The Medusa Stone by Jack Du Brul

Author:Jack Du Brul [Brul, Jack Du]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Action & Adventure, General
ISBN: 9781101100011
Google: Z43auocS1tIC
Amazon: 0451409221
Publisher: NAL
Published: 2000-04-01T11:00:00+00:00

The Eritrea-Sudan Border

There were two rugged gravel roads that crossed the lonely border, both of them traversing a deep gorge bridged with rickety wooden structures that dated back decades. Near both crossings, roughly forty kilometers apart, refugee camps had grown out of the scrub plain, tens of thousands of miserable people huddling together in tents that offered little protection from the wind or the brutal sun. The tent cities housed Eritreans who could not return to their homeland. Since the intensification of Sudan’s civil war, Sudanese natives too were seeking shelter here, hoping for the chance of a better life in Eritrea. Such was their desperation, they saw their impoverished neighbor as a promised land.

Situated close to the border and thus easier to reach, these camps were in much better condition than the reservations in Sudan’s interior. The people here received regular visits from United Nations and EC trucks carrying food, medicine, and clothing transshipped through Eritrea.

At the bottom of the gorge, a thin trickle of water passed the camps, and each camp had a continuous chain of girls making the trip down and back, heavy pots of water balanced on their heads. Washing and latrines were situated a short way from where they took their drinking water, but by the time the stream reached the downstream camp, it was fouled by its neighbor. Diseases such as dysentery and other bacterial infections raged.

A farther ten miles south from the second camp was a third, one occupied by soldiers rather than refugees. A compound had been carved out of a rare grove of camel thorn trees, tents erected in their meager shade. A generator hummed a short distance from the camp, and a pump drew water from the gorge through a two-inch hose. A team of three men tended the fires for boiling the water, purifying it with heat before it was further chemically treated.

Despite the efforts to maintain a sanitary encampment, the fetid smell from the refugee camp wafted on the breeze, carrying with it the stink of sewage. That and the constant buzzing of metallic green flies were the two biggest drawbacks to the soldiers’ camp, in Giancarlo Gianelli’s opinion. He found everything else to his liking. His tent was large and air-conditioned, and the cooking was surprisingly good. One of Mahdi’s rebel troopers had been a chef in Khartoum before taking up arms, and he delighted in the equipment Gianelli had brought into the bush. If he could ignore the armed troopers bivouacked around him, with their continuous arms practice and parade formations, Gianelli would have likened this to one of the elegant “Hemingway” camps run by the big safari companies in Kenya or South Africa.

Gianelli sat in the shade of his tent’s awning, his view of the world beyond made indistinct by gauzy mosquito netting. His desk was mahogany, but cleverly constructed so it could be folded flat and easily moved. The matching chair was covered with zebra hide. A glass of sparkling water, blistered with condensation,

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