Free Bettany's Book by Thomas Keneally

Stoner. He grew tombac, chewing tobacco. He owned cattle and two trucks, he owned camels he hired out for ploughing. But he said the people who got by on millet and sesame were in a really bad state. No rains last year, late rains this. Last year he’d driven some men into Nyala, once the ground was ploughed, so they could get a job cutting fodder for thebig cattle market there. But this year was worse – a lot of children had died. Allah took whomever He chose to take, the man had told Stoner. This spring God had taken children and goats. And now families, some of whom had improvidently eaten their seed crops, were making for Nyala, though those who still had millet seed had left someone behind to plant it.
    All this – the deaths, the burials, the dying livestock, the hard successive days – had happened within the great shell of God’s knowing, but to the universal ignorance of the world.
    Stoner boarded the EC truck again. They overtook the sheik’s groaning and swaying vehicle and Prim saw then a group of people heaping up a cairn of stone. Since a foot eloquently protruded from the structure, and children tottered up with more stones to mark the loss and protect the corpse from beasts, it looked obscenely stage-managed by some shot-happy cameraman. For the glimpsed scene was as immediate, yet as distanced from her by the frame of the truck window, as if she were watching a screen, perceiving a two-dimensional tragedy. Someone – Codderby or Crouch – had said great disasters rendered the victims more visible both in height and width, but took away their depth and their names. Only the victims of private and discreet murders had names.
    The most astonishing thing in Prim’s eyes was that Rahmin the driver took Stoner’s truck away from the drift of the lines of marchers whom Stoner seemed so delighted to have found; and that no one protested, neither the marchers nor anyone in Stoner’s vehicle. The Stoner–Bettany party and its preceding drilling trucks had specific objectives, a road plan, and diverged to Adi Hamit.
    Stoner had the truck stopped at one stage, got out his field telephone pack and with the exemplary composure of the true bureaucrat radioed his office in Khartoum, for transmission to Brussels, the news that a previously unreported food emergency seemed to be in progress during the supposed rainy season in Darfur. With a quick eye for assessing such things, he told his office that because it would be even worse to the north, in the desolate ground near el Fasher, there may be at least 300 000 people imperilled. Seeming perhaps an overstatement to Prim’s less trained eye, it would prove in time to be a fair estimate of the people who were now or would later be touched by whatever the term ‘previously unreported food emergency’ meant.
     
    Prim felt somehow relieved to encounter the more normal levels of Sudanese distress represented by Adi Hamit in its canyon between flat-topped hills. She had known they were close since the earth became bare, stripped for cooking fuel. They passed a Nissen-hutted, barb-wired food dump at the foot of an escarpment and penetrated blank afternoon light, and Abuk sat upright, smiling weightily and removing the cloth from her head. In this wide socket of the earth, open-sided tents and brush shelters with blue plastic roofs stretched away to a hazed infinity. Southern men and women, very different people from the people they had met on the road, walked out from beneath tent flaps and stood straight and thin, watching them pass with a wide-eyed lack of expectation. The men were middle-aged – there were not often young men in refugee camps. They were either dead, serving with the rebel SPLA, or trying to find work in cities. These were sundry tribes of Dinka. They had always been considered noble, cicatriced on the face, and ornamented for special events with the blood of cattle. Prim had read of them at university, and seen the photographs Leni Riefenstahl,