CHAPTER TWO: A SON OF THE NILE
EPISODE SEVEN

Most of my childhood was spent in Wadiy Halfa, near the Egyptian border, where my father was employed as a prison director until 1906, and where `Aliy and I attended school for several years thereafter. In 1906 my father was transferred to Waad Midaaniy on the Blue Nile about a hundred miles above Khartuwm. A year later he was transferred to Singah, about seventy miles above Wad Midaniy, and in 1908 he was promoted to the rank of captain and appointed ma'amuwr, or district commissioner, of Abuw Na`amah, about fifty miles above Singah. Two years later he was transferred back to Wadiy Halfa and then, in 1912, he was transferred back to Wad Midaniy.

The work of a district commissioner in Sudan in the early years of the twentieth century was not very different from that of a Texas ranger in the late years of the nineteenth century. Much of my father's time was spent on horseback chasing bandits, smugglers, and cattle thieves.

Abuw Na`amah, which literally means "Father of Ostriches," was then a center of the feather trade. We kept six ostriches as pets, I remember, until the day one of them swallowed my mother's keys. Ostriches, like goats and chickens, will eat almost anything. We also kept a grivet monkey with a long tail and a sad triangular face. Once the monkey leaped from the top of a water jar onto the breast of one of the ostriches. I could never decide which was the more frightened of the two. The ostrich ran around in circles squawking, until the monkey fell to the ground. While the monkey lay there whimpering like a newborn baby, the ostrich hid its head behind a basket in the comer.

Abuw Na`amah were covered with the heads of the gazelles, gnus, buffaloes, and other animals that my father had shot. There were elephant tusks, too, and leopard and lion skins on the floor, and on one wall was the head of a rhinoceros that had chased my father up a tree. The rhino was killed by a member of the party that was sent to my father's rescue.

At night we could hear the cry of hyenas and the cough of leopards and occasionally the roar of a lion. During our summer vacations, as `Aliy and I grew older and learned how to handle guns, we often shot at crocodiles for practice from in front of our house, which overlooked the Blue Nile. Sometimes, on Fridays, after saying our Sabbath prayers at the local mosque, my father would take `Aliy and me across the river in a rowboat to hunt wild doves on the other side. Once, while looking for doves, we encountered a striped hyena, which I was allowed to shoot. Hyenas are reputed to be cowardly creatures, but I can testify from personal experience that they are occasionally aggressive. The only other hyena I ever shot was of the more common spotted variety. I was a second lieutenant at the time, in command of an infantry company working on the Sudan Railways below Khartuwm. The hyena attacked me at night a half mile down the track from where my men were working.

My father, who was an amateur gardener, did his best to inculcate in us a love for growing things. He succeeded, but only up to a point. For my part, I was always more interested in experimentation than I was in cultivation. Once, before returning to school in Wadiy Halfa, I planted some strange seeds in my father's garden. He expressed his annoyance with me in one of his letters after scores of tabaldi seedlings had sprouted up in the midst of his cabbages and sunflowers. The tabaldi, or baobab, is the largest and fattest tree in East Africa. It bears a large green velvety fruit the size of a papaya, the seeds of which have a citrus flavor and are supposed to be good for curing fevers and purifying water.

Our houses in Singah and Abuw Na`amah were mud-and-wattle huts with thatched roofs. In Wad Midaniy, where the climate was drier, we lived in a one-story, mud-brick structure in the form of a hollow cube. Its flat roof was made of reed matting supported by beams and covered with layers of mud, dung, and straw. `Aliy and I found it an ideal place for playing chess and other games, of all of which my mother strongly disapproved. My father, who played chess himself, was prepared to distinguish between such a game of skill and the games of chance forbidden to Muslims by the Qur'an. My mother, on the other hand, believed that all games were gambling games and that even to play a game like marbles was a sin. `Aliy and I, like most boys everywhere, I suppose, when faced with such parental prohibitions, continued to play our games in secret. We liked chess better than marbles even though we never had a proper chess set. We used to make our chessmen out of mud, which we mixed in the patio and carried up to the roof when my mother wasn't looking. Our chessboard was simply a crosshatched piece of wrapping paper.

Every year before the rainy season it was necessary, at Wad Midaniy, to spread a fresh layer of mud, straw, and dung over the roof in order to make it waterproof. Once the roof had been thus prepared, `Aliy and I were forbidden access to it until after the rains. Here again we were often disobedient. One year, I  remember, I sneaked up to the roof to have a look at it immediately after the fresh layer of paste had been applied. It looked and smelled so fertile that I couldn't resist the temptation to sprinkle some of my father's seeds on it to see what would happen. My father was furious when the rains came and he discovered what I had done. Radishes were sprouting all over the roof, which their roots had perforated in so many places that it was leaking like a filter.

Usually I was a general, but sometimes I was an admiral, too, because the fortress also served as a naval base. Among the other objects that I liked to secrete inside were a couple of toy German locomotives and several destroyers or at least I thought of them as destroyers; actually they were old door locks.

I was so proud of my fortress that one day, to demonstrate the strength of its walls, I placed a large copper tray on top of it and invited a friend of my mother's, a very fat woman, to sit on the tray. Having found that the fortress would withstand her weight, I decided to test it further by sitting on top of the tray myself with one of my sisters inside. I gave her such a fright that my mother, as punishment, compelled me to destroy the fortress and never allowed me to build another.

(To be continued)