Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph (12 page)

I was shaking with excitement and relief, but had to get the bike upright quickly before I lost too much petrol, and for once I was able to twist it up from the handlebars without unpacking it.

Then I found out how hot I was. The effort, and the unused adrenalin, had me sweating from every pore. I was drenched. I looked at the mileage indicator. I had come approximately nine miles from Atbara in just over an hour.

I continued more cautiously, rarely exceeding twenty miles an hour. Twice more I fell, but easily, coming almost to a standstill before toppling over. After a while I found a tyre track which seemed to be following firm ground in the right direction. Occasionally it moved in towards the river, and once I thought I saw a hut among the palms, but immediately before the trees the ground was very soft, and dunes were reaching out into the desert. I stayed away from the river, and picked my track up as it came out again further on.

Just as I was beginning to feel that I had found the winning system, it led me into a trap. A ridge of high ground formed on my left. The track veered right. Then suddenly a fence appeared. A fence in the desert! The track followed the edge of the fence, and the ground became softer and softer. I was forced to go faster to stay on top, and then it was too late and I was buried up to the axle in fine ash-coloured sand.

Fifty miles in three hours.

Another two hundred miles to go.

It was plainly impossible to move the bike, so I began to unload it. I noticed immediately that my water bag was empty, the plastic perforated, the contents drained away. Well, at least I had a litre of distilled water.

With all the luggage off I glanced in the petrol tank. Had it been possible at this stage to shock me, I would have been shocked. There was only a puddle of petrol left, hardly a gallon. My fuel consumption was twice what it should have been and when I thought about it, that was perfectly natural. Grinding along in second gear over a loose surface in such heat, it is what you would expect. Only I, of course, had not expected it.

By now I was assimilating information like a robot. Buried in loose sand, with scarcely enough petrol to get halfway, one litre of distilled water, and no money. It was very plain that I was going to need help, the sort of help that was hard to come by in the best of circumstances. Where do you look for help in a desert?

There was no point in getting upset. All the riding and falling had emptied me of surplus emotion. I felt fit, and strong enough to survive a long time. If the worst came to the worst, the river was not too far away. There might even be water in it. I set about digging myself out.

Scooping the sand out by hand took half an hour, but I managed to make a lane back to the firmer ground. There was a bit of brush growing on the dunes, and I paved my lane with twigs. Then, inch by inch, I was able to haul the bike back to where I wanted it. Again I had lost a lot of sweat, and I got the water bottle out. It was warm to the touch. I put it to my lips, and then spat vigorously on the ground, mustering as much of my own good saliva as I could. The bottle contained acid. Battery acid.

It occurred to me that I might easily have taken a swig, instead of a sip. I knew many who would have done. At least I had that reserve of caution. In a silly, minor way I was encouraged, as though it entitled me to survive.

I started looking for a better way forward, and found one. With the bike repacked I went along slowly, hoping the fence might have something to do with people. After a mile the going got easier again. The ground flattened, hardened, and opened out. I moved towards the river. There were buildings, a figure on a donkey, a murmur of voices.

The biggest buildings were two storeys high and stood inside a compound. The voices came from there, and I rode up to the compound gate, dismounted and walked inside. A young man in a blue shirt and khaki

trousers received me gravely as though I had been expected, and we exchanged greetings. 'Salaam, salaam, salammat, salaamat,' and so on for the proper amount of time, shaking hands the while. Then he fetched me a bottle of fizzy orange and introduced me to the headmaster of Kinedra Secondary School for Boys.

When I had explained my circumstances, struggling between honesty and embarrassment, I was complimented richly on my courage, wisdom, initiative and good fortune, and the school was placed at my disposal. There were hundreds of boys and a staff of six young men, all anxious to devote themselves henceforth to my bidding. As far as possible I allowed them to continue with their normal routine, but it was clear that for the duration of my stay the functioning of the school became of lesser importance. Only one thing was demanded of me. I must stay. There could be no question of my going on.

Fortunately this coincided very well with my own ideas.

I was taken to the dormitory shared by the teachers, and a special meal was prepared and brought to me by the headmaster, with dishes of different meats and vegetables, in delicious peppery sauces. I did not disgrace myself. My fingers were nimble and my palate was thoroughly attuned. I ate with relish as the teachers sat around, admiring and plying me with questions. At other mealtimes they all ate from a common bowl of mutton, vegetable and rice, scooping up the food with pieces of an unleavened bread baked from millet and called
'kissera',
but I was always brought specially prepared dishes. They were cooked by the headmaster's wife, but I never saw her.

We discussed the matter of petrol, or 'benzene' as they called it. Perhaps the District Officer at Sidon might have some. He had a car.

Sidon? That was the town, three miles away. My concept of the desert was undergoing some changes. In fifty miles I had not seen a living soul, only the illusion of movement on the horizon where the heat haze bent the light and made it sway. That was the desert as I had imagined it since childhood, as I had wanted it to be, a place of awe-inspiring emptiness where only bleached bones could be at rest.

Obviously it was that, but it was also a home for thousands of people who lived around it and crossed it frequently as a matter of course. Had I been extraordinarily lucky to stumble upon Kinedra, or was the world a more hospitable place than I had ever realized? My memory flashed back to the beastly bird guarding the desert. Supposing I had been stranded out there, on that baking ground, thinking about my bones bleaching in the sun, what a bird of ill-omen that would have been. Instead I was being attended to like a lord. With little effort I could imagine the headmaster as a sheik, the boys as slaves, the walls as hides, the school as a great bedouin encampment, and I the honoured envoy of a distant monarch.

Such excellent fortune. Shouldn't I thank that red-eyed monster, and treasure its memory, for teaching me to drop my superficial judgements and let the world be what it was?

I tried to describe the bird to my friends, and at last they recognized it as something they called a 'Bous', and screwed up their faces in revulsion. I later learned to call it a Marabou, a stork turned scavenger, which appears with minor variations across Africa and Asia. I always thought of it with pleasure, and recognized it as a friend, although it was everywhere regarded with loathing. It joined the Pleiades as an ally on my journey. There were other creatures with which I had a special affinity. I was a great admirer of goats, donkeys and camels for their leathery determination to endure, and was always glad when they were around, but they had no magic power over my destiny, I felt. Just friends.

To show my gratitude I asked whether the boys might enjoy hearing me tell them about my journey. The teachers said they would arrange something that evening, but first they took me on a guided tour to see how their vegetables were grown and irrigated. An ancient Perkins diesel engine pumped water from the Atbara river in the winter, and so precious was the water that the owner of the pump got half the crop in payment. Even more wonderful though was the now disused wooden construction with interlocking vertical and horizontal gears, driven by an ox on a circular walkway. It hauled up water in buckets on an endless chain dipping into a deep slot in the river bank.

They described how the houses were built up from slabs of wet mud, one row a day left to bake in the sun, tapering slightly to the roof which is made of split palm and thatch and again covered with mud. The word 'mud' in no way does justice to these houses. With their rich yellow colour, the impression of enormous mass exaggerated by the inclined walls and absence of windows, they looked more like great ingots of gold. The space inside, dark, cool and mysterious, had more in common with the interior of a cave than a house. In fact, passing through the door of such a house from the desert at midday would be like dropping magically into some other dimension of space and time. Or so I fancied.

In the evening the teachers took off their Western clothing and put on galabeias. The boys wore nothing else. In its simplest everyday form the galabeia is no more than a cotton shift with floppy sleeves, and I was given one also to wear and to sleep in. That evening, however, the senior master wore a more voluminous and elaborate robe, crisply laundered, and a turban. He said the boys had been assembled to hear from me, and I changed back into my travelling clothes to give them a better idea of it.

I had given no thought to how it would be done, and I was rather taken aback. A rostrum had been set up outside on the open ground, with a

lamp. The boys, all in white, sat on the ground in a huge circle, and beyond them was only the velvet night.

The master translated my simple account into Arabic. The boys listened, and laughed at the right places. Then they asked questions.

'How often do you write to your mother?'

'Do you always wear those boots?'

'How do you get the money?'

And other sensible things like that.

The setting was dramatically beautiful, the whole thing had the air of a great theatrical event, and I was rather carried away by it, but the kids brought me down to earth again. Thank heaven for little boys.

Next day I took my five gallon jerry and walked the three miles to Sidon, across paddies and through scraggy trees. The District Commissioner received me with interest and changed a traveller's cheque for me, but he had only enough petrol, he said, to get his own Landrover to Kassala. He thought I would be lucky to find any, because most of the traffic that came through was diesel.

I began to face the unpalatable truth; I would have to go back to Atbara for petrol. Apparently a bus was due to come through from Kassala that evening. It would stop in the square.

The teacher accompanying me took me to the elementary school in Sidon, and left me in the care of a fiery headmaster called Mustafa who tried hard to convert me to the Muslim faith, and kept me entertained through the afternoon. In the early evening he introduced me to another man who was also on his way to Atbara. We drank tea together, and then Mustafa left saying:

'He is a rich merchant. He will take care of you.'

I looked at the merchant with interest, but my curiosity was unrewarded. His face was smooth and unmarked, if a shade plump. He could have been any age from twenty-five to forty-five, though his status indicated age. His smile revealed two rows of excellent white teeth and nothing more. His body, probably well fed, was hidden by the folds of an expensive white robe and he wore a voluminous turban. He spoke no English and his expression was as controlled as it was courteous.

The square of Sidon is simply a piece of desert, as big and stark as a parade ground. Along one side is a line of low mud buildings with thickly encrusted roofs sloping into the square and leaning on pillars to make a sheltered walkway. The roofs, walls and pillars flow together and the entire row looks as though it were made from one piece of clay by a giant hand.

At one end of the row was a tea shop, and we waited there as the sky dimmed and the heat subsided. Life in the square died down until there was only the proprietor of the tea shop and one other man. An oil lamp was lit in the shop and by the thick yellow flame and the red glow of the charcoal stove I watched them. They spoke between long pauses. Occasionally one would roll up the phlegm in his throat and discharge it, staccato, to the floor.

The buildings across the square dissolved in the darkness and were forgotten. The night swallowed all except the little oasis of life by the teashop. Soon even the shop closed. The merchant and I lay on the soft, dry sand, the only two mortals left in the universe, waiting.

We tried from time to time to speak to each other. I had a small vocabulary of Arabic, enough to suggest roughly the subject I wanted to discuss, but no more. He had a very few words of Italian. For the most part we lay in silence and I occupied myself with thoughts and cigarettes. I had almost decided to sleep and was lying on my back gazing at the stars, when the soft, careful voice asked:

'Sudan signora queiss?'

I was still wondering about the question, when I felt a finger tap my thigh, and the voice repeated, with slight urgency: 'You Sudan signora?'

I could not think how to tell him that I had never seen a Sudanese signora.

'Si,' I said. 'Yes,' trying to sound offhand and academic, wondering what was going on and looking up towards the voice. A moon was just rising. The merchant's robes gleamed, the turban had been released to fall as a shawl round the shoulders. The face was quite invisible, only the even teeth shone white as the disembodied voice spoke.