unable to leave, I have no desire to pen an account of that hollow pageant of an overtime.

On my flight to Bahir Dar to catch up Ian and Patra the next day, I
could see the Nile gorge to starboard looking like a snaking aperture
into the pit itself. Landing I could see the stripped and rusted hulk
of an attack helicopter off to the side at the head of the runway,
grim relic of conflict. Ian and Patra were having breakfast out of the
back of the vehicle when I got to the hotel. The other overland
couple, Florent and Pippa, were also camped out alongside, and it was
nice to see them. Their plates read, "Victoria—on the move."
At this point we are looking at a drive to Gonder later today. From
Gonder there is a road running west to the Sudanese frontier, and
tomorrow we will drive over that gravel track to within 30 km or so of
the border post, and will stay in a town called Shaheedi in favor of
the border town itself, where rumor has it that overlanders have
fallen prey to brigandage. The next morning we will cross the border
bright and early and start up the road for Khartoum, limber elephant's
trunk on the Nile. We have two weeks in Sudan on our transit visas,
but our effective touring time will be shorter still, since the ferry
into Egypt (there is no road running alongside Lake Nasser) leaves
only once a week, on Wednesdays, and we've heard that travelers with
their own vehicles often regret not getting there three or four days
in advance. So it'll be a quick jab for Khartoum, a day or two long
breather there with an excursion to the Nubian pyramids in the city's
vicinity, and then a drive up to Wadi Halfa, cleaving mostly to the
west bank of the river, with historical sites of indeterminate
interest to be taken in along the way. I am imagining ad hoc river
campsites, reading a book as the sun tends toward the limit of the
desert Cairo-bound Nile at my back. Sudan has many people, but on such nights will we see them? And what will the traffic be like on the road? On the river? I hope to use my camera often.

After which there's old haunt Egypt. To which Patra and Ian have never
been, meaning they'll want to do the whole shebang, which I may not be
up for. I am considering removing to Cairo and waiting for them to
wrap up the pharaonic circuit. Cairo, in turn, represents a fork in
the road. The vehicle may continue up the road toward Anatolia and
then Europe via Israel, Lebanon and Syria; but it in the event of
complications with the carnet or the visas, they may instead elect to
break west and take the trans-Maghreb route and ship the vehicle to
Europe via Tunisia—which latter is a voyage I would almost certainly
want to be a part of. Though of course there are questions of purpose
and direction and finances: My lodestone pulls the needle south toward
Zambia, where I have friends and missions both.

Let us briefly discuss the vehicle. It is a 1983 4-door Land Rover,
completely rebuilt. The engine is a 4-cylinder turbocharged diesel. I
have no insight into its performance specifications, but in favor of
its reliability let me site that it has acquitted itself well over all
the roads from Durban to Bahir Dar, and that Ian is a Formula One
mechanic.

The truck has a roof rack rig that includes a folding tent where Ian
and Patra sleep. The folding tent occupies the front of the rack. It
folds forward over the hood, and its front section is supported by a
steel ladder that fastens to the cattleguard. I have often speculated
on what might happen is a malicious passerby were to lift the ladder
support off the bar with main strength and with sleepers inside. That
has never happened. The back of the roofrack has been configured to
accommodate our trunks, which we use to store the clothes and supplies
that we don't need to get at every day. This area is accessed via a
narrow ladder running up from the left end of the rear bumper. The
trunks are locked, strapped down, and covered by a tarp. Yet there is
nothing to prevent thieves from simply cutting through tarp and straps
and making off with whole trunks. This also has never happened, most
of Africa not being as dangerous as you might think. The vehicle is
painted green, with white trim for windowframes and rooftop. There is
a snorkel to allow the engine to breathe when the grille is submerged.
There are two full-size spare tires. Oddly enough, the four passenger
doors have three different keys to open them, owing to availability
constraints on spare parts to fit the old Land Rover while Ian was
rebuilding it. My key, for instance, opens the right rear door and the
front passenger door, which is on the left, British-style. The fuelcap
cannot be accessed without a key, and there are two switches hidden
into the front console that have to be flipped on before the vehicle
will start--one to activate the electrical systems, and the other to
allow diesel into the fuel pump. Another key on my ring is used to
open the rear, access to which is guarded by one of those shielded and
circular locks you sometimes see on the backs of plumbers' vans in New
York. The back houses our food, our stove, our somewhat ingeniously
concealed stacks of cash, and other chattel we deem too valuable to
consign to the roofrack. Not to mention the tools Ian needs to
maintain the vehicle, as well as a refrigerator that runs off the
battery when the engine is on. Inside, the vehicle seats 4 in
racing-style bucket seats of the kind you might see in a tricked-out
Civic or other ricer. No radio, no other frills. But there is a
handheld GPS unit. And that is my home for the next three or four
weeks. Basta. More from Gonder, parhaps. And then Khartoum.

Fuck You, Orange County

See him! Does he not offend thee? Does such iniquity not rise stinking to the very heavens? The viperous evangelist reared up, his elbows cocked and goat's eyes smoking, and thrust a bony finger down. Die! he screamed. Perish a terrible death with thy bowels blown open and black blood boiling from thy nether eye, God save your soul amen.
-From McCarthy's Suttree

The night before last I was in the hotel bar with Ian and Patra, logisticians over a beer. We were discussing the road agead when I started to notice a CNN International Edition newscast on the satellite TV. The hour’s grim tidings began with a report on Iraqi refugees. After eliding any talk of ultimate responsibility, the show moved on to a segment that centered on the material losses incurred by Orange County homeowners as a result of wildfires with arson as the suspected cause. As I listened to the reporter rattle off how many millions of dollars had gone up in smoke, and as I watched a wholesome and well-heeled looking white family wail over the cinders of what had been their dream home, it occurred to me that the segment was being broadcast in the service of a religious rite, however unconsciously. What we were watching was an elaborately coded ritual to mourn the loss, not only of material possessions, but of the sanitized atomistic disentropy of the American dream. Never mind that the family was entirely unscathed in life and limb (even the fucking dog made it); never mind that, pending the insurance disbursement, they were about to embark on a million dollar shopping spree; never mind that the privileged strata of our society (of which these people eminently were a part) have transcended any true dependence on their material goods as a function of insurance policies and financial instruments—what CNN had put together was a hypocritical and atavistic dirge where the tawdry bit players keened over a feigned loss of wealth, fungible chattel that they will promptly forget all about after picking out a new house and taking a few trips to the mall, with maybe a weekend in Acapulco thrown in for good measure. Alloying con artistry with myth, the program showed the family isolated amid the ruins of their gorgeous refuge, conspicuously omitting the social and financial institutions that would nullify their loss, so inviting us to take part in a mourning ritual that was as offensive as it was meaningless. The gall.

As hinted earlier, the ritual's second function was to lay bare a rupture in the mail of the American dream—unguessed, I guess, by its orchestrators. Look at this family, formerly so secure in their home nestled in the woods away from everything and everybody. Who righteously were reenacting their innocent roles as settlers on the frontier, these proud, standardbearing, insular encapsulators of that original taming and of all that is white and godly, carbons to a tee of their forebears save his commutes to Burbank and her online shopping. When what foul heathen should set a satanic FIRE and destroy all they had accomplished at a stroke. The reactions seem neatly scripted: “I can’t believe it.” “Who would do this to people they don't even know?" “I never thought it would happen to us.” Read: People like us are not supposed to be affected by the outside world, or be vulnerable to disaster. It’s their own little 9-11. And just like 9-11, fragments of the shattered myth must be reconstructed using a scaffolding of righteousness, a mortar of vengeance. And then, when the shackled perpetrator is brought before wrathful Justice and sentenced and dragged off, the whole charade can start from the top.

I think being in Ethiopia helped key me into the absurdity of the segment somewhat. I imagine that on the very evening the report was shown, there were dozens of people throughout this impoverished country who were silently starving, shitting themselves to death, or succumbing to the final inert throes of malaria or AIDS. I wonder: How would a poor Ethiopian audience member react when made to understand that these people had not really lost anything? Not that I claim any kind of novelty for my observation. I would hope that there might be millions of Americans who might—should they pause to really consider it—be offended by that dirge to material lost. And more millions of intelligent Americans who would fail to understand why insurers and government should be obliged to defray the losses suffered by fools who choose to live on beaches and floodplains and faultlines or on southern California’s tinderbox chaparral. It is a mockery of the human intelligence to beg pity for a disaster without a victim (though our vindictive pseudobiblical legal system is expert at prosecuting crimes with no victim other than the wrathful deity of the old testament)—or, more properly, a disaster whose victim is the majority who subsidize the vain and wasteful 'lifestyle' choices that are the ordained prerogative of the hood-winking, forest-and-beachland-dwelling minority, America's Saxon elect, of whose depredations and hypocrisy the continent’s modern history is but a long blotter.

At the end of the broadcast there was talk of a $250,000 bounty for information leading to the arrest of the putative arsonist. Would that I had $250,000 of my own to offer up to a copycat. Fuck you, Orange County.

My day at the Sudanese embassy: A sketch in 4 quarters

Pregame:
I arrive at the embassy gate at 9 in the morning, dropped off by the Land Rover. I skitter up to a signboard proclaiming the function of the place, and its hours, texted in Amharic and English. It is not a board, but a series of square metal tubes welded at intervals onto a mast. Except for the topmost one, the informational tubes end bluntnosed and open. But the top tube, the one that identifies the place as the Sudanese embassy, ends in an arrow pointing its beholder toward a derelict cinderblock wall across the street. The outside of the embassy is guarded by a mutilated tin-and-plank-built sentry box where guards sit smoking. Ranged along the wall leading up to the gate are today's supplicants, eagerly clutching their folders and plastic document sleeves. Most, it will turn out, are Somalis. I am the sole mzungu. There is also a young woman who looks Chinese. In the minutes to kickoff, a door built into the gate swings open periodically to emit a guard. The first of these guards looks harmless enough, but after three or four swings of the door, the guards being turned out look positively ferocious. They survey the crowd scornfully before striding on long legs up the street. Is this place a guard factory? If I go in there, how will I end up looking when I come out?

Kickoff:
At just past 9:30, the door is opened by a small man in a jean jacket. He smiles mockingly to reveal teeth stained by tobacco. I take him for an Ethiopian. At a casual flip of this man's head, entire supplicant crowd swarms the gate and clamors through. Jean-jacket man seizes a man in front of me (a Somali?) and pushes him back out onto the sidewalk. "Imshi!" he yells (this is Arabic for go! or get out!). I proceed inside the compound. There is an inside gatehouse, a largish main building with a large corrugated-and-galvanized-tin roofed awning where we are to wait, and a smaller building off in the back left corner.

I walk toward the awning and see Tom, an Englishman I’d met earlier at the Egyptian embassy (you need a preexisting Egyptian visa in order to apply for a Sudan transit visa). We shake hands and he tells me he is there to pick his up. How had he managed that, I wonder. He says he applied the day before, on the Thursday. But they claim to be closed on Thursday, I say. Well, they had let him in. What could he say? I wish then that I had either not seen or blithely disregarded the information in the Lonely Planet about the embassy only being open for business on M-W-F. Which would have allowed me to accompany Ian and Patra on the first leg of their journey up north, to Bahir Dar. They already have their visas, and as they are raring to go, I will have to fly up to meet them once I have the visa in hand. I might add that Tom is flouting the embassy's posted admonition that visas are to be collected at 3 o'clock. No matter. Barely five minutes later the blithe young fellow is walking out with his freshly minted Sudanese transit visa.

First quarter:
I am sitting on a wooden bench and am tightly wedged between an elderly Ethiopian lady with a headscarf and leathery, knotted hands on one side, and a younger one on the other. Outside the lady on my right, there are not too many gray hairs to be found under this awning. The people here are young and youngish hopefuls. I look around and ascertain that, as is the case with Addis in general, the majority of those present are women. Christians among them are neatly turned out in western garb, makeup, and the occasional scarf; the Muslim women dress more modestly, but also well. Some of the Somali women are adorned by tribal tattoos that run in wreaths from forehead to throat. I can hear Somali, Amharic and Arabic spoken. I wait. I read my book about the Puritans' diabolical Indian conquests, occasionally darting my eyes off the page to steal glances at the most luxuriously beautiful of the women. In the interstices of my thinking I confirm that Africa's post-independence violence is inseparable from the rapacity of the continent’s colonizers, with special mention owed to the cowardly and cruel Belgians (may the country break in half an no longer tarnish the annals of history). And I wait. Occasionally there is some hubbub when a rejected application is returned to a defeated supplicant. At one point, a crowd of people rushes out from the shelter and mills around jean jacket man. To what end I have no idea.

At the bottom of the shelter are two windows for bureaucrat-supplicant interface and interrogation. For nearly two hours, neither of them are cracked, and nothing behind them stirs. Occasionally jean jacket man enters the shelter with a cluck to exhort the crowd to silence behind his mysteriously mocking smile. I see what appears to be a southern Sudanese dwarf enter the main gate and exchange salaams with a tall, turbaned Arab. I keep thinking about the business of the other people here. They are not itinerants or adventurers. In their lives they have somehow come to a conjuncture where they have had to set course for Sudan as the way forward—whether to engage in contract labor or to press on for Egypt and what lies beyond the Mediterranean I can only guess.

The first quarter ends when the Chinese girl approaches me to ask if I have any idea what is going on, in an Australian accent. I tell her what I know by way of Ian and Patra's experience: That we can expect to pick up the application forms from the left teller sometime soon; that after submitting the completed application with two photographs and copies of both our passports and onward Egyptian visas, the reviewed forms will be returned to us by the left teller with the word "neg" written down the margin in a calligraphic scrawl, something that should occasion no concern; that the application will then need to be submitted to the ultimate authority behind the right counter for further review, and that we should not be overly concerned if it takes an hour or more to get the attention of this ultimate authority; and that, barring any complications, it will then be time to pay. I tell her that my friends were here for a total of four hours. And that jean jacket man wields more power than you might expect, and should be approached in a pinch. What I do not tell her, for lack of knowledge, is that in the quarters or acts remaining, some bona fide dramas will be played out before us.

Second quarter:
I have moved to sit by the Australian girl when the window behind the left counter swings open to reveal an inoffensive-looking Sudanese bureaucrat. This is the man who hands out applications. Because most of those present are already somewhere in the middle of the process—back for their second or third go—there is only a minor tussle to get at the window. I recall that during the tussle, a strong wind scoured the canopies of whatever alien trees stood outside the gate, sending streams of seared fragmentary foliage trickling through the sunlight, a hissing reel of mortal decay. For a moment I forget the window, listening into the wind: Empty-handed messenger.

As we jostle for the applications being handed through the window I converse with a Somali (Moxammed I think) who like me is seeking a Sudanese transit visa. I ask him is he transiting to Egypt, to which he says in his harsh Somali voice, no, to South Africa. Which doesn’t exactly check out—but what tactics might you not employ if you were a Somali seeking a better life? The Aussie girl and I, having formed a natural faranji league, eventually manage to shove our passports through the window (they need to see the Egyptian visa before they will relinquish the precious form) and get our applications. We fill them out and fall to talking. She has been on the Africa circuit for six months, from South Africa on up. Much like Ian and Patra, with the difference that she is 21, and traveling on her own. Which speaks not only to her determination and courage (and affluence!), but also to the generosity and kindness of Africa's many peoples. Especially given the kinds of stories I hear about the reception Africans sometimes give people who they assume to be Chinese.

I tell her that I have shared her experience of such and such a place, but I am loath to qualify my errand in Africa, having found it to be usually more expedient to leave off disclaimers of project or purpose when palavering with fellow travelers. I don’t think I enjoy attention for my plans, preferring when it attaches to occupation of the moment, to charisma (is that condition any different to the full occupation and enjoyment of the present?). The second quarter ends when we hand in the completed applications to the man behind window number 1, and get them back in hand almost as quickly.

Third quarter:
By now it is perhaps 11:30. We are gripping our applications and conversing to pass the time. Window number 2 suddenly swings open to reveal a most severe Sudanese interrogator. From the south, from central Africa, his skin tone is at the far end of the human spectrum whose other extreme is occupied by the English and some of the pale peoples dotting the Baltic. His is a black alloyed with purple and cobalt. A name is called out by an officious Ethiopian in a pinstriped dinner jacket who sits on a desk between window number 2 and the crowd. The interrogator's lower lip is extended in a pout of displeasure and disapproval even before he begins questioning these people for whom there is actually something hanging in the balance of the visa application process. He conducts his interviews in a mixture of Arabic and English, and in Amharic through the agency of the man in the dinner jacket, whose position ensures that interrogator and supplicant are separated by six feet and one intermediate official.

To judge by their smiles and looks of relief, the interrogations seem to pass off successfully for the applicants concerned. Until a certain Ethiopian lady’s name is called. As she approaches, the man asks her to confirm her prospective address in Khartoum. She stumbles. Strike one. The next question concerns her kinship to a man indicated on her application. Was he her father? Husband? Brother? This is the crux of the interrogation. Again she faltered. She could not specify the relation. After trying to get her to specify who the man was another two or three times with something like patience, he handed her her application and passport in disgust, waving her away with a flip of the hand. For her part, because language and reason had failed her—who knows what sordid complexities lay behind the uncovered subterfuge—she was left with her face as the only effective means of suasion. As he was hacking away at her defenses, the expression grew ever more plaintive and desperate, until at last, like a master actress or caricaturist, she had her mien perched on the very edge of tears. When she was turned away she did not cry. Instead she went out to compose herself, and then returned to the shelter, standing in the “gallery” where she was on prominent display to the interrogator. There she managed masterfully to hold the verge-of-tears look for the better part of an hour. During which hour other women would emerge from their interview unscathed and elated, adding still more gravity to her affect.

After perhaps an hour and a half of these interrogations, I begin to think that I might try to make something happen on my account. I tap the dinner-jacketed interpreter to see when it might be my turn to submit to the visa section's ultimate authority, but he shrugs my hand off and fixes me with an acid stare. "Wait!" When, some minutes later, I approach jean jacket man to see if he can intercede to turn the crank of ultimate authority, he marches me right up to window 2 and is about to plead my case when the ultimate authority angrily tells him to leave, and me to sit down. So much for his pull.

Another hour passes. The girl and I talk lazily, perfunctorily. I doze briefly. She goes out to see if there is any food to be had. The 3rd quarter will not end. While she is gone I overhear two middle-aged Arabs (Syrians?) talking strategy. "Don't talk to that guy in Arabic. Talk to him in English, whatever you do. And don't tell him you work in my company. You're there on a visit." I'm not sure what that language caveat signifies—perhaps the assumption is that Syrian Arabic would make the Sudanese official feel somehow inferior and provoke a rejection out of spite.

It is also worth mentioning that the tutoring Arab, as well as a number of supplicant Somali men, periodically encourage me to make another move on window 2, thinking to sail in on my privileged coattails; and that whenever I heed their sage advice I am rebuffed by the pinstriped interpreter. When Pei returns (as the Aussie girl is named), we eat a couple of revivifying rolls. She says that she is considering withdrawing her application, taking the delay for a sign. I encourage her to wait it out, having come this far. At length the interrogations are concluded, at which point jean jacket man comes running in to silence everyone, then to pull them bodily away from window number 2, lest they should pollute the ultimate authority’s field of vision and so distract him from his delicate task. With the crowd reorganized and pacified, he collects our applications, as well as those of the strategerizing Arabs and some of the Somali men who had begun their long journey that day with me at window number 1. It is the endgame of the 3rd quarter, with the home team looking like it might pull off the shutout.

Fourth quarter:
It is 2:30 in the afternoon. It does not seem that jean jacket man has been able to hand the documents over to the ultimate authority, who appears to have either left the office or retreated into some murky corner of his official’s lair—so I feel my heart sink when jean jacket man draws near to hand them back. But it's not as I fear. Come back at 3:00, he says. Visa OK. Pay cashier then. Now we take lunch. So Pei and I go up the road for a quick njera sampler. Given the emotional drainage of the wait, I do not presently recall what we discussed. Emotional exhaustion! What vanity, I now feel, to cite the experience of the embassy as grounds for emotional exhaustion. What right to I the vagabond-itinerant possess in the face of all these people for whom love and livelihood are at stake—what right, I repeat, have I to be affected on my own behalf in the face of all this? Seeing how most of the world lives makes me want, in spite of myself, to occupy no space, to command no empathy, to merit no respect. None at all. What a contradictory sentiment to be seen in one who wants everything from the world! Well. I may want to squeeze the last gritty droplet of experience out of this thing, but I wish to go about it quietly, unobtrusively—by disappearing.

But—chaff!—this is a game summary, and I need to get on with the fourth quarter. Done breaking the fermented flapjacks that pass for bread here, we shuffle back to the embassy. It is five of three, the supplicants are ranged with patience and good grace against the wall, and the shadows of posts and palings are playing longer on their faces than before. The woman with the plaintive expression is not among the waiting. After 10 minutes or so, the gate opens and we are permitted to storm inside. Because I am utterly ineffective at African-style clamoring (being too much of a gentleman, you see), I end up near the rear of the line snaking from the cashier’s counter. Suddenly inspired to chivalrous pageantry, the Arab who had been advising his friend admonishes the women to form their own queue. "Lady first!" he says. Yet because the cashier alternates between the two lines in his processing of payments, the segregation is really no more than that. It is not to the women's advantage. But the important thing is that it was an arrangement that the consigliore could be content with. After some minutes Pei makes her payment and flees. See you Monday when the visas are ready. See you Monday.

It takes about half an hour to get to the head of the line, by which time I have the beginnings of a sunburn. Just as it is my turn to hand my materials to jean jacket man, who will in turn pass them to the cashier, he is approached by the Somali who featured in the second quarter—the one who was obtaining a Sudanese transit visa so that he could head for South Africa. "Please my friend. Please help me. I have been here 8 times and nobody has helped me. Please.” Jean jacket man takes his materials and makes no show of considering them before handing them back. The mocking grin turned malevolent, he orders the man to leave: "Imshi!" The defeated Somali trudges back to the tin-roofed waiting area, no doubt to enter a futile plea at window number 2. The dwarf is looking on from the shadows. He is grinning.

It is now my turn to pay. Never have I had to go through more for the honor of forking over $61. Of course, this process has been much easier than getting into the DRC, but at least that was free. The process is complete. The clock has expired. Payment filed, jean jacket man places my certified application and passport at his feet with the rest of them. I open my mouth to thank him, but have lost my voice and can manage little more than a croak.

A briefing from Addis

First some anecdotes, impressions. The funny signage in Addis: A hoarding trumpeting the Society for the Erection of Martyr Advancement Foundation; a hardware store marquee advertising Pumps, Hoses, Paint and Vibrators.

All around the streamers and flags and garlands from the millennium celebration at the beginning of the month. In Ethiopia, you see, it is the year 2000, just turned. Also—and this is something I failed to notice the last time I was here—their reckoning of the 24 hour period begins not at midnight but at daybreak, i.e. six in the morning is their hour zero.

An anecdote overheard, spoken by a road-tripping wzungu couple: “We travel with a little plastic snake that sits coiled up on the dashboard. It gives every African who peeps in through the window a fright. Once we flung it at some children who were giving us trouble. They ran away screaming.”

The cab drivers all want to know if I can give them an in to get to your country, get to your country, get to your country. Cabbie Markos has a friend who has been in a 'refugee camp' in Hamburg for five years. The government will not let him work.

The hills around Addis range to 3,000 meters, and on those high ridges is where the world's best marathoners get their practice. And yet down in Addis’s cauldron where the diesel-choked air shimmers dully with a color like slate, it is an effort just to keep putting one foot in front of the next. The aridity and elevation give the smoke a granular acridness that refuses to clear, unlike, say, the sootiest diesel in rain or humid air.

Addis is squalid, yes, but its people maintain a dignity whose betokening facial expression verges on haughtiness. On the subject of the people, it would be an unforgivable omission not to mention the women. They are of the rarest beauty, yet—uncannily—in this place such beauty is no rarity. A silly thing to subject to analysis or taxonomy, perhaps, but it’s something about the sharply contrasting tones of lips and face, the delicacy of their faces, the high foreheads, the curves teased out to fit elongate frames, no less the conscious flare used everywhere to accentuate the beauty: Scent of musk, nails painted black or purple, scarves that hide one curve and set off another. Several times a day I feel as if I must surely be witnessing the passage of one of the world’s most beautiful women in the flesh. And as in Zambia, it also seems that the women here, and I mean the poor ones, are better kept and less weatherbeaten and careworn than the men. Why is this?

And in other news...

Istanbul Cont'd

Mission accomplished on the first head. I had the bath. It was relaxing, no nonsense, and it made me see that the bathhouse in Sana'a had an Ottoman precursor. The same vaulted dome with small, tubular skylights bored out of the stone roof, allowing light to cut through the steam and play on the water and walls. There really isn't to’ much to report. Though (shucks) I suppose it does bear mentioning that there was a bit of pain involved. At one point my masseur Ahmed crossed my arms over my chest, bore down on the elbows, and managed to crack the cartilage between several vertebrae. There was also some painful, if not very thorough, leg massage.
I might add, with reference to an estate which I am fortunate enough to have seldom affected me to my detriment, that Turkey has just passed a parliamentary motion authorizing its troops to attack PKK rear bases in neighboring Iraq. The practical meaning may or may not be near nil. but the symbolic echo of our own unilateralism is unmistakable, and gives little comfort. It also makes it tempting to play on my Swedish identity as needed.

There is a phenomenon I often experience when walking around unfamiliar urban spaces. It goes a little something like this: I am walking along when it occurs to me that I wish to sit down for a coffee or a sandwich. There are many options available. But instead of inspecting them and settling on the first one that meets with my approval, I can't bring myself to stop and inspect a single one. Whenever I think about stopping to inspect a menu or poke my head through a door, I am gripped by a kind of horrible, self-loathing inertia. Why is this? One reason is the self-awareness that comes with being on display to the residents of an unfamiliar place. I don’t want to be seen hesitating. So why then do I not simply make for the first place that catches my eye? Well, because that would be impossible. It’s a matter of atmosphere, you see. When in unfamiliar places I am nearly always trying to think about them actively, or write about them. To make up for the soporific dazzle I feel New York sometimes imposes on mind and pen. So while I cannot risk ridicule by stopping at one bill of fare after another, nor can I hazard the frustration of wasting my time where, due to poor service or the presence of too many cretins, I cannot think. The alternative is to wander around for miles or hours with seeming purpose, while ready at any step to concede, to deflate in a heap of defeat. I start to feel I would have been better off staying at home. It started happening to me in Istanbul today, but I was fortunate enough to hit on a solution that I hope will not seem too creepy. This is what I did: As soon as I felt the onset of my purposeful indecisiveness, my eyes fixed on the form of a female pedestrian in front of me. I fell to following her, almost without thinking. After taking about 3 of the turns she had taken, I decided that if she entered a café or a restaurant within a few minutes, so would I. It seemed likely that an attractive young woman would lead me to an attractive place. And if she didn’t enter one within a few minutes, I would step into the first one she shot an appraising glance at. And that is exactly what I did. I am now sitting at the intersection of two narrow alleys under the high and watchful eye of a minaret. There is music, and a little bit of street life, but at the tables I am alone. It is perfect—even more so because I ended up here a function of someone else’s whim. Yes, I rode the waves of fate to get here. Not bad. I’d like to try this more often, to unburden myself of as much of the responsibility of choice as possible. Will that mean that I will end up behind a white picket fence, or behind bars? I just hope it doesn't get me into too much trouble!

~

In Darren’s harbor there are many boats seining for bluefish, mackerel, and I believe turbot. These vessels ply a fading, outmoded and unproductive trade, and form the foreground to the constant stream of container ships and tankers, the standard-bearers of globalization. Their boats are overstaffed, the waters overfished—although the currents flowing in from both the Black Sea and Marmara have kept them at this game of diminishing returns to date. The Black Sea offing has been cleared of smog by the bluster of this day, with ships at its very limit issuing a vague and blurry challenge to the uniformity of the horizon.
Just now there is a tanker passing called the Aegean Angel, its name writ small on the prow, its font size in sharp contrast to the huge emblazoning of the line’s name amidships, Arcadia Hellas, as if in challenge to the Turkishness of these waters, which of course have flowed and scintillated and been plied under the auspices of many different standards in many different times. And now to do a bit of fishing…

A list

As salat al-fajr (the dawn prayer) is called this morning--rustily, I think--I indulge in the workaday pleasure of composing a to-do list, albeit slightly turned away from the usual chaff to do with management of money and my own labor. This time I’m indulging in a list of sights to see, "experiences" to have, and perhaps, at the outside, people to correspond with. Notwithstanding which, or even as a function of which, depending, I should like to note that purchasing some original Izmir tile, or any Ottoman craft if at all within my means, seems as sound an investment as any. And, by the (noting) way, that this morning my mind seems ever to have skipped to something else by the time my pen moves to mop up whatever progression of morsels were previously in its eye, or teeth, or hand or mouth. That has a ring to it: In my all-devouring (pantophagor) mind's mouth, I digested a morsel. Or: Living from mind's hand to mind's mouth.
Enough, enough! Now for a plunge into sights future and potential, before backpedaling into a treatment of sights seen.

1. I want to bathe in a hammam. One of those stone-built Turkish baths deep in the bowels of some building where foreign voices are muted by hissing jets of steam. Which brings me to a half-waking question I asked myself earlier. Why, if gay men can visit a gay bathhouse and have casual, even anonymous sex, and this arrangement is accepted as a by and large legitimate manifestation of their sexuality; why then are no similar bathhouse arrangements possible for straight pleasure-seekers who wish to take the waters, and something else besides? Has anyone ever heard of a co-ed heterosexual bathhouse that acts as a sexual crucible? Sex among men and women that is truly casual is hard to come by. And perhaps that is as it should be. After all, no matter how effective the contraception, heterosexual coitus cannot be separated in form from the serious business of reproduction.

Only in a culture (or world) without a trace of hope* for future generations—or where sex had been irrevocably divorced from the business of reproduction, with the pair's latter half invested in the holy offices (labs) of gene science (obviously an arrangement that applies only to the rich, or to those who submit to the reproductive imperatives of Power), could we conceive of a bathhouse where men and women met for sex that, divested of the merest vanishing trace of sacred generative power, was truly casual. This thought spawns another: If reproduction (and its specter) were somehow totally cut out of the arrangement, would then a different logic apply to the selection of partners? I'll admit it's ridiculous right here, since so much of this business is impulsive and instinctual anyway. Men would still be attracted to the curves that denote the ability to bear and rear children, women still so to the hard lines and size that bespeak the ability to protect.
One thing that might disappear in the bathhouse of a culture’s twilight, though, is what might be termed speculative prostitution—when the body is offered in response to perceived wealth, on speculation of reward. Or at least the genetically (i.e. the promise of a safe childrearing environment) motivated branch of that behavior might disappear.

But no—I am getting ensnared in these speculations. I despair of their foolishness. On the one hand, if the production of new people were entrusted to magician-scientists, there is no guarantee that heterosexual sex would survive. All the mysteries—that vestige of sacredness (that "utopian trace" enshrined to this day in the institution of marriage, and negatively apparent in the opprobrium piled on the harlot) that attends heterosexual sex even today—would be lost. And lacking that sacredness, and even especially the cynical mock sacredness flogged by Hollywood and Madison Avenue and all the rest, what would drive the sexes to seek each other’s company? What, indeed, would keep alive any distinction between the sexes? If it is all taken care of in the lab, what need to attract the other by honing and displaying one's physical attributes, or through various social and intellectual flourishes to "demonstrate value?"

We have already begun to witness a tendency toward androgyny in the west. Witness metrosexuality. Witness the worship en masse of ephebic males and of waiflike boy-women who, in their quest of a supposed bodily perfection, deny that body its fertility. Witness the ever-increasing swapping and reversal of gender roles, and witness especially the tendency, among intellectual and technical elites, to define the self beyond the pale of sex. A bad thing? It is a thing like any other. Though it is something Islam has a problem with, in case you weren’t paying attention.

Or take the obverse of the coin: Cultural twilight, nihilism. Imagine you are on a doomed flight. Now consider the act of (heterosexual) sex as your final. Even assuming there is enough time, and that the mechanics are workable, is there not something obscene to the thought of having sex during your last minutes over the earth? (Note that this is not to be confused, either with becoming a member of the mile high club, or with dying of a heart attack during orgasm, both of which I hold to be desirable, the latter ideal) Never mind the old notion of death being something to face down stoically, alone. It’s the wisdom of repugnance, I say! Seriously now (calm down!), I can’t vouch for others' way of thinking, but when I think of being in a situation preliminary to a known catastrophic death, I think I would want to hold a woman, kiss her—I just can't see wanting sex. Isn't this because, whether we like it or not, the heterosexual act still has this aura of hallowedness about it, stemming from its (still) central role in the powerfully mysterious business of creating new humans? When in speaking of "casual sex" we say that it has become an empty ritual, I suspect that we do not quite believe it. Rituals involve us in processes that are greater than ourselves, and that is why we participate in them. Now imagine a somewhat more prolonged twilight, i.e. a nuclear winter. Obviously not the time to bring a child into the world, but beyond that even—let's say contraceptives are used—isn't it a sacrilege of sorts to commit the joyful act as the world is dying? Witness the scarcity of August babies.

That said, I think that a truly active heterosexual bathhouse will remain the stuff of fantasy. It may be a thrilling fantasy—who doesn't enjoy an occasional peep into the abyss of dissipation and irreverence? By way of closing I would like to mention that I can sense another can of worms ready to burst. Its label reads that there are those among us in the West who, despairing of all things, are of the opinion that it is wrong to bring children into the world as it is, despite the lack of any certain ending to our breakneck age—and who, acting with a truly moral consistency, eschew sex. These are the harbingers of the forlorn sight of the empty twilight bathhouse. Just a morsel for thought.
So that is one thing I need to do, is visit a Turkish bathhouse. The plan is to do so today.
2. Next up is the Hippodrome, that much celebrated center of Byzantine and then Ottoman political life. Forgive the flourish: It's almost verbatim from the Lonely Planet, that non plus ultra of forgettable bombast. I dare them to say "undiscovered gem" one more time. I fucking dare them. Regardless, the Hippodrome is where chariot races and wrestling bouts determined the faction that had political favor with emperors and sultans. I don’t aim to get into a lengthy treatment of this—I know very little of Roman, Byzantine or Ottoman history—but it brings me back to something I wrote in my first post on this trip. About how it is exciting to be able to read past chapters of history in the monuments that have survived its spasms and cataclysms into the present. That Istanbul gives an exciting feeling because it reads like a palimpsest. All very true. And which may lead visitor and denizen alike to make claims about the antiquity of a place. As opposed to, say, the New World. Or to Australia. Or to Scandinavia, which to my eyes has always seemed so newly civilized. What I’m getting at is this: Almost every land is antique in terms of human habitation. Our perceptions of antiqueness are conditioned by the survival of written documents and by the practice of having built in stone. These are the hallmarks of antiquity after all. I have been reading a book called The Conquest of America by Francis Jennings. It deals with the dispossession of the Indians of New England, and with the myths of civilization, and chosenness, and manifest destiny, as well as the legal fictions used first to justify and then to forget that dispossession. The point is that our land is also very much an antique one. In Boston, the book mentions, researchers carbon-dated an unearthed fish weir, and found its wood to have been felled some 4,000 years ago. Which in its own understated way provoked in me the same sense of sublimity and wonder that filled me yesterday in the Church of the Divine Wisdom, when I considered that that magnificent cathedral had been built a millennium and a half ago. The signs of what and who came before are everywhere. In North America, they are insubstantial, spectral, buried beneath centuries of mutually reinforcing violence and amnesia. It should come as no wonder that so very much of our landscape seems haunted, upon closer inspection, by reminders of the dead that are just faint enough to be disturbing.There are some other things I want to do before I leave on Saturday, like go out on the town one night, but if I begin to write about that I may lose myself in a mire of verbiage. Until next time then, I remain your faithful correspondent.

Repacking in Istanbul

I write this to you not from the accidental new city of Addis Ababa, but from Istanbul, a city that several times and under different names and dispensations has been one of the world’s great centers. My ticket provided for a 12-hour layover here before pushing on to Addis, but between having a good friend here and the leniency of my airline’s fare change rules (or the irregularity with which they are applied), I decided to parlay a half day into a few. Having a hospitable friend to stay with is enough to make almost any place half lovely, but the Stamboul’s charms extend beyond the comforts of hearth and stowage.

My first impression of Istanbul, which appeared very suddenly as our plane finally broke through the low undulating blanket of raincloud through which we had been descending for thousands of feet was of mélange. That breakthrough did not come until within 100 feet of the ground, giving the city an aspect of eastern hiddenness, of purdah, as eagerly I chased some sign of it on our descent. The glimpse I caught was of drab 1960’s modern 4-to-10-story apartment blocks intermingled with warehouses intermingled with mean and roughly timbered-or-masoned single-story dwellings, all in turn intermingled with many mosques whose minarets reached for the sky in the lovely tapering Ottoman style I’d only before seen in pictures.

As a traveler with a Swedish passport, my visa was free and immediate, and although the airport's atmosphere had the oppressive still dampness of a basement in a hot summer rainstorm. It was especially bad in the bathroom before I removed from my face that layer of oil that always attends a long flight.

The decision to stay on was not immediate. Darren, who is taking some engineering courses at Bosporus University, came to meet me outside of customs. Initially the plan was to go into the city, eat, walk, and then return in time for my night flight south over the Mediterranean and down along the Nile and its blue tributary. My thinking changed once we were on our way into the city. Along with the elements of attraction (its beautiful setting on the twin crescent ridges of mountain which, bounding the Bosporus, sweep away from each other in four directions to give a feeling of movement and airy openness, and make the city one of constant breathtaking prospects; the tasty food and the allure of a new people; and the feeling inspired by the apparent presence of a distant past that yet sprouts up among the trappings of the modern—not to mention the east-meets-west cliché), there were enough things to deter me from an immediate bid on Addis Ababa (having nothing but a foggy notion of where within Ethiopia my traveling companions might be, and being unable to contact them; feeling utterly exhausted and a tad unstable from my uninterrupted weeks-long pageant of I’m pushing off now revelry; and cherishing no special fondness for Addis)—and together they were enough to keep me here.

Before mentioning my impressions of Istanbul and making an remark or two incidental to my packing, a note on purpose. Before I left, a friend asked me what my goals were for this trip. I tried to respond in the spirit used to put the question, which was one of challenge, i.e. what could you possibly hope to… I think I cited something about improving my Arabic, looking into the “Afro-Arab fusion” mentioned long ago by a faded friend, perhaps taking more pictures, writing more, etc. But the primary thing, I now realize, is that, like Moby-Dick’s Bulkington, I need to keep open the independence of my sea. The life in New York City, while I’ll admit it’s been kind to me over the last 2 months, is not enough. I undertake this journey because it is my nature, and because I can. I know that these voyages push the envelope of vanity, of self-importance, perhaps of material entitlement—just know that I am keen, no desperate, to put forth as much if not more than I take in while on this voyage. Why should we be ashamed of doing the things of which we are capable?

So what have I been doing for the past few days? I will assume that this is a question you need answered. Flouting the conventions of this electronic medium (best suited to brief chatterings and unfounded oracular statements) with a view to enduringness, I will be at pains not to be pithy in a strict sense, but to provide as much pith as possible. I believe more and more that as with the brief, desperate pageant of life itself, each instance of expression or meditation occurs but once, so I feel compelled to fill it to the utmost, to be expansive, to occur in expression as much as in sentiment. When I returned to Zambia, I heard from many of you that I had not been frequent enough with my posts. I have taken your admonition to heart. Writing is like friendship. It is a matter of trusting investment. Here the act of giving should not be measured in the number of words remitted, but though prolixity comes to me by default, I believe my brand of it to be alloyed with many good and strong bits—so forbear.

And here I am. I am in the northern reaches of Istanbul’s European crescent, where my friend has a commanding view over the remaining sweep of the Bosporus and the limitless vista of the Black Sea beyond. The hour is passing from night to dawn. The muezzin will soon be broadcasting his declaration, which is something I have always liked to be up for, if not awoken by. The night is cold, and I feel warm in my sleeping bag. I am thinking about making coffee. I am feeling clear-headed, lucky. Here I am.

On the first day Darren and I sat down to eat a kebab dish in the old city center, close to the Blue Mosque and the Aya Sofia, those incomparable monuments set off against and eyeing each other like two lovely women jealous of one another's charms. On the way to the restaurant, we were greeted by a rug merchant who stepped up to the curb where the cab happened to drop us off. "You are my destiny," he said, smiling. "My rugs are your destiny." Dazed by the combination of air travel and the restraint I always exercise on my English while abroad, I said nothing. But the absurd and strangely poetic hard sell stuck with me. Perhaps destiny will pair me with one of his rugs yet.

After we had eaten, we went back to the airport to change my ticket. The running around I had to do, first to change the ticket, and then to claim my bags before they were loaded into a plane bound for Ethiopia, might merit their own post if I weren't so tired of that cheap mode of travel writing that makes sport of inefficiencies. Why not be content to say I was successful in my attempt, and that it was free to do so? We then returned to Darren’s apartment through a gathering rainstorm. I was happy not to be up among the thunderheads in a hurtling aluminum cage. Reaching Darren's apartment took over two hours, and the last stretch of the journey was on foot up a steep flight of stone steps. By that time it was raining torrentially, and getting cold. The palms looked cowed and unnatural, like the palms of Cornwall. My calves felt like they would melt.

The rain continued the following day. Rivulets flowed down the neighborhood’s steep streets and broken steps. A smell of sewage came up through all the drains in the apartment and I did not shower. Darren's grand view of the Bosporus was streaked by sheets of rain. The anchovy seine fishers were periodically obscured from view, and the container ships and tankers (the former full and the latter empty) bound for Odessa and Sevastopol proceeded with a thundering caution. Sometimes I stood in the window to look and listen (the seine boats, instead of using radios, were yelling out orders and imprecations at each other using bullhorns, the sound of which carried straight up the amphitheatric hill). But mostly I lay ensconced in my sleeping bag on the couch, alternately napping and reading the incomparable Moby-Dick. It was a wonderful luxury (or a return to sensibility) to be able to nap and read like that, unoncerned by the things and dollars needing to be done and made. Darren and I left the house once to get a bite to eat. It was getting blustery, and the sensation of atmospheric cold was another thing I had been craving through New York's latest stretch of eerie Indian summer. We went to a local kebab place whose food was delicious. I sat there, a mute and total foreigner, while Darren did the ordering. He speaks a passable Turkish, of which I managed to recognize a few words through Arabic: [tammam (OK); hisab (bill), ismi (name)]. To the traveler, Turkey presents the challenge (and advantage, as a function of scarcity) of a-anglophonia. I have responded with aplomb, and have gone to the length of learning the words for thank you and bread.

That evening I had a revelation. I had brought too many things. Several hours were spent paring, culling, reorganizing. When all was done, I had managed to shed ten pounds or more. Falling by the wayside were toiletries, a few tattered garments, a stainless steel hipflask, a bottle of gin, a book or two, some superfluous gadgets, and the dirty socks and underwear that just make me more depressed the longer I cart them along. All this fit quite handily inside a leather briefcase that I had no business bringing to Africa in the first place. I secured a pledge from Darren to have the articles shipped down to my mother when upon his return to the States. If you detect smugness, I retort that shedding ballast is an excellent feeling.

The next day was another in the same mold: Rain, reading, relaxation. In the morning I took a long sunlit walk along the Bosporus corniche to shift my onward flight still further into the future, infatuated as I was with the mutually reinforcing feelings of lethargy and bodily recuperation after abuse. The corniche I walked was lined with men fishing for anchovies. Bundled in scarves and caps, many of them also wore suits. According to immutable angling convention, each observed a respectful distance of separation between himself and the next. They smoked, cast, and pondered the waters. Sometimes a rogue wave blasted the corniche in the wake of a passing container ship. Once I’d made it back to Darren’s neighborhood, I walked up to an internet café to let my traveling companions know I was in a suspended state of transit. There I also managed to ascertain that I had won the weekend's fantasy football match-up, though my attempts were long frustrated by a url filter of some sort that must have mistakenly identified my results page as a gambling site.

In the days that remain to me here, I will continue napping, reading and writing. I may also go tour the Aya Sofia and an Ottoman palace or two. Perhaps, if I stay through the weekend, I will even meet some Turks. I will leave as soon as I get through or get an e-mail from Ian and Patra. How long will their Abyssinian vanishing act continue, I wonder?

There. This being the season of naps, I feel one coming on.