Loose ends all tied up

Following is the very last installment of the post about the Sudan trip that is starting to feel like it happened a long time ago. Enjoy:

Saturday: We have reached Wadi Halfa. We are camped on the desert under a sky bright with stars leaking light from some other world. The wind is gusting hard and kicking up dust between the fly and the tent whence which purgatory it then sifts down through the skylight and the windows and covers every surface in an accreting tide. I have dust in my hair, on my tongue, in my teeth. I wonder about all the things this dust has been before it became a part of me. It catches the light like millions of motes or flies when I turn on my torch and cleave the night's fabric. Today at sunset Ian and I climbed a scree mountain and heaved rocks down onto the pan below, seabed to our island. Inselberg. With the dust-saturated hues of dust for water. We pulled into Wadi Halfa at midmorning after an easy drive, mostly along graded roadbed being prepared for asphaltization, then around the very edge of Lake Nasser, which at the neck I went to examine it was reeking and otherworldly. In town we were quickly located by a fellow named Midhan Mahir, who is a fixer for the ferry and other things khawajaat (Arabic for whitey) might want to undertake but lack the bureaucratic savvy to pull off without assistance. At first we were wary of his smoothness--Ian would not let him handle any of our documents--but it did not take long for him to win us over and convince us that he was the right man to get us and the vehicle onto the ferry. When we asked about Internet, he said that while Wadi Halfa had no Internet facilities as such, we were welcome to come over to his place and surf the web using his mobile phone as a modem. When I asked how we would know his house, he fiddled for a minute with his phone and pointed to two sets of numbers on the display: These were the GPS coordinates to his house. After lunch we actually used the GPS device to navigate through Wadi Halfa's sandy streets to his family's compound to take him up on his offer. The mudplaster house centered around a sandy courtyard shaded by a tamarind. Midhan entertained us with stories and pictures of past clients (including one really inspired John Bull who paddled a kayak up Lake Nasser until he was hauled in by the Egyptian army), served us tea, and patiently reestablished the Internet connection several times when it blanked out. He was gracious and earnest. We did not yet know that he would prove very ineffective when it came to more difficult tasks like getting the Land Rover on the ferry. For the present I will spare myself the unpleasant taste of that memory.

We left his place toward sunset to seek out a bushcamp. Which was easy, since a few minutes in any direction but toward the unnatural lake puts you in the middle of the desert. Given all the sand sifting into my tent, I think we would have done better to select a site in the lee of something--but then again, why worry about something that will only multiply the purgative effect of tomorrow's shower, the first in six days? Tomorrow will be nice--besides sleeping in and spending a lot of time in the shade, I plan on finishing this trip log and making some headway on the Belgian in Africa story. I might also take a late afternoon hike to one of the crumbling mountains surrounding us that appear to have erupted out of the sand--fossils of heaven-tending aspirations that are slowly crumbling and returning to earth.

We will be boarding an Aswan-bound ferry four days from today, and will arrive in five and a half. At which point I think I will get straight on a train to Cairo. Maybe a month there? Where will I be when the new year begins? I wish to return to Istanbul, visiting the Levant thitherbound. I wish to cross Libya and then enter Algeria, then travel south through the wasteland proper to Niger. I wish to return to Zambia to pick up what waits for me there. I wish to hunker down and have time to work. And yet I wish to forever clutch at the feeling of journeying, of being hurried along while I gaze at the entirety of my life through the prism of the landscape into which I am venturing. How did Whitman put it? To be still, and yet be hurried? Perhaps that is best. I want to leave it all behind me, but there are people I want to get in touch with from my past. All I ask for is an ornateness that is simple, and for the new year a profound truth that I will glean by skimming, a revelation from God channeled through the embrace of someone unclean, and a recognition that is totally abstracted and anonymous. Ha!

But there are days I haven't written about somewhere back there, three of them, and let's see if I can't fish them up: On the first of these neglected days we were up at first light. A frenetic and oath-peppered sequence of me collapsing the tent, rolling it up, putting my things away, brushing my teeth, doing my sit-ups and push-ups, putting in my contacts, making my coffee, everything all at once and within the space of 20 minutes so that we could roll over the pan and ease onto the tarmac road just as the sun's first flames licked the low hills in the east. Macadam eventually yielded to graded preliminary roadbed and rubble and frontage roads for graders and dumptrucks and all manner of earthmoving machines, thousands of them to wreak the first work of modernity on the desert. Some of the crews waved happily at us as we passed them on the graded road. Others gestured angrily as if to challenge our use of it while it was still under construction. Parts of it were unpassable due to piled rubble that would eventually be spread out and tarred, forcing us onto the frontage.

At length we arrived at Karima, site of another ferry across the Nile. To locate it I had to ask only once: Wain il bontoon 'abr in-nahr? There it was, another two-hour exercise in frustration waning into restive forced patience. The precise modality of the incompetence bears no mention. Suffice it that we were cheated out of a spot once and had to wait for a long time once aboard the pontoon for the pilot to dislodge from the bank. Why bother to build a landing when you can stand around yelling and puffing yourself up with mock importance all day instead? Again, there was a nearly completed bridge just downstream, so we were among the last to have to deal with that farce. To what poorly executed labor will Sudan's ferry captains turn their hands once the bridges are built?

High fives all around once we were off and lumbering through the sleepy town toward the road on the other side. As we drove I took pictures of industrial and communications installations--noting their GPS coordinates as I did--preliminary to a mock espionage report I will be composing in Cairo. I hope no Sudanese official happens to rest his eyes on that last sentence, and then misunderstands it! A some point we got to Dongola. Fuel, cold water, a bit of rest. Then a couple of hours up a sandy track along the Nile through the agricultural heartland of the Nubians. Nubia had a look of long agricultural prosperity, in sharp contrast to the philistine oil prosperity of Khartoum and the tentacular roads that snake away from it. That night we camped out under an acacia in a farmer's field. I saw some children out in it tending goats and asked them where their father was, so I could ask permission to stay there, which he readily gave when I found him, a large, proud-looking Nubian man in spotless gellabiyyah and fez. We ate that night a curry with Lake Tana fish that we'd had in the freezer from Bahir Dar. I read late into the night and listened as the insects dumbly beat their wings against my nylon walls.

The next day the road north would pass through farming villages and then strike out into a desert almost martian in appearance--or at least like the Mars seen in Total Recall. I asked Ian what place might come to mind if he were shown a picture of the landscape we were passing through and not told what it was. He said Afghanistan. I said the Gobi. We pulled by in a wadi somewhere out in the desert to sit out the hot hours and have some lunch. There I started writing the story about the Belgian in Africa, and found myself inadvertently borrowing from Bolano's method of using absurd nonsequitur and undermining of narrative authority. We ate a delicious chicken Teriyaki prepared by Ian. At some point later that day, we heard the tell-tale flapping of a blown tire. It was the left rear. A quick change and we were on our way again. That night we camped hard by the Nile. The truck was nestled in among some date palms, and I pitched my tent right on the fissured earth of the riverbank. I slept early to give my road-jangled bones a rest. Before sleeping I put up my hammock, lashing it to the car at one end and around a palm trunk at the other. I lay in it briefly, but then discovered that I was more content to let it flap about in the strong wind. To cut the whiplash, I cinched the hammock around the midsection, then stepped back to behold a giant bikini top filled by a voluptuous wind.

The next day I had an incomparable feeling of abandon and freedom as we drove over the desert with me perched atop the spare tire mounted on the Land Rover's rear door. It reminded me of being on a boat, with a feeling of movement that rocked and swayed rather than jangled. The deck of a ship is high above the keel. Up there among the wind and photons, the engine noise was also more of a distant gurgle, as on a ship. We passed through several villages with me perched on the back like that, raising many an eyebrow. A green Narrenschiff shipping white apparitions through the desert and signaling some dissolute purpose that could only have meaning in the glutted and voluptuous lands of whose mysterious existence we were a sign. I held out like that for about an hour, but it was difficult going, like sitting an unruly horse, and finally I thought it best to dismount before my grip gave out and I was flung off with possibly nasty consequences.

Another wadi during the hot hours for lunch, and then off again. The day's other highlight came toward the end of the afternoon drive, when we chanced on a tiny village straddling the desert road after a good hour of nothing. I stepped out and was greeted by a portly Nubian man fumbling with a cigarette. I asked if we could have some wellwater, and he beckoned me in under an awning. As I laved water into our jug from his barrel, I noticed that he had a generator-powered refrigerator in a corner. He invited me to look inside. I cracked the door and felt an access of cool air wash over my legs and feet. Inside were dozens of ice-cold 7-Ups and Pepsis. I bought us each a can and ran back to the car with the loot. The Pepsi was delicious. I drank it in 3 gulps and flung the can out onto the scarp. That was the day's second highlight. Don't start.

That night we camped up a dry gulley ringed by good-sized peaks. I found wood for a fire--I had to dig up roots--but it was meager and did not last long. Once I ran out of the thicker stuff I grew disgusted with the endeavor and tossed the rest of it on in a single bunch. The flames surged and nearly licked the car, but soon expired. The fire then subsided into a tangle of skinny orange worms that periodically gave up sparks to the wind coursing down the wadi. At length I pissed the embers to sleep and went to bed.

There was one more thing I wanted to mention: Yesterday at sunset and with a wind scouring the desert, the sky was full of cirrus clouds that appeared to be hurtling toward the western horizon, as if they were draining into the hole burned by the setting sun.

And so ends the Sudan narrative.