Free To Run Across the Sea by Norman Lewis

excluded, on the promise that I would join him in a prayer, and I duly stood with him and did my best to recite the words of the Arabic formula.
    The Nile is rarely easy to approach. In the Sudan, river steamers only operate for about a quarter of its length, and roads following the valley are usually out of sight of the water. I had arrived with an introduction to the owner of a motorised felucca, but he had gone out of business, and the only man prepared to offer long-distance transport was a Mexican white hunter who offered 25 days’ hunting for £15,000. He mentioned as an inducement that on a recent expedition a client had had the good luck to shoot a bongo, an exceptionally rare species of antelope, only to be taken in the Sudan.
    It would have been nice to go to Juba, capital of the deep south, to visit at least the fringe of the extraordinary papyrus swamp known as the Sudd, and stay in Juba’s hotel where colonial nostalgia is so acutely felt that friends who had been there were prepared to guarantee that Brown Windsor soup was served with every meal. There were severe impediments to this project. In the Sudan communications are coming close to total breakdown, and this vast African country offers a foretaste of the likely predicament of the Third World when, in the end, petrol ceases to flow.
    The beautiful lady in the tourist office broke the news to me that such were the fuel shortages that the plane to Juba could be held up there for as long as a week, or, at worst, a month. Shortages of this order might delay, once I got there, the proposed return by river boat, and it was hard to come by precise information as to what was happening in the south because the telephone lines were out of order.
    Every world traveller will assure you that the Sudanese are the nicest people you are ever likely to meet, and I was beginning to agree. It was Saturday morning and there seemed to be a faint whiff about the place of the aphrodisiac smoke of acacia wood burnt in certain rituals on Friday nights. Young ladies in flowered chiffon saris came and went, smiling and giggling, shaking hands and touching their hearts, while the lady in charge of the office broke her depressing news.
    ‘You could go by car,’ she suggested, ‘but you may have to queue eight hours for petrol.’ She added that the car would cost £125 a day, mentioning that the journey to Juba occupied at least five days in each direction, and that 250 gallons of petrol would have to be carried. It was a moment, if ever there was one, to seek refuge in the art of the possible.
    I ran to earth the only man in Khartoum with a Land-Rover for hire; he found enough petrol to fill his tank and for two spare cans, and we set off with the object of travelling as far south as this meagre ration would allow. An asphalt road took us to Jebel Aulia, where we crossed the dam built in 1934, which was covered as if by graffiti with the great names of British engineering from those far-off colonial times. Here fishermen, casting their nets under a screen of herons and fishing eagles, were taking Nile perch from the water. These they bartered with the villagers for such things as firewood and eggs. Beyond Aulia the road, marked as confidently as ever on the map, turned into a tangle of interlacing tyre tracks in a near-desert. Its surface was as flat and hard as a cricket pitch and once in a while we drove into a drab village, overtopped by a chocolate and green minaret, with the mirage lying like stagnant water, and creeping back as we charged up the streets. Such villages, just beyond reach of the Nile floods, were so poor that even the vultures had given them up. Nothing, absolutely nothing, was ever thrown away. The rains came in autumn, the villagers grew a single crop of sorghum, and after that their lives teetered on the edge of survival for the nine months to the next rains.
    When we stopped for a midday snack a chance remark by the driver put the whole predicament of the