The Slow Road to Tehran by Rebecca Lowe

Author:Rebecca Lowe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: September Publishing
Published: 2022-01-11T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

The Imprint of the Desert

Sudan

‘No man can live this life and emerge unchanged. He will carry, however faint, the imprint of the desert … For this cruel land can cast a spell which no temperate clime can match.’

Wilfred Thesiger, Arabian Sands (1959)

As the ferry departs, I feel myself relax. The water is soothing, lying flat and still like a steadying ballast against my pounding heart. Like Freya Stark, I am relieved to be leaving the messy crowds and exhausting ‘pharaonic microbes’ of Egypt – although I admit I feel nervous at what’s to come. What I’ll find at the far bank, I have no idea; I’ve made no plans and the map is tantalisingly sparse on detail. From the border, the Nile seems to be accompanied by just one solid road, while other paths meander, frayed and broken, into the empty, parchment-coloured expanse beyond.

On the small cargo ship, around twenty passengers sit squeezed along two wooden benches shaded by a corrugated awning. Within minutes, I have two invitations to tea: one from an elderly Nubian couple, the other from a young Egyptian doctor. The latter warns me to be vigilant in Sudan.

‘Please watch out,’ he says. ‘There are many dangers.’

‘What kind of dangers?’ I ask.

‘Oh, many things …’ He trails off and I wait anxiously for him to continue. ‘Well, there are scorpions,’ he says finally. ‘And the insects are quite big.’

He falls silent again and, after a few moments, I realise that’s all he’s going to say. For a police state renowned for violent conflict, ruthless repression and homegrown terrorism, these concerns seem manageable. ‘Thank you,’ I reply. ‘I promise I’ll take care.’

We disembark at an empty dock. There is nothing here at all: no people, no buildings, no shelter. Just pale dunes dusted by rubble, rimmed by the jagged outline of distant mesas. The heat is fierce, and I’m a little dismayed to discover that the official border lies another thirty-five kilometres to the south. In fact, studying the map now in more detail, I see the line is not quite as razor-straight as I first imagined but hiccups briefly across Lake Nasser before lurching east in two directions at once in a kind of hesitant, drunken stagger. This, I discover, is due to the drawing of two separate boundaries by the British in 1899 and 1902, the former granting the oil-rich Hala’ib Triangle to Egypt, the latter giving it to Sudan. For this reason, Egypt observes the 1899 border and Sudan the 1902 – leaving, in the middle, a tiny unclaimed enclave known as Bir Tawil, said to be the only true remaining terra nullius in the world.

Despite the beating sun, the ride is smooth and easy. It wasn’t long ago that this route was just sand and grit compacted by millennia of moving feet, hooves and wheels. But now, to my delight, it is pristine, exquisite asphalt, and the journey takes less than two hours.

Crossing the border itself, however, proves somewhat less straightforward. Hundreds of

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