The Winter Vault Read Free

without boundaries, currency, or government, yet an ancient country nonetheless. To the west and to the east, the Sahara. To the south, from the town of Wadi Halfa, the desolate desert of Atmur. For centuries, armies travelled by river for Nubia's gold, its incense and ebony. They came and built their fortresses and tombs, their mosques and churches on the lush thighs of the Nile. When stone is scarce, it is the clearest sign of conquest, just as a tree is a sign of water. The first Christians lived in the Pharaohs' ruins and built their churches in the Pharaohs' temples. Then, in the eighth century, Islam travelled upriver to Nubia, and mosques appeared where the churches had been. Yet conquest was never easy, even by river. The infamous Second, Third, and Fourth Cataracts – and cataracts within cataracts – the Kagbar, Dal, Tangur, Semna, and Batn el Hajar, “the belly of stones” – discouraged trespassers. From Dara to Aswan, caravans of a hundred camels crossed the sand, creaking and jangling with heavy sacks of rubber from the forests of Bahr el Ghazal, with ivory, ostrich feathers, and wild game. They passed through the dry valleys and hills, stopping at last at the oasis of Salima before reaching the Nile south of Wadi Halfa, then following the west bank of the river north into Egypt. Some believe the Nubians are originally from Somaliland, or that they crossed the Red Sea from Asia, by way of the port of Kosseir. Over the centuries, Arabic and Turkish occupiers married Nubian women, and tribes of twenty-eight different lineages lived together in scattered villages along the Nile.
    Since the band of naturally fertile, silt-rich soil along the riverbank was only a few metres wide, for thousands of years Nubians have worked their eskalays . The eskalay , Avery had told Jean, holding his lamp close to an illustration in his journal that lay open beside him on their bed on the river, is the great machine of the desert. Its motor is a yoke of bulls. Countless generations of cattle have plodded tight circles in the sand to draw the river, waterbowl by waterbowl, into fields of chickpea and barley.
    Farming land was so limited that shares were passed down, single feddans divided and subdivided through generations so many times that, when compensation was to be allocated because of the dam, exasperated clerks found themselves dealing with shares as small as half a square metre. The divisions were so minute and the deeds of ownership so complicated – every single official landowner having died many centuries before – that any hope of straightforward compensation was abandoned. Instead, the Nubian way had to be respected – co-ownership in a communal economy.
    In Nubia, families distribute the fruit of the palm among themselves, with shared responsibility for the care of the tree. Cows are the property of a collective of four, each owning a leg, and these shares can be sold and traded. An animal can be rented. The one who feeds and shelters the cow has a right to its milk and calves. Each owner has to provide food and shelter when the animal works his eskalay . Division but not divisiveness, for that would literally kill the enterprise.
    Before the building of the High Dam at Aswan in the 1960s, a small dam was constructed, and its height was raised twice – ten, then twenty years later, the villages of lower Nubia, the fertile islands, and the date forests were drowned. Each time, the villagers moved to higher ground to rebuild. And so began the labour migration of Nubian men to Cairo, Khartoum, London. The women, with their long, loosely woven black gargaras trailing the sand, erasing their footprints, took over the harvesting and marketing of the crops. They pollinated the date palms, cared for their family's property, and tended the livestock. Men returned from the city to be married, to attend funerals, to claim their share of the harvest. And some returned in 1964 to join their families when, with hundreds of