Free To Run Across the Sea by Norman Lewis Page B

under the pretence that he owned the land, had levied a toll on access to the river. Watching from his lookout he spotted the Land-Rover’s approach and hurried to lay branches across the path, charging £1 per head before he would remove them. It was the first and the last time that I heard the hateful word baksheesh in the Sudan.
    The track leading to the north followed the railway line and in the space of an hour we passed the wreckage of two derailed trains. They had become a centre of local pilgrimage, and while we were examining the second train several goat-herds came into sight from behind the rocks to make a cautious, tiptoe approach as if for fear of disturbing a sleeping, but potentially dangerous animal. One of them picked up a stone and threw it at a mangled tanker-truck, and the sound of the stone striking metal was shrill and bleak in the dry air. They came up and shook hands with us repeatedly, delighted at the relief from the terrific monotony of their lives offered by the wrecked train and the sight of fresh faces.
    In this vicinity, at the approach to the important river junction at Shendi, we found ourselves among 100-foot-high mounds of immense ironstone boulders, heaped together in such a way that it was hard at first to accept that they had not been built by human hands. Scattered over the sand the shapes resembled squat armless Venuses, 100 tons of sand-polished sculpture by Henry Moore, sand-logged dinosaurs, black iron shards, and meteorites.
    Shendi, at one of the old crossroads of Africa, had always lived off the river traffic and the caravan routes crossing the Nile at this point. It had been an emporium of ivory and slaves, particularly the slave-girls brought down from Abyssinia, those highly valued harem items whose jet-black skin was—as an early writer put it—as cool to the touch as a toad, mentioning that a toad was sometimes kept on hand to enable the would-be purchaser to convince himself of the truth of the claim. Shendi had fallen into a decline highlighted by the loss of one of its ferries. It had been out of action for a year, although the spare parts necessary to get it going again had been delivered some months before, remaining in their crates by the river bank where they had been dumped from a lorry, and probably forgotten.
    Here a pull-in for market traffic offered the huge and expensive luxury of Pepsi Cola, English cigarettes (high-tar content for the Third World), a packet of which cost an average Sudanese worker a day’s wages, and hardboiled eggs by way of a snack. Children were waiting to seize upon and suck the discarded shells.
    A hard day’s drive brought us by evening to the site of the ancient Nilotic kingdom of Meroë where we camped for the night among the low pyramids—there are about 200 in all, clustered in groups over the low hills. They remain so well preserved, so clean-cut in their outlines that a few of them could be mistaken for follies built here by some Sudanese Victorian eccentric. The obvious clue to their antiquity lies in the fact that so many have lost their tops, dismantled in search of treasure by an early Egyptian military expedition tricked by an impostor into coming here in search of gold.
    Throughout most of its course through the Sudan the Nile is surprisingly difficult to reach behind the green mosaic of its gardens and its innumerable irrigation ditches. All this invaluable land has remained in the same families for many generations, producing a precisely calculable return and a sufficiency of food for all, based on a stable equation of birth and death. Antibiotics have destroyed this equilibrium. Until now epidemic sickness has carried off most of the children of the Third World in the first year of their lives. Now they survive to compete with each other for food supplies that have reached their limits. Up to four crops a year are raised at Meroë, but there is no way of coaxing more food from the soil, and even the volume of water