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  In form and ornament the temple complex at Al Naggar was Egyptian, resembling many others farther down the Nile. This temple in the middle of the Sudan sited more southerly even than Nubia, was like a copy of the temple at Edfu. The walls even had the same symbolic figures of the king and queen holding enemy prisoners by their hair, and lions preparing to eat them. On the sides of one pylon a coiled python with a lion’s head – Apademak again – was rising from a lotus flower, the symbol of everlasting life. On the other pylon, King Natakamani was shown worshiping the lion god.

  On every surface there were bas-reliefs, some of ram-headed Amun, and Khnum, and many lion heads, beautifully sculpted and uprisen, their paws extended to snatch and gobble prisoners. The north wall showed symbols of peace and prosperity, the south wall images of chaos and war. A crocodile with its jaws tied tightly symbolized peace; armored battle elephants dragging captives depicted war.

  Inside the kiosk of the temple were old pieces of graffiti (‘Holroyd 1837’) and pharaonic scenes too, delicately cut into the sandstone that had been quarried from the nearby stone hills that surrounded this ancient settlement. The place was known by its Arabic name, Musarrawat al Sofra, ‘Yellow Drawings.’

  ‘But why these people here?’ Ramadan said dismissively, meaning the Sudanese peasants at the well. ‘A few huts. A few goats. Two days by donkey to Shendi if they want to buy something.’

  A handful of Sudanese toiled with donkeys, drawing water from another well half a mile away – a well that probably dated from this Kushitic site. But what seemed like the middle of nowhere had once been a trade route. It must have been, because there was a way south in the wadi here that had produced the prizes from deeper in Africa: wood, honey, gold, and slaves. And ivory: it was said that many tusks had been dug out of the ancient store rooms on this site.

  Here we camped, in the dune near the temple, just the two of us, like a pair of nineteenth-century travelers who had happened upon an ancient ruin in the desert. No fences, no signs, no commercial activity, no touts, no postcards. The locked-up quarters of the German archeologists who were cataloguing this site were over the next hill.

  When we started cooking, some local men drifted over and squatted with us and shared our food. You couldn’t blame them – in the odorless desert the aroma of shish-kebab must have stirred appetites in the distant huts. We talked awhile, and then I sat in a plastic chair in the dark and in this peaceful place listened to bad news from the larger world on my shortwave radio.

  That was the night Ramadan said, ‘This my country! This my desert! I sleep here on the sand!’ That was the night the moon was clouded over; the night in the hot darkness I heard the pitter-pat of tiny feet which turned out to be raindrops, the prelude to a violent downpour, and another later. In the morning I woke up sneezing, surrounded by these glorious temples, reddish-gold in the sunrise.

  Part of that next day I spent at another temple on a nearby hill, an Amun temple, with a ramp, a walkway flanked by recumbent rams (a dozen altogether, their faces broken). Khnum was the ram god, ‘God of the Kings, and King of the Gods.’ The king and queen who had had this temple built were shown on the bas-reliefs with ram heads. But Egyptology seemed a discipline based largely on conjecture, assigning names to eroded faces of royalty and deities and animals. So much was speculation, for the Kingdom of Kush, the Napatan and Merotic periods had lasted for a thousand years, until the fourth century AD. What was known was piddling compared to what was not known. A quarter of a mile away was the Great Enclosure. It was lovely but enigmatic: carved pillars, lions, elephant sculptures, feet, legs, torsos, with the implied self-mocking command: ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

  Was this a center for training elephants for warfare – the battle elephants depicted on the temple at Al Naggar? Some archeologists thought so. Others thought it was perhaps a religious center. But it might have been used for coronation rites. Or some sort of royal arena: ‘The ruler might have had to renew publicly his or her show of strength in order to retain the throne.’

  The experts didn’t know, so how should I? I was just a wanderer, heading to Cape Town, wearing a faded shirt and flapping pants, sunburned toes showing in my Syrian sandals, and with a head cold from having been rained on: a traveler in an antique land.

  The greatest part of my satisfaction was animal pleasure: the remoteness of the site, the grandeur of the surrounding mesa-like mountains and rock cliffs, the sunlight and scrub, the pale camels in the distance, the big sky, the utter emptiness and silence, for round the decay of these colossal wrecks the lone and level sands stretched far away.

  It was necessary in the remote provinces of the Sudan for foreigners to report to the local security police within twenty-four hours of arrival. These were the same police who had interrogated one American man for days before they performed a mock execution on him. The same police, of which the State Department advisory had warned: The government of Sudan’s control of its police and soldiers may be limited.

  True, I might be interrogated when I showed up; but if I didn’t show up the consequences could have been dire. There were worse things than a mock execution; there were real executions, for example.

  Shendi was the nearest town. We drove across the desert to it and entered. The place was biscuit-colored and dusty, a low settlement of poor huts and small shops, the streets overrun with goats and camels. The largest house in town, a conspicuous villa, belonged to the president’s brother. There were some beat-up vans and old trucks and a fleet of battered blue taxis, which Ramadan said were all Russian-built, jalopies from long ago, called Volgas. This was the only town in the Sudan where you would see such vehicles, but the engines had been replaced with newer Japanese ones, purloined from other cars. There were no trees anywhere, and not much shade.

  The security office was at the edge of town on a side street, the officer a stern skull-capped man with a visible prayer bump on his forehead, a facial feature I always took to be a warning sign. He was with three other men who, Sudanese style, sat on chairs with their feet tucked under them. They were all watching a small TV set – more worry, a black-and-white set showing a howling placard-carrying mob, some of the slogans readable in English. They were angry Palestinians. The sound was turned up, and so the only voices audible in this security office were those of outraged Philistines.

  I had a very bad moment just then, for in my passport were two Israeli stamps, one from the checkpoint at Allenby Bridge where I entered from Jordan, the other at Haifa, where I departed Israel on a ferry. The instructions from the Sudanese Embassy said that any passport ‘with Israeli markings’ would be rejected. Yet I had handed in my passport and been granted the visa. If any Sudanese had seen the ‘Israeli markings’ he had not mentioned it.

  But a scowling man with a prayer bump in the desert town of Shendi might find them, and might object. He took my passport and laid it flat, and smoothed it with the heel of his hand and began scrutinizing it. Perhaps the stamps from Kiribati, Ecuador, Albania, Malaysia, India, Hong Kong, Gibraltar, and Brazil dazzled him. Some were colorful. He glanced from time to time at the television. He wiped his mouth. I sat rigid, expecting the worst. Then, without a word, he gave me back my passport and dismissed me, and went on watching the Middle Eastern mob scene.

  We walked through the market, choosing tomatoes and basil for lunch.

  ‘Awaya,’ children called out often, and less often, Aferingi. White man. For I was a novelty The only other foreigners they saw were the occasional Chinese who manned the oil refinery up the road. The market was full of vegetables and fruit, spices and herbs. Lots of plump grapefruit, lots of bananas. Not many buyers circulated among the stalls, and so people hectored me and thrust melons in my face and tried to sell me baskets of limes, because as an awaya – even better as a masihi, a Christian, a believer in the messiah – I was likely to have lots of Sudanese dinars.

  Ramadan and I ended up at the Shendi ferry ramp, drinking coffee with a distinctive tast
e.

  It wasn’t really coffee but rather an unusual brew called jebana, coffee husks steeped in water, with sugar and, Ramadan said, a certain dawa – I recognized the Swahili word for medicine – zinjabil, powdered ginger. It was a cultural link with the Horn of Africa, of which Sudan has many. That same drink in Yemen and the Emirates is called qashar.

  A few miles up the riverbank was the Royal Palace, hot, muddy, fly-blown and mosquito-ridden, but at least with a tree or two. I could not make head nor tail of the place. There were friezes showing animals and gods, and cartouches enclosing hieroglyphics, but this complex of crumbled foundations spoke of nothing except the visible fact that once upon a time the site had been a populous town with many buildings and avenues – and perhaps a Romanesque bath. Had the Romans come here?

  Mohammed the resident watchman and guide was not much use.

  ‘American?’ he said in Arabic, an unmistakable word, accusing me with a brown twisted forefinger.

  ‘American,’ I said.

  ‘Bush is Satan.’

  ‘Ana ma’ arif.’ I said.

  ‘Clinton is Satan,’ Mohammed said.

  ‘Ana ma’ arif.’

  ‘Why you say you don’t know?’

  I just smiled at him.

  ‘American soldiers no good. Kill people!’

  We were walking from the broken steps to the broken wall, and along it, treading on Kushitic bricks. Mohammed looked tired and disgruntled. He said he had three daughters, no sons. He had no money. His grandfather had been the caretaker and guide here, so had his father. But if Mohammed knew anything technical or historical about this place he did not reveal it to me.

  Suddenly he said in halting English, ‘I want to go America.’

  ‘America ma kwais,’ I said, mimicking what he had said.

  ‘Yes, but no work here.’

  ‘You want to work in America?’

  ‘Yes. Get job. Get dollars.’

  ‘Bush Shaytaan,’ I said, teasing him again.

  ‘How I can go America?’ Mohammed said, kicking at the ancient bricks.

  ‘Ana ma’ arif,’ I said: I dunno.

  In the most atmospheric of nineteenth-century exotic scenes, the essence of Orientalism, explorers camp at the foot of dramatic ruins – the tent beside the Sphinx’s paw, the canvas shelter at the base of the pyramids, the campfire glowing near the Temple of Isis. Ideally, the whole thing is moonlit, and there are some hobbled camels nearby, looking luminous in the moonshine. No one else around, just this tableau: hardy campers, lovely ruins, big-eyed camels, a cooking fire.

  This was precisely my experience that night. We camped by the pyramids, and I felt as those old travelers must have – lucky, humbled, uplifted by being alone in this sacred place, a solitary meditation among marvels. These Sudanese pyramids, remnants of burials of the Kingdom of Kush, were numerous – about thirty-five of them on a sandstone ridge. They were smaller and steeper than the ones at Gizeh, like a mass of art deco salt shakers up close, and from a little distance like a row of fangs in the jawbone of the ossified ridge. The ribbed drifts of golden brown sand were heaped against the pyramids and their chapels. The sand glowed beautifully at sunset, the great dunes of it piled up and scooped out at the corners, the way snow blows and stays in improbable forms, in sculpted shapes and overhangs.

  There wasn’t time to look around; the sun was setting. We cooked some potatoes we had bought at Shendi and made tomato and cucumber salad. I put up my tent and Ramadan the romantic (‘The sand is my pillow!’) chose a sandy crease in a dune. The night was clear but the wind came up, blew sand against my tent and covered Ramadan. The moon passed overhead and when it dropped into the west the dark stars shone with such power their intense light pierced the nylon of my tent and the rest of the sky was blacker without the bright pollution of the moon.

  The wind died at dawn, when it became so chilly I had to wear a jacket, and in this pure light, under a clear sky, the pyramids were uncluttered and smooth-sided, standing among the rubble of stones and fallen bricks. Nearly all the tops of the pyramids had been destroyed and all had been torn open and robbed. Several of them, just broken tumbled blocks, had been dynamited. You could see the effect of the explosions which had shattered the bricks in the beheading of the pyramids.

  The tomb raider who carried out this destruction was an obscure Italian adventurer and treasure hunter named Giuseppe Ferlini. Just a few facts are known of this man, who vandalized the pyramids and the tombs in 1834, though his name is notorious in the Nubian Desert. He was born in Bologna in 1800, qualified as a medical doctor, and after a spell in Albania and Egypt as a soldier of fortune, he sailed up the Nile to Khartoum. On the way he visited the more obvious ancient sites and conceived the idea that they were full of gold. Records show that he received permission from the ruler of the Sudan, Ali Kurshid Pasha, to excavate sites in Merowe. Ali Kurshid was a slaver, who, trading in humans (he hauled Dinka and Azande from the south, to sell on the coast), could hardly have scrupled to preserve a jumble of old stones and dented bronzes.

  With a large gang of Sudanese laborers Ferlini began digging and very soon found a gold statue. This trophy inspired him to keep digging. He also used explosives. Ferlini missed some treasures – we are certain of this, because when the Germans began their careful reconstruction of these sites in 1960 they found a gilded statue of Hathor, a beautiful bronze of Dionysius and many other bronzes. But Ferlini must have found many similar objects. He sold them for ‘a small fortune,’ according to one historian and did violence to the pyramids. He left the Sudan soon after his destruction of the sites. He simply disappeared down the Nile with crates of treasures. He wrote nothing. He lived like a prince in Italy on the proceeds of his tomb raiding. ‘He gave no coherent account of what happened to the treasures.’

  What had he taken away? Pots and chairs, carvings, little idols in black stone, mummified cats and alabaster falcons, the contents of the burial chambers, bronzes, gold statues and the gilded heads of gods and goddesses. What he had not taken, for they were impossible to remove, were the incised murals, the processions of lion-headed kings, the queens in horned headdresses, the lotuses, cobras, elephants and sacred bulls. The cattle in those 1000-year-old bas-reliefs had the twisted horns that were seen in today’s Dinka herds, in the south of the Sudan.

  As I was wandering from one blasted-and-rebuilt pyramid to another, some children from a nearby village showed up with trinkets – amulets and carvings – they claimed they had dug out of the rubble and some clay models of the pyramids. I gave them each a banana and off they went.

  Another cluster of pyramids stood on a more southerly ridge, another citadel of reddish wind-scarred sandstone, dating from about 295–250 BC. The landscape was either this weathered stone or else smooth sand, some of it like brown sugar, the rest flat and yellow. No trees, no greenery, nothing growing, not even grass. I hiked to these other pyramids and examined them and drew some sketches in my notebook of the lions and the bulls.

  While I was doing this, three tall white-robed Sudanese appeared – impressed and gratified that I was taking the trouble to draw pictures. They were pilgrims of a sort, the leader an older man named Kamal Mohammed Khier.

  He said by way of introduction, ‘I am not an Arab.’ He said this as a challenge and a boast.

  ‘But you speak Arabic.’

  ‘Yes, but it is not my language.’ Saying so, he sounded like Salih Mashamoun, the Sudanese diplomat I had met in Cairo. ‘I am a Nubian. I speak Nubian. My family is Nubian. I am from Dongola in Nubia. We were kings in this country. We ruled Egypt. We built these pyramids.’

  It was quite a speech and perfect for the place, the visitation by this proud son of the land. He introduced the others, his son Hassan and another man, Hamid.

  ‘This man, Hamid, is a real Nubian, too,’ Kamal said. ‘Not an Arab.’

  Kamal frowned at the pyramids. He was looking at Ferlini’s damage. He said, ‘Look at the condition of them. The governme
nt doesn’t take care of them. These are great things!’

  It was true that the Sudanese government did very little to preserve these ancient sites but in almost every case the site had been adopted by a foreign university – German, British, American – and was in the process of restoration. A philanthropic Englishwoman was waging a single-handed battle against neglect and erosion at a temple complex just to the west of the pyramids, and an elderly German named Hinkel, a self-financed enthusiast apparently, visited here once a year in his long-term project of piecing together the Temple of the Sun.

  I accompanied Kamal and the others around the rest of the pyramids. They asked how I happened to be here. I pointed out my little blue tent in the dune.

  ‘Yes, you can be safe here,’ Kamal said. ‘In Egypt, no. In other countries people will trouble you – and this and that’ – he was hacking at his head with his hand. ‘But here, no one will bother you. You are safe in Sudan. We are all your friends.’

  We broke camp and drove through the dunes and the gravely sand to the Temple of the Sun. An old man ran over and made me sign a logbook. He saluted me. He showed me the temple. Sand had almost covered the foundations but that was a help, for the packed sand preserved the carvings on the friezes.

  The old man sat on a rock and said it was a throne for the priest. He put his hands together and mimicked the priest greeting the sun god, ‘Allah!’

  Ramadan teased the old man and said he didn’t know what he was talking about.

  The old man laughed. ‘No, but Hinkel does!’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Fifty-six or fifty-seven,’ the old man said doubtfully.

  ‘No – much older! Sixty-something.’

  ‘How am I supposed to know that? I can’t read,’ the old man said. He was laughing, because there was a lot of affection in Ramadan’s teasing.