area is becoming more and more unreal and hotter than ever before.
The haze over Sudd, the giant swamp area, the Bahr El Jebel, the
white Nile and its numerous tributaries that flow into the plains of
Bahr El Ghazal—all this blurs the horizon. The rainy season is
drawing near.
En Nahud lies behind us, a desolate place with an abandoned
garrison. We bought dates for the camels and sugar and salt. Master
Jack measured the salt with his ticker, which he calls a geiger counter,
and said that it was radioactively contaminated and that we would
have to throw it away. Our escorts would have loved to beat the
merchant who sold us the contaminated salt. However, Master Jack
made sure they understood that the man could not have known
himself and that he had probably been sold salt from Ethiopia or
Somalia.
Master Jack reads a lot in a little book that the king gave him as a
present. Yesterday evening, I know he was crying, I saw him. It really
touched me.
‘Why are you crying?’, I asked him.
He closed the book and said, ‘I am not crying. The light is already
too weak to read by and I have been reading too long. My eyes are
watering. There’s a good boy, bring me another cup of tea, Beschir.’
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I brought him a cup of tea. There was enough light to thread a
needle by.
Extracts from the Journal of Master Jack
June 24th, 2036
We are progressing faster than ever expected. If we are lucky, the rainy season will only catch up with us in Omdurman. It ought to take us 20 days to get there if everything continues as well as it has so far.
The journal of Henri Fleurel, the architect of the king, is a shocking document which moved me to tears. Naturally, we know what happened, but the extent of the horror can only be really understood if all the ghastly details of the desperate exodus that the survivors from Europe went through are known.
Henri Fleurel was an architect in Perpignan, France. His wife and three of his children were lost in the war. Those who survived, his eldest daughter and her husband and a few neighbours, convinced that they were not radioactively
contaminated or infected by the biological warfare, risked the crossing to Africa in a boat. They were not only shot at from land, but Algerian torpedo boats were constantly on guard to drive the numerous refugee boats away
from the coast. It was only in Tunisia, where the authorities were more
tolerant, that they were allowed to land. When they realized the extent of the danger in Tunisia too, the massacre began. Europeans, who wanted to
exchange the valuables that they had salvaged for food, were brutally
murdered. Or they isolated refugees into camps, but by then it was too late.
They had brought the biological plague to Oran. The devilish plague
developed in the war research laboratories, seeped in from the battlefields of Europe, depopulated the whole of North Africa within four months and
spread like a bushfire through countries not even directly concerned with the war.
Countries like Sudan, Chad, Niger and Mali imagined themselves to be
relatively protected by the desert belt in the north, but it soon became clear that the Sahara was the lesser of two evils for those who had fled the hell of nuclear war. Enterprising caravan guides, promising themselves rich plunder, told stories of missionary settlements in Uganda, in the Upper Congo, and in Rhodesia, supposedly organizing migrations to a safer place. The old tale of Prester John’s Kingdom in the heart of Africa had survived for centuries and it was to this tale that the pilgrims turned, willing to believe anything, putting all their hopes into this paradise—a paradise that was as unreal as a paradise on the moon. Even if the pilgrims survived thousands of miles of desert after untold hazards, they then faced firing squads in Niger, Chad, or Sudan. The
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troops massacred them in the desert, after having been informed in time by the caravan guides who naturally kept a quarter of the loot collected for this service—in order—so the story went—to protect their own people from
sickness and death. The refugees were given an ultimatum to pull back to
the north at once—an absolutely deadly venture. Then the guns did the
talking. If there was not enough ammunition, the Kabartu, honorary
executioners, were put to work to smash the heads of those due to die with one full swing of their iron-clad clubs. They often worked for hours until exhaustion set in. Untold horrors must have taken place in such ‘mantraps’.
Most horrible of all, according to Henri Fleurel, was the screaming of the young boys who were rounded up and castrated to be sold as eunuchs.
‘I know’, he writes, ‘that in these countries it has been a custom for centuries, especially at the large slave markets, to order barbers to carry out a total amputation with their razor and pour hot butter in the horrible wound in
order to stop the bleeding. I shall never forget the smell of hot butter and burning flesh. I shall never forget the screams of castrated boys. If they lived through the ordeal they were then sold for a good price to the palaces of those in power as male concubines or eunuchs. Naturally, they had an explanation for this horror too. The genes of the young boys were radioactively
contaminated—one couldn’t take the risk. I understood—genocide is the
worst kind of murder.’
Henri Fleurel and half a dozen scholars, ‘selected’ with the aid of a
questionnaire before the journey to the supposed missionary settlements,
survived the massacre and were sold to the court of El Fasher.
The mummies of Bir Meschru keep haunting me, robbing me of my sleep. The
gold fillings in their teeth had been stolen.
Master Jack has hardly spoken at all for the past few days. He seems
very depressed. Even Alkuttabu’s jokes don’t have any effect on him
at all. The Samun, the breath of poison, blows hot and stifling.
Instinctively, we try not to breathe more than is necessary. How
lovely a cleansing storm would be, bringing the Charief, the rainy
season.
We ride into El Obeid. There are even more soldiers here. Many of
the old caravansaries and the pilgrims’ quarters are empty. The town
lies in ruins, but the garrison is new and being enlarged. The flags of
the king fly over it: green and white. We are given quarters in the
barracks.
The stern reputation of the king can be felt here, though nothing of
the freedom that rules in his palace. The laws in El Obeid are
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merciless. If anyone with any signs of the plague arrives, his left ear is cut off as a warning to others and he is run out of town. Should he
dare show himself a second time, he is caught, clubbed to death and
his body burned before the city.
The mutants are luckier. They are led before a Tabib, an official
doctor chosen and paid by the town, who examines them carefully
and then makes his decision. Should a man turn out to be a mutant,
he is not allowed to spread his contaminated sperm, which means—
off to the barber and castration.
Our escorts spent the day in a public bath. Master Jack went with
them. They came back to the barracks very late in the night and were
all very drunk.
Master Jack wasn’t able to stand up alone. Alkuttabu helped me
carry him to bed. The others started a fight with some soldiers who
had complained
about the noise. Since then, Keiki, our officer, has
been going around with a bandage over his nose and a swollen
eye.
Extracts from the Journal of Master Jack
June 30th, 2036
Today, just this quick note:
1) I believe that civilization will continue to exist. There are still public baths with hot water and other comforts.
2) I got myself stoned last night. I really needed it to wash down Fleurel’s taste of hot butter.
3) The prostitutes of El Obeid are so unbelievably ugly that it takes several cups of Laqbi to overcome my disgust, which however (see 2) I finally
succeeded in doing. I made them show me their left ears first.
We only stayed in El Obeid for four days. Now we are on our way to
Omdurman. The paths have been softened by two intense down-
pours. Red spiders with velvet-like bodies, Kul Ningilibe, which are
called Fanna Kimme in this region, swarm by the hundreds of
thousands over the ground all along the way as they usually do at
the beginning of the rainy season.
But the mosquitoes bother us more than the spiders. We bought
fantastic white fly swatters made of long baboon neck hairs from a
merchant and we seem to do nothing else the whole day but swat
around us to get rid of the pests. Their stings can be very dangerous.
Who knows whose blood they sucked before?
The river is near. We can tell by the smell of the air.
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4
The River
Two days before we reached Omdurman, we overtook a caravan
which had left El Fasher at the beginning of April. Two or three dozen
pilgrims made up the caravan and they received Master Jack with
hate-filled remarks and a display of anger. There was even one of
those young Muhadshirin, who believe they hold the wisdom of the
world in those small dried out gourds in which they keep their thin
ink. I didn’t like the travelling schoolboy the moment I saw him. He
didn’t have anything better to do than seek out Master Jack’s
company and fawn upon him, full of his own importance. Master
Jack, in his guilelessness—Allah hold his hand wide over him—
answered each question frankly and openly. The know-it-all
scratched everything down on his Loah, his wooden writing block,
and assiduously covered it with writing that looked like fly specks.
The traditional goat skin that he wore stank and he himself even
more, as if he had not washed since El Fasher.
Master Jack seemed not to notice the smell of this sanctimonious
billygoat. The supposed learning and thirst for knowledge of the
stupid babbler seemed to please him. He told him all about his
orbital startrekking, about the heavenly caravansaries and the
earthly satellites and other flying ships to be found under the stars
at night.
Inevitably, as soon as we arrived in Omdurman and had unsaddled
our camels in Messhid, the stinking billygoat rushed to the adminis-
trator of the mosque, who was at the same time justice of the town,
and denounced Master Jack for blasphemy. Two guardsmen of the
town arrived, put him in shackles and led him off. Keiki, Alkuttabu,
Schuschan and Alifa were nowhere to be found. They had gone to the
town and nearby garrison to look for better accommodation for us
rather than the stinking pilgrim quarters. But it is not easy. The city is overrun with pilgrims waiting to join a caravan to the east.
I was powerless. I bellowed as loud as I could and kicked one of the
guards in his fat arse. This only brought me a painful blow in my ribs
with his spear and a reprimand from Master Jack who put up no
resistance at all and let himself be led off.
Half the afternoon went by before our four escorts arrived. I was
furious and told then what had happened. At first they were stunned
by the news, then they set off in anticipation of adventure. I remained
with our packs because everywhere I looked there were vultures.
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Extracts from the Journal of Master Jack
July 16th, 2036
Today, something very unpleasant happened. A young man, who accom-
panied us on the last two days of our journey, whose apparent thirst for
knowledge and interest in scientific and technical things flattered me, whose questions about our work on Mount Darwin I gladly answered, reported me
to the local authorities for heresy. I was shackled and brought before a sort of religious court that had been set up on the spur of the moment. I was accused of having maintained that Allah does not guide the stars through the heavens at night. I had maintained that a group of white unbelievers were guiding them from some station that they had set up somewhere in the south on a
mountain. The justice asked me whether I really believed all this and whether I knew that such blasphemous talk was punished with instant death. I must admit that I have met up with many dangers, but this time I really feared for my life.
*
*
*
*
*
Luckily, at that moment, our four escorts appeared in court, boxed the guards’
ears for them and freed me from my shackles. I begged then to restrain
themselves knowing their temperament and fearing trouble with the local
authorities.
‘In whose name are you forcing entry to this court?’, the justice demanded.
I caught my breath as Alkuttabu aimed his rifle at the justice and pulled the trigger. The bullet hit the wall, barely two inches above the distinguished turban, and plaster rained down on his desk. Crying for help the justice took shelter under the desk.
‘Next time I’ll aim lower!’, Alkuttabu bellowed in a thundering voice. Then he continued in his curious tongue clicking dialect, ‘I am here by order of the king. This white scholar is travelling under the mandate of the king as the scholars of the king guide the stars around the earth at night.’ And as if this weren’t enough, he added, ‘All the stars!’
before rushing off to the brothels!’
Alkuttabu stared at him speechlessly and nodded his head in acknow-
ledgement. In the meantime, Keiki and Alifa had already caught the young
scoundrel, who had tried to disappear unobtrusively. They fastened him to a
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rack outside, cleverly designed to force the victim into a humiliating posture, and, with remarkable mathematical precision for desert boys, gave him one hundred strokes of the whip on each of his unwashed feet.
I fear that I put an end to his thirst for learning for a while. It will certainly be two weeks before he can continue his educational journey—unless Allah
provides him with a sedan carrier.
We were given quarters in the garrison, ugly flat buildings around a
dusty inner courtyard. The courtyard becomes a filthy mire with
every downpour. At night black worms crawl up along the raw
whitewashed walls fleeing the damp. They wither up in the sun
during the day and fall down, becoming plunder for the chickens,
who take this gift from the heavens for granted.
It is not at all easy to leave Omdurman. The power of the
authorities and the power of the king represented by our escort
Keiki apparently ends on the banks of the river. The muddy river is
rising.
This is the domain of Ngar Ba, the overseer of the river, as he is
called by the captain of the harbour and the domain of the Tuweirat,
the cavalry of the king which escorts the pilgrims’ caravans to Port
Sudan and back. The cavalrymen of the king are all, without
exception, rascals and cut-throats who shamelessly enrich themselves
on the pilgrims. Perhaps there is something in the name after all.
Master Jack said it wouldn’t surprise him if Kostas Ben Muchtar of El
Fasher didn’t have a hand in this lucrative business as it would be no
problem for his garrison to do away with the riff-raff.
These so-called cavalrymen are thus allowed to ask a fortune for
their service of ‘Protection from highwaymen, monsters and mu-
tants’; and to top it all off are not above demanding a present if they
see something that takes their fancy. However, it is true that they are
riding to the coast through a country in which all living things are
contaminated, even the grasshoppers, and where all water is polluted
and undrinkable. Whoever takes it upon himself to go beyond the
edge of the inhabitable world, must take everything he needs until his
return . . . food, salt, sugar, water and more water.
We have to do the same.
We will make the journey to Atbara in a sailing vessel that will not
be let down into the contaminated water until necessary. This time is
to be decided by the overseer of the harbour, Ngar Ba, together with
the Tuweirat, the cavalrymen of the king, who observe the river
incessantly and estimate its danger. Funnily enough, the favourable
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time of minimum contamination always corresponds with the time
when the maximum number of pilgrims have gathered, so that the
vessel built for at the most one hundred people and two hundred
animals, can then be loaded with two hundred pilgrims and three
hundred and fifty animals.
Our request to make use of the services of the cavalrymen of the
king only as far as Atbara was received with a benevolent shrug of the
shoulders. This would be condescendingly permitted if the entire