If it were not for the drink I would never have come twice to the Sudan…I wonder if you ever were thirsty. Probably not. I never had been till I came to the Sudan and that is why I came again.
-G.W. Steevens, With Kitchener to Khartoum, 1898, from the chapter The Pathology of Thirst
There is a lot of hooey said in Egypt about the Nile. The Mother of, the Gift of, Once you drink you shall always return. I didn’t believe a word of it. But there was something about drinking tea in Sudan, made not from Nile water but rather from deep well water drawn at places like Mahtoul and ‘Idd Ahmad, especially when the sugar had run low and we drank it Murr, Bitter. To look at the drovers’ faces then, you’d think that they’d been forced to drink Būl or Damm or Khall, Piss or Blood or Vinegar.