…the vast, silent, torrid, murderous desert land…On us English, too, the Sudan has played its fatal witchery.
-G.W. Steevens, With Kitchener to Khartoum, 1898
One needn’t have a spell cast by some Sudanese Siren’s Song to be beckoned again to the desert, which by the way does not kill but rather makes one stronger. Vast, silent, and torrid it was; murderous it was not, excepting once or twice, according to Hajj Bashir, when his drovers were killed and his Dabouka rustled by automatic rifle-toting brigands spilled over from Libya’s arming of Chadian rebels. We did not hear about that until later, and until then we expected nothing more injurious on the Darb than raw bottoms and sunburnt noses, and for that we had brought extra Shahm, which Wehr defines variously as Suet, Sebum, and Axle Grease, and in Sudan can be bought in beauty salons.