Desert Dies

Michael Asher

Description

A Desert Dies chronicles Michael Asher's life with desert communities in the Sahara over three drought-filled years. While Michael came to appreciate the allure of a nomadic life in isolation, he also saw how the perennial failure of rains devastated the way of life of even the hardiest of residents.Shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award for 1986-87A classic travel writing piece previously published by Longman's and Penguin Books in 1984 and 1986 respectively.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Travel writing
• Memoir

Informations

• Publié par: Master Publishing
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 0001
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789966052001
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

To my mother and my father
The parched eviscerate soil, Gapes at the vanity of toil, Laughs without mirth, This is the death of earth.
T. S. Eliot, ‘ Little Gidding ’, Four Quartets
Contents
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
Part 1: The Kababish
Heart of the Herdsman
Good Things in Humble Guises
Lord of the Drums
Lost Worlds of Dar Kababish
Legendary Pastures
Arabs of the Wadi
Part 2: The Journey to El ’Atrun
A Small Salt Caravan
Bringing Back the Salt
Legend of the Drums
Part 3: The Trek to Egypt
Interlude in the Damar
A Camel Race to Egypt
Part 4: The Search for the Lost Oasis
Hidden Pearls
The Last of the Desert Arabs
Nearing Zazura
Part 5: The Death of Earth
The Desert Dies
Journey through a Dead Land
Epilogue
About the Author
Acknowledgements
My Companions
List of Tribes
Glossary
List of Botanical Species
About the Publisher
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
THIS BOOK IS A WINDOW into the forgotten life of the Sahara as seen firsthand by Michael Asher in the 1980s. It is a throwback to the time before the southern part of Sudan split into an independent nation, before the culture of nomads in the Sahara was overtaken by the march of technology, before regional conflicts made such travel as is described by Asher virtually impossible today. It had long gone out of print, but we are now privileged to publish this e-book version.
From the start, readers are thrown into a world they are unfamiliar with, and together with the protagonist Omar, they learn the ways of the Kababish people in Sudan. It takes a poignant tone as the author reveals the degeneration of their culture by nature and urbanisation. A prolonged drought dries their oases, causing them to fight each other for resources. They are eventually forced to move into towns or else perish.
To quote the author, “Men wandered the ranges hungry and desperate. Women took the children to the cities. For the first time, the urban population saw proud Arab nomads begging in the streets. For the first time, they could no longer rely on their innate toughness and their ability to endure.”
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 and index due to technical issues that we intend to address in a subsequent edition. 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 1988.
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 December 2012
Part 1 The Kababish
A desert is not uninhabitable through lack of wells, but through lack of grazing, which in turn depends on the sterility of the ground as well as upon rainfall.
Ralph Bagnold , Libyan Sands, 1935
_____1._____ Heart of the Herdsman

Strong is the Sheikh of the Arab in the season of the rains.
Arab saying
FIVE MINUTES AFTER MY PLANE touched down at El Fasher airport, I knew that something was wrong.
The rains had been due weeks ago, but the air outside the plane was dusty and dry, and the trees that stood on the edge of the runway were as stark as scarecrows. There was no water in the wadi that plunged down to the camel market, and the thorn bush that lined it was brittle and dead.
The feeling of desolation increased as I looked out of the Toyota truck that took me into the town. Nowhere was there a fleck of green grass or a tree in leaf. As we pulled into the road that led to the market, I noticed with surprise that the rainwater fula was empty. It was normally brimming at this time of year, the great siyaal trees around it pulsing with the cries of ten thousand water birds. Now its bed was a carapace of cracked earth on which some men were making bricks. The trees around were empty.
I turned to the driver and asked, ‘What happened to the water?’
‘The rains did not come. They are later than ever.’
‘I have never seen the fula empty at this season:
‘Neither have I,’ he told me, ‘and I was born here!’
I was to remember that scene many times over the next three years. It reminded me that from the moment I had arrived in the west of the Sudan to fulfil my ambition of living amongst the Kababish nomads, there had been signs of the powerful changes that were already in motion.
El Fasher was already a place of many associations for me. It was from there in 1980 that I had set out with a guide called Abu Sara and six other nomads on a five-hundred-mile camel trek to Dongola in the Northern Province. That experience had been my first taste of life in the desert. At the end of it, exhausted and a stone lighter, I had realised that here was the environment that offered the challenges I craved. Amongst these nomadic herdsmen, I had discovered comradeship that could overcome even the deeply rooted barriers of culture and race.
While working as a teacher in the Sudan for three years, I had spent almost all my spare time travelling and living in the harsh world of the nomads. I had ridden across the rolling savannah of Central Kordofan and explored the then little-known country along the Chad border. I had journeyed with tribesmen of the Zaghawa and the notorious Bedayatt. I had suffered many setbacks: once, my camel had been taken, and on another occasion, I had been arrested by the police under suspicion of being a Cuban mercenary. Undeterred, I had set out again across the country of the Bani Hussayn between Gineina and Kutum, and from there had ridden through the Tegabo hills and penetrated into the narrow chasms of Jabal Meidob. I had travelled with nomads of the Mahamid as they drove their camel herds on their annual migrations through the acacia forests and across the plains of West Darfur, and visited families of the Baggara, the cattle Arabs, who planted their winter crops on the hills outside Gineina. I had stayed with nomads of the Awlad Zayid and Awlad Janub as they wintered with their herds in Wadi Habila, and crossed the Fur country of Jabal Kawra, where I had watched half-naked Fur women hunting porcupines in the thickets. I had been into the desert and felt its vastness. I had seen the great ergs spreading out before me to every horizon, day after day, without a blade of grass or a tree, seeing no one but my companions, until it seemed that there was nothing in the world but this huge emptiness and this handful of men who were with me.
These brief tastes of life in the vast ranges only served to whet my appetite. My time was always limited. I always had to return to my classroom, where I felt suffocated and inactive. This was not the fault of my students: they were gracious, affectionate, and on the whole, eager to learn. But all my life, I had felt the need for a challenge that would tax both my mind and body to extremity. Some men had found the answer to that challenge in the high mountains and the seas, others in the jungles, the uncharted rivers and the poles. I found it in the desert.
This time, I had come to El Fasher to resign my job as a teacher, and to take on the challenge that life amongst the nomads offered me. I had decided to live and travel amongst the nomadic Kababish.
The Kababish were the nomads who inhabited the deserts and desert steppes in the northern third of the Sudan, west of the Nile. They called themselves Arabs and spoke Arabic, yet their origins were many and varied, and almost certainly included non-Arabic elements. I chose them because they were the heirs of the thousands of generations of nomads, African and Arab, who had occupied this most arid of regions.
The tribes I had travelled with previously were peoples of the Sahel and the desert fringes. They ventured into the desert wastes as outsiders, and were never totally at ease in a hostile world. Nothing could change the affection I felt for those like Abu Sara, for the men who had been early companions. But to live with the Kababish represented an even more exacting test. I went amongst them to live the life of the desert and to understand the demands made by one of the most desolate places on earth.
The day after my arrival in El Fasher, I handed in my letter of resignation to the Province Education Office. The same evening, I visited my friend, Mohyal Din Abu Satita, in the Brinjiyya district of the town.
I had met Mohyal Din the previous year. He was a camel merchant. His family, the Abu Safitas, were people of Libyan and Mauritanian extraction, with the blood of half the races of the Sahara in their veins. They were the richest merchants in Darfur, but their wealth was founded on the camel trade. They had contacts amongst all the camel-rearing tribes of the west, and I hoped that Mohyal Din would be able to give me a letter of introduction to the nazir of Kababish, Hassan Wad at Tom.
Mohyal Din was a well-built, imposing figure, with an uncompromising manner and a face that was grained with the toughness that comes of countless transactions. Although a prosperous merchant, he was no stranger to the desert. His ancestors had come to the Sudan by camel and he maintained the tradition, travelling with the herds and riding and hunting like a nomad. There was little he did not know about camels and the tribes that bred them, and he and his brothers owned some of the finest racing dromedaries in Darfur.
As I sat in the courtyard of his house on that day, he mulled over my project with a thoughtful face. ‘I can easily give you a letter to Hassan Wad at Tom,’ he told me. ‘He is my friend. I have entertained him here at my house. But if you visit him now, you will not find any camels. All of his camel herds are moving to South Darfur because the rains have not fallen in their