To Run Across the Sea (7 page)

Ruling out Pattaya with its pampering and its gun-slinging cops, I went instead to Phuket, Thailand’s largest island, down close to the border with Malaysia—a younger arrival in the field of pleasure. Here I stayed at a comfortable but isolated hotel, in appearance half-way between a pagoda and a railway station, with mock-Tudor half-timbered additions in which artfully painted concrete stood in for wood. The central feature was a series of still pools in the lobby, which, at a touch of a switch, could be set in motion to feed a river flowing through open doors over a flight of concrete steps into a lotus pond below. Everything had been thought of here to further the guest’s pleasure down to the orchid laid on the pillow at night, attached to two wrapped peppermints and a quotation—sometimes from Shakespeare—in praise of sleep. The only trouble was there was nothing whatever to do and nowhere to go in an immediate vicinity of sand-dunes and stagnant ponds from which I was assured a leisure complex of unprecedented dimensions would shortly emerge.

In Patong, a few miles further along the coast, something like this had already happened. It had been first in the field of development, and here had arisen a concrete jungle of the most fanciful kind. In a rabid assortment of architectural styles, the pacemaker seemed to have been modelled on a Dayak long-house with a soaring, gabled roof under which the wooden idols of Borneo might have been stored. There were a number in this style. There were also a little suburb of snow-proof mountain chalets built for Swiss occupation under this refulgent sun, a German
speishaus
with a sweating employee in
lederhosen
at the door, what looked like a Spanish model prison, and for the Brits, the usual nostalgic pubs.

Nothing much in Patong seemed to be working at the time of my passing through, for the sewers were being replaced and 100 yards of swamp spread from a burst water-main. Pyramids of building materials obscured all the views, such as they were, while newly opened-up terrain on all sides was spiked like a fakir’s bed with iron reinforcements awaiting the concrete. In the background, tremendous earth-moving machines charged about like an armoured brigade in action. A dried-out part of the town contained scuttling whirlwinds full of calcine dust, through which the visitors struggled, handkerchiefs clamped to their noses. From the invisible bay below a despondent howl arose to announce the presence of the long-tail boats of Bangkok.

Beyond Patong, the newer resorts, Karon, Kata and Naihan had some way to go before reaching this extreme. Nevertheless, here too, the shape of things to come was to be discerned in the new roads slashed through the contours of the landscape; the ironed-out dunes; the drained marshes; the streams corseted with cement; the hills sliced away.

Of the unique charm of South-East Asia where it borders the Andaman Sea, little survives in Phuket but what is to be found at Mai Khao—a long and deserted beach north of the airport, which, with its hinterland, has mysteriously been spared. For a while the road leading to the mainland via the Sarasin Bridge runs within a mile or so of the shore, to be reached by any track taken to the left. Here a seascape of oriental antiquity remains. The beach is feathered by the mossy shade of huge cassuarinas, from which fishing owls as large as eagles come planing down to the waves in the early hours of the evening. Within hearing of the planes taking off, painted storks mince in casual fashion among the lilypads of a shallow lake. In the rainy season, beginning in July, orchids flower in the branches of every tree. When I was there in February none were in flower, but this was the month when the turtles come ashore at night by the hundreds to deposit their eggs, and in the morning their scuffled tracks—strangely industrial-looking in their regularity—are everywhere to be seen.

T
HE PEOPLE WHO SHOULD
know differ strangely as to which is the longest river. The
Times Atlas
casts it vote in favour of the Amazon, the
Encyclopedia Britannica
says the Nile, while the
Guinness Book of Records
cannot make up its mind. Whichever the winner in this photo finish, one thing is certain: the importance of the Amazon in the human scheme is slight, that of the Nile huge. The one, majestic and aloof, has no history, enriches no land, supports only a handful of fishermen. The other is currently responsible for the existence of 50 million people, and even in the time of the pharaohs may have supported a population half that size, which, ruling out China, would probably have exceeded the number of the inhabitants of the rest of the globe.

The Nile brought glittering civilisations into being, wholly dependent upon the annual bounty of its floods, and a single year’s withholding of its waters from the parched lands awaiting them would have been enough to obliterate an empire. ‘Egypt,’ said Herodotus, ‘is the gift of the Nile.’ And not only Egypt but that 3,000-mile-long ribbon of fertility which uncoils through the deserts of the Sudan, where local wars of extermination have been fought when an occasional drop of a few inches in water levels meant that there was not enough food for all.

Khartoum, capital of the Sudan, seemed a likely starting-off place for explorations of the Upper Nile. It turned out to be a somewhat caved-in town with an embalmed colonial flavour, an occasional leper in sight, isolated grand hotels, and a Sudan Club where the many British expatriates that remain appeared to spend much of their lives. The Chinese had built a sumptuous Friendship Hall and glutted the town with Double Happiness matches—now serving as small change—while the Japanese kept the broken streets filled with yellow Toyota taxis. A thousand elephants had died to stock main-street shops with banal ornaments carved from their tusks, and the skins of such endangered animals as leopards, cheetahs and crocodiles were on offer at bargain prices.

I stayed at a new hotel in the centre where the novelty and the charm of Orient fully compensated for faltering Western technology. A little Arabic, not well learnt so many years ago, had been resuscitated for the occasion, and this permitted a proper exchange of courtesies with spotlessly robed fellow guests queueing for the lift. ‘Peace on you.’ ‘And on you peace and the blessings of God.’ ‘They say today that if you wish to reach floor three you must press button six.’ ‘Let us do that.
Inshallah
we shall arrive.’ ‘
Inshallah
.’

The doorman swept off his hat in the way Sudanese servants probably did 30 years ago. Fifty yards from where he stood smiling and bowing, a beggar advertised his plight by a strong-voiced cry, ‘God is merciful,’ repeated with unflagging conviction every 10 seconds throughout the daylight hours. According to a printed warning it was as strictly forbidden to photograph him, or any other ‘debasing sight’, as it was a power-station, a military establishment, or a bridge.

Down on the waterfront the scene was a lively one. Khartoum is built at the confluence of the Blue and White Niles, the first gathering its waters in the Ethiopian Plateau; the most distant source of the second being the Kagera River in Burundi, some 1,500 miles to the south. It came as a surprise to find that one river is actually blue, and the other, if not quite white, at least a palish green. It is regarded by many visitors as an emotional experience to discover a spot on one of the sand-banks where this separation of colours is clearly visible, enabling the pilgrim to stand with one foot in each river.

Hotels and government buildings impose a stolid conformity along the city waterfront—one could be anywhere—but at Abu Rof, just outside the town limits, the Nile comes into its own, and could almost be mistaken for the Ganges. Here people strip off to wash down, having pushed their way down to the water through the herds of cows and goats that are brought to drink. Here, taxi drivers back their shattered Toyotas into the shallows to sponge off the dust, and here—inevitably—the donkey-drawn municipal water-carts are brought to be filled. This is a playground to which men bred in deserts are attracted by the mere presence of water. They sit here in rows in barbers’ chairs to have their heads shaved, and before the lathering begins the barber adjusts the mirror to enable his customer to enjoy the reflected scene of all that is happening down by the river at his back.

Abu Rof fosters the intense sociability of lives lived outside in what is for the most part of the year a good climate. Neighbours carry out their beds to sleep on the beach, which is furnished like a communal room with domestic objects, chairs, the occasional sofa, a kitchen stove, most of these softened in outline by pigeons’ droppings. The villagers swap tall stories, pray a little, brew up tea, and polish each other’s shoes, and turbaned and immensely dignified men gather in clear spots among the domestic litter for a game of marbles.

The backdrop to this amiable scene is the brown ramparts thrown up by the Khalifa and held with hopeless courage for an hour or two against the cannon fire of Kitchener’s expedition sent to avenge the death of Gordon and to recover the Sudan. Kitchener’s gunboat, the
Melik
, with its paper-thin armour and single three-inch gun, is still tied up a mile or so upstream.

Sheikh Hamid el Nil’s cemetery, and the tomb of this holy man, whose name implies his mystic involvement with the river, is a short taxi-ride away. It has become the centre of a dervish cult, hardly more than tolerated by Islamic orthodoxy, which views gymnastic devotions with the same uneasiness a practising Anglican might feel in the presence of Holy Rollers at worship. I drove out on Friday evening, when all Khartoum relaxes, to see the dervishes whirl. About 100 of them had marched in under their flags and were engaged in a preliminary workout. The drums crashed, and the dervishes began to jerk and twitch.

There was nothing exclusive about the occasion. Any bystander could join in, and many did. A hard core of devotees whirled in professional style, but the onlooker caught up in the spirit of the thing was free to improvise. The drums imposed their own tremendous rhythmic discipline, but within this framework anything went. One pranced about, leapt, galloped, whirled until eliminated by vertigo, howled, shrieked, frothed at the mouth if possible, while the dervishes cracked their whips and lashed out with their canes. It was to be enjoyed by all; all good, therapeutic mania, like a ‘Come Dancing’ session with 10 marks out of 10 for contestants who could throw a trance or work themselves up into a fit.

My driver, who had been standing by his taxi, soon began to suffer minor convulsions and, after grabbing at the steering wheel through the window in an effort to hold himself back, suddenly tore loose, picked up a stick, and went bounding away. A few minutes later he appeared again, exhausted and reeling, but spiritually renewed. ‘If you believe in God, sir,’ he said, ‘why do you not join us?’ It was an experience he thought I ought not to miss.

I had no objection when he suggested a visit to the nearby tomb of the Mahdi, liberator of the Sudan from Gordon and the ‘Turks’. It proved to be a garish edifice of recent construction, reminding one of a space-ship on its launching pad. Kitchener destroyed the original tomb. He had the Mahdi’s body dug up and went off with the head with the intention of turning it into a drinking cup, deterred only from doing this by Queen Victoria’s startled outcry. Winston Churchill refers with distaste to this incident in ‘The River War’. He speaks of the Mahdi’s ‘unruffled smile, pleasant manners, generosity, and equable temperament’. ‘To many prisoners he showed kindness … to all he spoke with dignity and patience.’ His limbs and trunk were flung into the Niles. ‘Such,’ says Churchill, ‘was the chivalry of the conquerors.’

The driver obtained my admission into the enclosure from which non-Muslims are normally 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.