The Network - Jason Elliot [91]
We drive north for about two hours on the road to Atbara. Seeing how quickly the complexity and prosperity of the city fall away, as if from the edge of a flat earth, I’m reminded of Kabul, where the surroundings beyond the capital return to almost prehistoric simplicity after only a few miles.
At a small settlement called Bagrawiya on the east bank of the Nile we turn off the main road and bounce along an unsurfaced track. It’s oppressively hot. Then the pyramids loom up, some pointed and others broken, reaching like ragged sets of teeth out of the orange sand. There’s about a hundred of them, much smaller than their Egyptian relatives and much less well known, fashioned from black stone nearly two and a half thousand years ago as tombs for the kings and queens of ancient Nubia. There is no one else there except a solitary local who wants us to ride his camel for an outrageous sum, and we send him guiltily away.
‘Quite a place,’ I say to Jameela, ‘for your ancestors to be buried.’
‘Do you know anything of the history?’ she asks.
‘Only that Meroë was the southern capital of the kingdom of the Kushites, who ruled Nubia for a thousand years, invaded Egypt and ruled as the pharaohs of the twenty-fifth dynasty. They traded with India and China, and their warrior queen Candace, riding a war elephant, confronted Alexander the Great himself, who withdrew rather than fight her magnificent warriors.’
‘You’re funny,’ she says.
‘I read it in the guidebook last night. I wanted to impress you. Did you know the gods were so jealous of the beauty of the queens of Nubia that they struck the tops of the pyramids with lightning to humble them?’
‘Good try.’ She smiles. ‘The tops were destroyed with dynamite by an Italian explorer in 1820. He was looking for gold. There wasn’t any.’
We walk among the ruins in wonder at the lost civilisation that created them, ducking into the coolness of the few tombs that are open. As we enter one of them, Jameela reaches behind her for my hand and guides me gently inside. On the walls we can make out carved stone panels with Egyptian-looking winged gods. I run my hands over them and turn my head towards Jameela to see an expression of worry on her face, which I haven’t seen before but which disappears as my eyes meet hers. Outside again, under the stone gateway to the entrance we lean against the walls, facing each other in the silence. I’m just looking at her, and she’s returning the look, because we have somehow reached the end of the words we want to say to each other. The sun is low and the golden light catches the perspiration on her upper chest, and for a moment it’s as if her dark skin is glowing.
I’m not sure what would have happened had the elderly guardian of the place not emerged from his nearby hut, and waved to us with a shout to let us know it was his time to clock off.
‘We should go,’ she says.
It’s hot in the car. We drive for a long while in silence, as if the spell of the place is still on us. We pass trucks piled precariously high with cargoes, as well as passengers clinging to sacks of food and supplies, who wave and smile at us above the billowing fumes and dust.
‘Sometimes,’ says Jameela suddenly, ‘I miss the sea. I want to swim in the sea. I want to go to a desert island and feel the sand instead of this dust, and feel the water instead of this heat.’
‘Then let’s go to the sea,’ I say.
‘It would take too long.’ She sighs. ‘Several days just to get there and back. It’s impossible to get to the islands in any case.’ She changes the subject. ‘Do you know anyone in Khartoum?’
‘Not yet,’ I tell her. ‘I haven’t done much socialising.’
‘Listen,’ she says. ‘I’m having dinner with a cousin and his family tomorrow. They’re nice people. You could come and impress them. With your knowledge