In Search of the Forty Days Road

By Michael Asher

Asher is captivated by the Libyan Desert from the moment he sees it. He soon becomes frustrated with the confines of public transport and decides to buy his own camel. He discovers that this is the best way to live the experience of traversing the land of sun, sand, and stars, and tries to adapt. He sets out to trace the path of the once historic Forty Days Road. After riding solo for a while, he attaches himself to desert tribes but gets caught up in their conflicts. With the authorities frowning on his excursion, he finds himself battling for acceptance, freedom, and survival.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Master Publishing
• Release date: Jul 23, 2012
• ISBN: 9789966158932

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In Search of the Forty Days Road

Michael Asher

To Katie Mitchell,

Wherever Time May Find You,

Allah Yabaarik Fiiki

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

FROM THE ONSET, WE WERE very pleased to acquire the digital rights to this travel writing classic by Michael Asher. At a time when Chad, Libya, and Sudan have been grabbing international headlines for the wrong reasons, we find their panorama drawn on Asher’s canvas ruggedly romantic, almost idyllic as a world far removed (literally and metaphorically) from any other place on earth, a place to visit for self-discovery and adventure. But these are just our gut reaction to the book and beside the point.

What is clear about In Search of the Forty Days Road is that it stands as an authoritative, firsthand account of Asher’s experiences, part of his body of writing, which have made him an established and respected expert of the life, culture, and peoples of northern Africa and the Sahara. It is now our great privilege to publish the e-book version.

For the digital edition, we have retained the original language, although certain elements of it may not apply to today’s politically correct landscape. We believe, however, that they are important to keep as part of that particular historical milieu. We did not include the print version’s photo section due to technical issues. Other than this exclusion and minimal editing (to conform to our in-house style), we have remained true to the original published by Penguin Books in 1987.

We hope you will enjoy the book as we have because Asher is a brilliant storyteller, a keen observer of the nuances and idiosyncrasies of his subject.

Agatha Verdadero

Publisher, Master Publishing

July 2012

PREFACE

THIS BOOK IS THE RESULT of a love affair. Like many Englishmen, I was captivated by the desert from the moment I first saw it, and even now my image of its grandeur and beauty is undiminished. But perfect as it is, the desert is no more than sun, sand, and stars, and perhaps man should not bestow his affections so easily on something inert. My romance, therefore, was not with the Libyan desert, but with its peoples: the Arabs and other tribes which inhabit the desert and its fringes, without whom my journeys would have been meaningless. This work is a tribute to them.

During my years in the Sudan, I received help and interest from many quarters. Amongst my colleagues, fellow volunteer teachers, I owe a great debt to Kathleen Mitchell, who both inspired and encouraged my interest in the desert and its peoples, and to my other friends in Dongola, Maria Laudenbach and Marc Weedon-Newstead.

My thanks are also due to Donald Friend, who showed me how well an Englishman could adopt the customs and language of a foreign people. I am also indebted to John Armstrong, who acted as ‘midwife’ for many of my ideas. Nothing could surpass my indebtedness to my parents whose support has been unshakeable.

David Granville, English Teaching recruitment officer at the Sudanese Cultural Centre in Knightsbridge, also deserves my thanks for allowing me to pursue my research in the library there. The Sudanese teachers, administrators, and others who gave me assistance and hospitality during this time are too numerous to mention, but I am especially obliged to Awad Abu Zayd and his family who were true friends in Dongola, to Mohammed Hissein Mukhtar of the Zayadiyya, who acted as guide on my journey amongst the Mahamid Arabs in dar Mesalit, and to Awad Abdal Kariim of the North Darfur Veterinary Department, who was instrumental in organising my expedition across the Libyan Desert with the Rizayqat. I must also thank Farah Yusif Suleiman of the Forestry Commission for his patience in teaching me about the problems of desert encroachment. I am indebted to my friends in Gineina, especially Mohammed Zakariyya who was always ready to help in the organisation of my schemes, and to the neighbour who came before the house, Ahmad Abdal Faraaj Ahmad, now a member of the People’s National Council of the Sudan.

My greatest debt, however, I owe to the nomadic peoples of the Sudan, to the Rizayqat, Kababish, Hamar, Bedayatt, Zaghawa, Zayadiyya, Awlad Rashid and others with whom and amongst whom I travelled. These men will never see their names in print nor appreciate the concept of this book, yet they taught me some of the most profound lessons of my life. I salute, therefore, the tribesmen who for three years were my companions along the way.

M. J. A.

Gineina, North Darfur

The Democratic Republic of the Sudan

January 1982

AUTHOR’S NOTE

IN TRANSLITERATING ARABIC SOUNDS, I have followed convention in renderingqaaf as ‘q’, though the reader should note that this is pronounced ‘g’ in the Sudan. Thus the name of one of the principal tribes, the Rizayqat, is pronounced Rizaygat. The Arabic sound ’ayn is represented by the apostrophe ’. The sound is difficult for most English speakers, and is pronounced by a slight retching effect in the back of the throat; it is a consonant not a vowel. The diphthong ei is represented generally by ‘ay’, although where it occurs in proper names of an accepted English spelling, it has been left.

I have taken the liberty of giving some Arabic words anglicised plurals, as the plural system is complicated in Arabic. Thus the plural of qayd, a hobbling rope for a camel, is written qayds although it is actually qiyuud. The exception to this is in tribal names of communities, where I have preserved the singular and plural forms. The singular of Rizayqat is Rizayqi, of Kababish, Kabbashi, of Bedayatt, Bedayi, and so on.

The reader should note that some of the dialogue has been translated literally, not idiomatically, in an attempt to preserve the texture of the original. All translations are my own.

Finally, the names of a few of the prominent characters have been changed in the interests of their privacy and security.

M. J. A.

1. SURVIVORS OF A LOST WORLD

Ask of the neighbour before the house

And of the companion before the way.

Arab saying

THE TENTS OF THE MAHAMID lay on the banks of a wadi. The rainy season had been over for a month, and the nomads were making their way back south to where the old and weak members of their families lay in the damra, their semipermanent camp. The watercourse, only weeks ago flooded with fast-moving water, was dry: a bed of flat, yellow sand, decorated with blue boulders, worn smooth by the annual passage of the rainwater over centuries.

It was night and the weather, sharp. In the camp, amongst the acacia trees, the fires were no more than glowing spills, their lingering smoke draping the thorn trees like gossamer. Most of the men slept in the square tents, which were gathered in family groups, but the unmarried and the hardy lay in the hearth area, the dara, on rugs and mats. Not far away from them, the camels were drawn up in a great crescent, drowsing in the depths of the moonless night. A couple of stallions were tethered to posts which had been driven into the ground, and a clutch of sleek hunting dogs were curled up under the eaves of the tents. All was silent and peaceful on the wadi-banks. The tribesmen, exhausted after a day’s watering, slept deep in the knowledge that the next day they must move to richer pastures further south.

Unknown to the sleeping men, other figures lay beyond the perimeter of the camp, cowled against the night but far from sleep. They had come amongst the trees like assassins, moving downwind of the dogs, leaving a nest of riding-camels not a stone’s throw away. The camels under guard could not cry out, for their jaws were bound tightly with cloth.

Now the figures began to move towards the Arab encampment, leopard-crawling like trained saboteurs, camouflaged by the shadows, until they were amongst the herd. A dagger was thrust forward in the darkness, and the hobbling rope of one of the female camels was severed, then another and another. Finally, the stealthy figures moved back into the bushes whence they had come.

Some moments passed; one of the camels stood up quietly. She remembered some tasty thorn leaves just a few yards away and began to move towards them. One of her sisters, finding herself free, followed out of curiosity, then another. When the five females whose ropes had been cut were feeding busily in the shrubbery, out of sight of the camp, one of the cowled figures appeared and began to hustle them towards the couched pack of camels. So skilfully did he coax them on that there was not a hint of a cry or groan. Only when the raiders were mounted and beginning to move away did one of the females let out a roar of objection. A dog barked in response, and the Arabs in the camp were awake and leaping to their feet; rifles were seized as the Arabs raced through the bushes in pursuit of the raiders. But they were too late; the Bedayatt had come and gone with the expert precision born of years of practice, and even the most experienced of the Arabs’ trackers could not follow them quickly in this darkness. The Arabs could do nothing but wait till the first embers of dawn lit up the desert, to pick out the trail of the raiders. They would follow them on their little stallions, and perhaps, they thought, they would recapture their camels. Perhaps there would be fighting, and tribesmen would be killed. Most likely, they would not see the camels again: they would be dispersed, their brands changed, to be sold in the small markets all over the region.

I heard this story one night in an Arab camp. Sitting by a flickering fire, with the stars out like tiny jewels laid on the black velvet screen of the night sky, my host Hassan Abdal Kariim, a young man in his early twenties, told me the tale with all the oratory and rhetoric of a master storyteller. It could have been a heroic story from the legends of the tribe: an epic from the deep past, of Hassan’s ancestors in Arabia. But it was not. Hassan had been one of the victims of the raid, which had occurred in the winter of 1980. The place was the Province of Darfur, an area in the west of the Republic of the Sudan.

When I first went to the Sudan, I never dreamed that I should find there the survivors of a lost world. I thought I knew the Arabs: that word lay in the sump of my memory, where it had been since as a child I had read the simplified Arabian Nights, as a youth I had seen Lawrence of Arabia, and as a young man I had read the poetry of James Elroy Flecker. I did not know, however, that the images which these romantic works conveyed were composites, created through the rose-tinted glasses of my own culture. They had little connection with the real figures which loomed behind the celluloid strip and the romantic phrases.

The Arabs had once been the nomadic tribes of the Arabian Peninsula, and that name was given to them by the townsmen with whom they interacted. They called themselves Bedu, the people of the desert, and indeed their environment was amongst the worst of all imaginable worlds. It was a vast shelf of rock and sand, where monotony and sterility were broken by the occasional clump of trees or patch of grass around a well.

Many different Arab tribes came to the Sudan between the ninth and fifteenth centuries, and eventually established dominance over the area. Many tribes settled along the river, but bedouin such as these, who were ancestors of the Mahamid, never gave up their wandering lives, and even now, generations later, they continued in the same pattern of nomadic existence.

The Bedu lived a life which was strictly regulated by rules of honour and chivalry. The various tribes were constantly in competition for grazing and water, and this led to raids on enemy tribes, battles, and bloodfeuds. But this competition was also a factor which preserved the vigour and vitality of bedouin life, provided an opportunity for the equalisation of wealth, and promoted many of the Arabs’ qualities of chivalry, courage, and tribal solidarity.

The Prophet Mohammed, born in Mecca in the seventh century AD, was the first man to impose an uneasy unity on the tribes. They rallied under the banner of Allah, the One God, and instead of fighting each other, poured their considerable energies into conquering half their known world, a venture which they achieved within a few generations. The faith of Islam perhaps came from the city, but it was the character of the Bedu which stamped it most powerfully.

In due course, the tide of empire ebbed, and the nomads returned to the life they loved. Some were by now far from the Arabian Peninsula, but always they gravitated to the desolate places they knew and understood.

After thousands of years of eking out a precarious living in their harsh environment all over the Arab world, it was discovered that for all that time the Bedu had been sitting on a material which was beyond price: oil. Discovery of oil in the Gulf, Saudi Arabia, and North Africa brought to an end the way of life which the bedouin had preserved for so long. They became the labourers in the first oilfields, and for the first time in their history, affluence came to the desert people. As their stock of western material goods increased, so their mobility decreased. In the past, material goods had been an embarrassment to the nomads, who had to carry everything on a few camels. Jobs and the new possessions meant settlement, and led to the death of their animals. All over the Middle East and North Africa, the bedouin drifted into towns in search of the new comforts to be found there, but their values were not those of the townsmen, and the new wealth slipped through their fingers and often left them stranded at society’s lowest levels, bereft of the dignity which even as poor desert dwellers they had known. The spirit which spawned their greatness was diminished, leaving in places a flotsam on the desert’s edges, a hollow imitation neither of the east nor of the west, but combining some of the worst facets of both.

The disappearance of the Bedu from the deserts was speeded by the new central governments which were growing up in the first half of the twentieth century in the Arab world. It was not in the interest of such governments to have powerful forces, whose allegiance was not to them, wandering within their borders. Bedu raiding of peasants and of each other was a threat to the stability of the state, and had to be prevented.

Libya, until recently a country largely populated by bedouin tribes, tried to settle her nomads overnight into luxurious flat complexes with all modern conveniences, but without any instruction as to how they should be used. The bedouin ripped out washbasins to use as watering-troughs for their goats, unravelled electric cable for tethering-rope and carried their livestock up and down in the electric lifts. They grazed their flocks on the ornamental lawns and often slept outside below the stars with their animals, disdaining the tight confines of their new homes.

The new technology transformed the lives of many bedouin even if they refused to settle or be settled. Motor transport meant that for the first time water could be taken in large quantities to the herds, creating a situation where the herds no longer had to be moved, and making the traditional lines of migration unnecessary. This in turn led to overgrazing, and as a result the production of camels, the traditional occupation of the bedouin, declined. The skills of the desert were lost, and eventually, in some places, the culture which had stamped the Arab coin in its own image became all but unrecognisable.

In Arabian Sands, the explorer Wilfred Thesiger wrote:

Life in the desert ceased to be possible when the few but entirely essential commodities that the Bedu had hitherto been able to buy in exchange for the products of the desert became too expensive for them to afford, and when no one any longer required the things which they produced.

In the Sudan, however, there has been no breakdown in the economy of the nomads. The bedouin culture has survived in countries where the oil boom has yet to take place, where perhaps the state lacks the resources or the inclination to settle its nomads, or where the wages and material goods are simply not available. The Sudan is such a country. The nomadic Arabs there are the survivors of a heroic age which was once the property of the entire Arab world. These are the principal characters of this book.

These people do not know the word Bedu, though they are proud to call themselves Al Arab, and despite some admixture of African blood, it is they who preserve so nearly the culture and values of their ancestors. They are as proud of their lineage as any of the so-called noble tribes. The latter are no longer able to produce camels in the same numbers, but the Arabs of the Sudan are producing more than any people has ever produced, and even exporting them to other countries. Whereas other bedouin tribes may have become Syrians, Libyans, Saudis, Algerians, Jordanians, and Yemenites, the Arabs of the Sudan have remained Arabs, with allegiance only to their tribe and its interests.

Although technology may have transformed their lives and culture, their culture remains almost unchanged, and their economy intact. Camels are still required by cultivating tribes such as the Fur and Mesalit for use as beasts of burden, for ploughing and carrying. Similarly, the townsfolk are still keen to obtain the animal products which the Arabs provide: buttermilk, skins, leatherwork, goats, sheep, and horses. From the sale of these items, the nomads are able to buy the commodities which they themselves cannot produce, such as grain, sugar, tea, vegetable oil, salt, cloth, swords, daggers, and rifles. Some of the Arabs have settled near towns and become charcoal-burners and woodcutters, but the majority still prefer the tribal society of the desert and semidesert, which has been their home for centuries.

Not all my companions in the Sudan were Arabs, neither were they all nomads. The Zaghawa and Bedayatt, for example, are black Saharan nomads and seminomads, whose relationship with the Arabs has traditionally been one of mistrust. These people, who claim Arab ancestry but do not speak Arabic as their mother tongue, nor resemble the Arabs, have no less a claim than the bedouin to be the ancient stock of a great desert. I also travelled with tribes such as the Hamar, whose transition from nomadism to sedentarism was brought about by impoverishment rather than policy. Their views provided an important counterpoint for me against the attitudes of the pure nomad. I myself made no distinctions of quality between the various tribes and cultures, and the opinions I recorded were those of others. Nevertheless, because I speak their language, it was to the Arabs that I felt most strongly attracted.

Many of the tribesmen whom I met knew nothing of my own culture. They knew only of those British administrators who had ruled their lands until 1956. Two of the most famous of these in the west were Guy Moore and Wilfred Thesiger. Moore had been inspector in Kutum, a small town in Darfur Province, from 1936 to 1948. Tales of ‘Mr Moore’ were passed down from generation to generation and people delighted in recounting them. Thesiger, who had been Moore’s assistant in Kutum, was remembered as a skilled hunter. Years later he became world-famous as the explorer of Arabia’s notorious Empty Quarter. I admired these men in many ways, and was proud to be associated with them inasmuch as they were remembered as men of good character. Nevertheless, their political power had placed them in quite a different class from me. Often I felt glad that my relationship to those with whom I travelled was one of equality, not of dominance. I knew, though, that these men, particularly Moore, had struggled with some of the same paradoxes involved in living in another culture which I had encountered.

Like me, Moore delighted in Sudanese culture. He and Thesiger travelled light, without the retinue of servants and cooks which usually accompanied an official party. Moore could speak Arabic fluently and often amazed Muslims with his knowledge of the Koran. He would eat squatting on his haunches from the communal bowl like the local people, a thing unheard of for British officials, and he observed local feast days and customs. He was renowned for his generosity, but equally for his harsh treatment of offenders. He maintained a large prison in Kutum, held public floggings and kept firm control of the movement of people in and out of the district. He respected the simplicity of Sudanese life, and considered that innovation and advance were a dangerous threat to it. Because of this he opposed the advent of motor transport and forbade people to wear European clothes or wristwatches. Unfortunately, in a country which was already struggling with the idea of independence, such conservatism was bound to be taken amiss. A prominent Sudanese journalist was sent by a national periodical to investigate the rumours about Moore’s ‘private kingdom’ in Kutum. Moore refused him permission to enter the town, and the journalist, infuriated by such high-handed treatment, wrote a series of inflammatory articles about what he referred to as ‘rule by inspectors’.

The articles created a great stir and perturbed the colonial government, which was already preparing for a peaceful handover of autonomy to the Sudanese. Moore was obliged to resign, and left the Sudan under a cloud. From what I had heard of Moore, I felt sure that he had acted with the best of intentions, yet the story remained a salutary example to me of the dangers of toying with another culture, no matter how much value one may see in it.

Yet the nomads whom I met during my years in the country seemed very resistant to change. During December 1981, for example, when I was spending some time with the Awlad Januub in Wadi Habiila, an incident occurred which has always remained in my memory. The tribe were in their winter camp and their tents were slate-coloured canvas, stretched over wooden frames, almost hidden in the thick bush which had broken out into yellow flower.

At sunset I sat with my host, Mohammed Belal, in a straw shelter which had been erected in my honour. Above us the sky was candyfloss pink lit by veins of gold which threw the sharp heads of the bushes into silhouette. Mohammed sat across the fire from me with his four small sons, huddled close. He was a raw, big-boned man with a massive head and an aggressive expression. His sons were slim boys with berry-red faces and shaven heads on which small coxcombs of hair had been left, in the Arab custom. Mohammed picked up the smallest child, a baby of less than a year old, and began to dandle him. The baby babbled in delight and the man gibbered back, echoing his baby-talk. Finally he sat the child on one of his knees, and peered across at me with an intense expression. ‘Have you got any sons?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I replied.

‘Then you should have some. You could dandle them like this. It does your heart good.’

‘But what about the future?’ I asked. ‘Don’t you want to send your boys to school?’

‘School?’ he exclaimed. ‘Why? What good is school?’ He lifted his small son up once again. ‘Shall I send this one away from me? To live in a house in a town?’ He lowered his voice, ‘Look around you, khawaja.’ He gestured towards the bush, where his herd of camels shifted and belched in the shadows. ‘Green bushes. Tall grass. Water. Fat camels, which eat well. What more do we need? We don’t have houses like you. We can move our tents where we like, by God! We don’t need lorries. Our camels carry everything. What would my son do in the town, away from the herd and away from his family? No, he doesn’t need school. His school is here in the ranges and the wadis.’

I had intended to try to explain the advantages of education, the need for engineering and technology in the advancement of the country. But I knew that I could never argue with the honest logic of this simple man. It may be, though, that the nomadic tribes of the Sudan may not stay as they are for much longer. Already the government has plans to settle them, and those amongst them who are educated or ‘enlightened’ are beginning to claim the right of education and other services.

The government has refused to provide these unless the nomads agree to settle. Alternatively, the oil which is already beginning to trickle from Sudanese fields may provide the nomads with technology which will transform their culture. For the three years in which I made my convoluted arabesque of journeys across and around the Libyan Desert, these peoples were my friends, companions, and sometimes my enemies. Although I started out with the illusion that the Libyan Desert was somehow to be ‘conquered’, as a man may climb a mountain, I soon came to realise that it was in being able to call these men companions that I was truly privileged.

2. SOJOURN IN NUBIA

In these deserts the river was life itself.

A. Moorehead, The White Nile

I FIRST SAW THE LIBYAN Desert from the porthole of a Fokker Friendship, cruising down through serene and cloudless skies over the small town of Dongola in the Northern Sudan, the place to which I had been posted as a teacher for the next nine months.

Framed by the small window, I saw in microscopic display the elements which were to play such a large role in my life. I saw the thin green ribbon of the Nile, meandering like a serpent on its way north, between thick yellow wedges of desert. The entire area seemed devoid of vegetation, though as the plane dropped nearer I noticed some islands in the stream which were verdant and leaf-shaped. A little closer the nail-parings of green along the riverbanks, Dongola’s famous palm groves, became visible, but from this height any greenery was swallowed up by the enormity of the desert and rendered as insignificant as scum along the edges of its vast emptiness.

My view of the scene was both obscured and distracted by the face of a pretty English girl, who was rapt in contemplation of the same landscape. Her name was Katie, and we were to be colleagues together in Dongola. I did not guess at that time that I would come to love all that I saw before me at that moment: the river Nile and its palette of colours, its inestimable poetry, the desert with its power and its unfathomable mystery, and Katie, who had a poetry and a mystery which were all her own.

When I was a child my father spoke to me of the lure of the desert. His words had no meaning to me, however, until the moment I stepped onto the tiny airstrip outside Dongola. When the pilot cut the aircraft’s engines, and the dust had settled, I immediately became aware of the appalling aridity of my new environment. It was ‘The Desert’: a vast roll of paper, dried and corrugated, laid out to a dazzling horizon. It seemed a virgin stage, and almost at once I sensed that I should take some role upon it. Its only props were rocks and lonely bushes, its backdrop distant mountains hanging like grey ghosts beyond the skyline,