The southern half of the Libyan Desert, which reaches from the Tropic of Cancer to where the grass-covered steppes of Northern Kordofan and Darfur begin, has remained until this century a terra ignota and is still largely unexplored…a country where in default of spot-levels and of contours, the old mapmakers set down unicorns and basilisks, tailed and dog-headed men, and hideous figures with faces set in their bellies. Others, less artistic but more direct, simply wrote across the waste space, “Here dwelle very eville men”.
-A Desert Odyssey of a Thousand Miles, D. Newbold, Sudan Notes and Records, 1924
I took with me a map, the Northeast Africa quadrant from the National Geographic World Atlas showing a few towns and villages- El Obeid where we were greeted by the herd’s owner Hajj Bashir, Nahud where for three days we awaited the herd’s departure in the house of Hussein Hamadami, Khuwei’s shallow wells where we saddled up, and ‘Iyal Bakheet’s bore well which we passed without stopping.
I was able to see where we were in those first few days and felt reassured, my location being known at the least to one mapmaker, somewhere.
And then we fell off the map. For the following twenty days I couldn’t follow our progress because nothing was marked. Jebel Abu Fas, ‘Idd Ahmad, Karabat al-Sireer, Wadi Abu La’oot, Baqariyya al-Taweel- we passed them all, KhairAllah told me their names, but I couldn’t find any of them. Was I lost, were we all lost, or did the villages of Zureit and Maraheet not even exist, despite having drawn water from their wells? The Wadi al-Milk was marked, running northeasterly to the Nile and we were following it, but I had no sense of our forward movement.
Newbold says that old mapmakers wrote about this part of the desert, Here dwelle very eville men. Let me quote from my 1984 trail diary.
“Day 8, Toum Hassan came in on a donkey, with a sleepy dog and shotgun, to speak to us about Allah and to ask for sugar and tea, Adam gave him a pound note from his own pocket, with the money he rode off southwest to his hut amid the acacia trees…Day 9, Um Kheirwa wells, Idris Abd al-Rahman is our watering agent, organizing the mud troughs and dividing the camels between them, helping women fill skins and load donkeys…Day 15, Buqaan village, an old man in a tattered black long coat patched with white thread asked for sugar and our form of government in America, said one ripe watermelon was up ahead somewhere and we were free to eat it. His parting words, Why don’t you take a truck?”
Do Toum Hassan, Idris, and the old man sound very eville to you?