Yo-Ho-Ho and a bottle of date sherry.
The pirates are passing a joint round. The Arab waves it in the air and murmurs sibilant nonsense as though in a haze of mellow stupefaction, but his eye is much too bright. The scent of the smoke is delicious, the silence around us is like a cool bath. Is anything more relaxing than the hospitality of harmless villains? How do I know they're harmless? I don't, and yet I do.
The Arab invests in another bottle of sherry and we sit for an hour as the sun goes down, lost in lazy contentment. During that hour I feel I have arrived in the Sudan.
A muscular black man comes towards us, urgently, asks us to come to the hotel. The bar is open now, and a naked bulb is shining down on ugly plastic surfaces. I am very reluctant to leave the garden. The man insists. He has a tigerish body, too restrained in his neat shirt and trousers.
I am coming to see if you are alright, and I f ind you sitting with a bad man. I am Pabiano,' he said, 'My name is Munduk, my brother is in the p olice. That man is not good. He is a teep. He is only pretending drunk so that others will become drunk. Then he steal prom your pocket . He has been in prison .'
I look back to the table. In the last faint light the Arab has twisted in his chair to look at us, one arm outst retched towards us, the long cotton sleeve trailing, imploring us to return. I feel a sad affection for him. There was a kind of understanding.
Three nights in Atbara. From the ceiling hangs an enormous propeller , slowly kneading the thick night air. During the days I prepare for the desert. There is an obstinate electrical fault in the bike. I take the lens off the headlamp, and it spills wiring over the veranda , pitifully, as though vomiting its entrails. I work on it as martial music drifts across the wall from a school Sports Day. By evening the bike is repaired, the hernia sewn up. I have been considering how to carry water. I have brought a collapsible plastic container, and can carry a gallon on the back of the bike, but I am not quite convinced it will work and I want a reserve. If I fill the aluminium bottle with distilled water, then I can use that for the batteries also. A garage fills the bottle for me. I have to cross two hundred and fifty miles of desert to Kassala and the next petrol pump. With three gallons in the tank, and the jerry half full I should have plenty. Tomorrow I will buy more, just in case. Today I can't because I haven't enough money. It is Sunday and the banks are closed.
I have asked everyone about the way to Kassala. They all say it is 'queiss', which means good. Thomas Taban Duku, the registrar of aliens, said so. It was more usual for people to go to Khartoum, but many buses go to Kassala, at least one each day. He could not remember anyone coming by motorcycle before, but then, he said, a motorcycle can go anywhere. If a bus can go, then so can a motorcycle, isn't it? And faster even. 'The road is queiss'. He was quietly confident.
So is the man at the hotel. He says it's a good road, now the rains have gone. And the Michelin map calls it a marked and recognized track.
Munduk also says it will be easy. He comes to the hotel, and that evening, under a waxing moon, we visit his house to see how to make date sherry at home, and then to look at the Nile.
'Here is the Blue Nile,' he says. 'The White Nile is one day walking from here.'
He is wrong. The Blue Nile joins the White Nile at Khartoum two hundred miles upstream. How can he be so wrong about something like that? Who knows? Away from Western cities you get used to it. If you want to know something, you ask again and again. When many opinions run together they thicken to form a fact. Isn't that the essence of modern theoretical physics? So often it seems that every scientific principle has its counterpart in social behaviour. Simon's Hypothesis? Waves & Particles. Critical Mass. Fission, fusion, all of thermodynamics and Maxwell's Demon as the exception
The pirates are passing a joint round. The Arab waves it in the air and murmurs sibilant nonsense as though in a haze of mellow stupefaction, but his eye is much too bright. The scent of the smoke is delicious, the silence around us is like a cool bath. Is anything more relaxing than the hospitality of harmless villains? How do I know they're harmless? I don't, and yet I do.
The Arab invests in another bottle of sherry and we sit for an hour as the sun goes down, lost in lazy contentment. During that hour I feel I have arrived in the Sudan.
A muscular black man comes towards us, urgently, asks us to come to the hotel. The bar is open now, and a naked bulb is shining down on ugly plastic surfaces. I am very reluctant to leave the garden. The man insists. He has a tigerish body, too restrained in his neat shirt and trousers.
I am coming to see if you are alright, and I f ind you sitting with a bad man. I am Pabiano,' he said, 'My name is Munduk, my brother is in the p olice. That man is not good. He is a teep. He is only pretending drunk so that others will become drunk. Then he steal prom your pocket . He has been in prison .'
I look back to the table. In the last faint light the Arab has twisted in his chair to look at us, one arm outst retched towards us, the long cotton sleeve trailing, imploring us to return. I feel a sad affection for him. There was a kind of understanding.
Three nights in Atbara. From the ceiling hangs an enormous propeller , slowly kneading the thick night air. During the days I prepare for the desert. There is an obstinate electrical fault in the bike. I take the lens off the headlamp, and it spills wiring over the veranda , pitifully, as though vomiting its entrails. I work on it as martial music drifts across the wall from a school Sports Day. By evening the bike is repaired, the hernia sewn up. I have been considering how to carry water. I have brought a collapsible plastic container, and can carry a gallon on the back of the bike, but I am not quite convinced it will work and I want a reserve. If I fill the aluminium bottle with distilled water, then I can use that for the batteries also. A garage fills the bottle for me. I have to cross two hundred and fifty miles of desert to Kassala and the next petrol pump. With three gallons in the tank, and the jerry half full I should have plenty. Tomorrow I will buy more, just in case. Today I can't because I haven't enough money. It is Sunday and the banks are closed.
I have asked everyone about the way to Kassala. They all say it is 'queiss', which means good. Thomas Taban Duku, the registrar of aliens, said so. It was more usual for people to go to Khartoum, but many buses go to Kassala, at least one each day. He could not remember anyone coming by motorcycle before, but then, he said, a motorcycle can go anywhere. If a bus can go, then so can a motorcycle, isn't it? And faster even. 'The road is queiss'. He was quietly confident.
So is the man at the hotel. He says it's a good road, now the rains have gone. And the Michelin map calls it a marked and recognized track.
Munduk also says it will be easy. He comes to the hotel, and that evening, under a waxing moon, we visit his house to see how to make date sherry at home, and then to look at the Nile.
'Here is the Blue Nile,' he says. 'The White Nile is one day walking from here.'
He is wrong. The Blue Nile joins the White Nile at Khartoum two hundred miles upstream. How can he be so wrong about something like that? Who knows? Away from Western cities you get used to it. If you want to know something, you ask again and again. When many opinions run together they thicken to form a fact. Isn't that the essence of modern theoretical physics? So often it seems that every scientific principle has its counterpart in social behaviour. Simon's Hypothesis? Waves & Particles. Critical Mass. Fission, fusion, all of thermodynamics and Maxwell's Demon as the exception
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