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By Root 643 0

perhaps in the very chair I was sitting in. I kept thinking, Would the city have felt ominous to me even if I had not seen that marker in the station? Would I have felt this foreboding nonetheless, this presence, this dread, this hauntedness we sometimes feel – inexplicable, ineffable – in certain places, in a cast of light? In any case, my father drank his tea, and I ate my chocolate ice cream from its ornate sweating silver dish. We left the hotel early the next morning, after a restless night – my father because he had missed his business meeting and I because of my apprehension – and we walked to the train station. My father – no doubt remembering London during the Blitz or other places I knew nothing about – said, ‘Some places are drenched with sorrow.’ I remember specifically he used the word ‘drenched’ and we walked for a while in silence, my hand in his. Then I thought, Some people are like that, drenched in sorrow, despite the expression on their face.

When Hassan Dafalla, the commissioner in charge of the emigration, read the results of the census on a May morning in 1961, he learned that all Nubian land – without exception – was registered in the name of someone who'd died centuries before. This statistic moved him deeply and, with the report still in his hand, he walked out of his office in Wadi Halfa to contemplate it.

Hassan Dafalla was a man given to reflection, and the Sudanese government could not have chosen anyone better suited to the task of resettling an entire nation. He was a man of feeling – of empathy, fairness, and an extraordinary patience for the meaningful detail. It was Hassan Dafalla who ensured that an extra ration of grain reached the bakeries before the journey, and who arranged that there be a birthing car with hospital beds on the train for expectant mothers. It was Hassan Dafalla who handed a parcel of shrouds to the train conductor, in the event they might be needed during the long emigration, more than twelve hundred kilometres from the villages of Nubia to the new settlement at Khashm el Girba, near the sluggish Atbara River. The Atbara was a seasonal river, which annually turned to dust. It was Hassan Dafalla who insisted that the names of the villages be posted in the new town instead of numbers, though his order was ignored. And it was Hassan Dafalla who stood silenced at the sight of the new houses, hollow blocks of concrete that sat in rows on the ground with no connection to it, like packing cases. It was he who felt the acute, breath-taking, shock of defeat; and saw that life can be skinned of meaning, skinned of memory.

The houses in the “New Halfa” scheme had sloping tin or asbestos roofs and rooms too small for the families assigned to live in them; thus, villages were split apart. And when Hassan Dafalla saw that there was not a single tree in Khashm el Girba, he returned with a gift of thirty thousand tree shoots. Eight hundred date shoots were planted along the main street in a tree celebration. It was a shamefully deficient gift, he thought, for the ones who mourned their groves by the Nile.

When it was certain the Aswan High Dam would be built, the census-takers from the Department of Statistics in Sudan were sent from village to village. They recorded the number of inhabitants in each dwelling, the number of livestock, an accurate account of the burden of furniture for each family. Everything would have to be carried – by lorry, boat, and train – and the number of railcars and trains accurately calculated.

Hassan Dafalla had studied the numbers carefully. In the Sudanese area under his concern there were: 27 villages, 70,000 souls; 7,676 houses, with an average number of rooms calculated at 5.8; the number of residents per room 0.9 in the town of Wadi Halfa and 1.1 in the villages. Of the animals to be transported there were: 34,146 goats, 19,315 sheep, 2,831 head of cattle, 608 camels, 415 donkeys, 86 horses, 35,000 chickens, 28,000 pigeons, and, grouped together, 1,564 ducks and geese.

Each fruit tree would have to be counted and described, so that proper