Free To Run Across the Sea by Norman Lewis Page A

underfed four-fifths of the world population in stunning perspective. Schooled in the proprieties of the well-nourished fifth I made a move to gather up our litter. He was horrified. ‘Leave everything,’ he said. ‘The goats will deal with the orange skins, even the paper, and the Arabs will turn the beer-cans into cups. Come back here in an hour, and you won’t see a trace of anything.’ Since the vultures had lost hope and gone away, animals that had died from natural causes lay scattered about these villages quite intact, but mummified by the sun.
    We turned away to the east, passing without warning across the frontier between arid savannah and the brilliant fertility of the nearly two million acres of the Gezira, the great garden of the Sudan filling the triangle south of Khartoum between the Blue and White Niles. A glum prospect of mud huts afloat in the mirage still showed through the rear window, but ahead was a soft bedazzlement of green fields moated with running water, and sparked with the refulgence of brilliant birds; great wading storks in absurd postures, ten kinds of kingfisher, green cuckoos and crimson bee-eaters, insect-hunting from the telegraph poles where they perched in their hundreds. The Nile valley, throughout the length of its passage through the arid lands, is the paradise of birds, drawn to its water and the teeming insect life of its marshes and its saturated earth.
    It was intended back in the twenties that the Gezira project should provide cheap cotton for the Lancashire mills, but each year less cotton is grown for export and more food for home consumption, although the Gezira still provides most of the national income. It is not quite the success story it was, and production in most sectors is in decline. The management of water on this scale is a complex affair and technological breakdowns are compounded by a brain-drain to the affluent Gulf States. Water levels are maintained by specialists at pumping stations and irrigation regulators, who are required to be in constant touch with one another through the telephone network. This has begun to break down, so that canals frequently overflow and land is damaged by excessive flooding.
    It is said, too, the canals are no longer kept as free as they should be from weeds. This not only reduces the efficiency of irrigation, but has provoked a marked increase in the incidence of bilharzia. I was told that 80 per cent of Gezira children before the age of 10 now suffer from the disease, and the anaemia and chronic diarrhoea it entails. The shells of the snail that acts as host to the parasite in the intermediate stage of its development were to be seen everywhere in the mud excavated from water-courses.
    A quick forage round the market was to produce enough fuel, a gallon here, a gallon there, for a two days’ trip to the north, and our first stop was at the sixth cataract of the Nile, where the river slips between burnished coppery hills and a miniature gorge. The description cataract over-dramatises a fall in the water, rippling over pink stones hardly more than a few feet high; but here the boats taking part in Kitchener’s river war had to be dismantled once again to be reassembled only a few yards further on (nuts and bolts had sensibly replaced rivets in their construction), and there is a local legend that here they were bombarded by Mahdists who remained miraculously immune from the Maxim guns by reinforcing the chainmail they wore with pages from the Koran.
    There were wide, tranquil waters above the babble of the cataract, with palms, beanfields and birds and butterflies galore, and little girls were tugging goats by the ear, one by one, down to the water and actually persuading them to drink. Here I ran into the corruption spread by tourism even in this remote place. A year or more back, before petrol shortages had closed them down, an agency had been accustomed to send parties of trippers to this enchanted spot, and a local peasant,