The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [41]
In mourning, the Nubian women removed their black gargaras, flowing as the Nile, and disembarked wearing the plain saris of central Sudan.
A few days after the evacuation, Hassan Dafalla returned to Faras to meditate upon all he had seen. The sun beat down into silence. He saw the holes where the decorative plates had been pulled from the walls. He saw the footprints of hyenas everywhere.
After several days sunk in thought, Hassan Dafalla journeyed to visit the exiled settlers at Khashm el Girba. “We had a mutual longing to see each other,” he wrote later in his diary, “as if we had been parted for a very long time.”
At 9 a.m. on the day of the evacuation of Sarra, Commissioner Hassan Dafalla had arrived, hours before the train was scheduled to depart, to find the village already deserted. He stood in shock, at the wild unreality of finding no one there to emigrate. The night before, all the baggage had been loaded onto the train; wagons and heavy trucks stood in the sand, braying with livestock. Yet in the morning there was not a single villager to be found. Commissioner Dafalla, at a loss for what to do, climbed the hill above the village to think. When he reached the top he was startled again, this time to find himself looking down upon a shining green pool where yesterday there had been only stones and sand. Now he saw that hundreds of palm branches, shimmering in the heat, had been heaped upon the graves of the cemetery. In a great circle around the graveyard the villagers were dancing the zikir. For two hours longer, Commissioner Dafalla sat on the hill while the villagers of Sarra read and sang to their dead. Suddenly, the green pool bled apart and reformed as a river, as all of Sarra moved in a wailing line up the hill, carrying their palm branches from the graves to the train.
The very staples that the Nubians had so expertly cultivated would now have to be bought at market – lentils, beans, chickpeas, lupins, and peas. In the new settlement there were no terraces for the women to sit together, no Nile with its green inlets and islands where they could sail their feluccas and watch the steamers passing to and from Egypt, loaded with goods. Now there was only the steep gorge of the Atbara River, with its barren banks, the dry thorny acacia scrub, and the rainy savannah. There were no palm date forests and no limitless hills of the Sahara. The women permanently gave up the elegant gargara because now it simply trailed through mud.
Their sense of time changed; the way they looked at sky and stars was now different. Their Coptic calendar was replaced by the Arab stellar calendar. They learned to predict rainfall, the fierce tropical rains, from the direction of lightning – lightning in the east brings the storm, but lightning in other directions turns it away.
They had to give up their beds lined with date branches and now slept in beds of steel frames and wire springs.
Several months before the inundation, a Polish archaeologist had discovered a buried mud brick church not far from the village of Faras. One wall bore a magnificent painting in coloured lime. Using a chemical solution to imprint the image on muslin cloth, Professor Michałowski began to make a copy of the painting when he was surprised to find another image underneath. Each time he copied the painting on the wall, another was discovered beneath. Eighty-six layers of paintings were uncovered.
The Nubians, who had given up everything for the hydroelectric power provided by the new dam, were themselves without electricity. The cables passed right by the new settlements; only some extra poles and wire would have been needed to bring electricity into their houses. But the Nubians had to wait seven years to turn on a light.
Many days Jean watched from the shade of the houseboat