Between Past and Present: Sudan
For a brief window of time — a blip, really, in Sudan's grand scale of time — the country experienced a cautious hope: in 2019 its red-handed dictator of many years, Omar al-Bashir, was ousted and an interim civilian-military government was formed. But after only two years, a coup disrupted the peace and the country has since disolved into what's often described as the world's worst humanitarian crisis.
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I'm very fortunate to have visited Sudan in that brief period of calm, between their often plagued past and their horrific present. And I sometimes wonder what has become of the Sudanese people I met. I hope they're safe.
Below is an excerpt from Somewhere Found.
The next day’s morning wasted upon a bland hotel breakfast, we soon venture beyond the city. On the drive north from Khartoum, the road keeps close to the river, passing through several small towns and agricultural fields. But once it strays from the river’s fertile margins, the date palms and acacia trees in dull hunter green quickly give way to sand and rock in sunbaked brown. The landscape’s flatness is disrupted on the horizon by rocky outcrops, possibly the same formations from which two or three thousand years ago the ancient inhabitants of Sudan — or Nubia, as it was known — quarried sandstone to build their pyramids and necropolises.
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Several dozen pyramids have been found in Sudan — “so far,” the literature is quick to note; a new cluster was discovered as recently as 2009. That’s far fewer than existed here from 2500 BC to AD 300, the period during which three Kushite kingdoms flourished along the Upper Nile. In the 1830s an Italian looter — or “treasure hunter,” as some articles choose to sanitize it — by the name of Giuseppe Ferlini demolished more than forty Nubian pyramids, carting off his ill-gotten gains to Europe to hawk for cash. So singular was this act of greed and vandalism in Ferlini’s otherwise unnoteworthy life that the inscription on his own tomb in Bologna, Italy — far less impressive than the tombs he desecrated — spends nearly a third of its few dozen words boasting of it. (Strangely absent from his epitaph is the Italian word stronzo, meaning asshole.)
Two dozen of the surviving pyramids are clustered among hills of rust-colored rock near the ancient site of Meroë. Under an unforgiving afternoon sun, a small team of restorationists works at remortaring some of the wayward rubble. Aside from them, I’m the only other person within sight; Zareb has driven off somewhere, promising to return in an hour or two. I’m free to wander the ruins, careful not to create more work for the nearby team but otherwise making myself at home.
The structures are tightly arranged, in some cases only a few feet separating their bases, and seemingly more random in placement than their more famous Egyptian cousins. Nubian pyramids are different also in their size and shape, usually no more than 100 feet high, with sides more steeply angled. They look less like familiar postcard images and more like manufactured sets for a science fiction film. Around any corner I expect to find an actor in alien prosthetics, or maybe a sweaty ’70s-era Charlton Heston, no longer in Khartoum’s British uniform but in apocalypse rags. Like yesterday’s abandoned steamship, in the absence of a tour guide’s assuring information, the site can easily be mistaken for an old film set. Kick at the sand and find an actor’s mark; peer behind a rock and find cables and gaffer tape. It feels surreal and uncertain, mentally wedged somewhere between Santa Monica and the Red Sea, between present and past.
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On the other side of a hill from the Meroë ruins is my lodging for the night, a utilitarian building consisting of half a dozen rooms and a communal area — communal in theory: I’m the only guest. I sit alone at one of the four empty dining tables and eat the chicken Zareb has told someone to grill for me. Zareb himself is somewhere else, as always. The building is powered by a generator, and I’ve been warned I have only a couple of hours before the lights go out, most of which I spend wandering the barren grounds outside.
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Somehow it’s more real now under the blanket of stars, with all the stagecraft of daylight shut off. This is now, unambiguously, old Nubia. To the south of me are black outlines of hills against the purple night sky, and just behind them are the pointy tops of ancient tombs that I, and so few others, have touched only hours ago. Is this how undertakers feel, the intimate, behind-the-scenes custodians of our loved ones’ remains, so heavy with secrets? The generator dies. I have no choice now but to go to bed.
To read the entire chapter and many others, you can purchase the book here.
