The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur Read Online Free PDF Page A

right thinking. For a time, I thought the old jailer had perhaps slipped it in there as I slept. But it was so folded and faded that I think it was waiting for me a long time in that pocket, in the way that many things are waiting for us to be ready to receive them.

4.
A Bad Time to Go Home
    It was the summer of 2003; an Ethiopian Airlines jet lifted me over the Red Sea in late afternoon. My cousins in Britain had purchased my ticket home. The plane banked over the Nile and then floated south above the river with a view west into the Sahara. Almost as if I had died in the Egyptian prison and was now going home on the wind, there was a magic-carpet feeling to it. I could see, for the first time in my life, the immensity of the Sahara: a forever sea of sand below with scattered dots of green, with the curled and weathered backbones of dead mountains, with the chalk threads of camel trails and dry streams tracing delicate currents around the dunes.
    As we continued to rise, the trails disappeared and the dunes became the rough weave of a canvas extending to the distant horizon. This desert of sand is about the size of the entire United States. From above, it is easy to understand why men must build great pyramids to achieve any noticehere.
Amazing to be alive and see such things
, I thought as I rested my head beside the window and sipped a tea. I watched a red sunset spill over the land.
Amazing to be alive. Humdallah, humdallah, amazing. God bless my cousins in London. God bless my friends in Cairo and the human rights groups. God bless the old jailer in Aswan. God bless the hundred-pound note in my jeans. God please even bless the person who invented those little pockets in jeans where such a note might become long lost and someday found. God bless Ahmed and all my brothers and sisters and my mother and father
.
    After so many years away, I would see them all soon, though they were now, as my cousins informed me, in the middle of a war. My brother Ahmed would be happiest to see me, and would want to know everything of my adventures.
God bless Ahmed
. I could see him already in front of me, delighted to hear each turn of my story.
    In the distance somewhere just beyond my view to the west was Khartoum, its lights probably just now blinking on, the blue dusk probably shining in the strands of the Nile River where it is born from the White and Blue Niles. The Blue comes from Ethiopia and contributes the most water, while the White comes a far greater distance through Lake Victoria, losing much of its water in the vast swamps of southern Sudan. In ancient times there was another great river in Sudan, running through Darfur west to Lake Chad. The great valley where it once ran is the Wadi Howar, also called the Dead Nile by the people. Except for the summer rain time, its waters now flow under the sand.
    After a stop in Addis Ababa, I flew in a southern loop through Kenya, Uganda, and the Central African Republic, then cut back up across South Darfur in Sudan. Mostly itwas dark below, as most of this land has little or no electricity and goes to bed early. The stars and a new moon were all I could see for most of this time, until suddenly there were some flickering lights below.
    “Where are we?” I asked the young flight attendant whom I had come to know a little; she was perhaps my age, about thirty. She leaned over to look out my window, letting her hand rest gracefully on my shoulder for balance.
    “Nowhere, I think!” she smiled as she looked patiently into the dark.
    By asking the time until landing, I calculated that we were probably crossing over southern Sudan and very probably South Darfur. The lights below were likely the lights of war—the last flaring of huts and villages attacked earlier that day, of great, centuries-old village trees that had become like bonfires. Darfur was burning.
    I rubbed the Zaghawa scars on my temple as I looked down at this dark scene. Somewhere down there—though north of there,