Were you to come to our village as a tourist, my son, it is likely that you would not stay long…I know, my son, that you hate dark streets and like to see electric light shining out into the night. I know too that you are not enamored of walking and that riding donkeys gives you a bruise on your back side.
-The Doum Tree of Wad Hamid, Tayeb Salih
The man from Khileewa may have said something like that to me on Day 21, the day we arrived at the Nile’s bank at this watering place where the trail first touches the river. His name was Al-Fadil and he was curious why two Americans rode with a dabouka up from Kordofan. I tried to explain, and then he took David and me to the school where we gave his students a lesson about American Presidents, that Reagan was a movie actor and Carter was a peanut farmer like many of their fathers.
Khileewa was a lot like, and very near, the farming hamlet of Karmakol where in 1929 Tayeb Salih was born and where a little farther upstream to the south the Nile makes its big lazy S turn back to the north toward the Fourth Cataract. Wad Hamid was Salih’s name for Karmakol in all his stories about the semi-magical life he remembered as a child from rural Nubia, a bit like Brigadoon or the Hobbit shire.
No, I explained to Al-Fadil, and as I had to explain again on Day 32 to Al-Hajj Hassan Sayyid in an even more remote village in Dal Cataract who had also asked me why we rode with KhairAllah’s dabouka, I did not hate dark streets without electric lights at night, nor did I mind walking as far as Cairo on my own two legs, but yes, I did prefer to ride camels because they bruised my back side less than did riding donkeys.
Al-Fadil and Al-Hajj Hassan knew Tayeb Salih’s name because he was famous worldwide and his Doum Tree of Wad Hamid was his first published story, from 1960, twenty five years ago. In it Salih wrote about how Khartoum’s plan to build a passenger ferry station beside Wad Hamid’s doum tree would have forever blotted its value as a place free from the passage of time and the hand of man. Not a place for whistle stops, not a place for ticket taking, so the villagers said no, they would rather walk to the ferry dock in the next village. Al-Fadil and the Hajj knew that, and when I got home and reread Tayeb Salih, so did I.