Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph (11 page)

Through the carriage window the desert has been sweeping past, almost unbroken, for hours. I stare at it mesmerized, trying to imagine myself riding over it. Now there are signs of life: some animals more thorn trees, tents and huts. The train slows. Atbara Station. The corridor is jammed with people and bundles. My mind is in gear again. To meet trouble halfway, what disasters shall I anticipate now? Perhaps e bike has vanished off the train somewhere
en route?
Maybe half of it will be missing? Or I will be asked to bribe someone to unload it?

The wheels screech on the rails. The crowd tumbles off. The bike is still there. Nothing is missing. There are no problems. To me this is a sort of miracle. I wheel it to where my bags are heaped on the platform and pack them on as children peer into the speedometer where they believe the soul of the machine to reside. I flood the carburettor.
For God's sake start!
Don't give me any trouble. It's too hot to wrestle with you now.

One kick and she starts.
You lovely machine.

First to the police, to be registered as an alien. The locomotive is hissing and panting in the station. I can hear it across the road. It howls and clanks into action. Plunk, plunk, plunk-plunk-plunk-plunk as the train's vertebrae stretch. It rolls away to Khartoum, but now there is more noise, and agitation continues with a taxi for my friends, and the bike following, to find a hotel.
The
hotel.

Atbara is a frontier town; mud houses, wooden facades, and the enveloping dirt road filling all the spaces between like a brown flood ready to reclaim it all. Here is a more imposing street, red brick and cement. Is this the hotel? We stop. The taxi leaves, but the travelling noise goes on in my head. We're not there yet. The building looks abandoned.

'Hotel?'

An old man sweeping leaves shakes his head angrily, and points down the street.

Alongside the next building is an alley. It debouches into a garden with tables and chairs rooted here and there among the weeds. A cemented
veranda
at the back of the building gives access to a series of closed green doors. Hotel!

At a round iron table sit five men.

'Hotel?'

'Hotel, yes. Come and sit.'

One last effort, to fetch the bike into the garden, park it against the
veranda
, close the petrol tap, walk to the table . . . and sit. The noise stops.

The sun is getting low now, the light is yellow and grainy. The five men are gathered like a conspiracy of pantomime pirates. One has a black eye-patch, another a vivid scar. The one next to me, an Arab in galabeia and turban, has a squint and a thin-lipped smile of artless evil. Every child in the audience knows he has a dagger under his robe.

The table is laden with date sherry bottles, all empty but one. With exaggerated hospitality the Arab sweeps up the sleeves of his galabeia and pours out glasses for the Dutch couple and myself. Yo-Ho-Ho and a bottle of date sherry.

The pirates are passing a joint round. The Arab waves it in the air and murmurs sibilant nonsense as though in a haze of mellow stupefaction, but his eye is much too bright. The scent of the smoke is delicious, the silence around us is like a cool bath. Is anything more relaxing than the hospitality of harmless villains? How do
I
know they're harmless? I don't, and yet I do.

The Arab invests in another bottle of sherry and we sit for an hour as the sun goes down, lost in lazy contentment. During that hour I feel I have arrived in the Sudan.

A muscular black man comes towards us, urgently, asks us to come to the hotel. The bar is open now, and a naked bulb is shining down on ugly plastic surfaces. I am very reluctant to leave the garden. The man insists. He has a tigerish body, too restrained in his neat shirt and trousers.

I am coming to see if
you are alright, and I
f
ind you sitting with a bad man. I am Pabiano,' he said, 'My name is Munduk, my brother is in the
p
olice. That man is not good. He is a teep. He is only
pretending
drunk so that others will become drunk. Then he steal prom your
pocket
. He has been in
prison
.'

I look back to the table. In the last faint light the Arab has twisted in his chair to look at
us, one arm outst
retched towards us, the long cotton sleeve trailing, imploring us to return. I feel a sad affection for him. There was a kind of understanding.

Three nights in Atbara. From the ceiling hangs an enormous
propeller
, slowly kneading the thick night air. During the days I prepare for the desert. There is an obstinate electrical fault in the bike. I take the lens off the headlamp, and it spills wiring over the
veranda
, pitifully, as though vomiting its entrails. I work on it as martial music drifts across the wall from a school Sports Day. By evening the bike is repaired, the hernia sewn up. I have been considering how to carry water. I have brought a collapsible plastic container, and can carry a gallon on the back of the bike, but I am not quite convinced it will work and I want a reserve. If I fill the aluminium bottle with distilled water, then I can use that for the batteries also. A garage fills the bottle for me. I have to cross two hundred and fifty miles of desert to Kassala and the next petrol pump. With three gallons in the tank, and the jerry half full I should have plenty. Tomorrow I will buy more, just in case. Today I can't because I haven't enough money. It is Sunday and the banks are closed.

I have asked everyone about the way to Kassala. They all say it is
'queiss',
which means good. Thomas Taban Duku, the registrar of aliens, said so. It was more usual for people to go to Khartoum, but many buses go to Kassala, at least one each day. He could not remember anyone coming by motorcycle before, but then, he said, a motorcycle can go anywhere. If a bus can go, then so can a motorcycle, isn't it? And faster even. 'The road is
queiss'.
He was quietly confident.

So is the man at the hotel. He says it's a good road, now the rains have gone. And the Michelin map calls it a marked and recognized track.

Munduk also says it will be easy. He comes to the hotel, and that evening, under a waxing moon, we visit his house to see how to make date sherry at home, and then to look at the Nile.

'Here is the Blue Nile,' he says. 'The White Nile is one day walking from here.'

He is wrong. The Blue Nile joins the White Nile at Khartoum two hundred miles upstream. How can he be so wrong about something like that? Who knows? Away from Western cities you get used to it. If you want to know something, you ask again and again. When many opinions run together they thicken to form a fact. Isn't that the essence of modern theoretical physics? So often it seems that every scientific principle has its counterpart in social behaviour. Simon's Hypothesis? Waves & Particles. Critical Mass. Fission, fusion, all of thermodynamics and Maxwell's Demon as the exception that proves the rule . . . My head is flying and my feet slip into the marsh. Eye Pierce Heaven, Foot Stick in Mud. As I stumble out I see Munduk prowling round some bushes, more like a tiger than ever, sniffing the air, cocking his ear. He reminds me of Castaneda's Don Genaro looking for a car under a stone.

'Serpent,' he says. 'Or some animal maybe. I show you how we hunt in the bush.'

He and his six brothers, he says, fled to Uganda when the Moslems killed his parents in the war. They lived by hunting in the bush. Now all his brothers are famous. So he says. Why not believe him, until it becomes important?

Atbara is among the hottest places in the world. In summer it goes to 110 degrees in the shade. In winter it simmers at a few degrees below ninety. Shops do their business early and late in the day. Banks, I thought, would do likewise. But no. In Atbara, as everywhere else in the world, bankers followed their own inscrutable whims. Opening time was nine-thirty.

It was already half past seven
. I was packed, paid up, booked out, and ready to go. By ten the last cool hours of the morning would have evaporated. I thought I had enough petrol. What need could I have for money in the desert? The time was ripe to begin my great adventure, to catch the tide.

I rode out of Atbara directed by dry, black fingers.

'Queiss, queiss,'
said the owners of the fingers. 'Road good, this way.'

Atbara's only stretch of tarmac gave way to mud. I went past the Ethiopian prostitutes' quarter, alongside a last row of mud houses and came to a piece of stony ground surrounded by thorn trees. Spread out before me was a vast heap of stinking rubbish. No road. Not a sign of a road. I was not looking for tar or paving or even made-up dirt, but there was not so much as a track.

The difference between men and gods is farce.

During all the months of preparation, the girding of loins and steeling of resolve, the one feat which I thought would set me apart from mortal men was my single-handed crossing of the Atbara desert.

And now I could not find it.

I rode back into town to ask again. Once more I followed the fingers, other fingers, along the same route. I could find no other way.

Twice I inspected Atbara's garbage, and twice I returned. I was in a fever of impatience and I felt completely ridiculous. If Neil Armstrong had lost his way to the launching pad he could not have been more frustrated.

There was a police station along the way which I had carefully avoided, but now I could think of nowhere else to go for an explanation. I was always afraid of involving myself unnecessarily with officials. Generally when a man in uniform has something unusual brought to his attention, his instinct is to stop it. Uniform is as uniform does. There are honourable exceptions however. The Atbara police delayed me, but they did not stop me, and they explained that the road to Kassala did, indeed, go past the rubbish tip. And I began to understand, with some embarrassment, that in Sudanese English the word 'road' has no mineral connections, it simply means 'the way'. I had fallen into the simplest linguistic trap, imagining that the road had a physical reality. There was no road; only an imaginary line across the desert.

By now it was nearly nine o'clock. I should have swallowed my pride, gone to the bank, cooled off, and left the following day, but I was rolling under the momentum of my own folly, and I knew I could not stop or something might break. A dream, for instance.

This time I rode round the rubbish tip. Beyond it was a gap in the trees. Through it I saw the open desert. To the right of the gap was another heap of fresh garbage, and as I rode past it a big red eye met mine.

The eye was level with my own. It was inflamed, and encrusted with dirt. The dirt was sticking to the few vagrant hairs that remained on its bald and dreadful head. I was deeply shocked by it, and rode on before I had collected my wits and assembled the images. Then I saw that it was a monstrous bird, of human proportions, with a great pendulous beak and long and filthy white neck. I wanted to turn back, but I was carried on relentlessly by some inner current, and the bird became for a while a mythical beast and guardian of the desert.

I rode into the desert. It looked flat, but of course it was not. Nor was it sandy, but made of a rather greyish, fairly compact stuff halfway between sand and soil, littered with small shards of stone. I found I could ride across it quite easily, and the faster I went, the smoother the ride, though stopping might be a problem.

The question was, which way to go? Ahead and to the left, the desert stretched to infinity, only interrupted by the well-defined profile of an occasional umbrella tree. To the right, however, perhaps a mile away, was a line of trees, which I first took to be the edge of a forest. Then I realized that they were palm trees, and that they must define the bed of the Atbara river, which ran from Atbara to Kassala. My first great fear was dispelled. Obviously I could never be lost in the desert as long as I kept the river bed in view.

Also there were tyre tracks, quite deep ones, made when the ground was softer at the end of the rains, but their direction was puzzling. Some headed towards the river, others made for the heart of the desert, none followed the route I thought I should take. I tried to move closer to the river, but the ground became softer and occasionally even drifted into dunes which would certainly swallow my wheels. I wondered whether the desert-bound tracks might be aiming for a better and firmer route away from the river, and I followed one for a way, but it showed no sign of bearing right, and as the river line was almost lost to sight, I thought better of it and headed back.

So I steered a middle course, and gaining confidence increased speed until I was doing nearly forty miles an hour in third gear. Then, quite unexpectedly, two sets of wheel tracks converged and intersected in front of me. I could not avoid them, nor could I stop. I bounced through the first track but nose-dived on the second. I saw it coming, and was interested to notice that I did not say 'Christ' or 'Fucking Hell' or 'Here We go my Darling' or even 'Sic transit gloria'. I said 'Oops!'

Anything could have happened. I had never fallen with a full load at any speed, and I was prepared for a major disaster. The result was immensely encouraging. The bike slid along on its side. The Craven pannier, packed solid, took the weight with a few scratches, and I fell easily and without harm.