Walking the Nile (9781471135668) by Wood Levison

Author:Wood, Levison [Wood, Levison]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781471135668
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

THE IMPENETRABLE SWAMP

Juba to Bor, South Sudan, April 2014

‘Missionaries, mercenaries and misfits,’ said the man behind the hotel bar. ‘Everyone here’s a lunatic with nowhere better to be, but if you find the right one, they might be able to help you get north.’

Two days after we had been dragged to the Blue House, I was prowling the hallways of Bedouin Lodge – a popular hotel crammed between an abattoir and a graveyard where dogs regularly dug up human remains – intent on finding a way to further our expedition. The morning after our arrest, our equipment had been returned and the spies’ specious charges all dropped – half of me understood that, when the soldiers had found nothing suspicious, they had decided to let us go; but I also suspected they had been looking for money, some kind of bribe. Whatever it was, I didn’t want to stay in Juba long. The problem was how to go further. Allam had prepared papers that would allow us – mindless government agents aside – to get to the city of Bor, a further 120 miles downriver. But, after that, there were still five hundred miles before the border with Sudan.

The man in the hotel bar was Andy Belcher, a white Kenyan pilot who had turned hotelier and refused to leave Bedouin Lodge even when Juba erupted into ethnic violence. Belcher was a gregarious man with a sardonic sense of humour; you had to have a certain kind of mania to live and work in a warzone.

‘I can . . .’ Belcher began, ‘. . . make some introductions.’

‘Introductions?’

He gave me a knowing smile. ‘Leave it with me, Lev.’

Boston crossed the bar and went into the hotel lobby. Once or twice he tried to venture outside, only to reappear moments later, seemingly unwilling to wander too far. In the past days, I’d been watching him closely: he was peculiarly skittish, refusing to engage me when I’d tried to broach the subject of his family and what they would make of me dragging him further north. ‘You are not dragging me, Lev,’ he kept saying. ‘I want to see the river’s end.’ My dream, it seemed, had become Boston’s too, but every time I considered taking him further I remembered Matt Power and felt my stomach tighten.

Belcher spent the next days introducing me to a roster of every defiant ex-pat he could find, while I sourced out every remaining aid worker and NGO in Juba, only to hear the same: to travel north was to invite disaster; if one side didn’t kill me, the other certainly would. Alone among them, only one of Belcher’s contacts thought differently. Three nights later, I walked into the bar at the Bedouin Lodge and, in a fog of cigarette smoke, Belcher introduced me to Ken Miller.

Miller was not the first suspicious associate that I had met thanks to Belcher. There had been a man known to all as Commander Dan, a sixty-year-old former Catholic Irish priest who’d

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