The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [40]
Of all the villages included in the mass relocation, only the inhabitants of one village – Degheim – refused to cooperate, though, of course, the water would defeat them in the end. The women of Degheim, in their black gargaras, swarmed and shouted, “Fadiru wala hagumunno Khashm el Girba la” – We will die rather than go to Khashm el Girba – and created a great cloud of dust, throwing into the air the earth that was no longer theirs.
The first village to be evacuated from the Wadi Halfa district was Faras. The journey would take a biblical forty hours, an exodus of epic proportion.
Hassan Dafalla had requisitioned 20,000 jute sacks, 20,000 coils of rope, and 15,000 baskets for the journey. Twenty lorries had been pressed into service to transport the baggage to the train station. More than a hundred porters were required to load lorries and then the fifty-five train cars, the sixty-six goods cars, and the two hundred and sixteen animal wagons and the wagons of fodder and water for the livestock; and before all this, the villagers on the west bank would have to cross the river by steamer. The inhabitants of the Kokki islands – deep in the narrow gorges of the Second Cataract where no boat large enough to carry their baggage could reach them – made rafts of logs and inflated water skins and floated their worldly goods to shore.
January 6, 1964. On the east bank of the Nile at Faras, the train was waiting, complete with hospital carriage for the ill and elderly and for the women who might give birth at any moment. On the west bank, porters began to carry the bags, mattresses, and baskets of every size that were heaped at the front gate of every home, down through the village to where the steamer was docked.
Hassan Dafalla watched as the Nubians took the great wooden keys from their locks and then disappeared back into their homes to look once more. He watched as they sat silently in the cemetery. On the steamer, every eye took in the sight of their departing village; surely, thought Hassan Dafalla, few places on this earth have been looked at by so many at once, with such common feeling. Yet he knew history was crammed with precisely such scenes. Crowding the train station were the villagers from Faras East who had come to wish their neighbours safe passage and who would very soon be making the same journey themselves. He watched as all boarded the train, straining to look back, and as the train driver fastened branches from the Faras date groves to the front of the locomotive, shouting, “Afialogo, heir ogo” – good health, prosperity. He watched as the train slowly started to move, until it disappeared into the desert.
They would follow the main Khartoum line to Atbara junction, then by the Port Sudan line to Haya junction, then south to Kassala and Khashm el Girba. At each village along the rail line, people crowded the station, waving and calling out their support and, wherever the train stopped, dispensing tea and gifts of food to the passengers: sacks of sugar, flour, wheat and rice, butter, oil, cheese and honey. “Afialogo, heir ogo, adeela, adeela.” At Aroma, all the tribesmen of the Hadandawa gathered on their camels; each with a sword, a lick of light, at their sides. Pointing their staffs to the sky they banged their copper drums to the word “Dabaywa” – welcome. And so it was the same, at Sarra East, Dibeira, Ashkeit, Dabarosa, Tawfikia, Arkawit, and El Jebel. At Angash station, at Haya, and Kassala, the farmers loaded the train with generous sacks of citrus and vegetables until there was not a centimetre of space left in the bulging cars. Night was falling. Suddenly, at the Butana Bridge, every passenger leaned toward the windows for a glimpse of the Atbara River. Those