In physical appearance, Kordofan is very monotonous. It is a rolling steppe country marked by no abrupt or grand accidents. In the unending succession of undulating plains, a hill fifty feet high is a landmark for a day’s journey…On these steppes, one landscape is much like another…For the last months of the rainy season when everything is green, this landscape is pretty…All the remainder of the year, the parched land under a burning sky is dreary to the extreme. Only a waste of sand can be more forlorn.
-General Report on the Province of Kordofan, H.G. Prout, 1877
On a camel you can see common thorn trees from far away and less common baobabs, so uncommon that they startle you with strangeness every time you come upon them, from even farther. Everything that grows above waist high becomes a landmark when one travels across a dead flat sand sheet.
Camels gather on all sides of a thorn tree to browse and pass under a baobab close to the hollow trunk, letting the rider look overhead to see the hole up maybe twenty feet through which rain water can be scooped for storage in the wet season and pulled out in buckets in the dry when the land is parched. It makes you wonder if Prout missed Kordofan’s greatest landmarks altogether and so never learned that one of the many Arabic words for baobab- which gives us its English word- is Abu Hibab, Father of Seeds, not to confuse with Abu Habib, Father of the Beloved.