As I was getting up at 5 am after a rather poor night, I saw a woman approaching through the half light- pulled on my shorts and shooed her away, telling her to come a little later. It is astonishing how someone always turns up with a complaint just as one is moving out….Rode until 6 pm when we arrived at Abu Zaima wells. No Arabs came to me, but I could hear dogs barking.
-November 3, 1931, from the Trek Journals of a District Officer in Sudan, C.A.E. Lea, Assistant D.C. in Dar al-Kababish
I guess that on some nights District Commissioner Lea paid no heed to the old Sudanese proverb, The Dog Barks and the Caravan Moves On. Especially when women were involved. Luckily for us on the Darb, women were never a problem, because we never saw any, except for the time we were camped outside a village and I walked over to the school teacher’s hostel hoping to ask for some bread, and when I returned found Mustapha getting his hair shampooed and all his clothes but the riding tunic he was wearing washed by an old lady in a deal arranged by KhairAllah.