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.