Travels with Myself and Another (25 page)

The frontier post at El Geneina was closed for the night by the time we arrived, but Mr Kabbabé knows everyone and someone was sent to rout out the customs officer. Meanwhile two tall pale-black men in robes appeared, Sudanese officials. They were pleased by my compliments on the station compound, which looks like nothing in Chad—it is whitewashed, pretty with bougainvillea, neatly laid out. They were calm and agreeable, sure of themselves, speaking correct English, and altogether an advertisement both for the Sudan and for the British as colonial nanny. But there are always vast numbers of papers to fill in; the blacks have copied our bureaucratic foolery with enthusiasm, and added to it. Patience is the first requirement for travellers in Africa.

Eventually we arrived at the resthouse at the airport—it was now 8.45 at night. My day had gone on too long, seventeen hours and forty-five minutes. I was nearly crazy with fatigue. There was no room at the resthouse. The President of the German Parliament (a short man who resembled an irritated warthog) and two subservient underlings had got there first; they have been travelling around West Africa offering German money for something or other, and they look as if they hated life by now. The other rooms were used by the Sudan Airways crew.

Mr Kabbabé suggested that I give a tip to the head boy and something would be fixed for me. I thanked Mr Kabbabé who had earned his money the hardest way, and promised to look up another daughter in Khartoum. The head boy brought a cot into the customs room; this was a large room filled with counters for examining luggage (too odd; luggage-laden passengers here?) with three doors and four windows; a scruffy goldfish bowl. My cot had a paper-thin mattress and for sheet and blanket a soiled cotton brocade tablecloth. There was only a weak kerosene lamp, and by careful positioning, I could undress in privacy and not notice my new home.

The bathroom was another horror. I stood in the filthy tub and dipped water out of a bucket with a thermos cup, to give myself a shower. The latrine broke my lion heart. For dinner I had a bottle of tepid beer, two Equanils and a sleeping pill; the intention being to pass out as fast as possible.

In the night, I was very cold and woke and had to go to the loo. The latrine was more than I could face so I wandered out in my nightgown, on to the sand. And saw, drugged with sleep and shivering, the great African sky which I have been seeking—a riot of stars, velvet black, felt as an arch, and the air seeming to glint with starshine. I just managed to attend to my needs in time; out of nowhere black shapes rose—the Ramadan feasters were not all asleep. I crept back to my cot and thought what a price I had paid for that one glimpse of a perfect sky.

February 11:
Shortly after eight in the morning, the English crew appeared and walked to the plane. They were shaved and wearing spotless white shirts and shorts; cheerful and serene. I do admire the English. To keep up this appearance is a superb act of will, an affirmation of self-respect in the face of all odds.

It was hot in the plane and hotter on the ground. We landed at Nyala, El Fasher, and El Obeid, and arrived at Khartoum at 4.35 in the afternoon. A wearing weary day.

The land is desert but not pure sand; the earth is brown, hard-baked, cracking, spotted with an acne of scrub and lined with dry stream beds. How or why anyone lives here beats me. El Fasher is a big cattle and horse trading centre, lashed by a hot wind. We ate lunch in the airport building, abominable greasy food, and afterwards I waited in the lounge, which was occupied by two heavy Britishers, drinking beer. One was a Scot, the other working-class English—he spoke uneducated English and fluent Arabic. These men, in their forties, are engineers, stuck in this hole to help the Sudanese build dams to catch the rains in the wadis. I can perfectly understand the remote life where nature is welcoming but regard this sort of man as a mad hero.

The Sudanese are all glum from Ramadan fasting. Their officials wear clean starched khaki uniforms, exact copies of British tropical army gear; they look natty; one has a feeling of greater tidiness and pride here.

The Khartoum airport is a fine modern building, and to be avoided.
Pagaille
reigns. Perhaps the fasting has made everyone more surly and incompetent than usual. I waited endlessly where my luggage was supposed to arrive and finally found it sitting outside on the pavement. Meanwhile I watched a touching scene. On our plane there had been a black mother with four beautifully behaved small children. At the airport, their father met them. The children raced to him; he kissed them all, but his favourite was the littlest girl; he could not get enough of her. They sat on a bench, waiting for who knows what, and it was a picture of family love and happiness and tenderness. Whites say that the blacks have no real personal affections and I doubt that very much indeed.

Men, meeting each other, put their left hands on each other’s shoulders and shake hands; it is a noble-seeming gesture. This race is deformed by tribal scars too, but tall and well-made with handsome round heads.

I had been dreaming of the Grand Hotel; one must not dream of hotels in Africa. Upon arriving there I was flattened by misery. From the outside the hotel is a long and attractive-looking building which faces the Blue Nile. Inside, it is like a big English hotel on the seaside, gone to seed. No English hotel by the seaside is good enough as a start. I was given a room, exactly like an eighth-rate English hotel room, with dark blue rep curtains and dark varnished cupboard and washbowl and hard bed, and the use of the public toilet and bath, both filthy. The food was inedible English, too.

This is Khartoum, at the junction of the two Niles, fabled in song and story, the scene of Gordon’s Last Stand. Only a firm resolve to live in imagination and literature would make it bearable. My heart sinks like a stone.

I give up. I am getting out to East Africa. Camping in game parks and watching animals cannot be as dreadful as all this. I hoped to go by boat up the Nile and land at Entebbe, but the Sudanese government has declared the upper Nile a military zone (whatever next) and I cannot face any more paperwork, squalor, or heat. Besides, now I think about it, I find this government a damned bore; they too will not issue visas to anyone who has an Israeli visa on his passport. The hell with them all.

February 12:
Here the process of waking was reversed; I left a call for 6.30 a.m. and was awakened by a battering ram on the door at 6 a.m. in the dark. At 7.30, Mr Kabbabé’s other son-in-law called on me; he was sorry he could not take me round but the clerk (the everything) of his tourist agency—one of Mr Kabbabé’s many interests—would escort me. I spent most of the day and dined with the clerk, Mr Sharir, an Egyptian Copt.

In the morning light, the Blue Nile was pretty between its sandy banks, with palm trees on the far shore and a crowd of white-robed Sudanese waiting for the ferry. Nothing much else is pretty, though the actual joining of the Niles is unusual, the White Nile being mud-coloured, and the waters of the Blue Nile running into it, parallel but not mixing for a long distance.

Mr Sharir and I went sightseeing. We visited the Khalifa’s house (the son of the Mahdi), a museum which proves how—in earlier times and certainly in colonial wars—the individual soldier had to be more heroic than nowadays; it is fearsome to see the weapons used, and to imagine the hand-to-hand fighting. The bath in the harem was luscious; I’d have liked to have the sunken pool filled with water and spend the day there. The market is a smaller, dirtier, poorer version of Cairo; strong feeling of the Orient, as in Cairo, and native craftsmen at work in their little shops, fashioning objects out of gold and out of ivory (never see an elephant’s tusk without indignation; criminal to kill these great beasts in order to make ugly knicknacks). Mr Sharir says the people are either gloomy from real fasting, or pretending to be gloomy from pretend-fasting.

A boring hot day, followed by dinner with Mr Sharir in a dismal garden restaurant on the Nile; it is the best local-colour place available. Mr Sharir is a novelty. He is small, quite good-looking, brown-skinned and aged thirty-five. He is so bored with life that he does not care if he dies tomorrow. He has no interest except women, and the women are not interesting. He is married; his wife and child live in Cairo, occasionally he goes to see them. He says stoutly that he loves his child, but he is paying lip-service to the role of a father. Obviously the child bores him as much as the mother.

He said he married because there was no other way to get the girl to bed, which was why they all married. After marriage, the girls are not keen on bed (they want marriage), let themselves go, get fat, eat candies all day, and are only interested in their children. So the men continue going to bed, with professionals, and that’s a bore too. Here one has the perfect example of justice: the men have kept their women enslaved—the Arabs more than the Christian Copts—kept them stupid and limited and apart, for their male vanity and power; result: the dull women bore the daylights out of the men. Mr Sharir approves of Nasser and says all Egyptians do; not for what he has done in Egypt (nothing much) but because he has made Egypt into a Power—i.e. a nuisance to the world, to be placated.

We passed Gordon’s palace, a fine great white house, now the home of the Sudanese dictator and closed to the public. Dictatorship inconveniences almost no one, Mr Sharir points out; you only have to keep your mouth shut and mind your own business, and you are not bothered. It does not occur to Mr Sharir that dictatorship, like the enslaved women, contributes greatly to the boredom of life.

I went to bed at midnight, to be called at 3 a.m. for the plane to Nairobi. This is the end of West Africa, suitably finishing on a note of irritation, discomfort, boredom and exhaustion. Seek and ye shall find, we have been told. I have been seeking for nineteen days and found nothing that I came to find. I am almost afraid to risk hope of East Africa.

It is high time that I learn to be more careful about hope, a reckless emotion for travellers. The sensible approach would be to expect the worst, the very worst; that way you avoid grievous disappointment and who knows, with a tiny bit of luck, you might even have a moderately pleasant surprise, like the difference between hell and purgatory.

There the diary finishes; now I am on my own, with a few fairly useless East African notes and my memory. The prospect is daunting. As near as I can figure, on a straight line basis, I drove some two thousand miles through Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika and the journey lasted three weeks to a month. Time was not gauged by any previous measurements. Time related only to daylight and the gnawing question: will we get there? Two thousand miles on those roads is equal to ten thousand miles on autobahns, superhighways, the speedy smooth surfaces we are used to. The journey was long, that’s sure. When it was over I felt I was Mr Henry Morton Stanley himself.

I spend and waste time like a millionaire; plenty of capital on deposit, I will never run short. And forget with the same lavishness; no need to save old memory since new memories pile up, an unlimited supply of money in the bank, a bank as big as the world. From the day of my arrival in Nairobi to now—writing in temporary furnished quarters in Ta’Xbiex on the island of Malta—I have spent and wasted and piled up and forgotten fifteen years and three months’ worth of time and memories. There is no way I can lift out and reconstruct the weeks with Joshua in East Africa. I can trace the journey, remember many events and emotions, and allow myself writer’s licence to fill gaps. But I don’t want to begin or end each sentence with “as I remember,” that unwritten qualifying phrase will be everywhere present.

Having been waked at 3 a.m., after three hours’ sleep, a close call for a 4 a.m. plane, I arrived out of breath, slung into my clothes, feeling hollow and sour-mouthed, and waited in the cold dark Khartoum airport until 5.30: engine trouble. Thus far, African travel recalled the dreariest aspects of war. Always up in the middle of the night, always exhausted, always deep in discomfort varying from fierce to nasty, and always preyed on by boredom. The one fine, loved aspect of war was missing: except for two days of C., in Cameroun, I had met no companions of the road. War is full of them, a shifting population of men made extraordinary by circumstance. Nobody to laugh with means the horrors of the journey are undiluted. Very heavy going.

By now, I was a tired lonely ant on this outsize continent. Loneliness caused me to wire ahead to Ker and Downey Ltd, Nairobi, not knowing whether a telegram with no further address would ever reach anyone. I wanted to be met, carried on a cushion, patted on the head, rocked to sleep with lullabies, cared for, cherished, taken in hand. Far below, where the Sudan joined Ethiopia, the scenery was the weirdest and wildest yet; brown-red mountains, gorges, craters, no sign of life, desert in the act of boiling. Was East Africa going to be worse than West Africa? Slowly the earth became green, then greener; Mount Kenya with snow on it, cultivation, big separate trees, not jungle, not bleak twisted thorn. The land seemed livable, the first hint that Africa might be more than an endurance contest.

No other airport had looked like this: small, white, tidy, bordered with flowers. The sky performed the way I had longed for it to do; it went up forever. Soft air, warmed by a high clear sun (farewell to fried eggs) smelled as I hoped Africa would. I was glowing and gushing when I met Mr Whitehead, of Ker and Downey, beyond the Customs barrier; “a shy charming man” (from notes) of whom no picture has stayed in my mind though he was kindness itself.

As a routine courtesy, Mr Whitehead had come to collect a prospective client. I had no idea that Ker and Downey was the grandest safari outfit in Kenya; if I had thought at all, I imagined Ker and Downey to be an East African version of Le Keeng. This misunderstanding percolated dimly through my fatigue while Mr Whitehead was driving me to the New Stanley Hotel. I was given a room on an airshaft with the noise of kitchen pots and pans below but was too broken by Africa to rebel, complain, demand better conditions. I took what I got, aware of being the Unknown American, not entitled to superior quarters and a welcoming bouquet from the manager; I slept.