mine. Ought to have given you better warning. A precaution, landing in dodgy areas. Coming in like that makes you a difficult target, in case there’s anyone below with a mind to take a shot at you.”
“So that was deliberate? I wasn’t sure.”
Douglas laughed, patted his shoulder.
“First time in the Nuba, and you hurl lunch.”
“Breakfast, too.”
Just then a procession of men emerged from the scrub, men as tall as Dinka but more powerfully built and almost naked. The best clad wore patched shorts, the rest strips of cloth or animal hide tied to braided waist cords or leather belts. Behind them came more giants, gowned in white jelibiyas and leading a string of donkeys toward the plane.
“Give me a hand,” said Tara, motioning at the cargo.
She flipped up the top half of the rear door, then swung open the bottom half. The half-naked men were outside, formed up in a human chain, and the sight of them close up momentarily arrested Fitzhugh and Douglas. One man had cut horizontal bands into his hair so that he seemed to be wearing a striped stocking cap, and another had painted a white streak down the middle of his skull. There were half a dozen more, each proclaiming his individuality with one sort of ornamentation or another: gold hoop earrings and nose rings, feathered ankle bracelets, armbands encircling thick biceps, bead necklaces on muscular necks, bare ebony chests decorated with tribal scarring in the forms of antelope and lizards and leopards.
“They’re quite something, aren’t they?” Tara said.
Douglas pronounced them “incredible” and then, deciding that the adjective was inadequate, “beautiful, magnificent.”
Fitzhugh felt as if he were looking into the face of an Africa that hadn’t changed in a thousand years. The Nuban at the head of the line, making movements with his immense hands, shook him and Douglas out of their trance. Time to do some work. They and Tara pitched the boxes outside, to be tossed down the chain to the giants in white, who wrapped them in hide blankets and lashed the bundles to the donkeys’ backs.
The job done, Tara stood in the doorway and looked around, making a visor with her hand.
“Ah, here he is,” she said, and climbed out, her two passengers following her into a heat aggravated rather than relieved by the sear wind hissing through the trees, the desiccated grass. A man approached them, consuming six feet or more in a stride. His jelibiya, which would have been ankle-length on someone of ordinary height, reached only a few inches past his knees and made a startling contrast with his jet-black skin. He looked like a three-dimensional shadow dressed up as a ghost.
“Goraende?” Fitzhugh asked.
She shook her head.
“Tara! And pleased to see you once again!” the man said in almost perfect English. The top of his skull not far below the Caravan’s overhead wing, he made Fitzhugh and Douglas look short and shrunk Tara to the stature of a child. “Always welcome and good day to you. These are our gentlemen?”
Nodding, she introduced them. The man’s name was Suleiman, and he shook hands by gripping the fingertips and then moving his own fingers rapidly, creating a tickling sensation. Fitzhugh blinked at the peculiar greeting and Suleiman grinned.
“Our way of saying hello! Which of you is the one to look for good landing places?”
“That would be me,” Douglas said.
“We will be working together. I know the Nuba, top to bottom, and I know airstrips, I am your man,” Suleiman declared. “And please for you both to follow me.”
They reached for their rucksacks. Suleiman shook his head and called to one of the half-clothed men in a Nuban dialect. He came up, slipped each fifty-pound ruck over a shoulder with ease, and lugged them to where the donkeys waited in the shade, under their loads.
“We can hump our own gear,” Douglas said.
Suleiman looked puzzled.
“We can carry our packs ourselves.”
“I am sure you can, but why do it when there are donkeys to carry them for you?”
Airtight logic, Fitzhugh thought.
“I’ll be going as soon as I top off the tanks,” Tara said as two men rolled fuel drums across the runway. “If you can, call me on Michael’s radio the day before you’re ready to come out. That way, I’ll be sure to have a plane ready. Whatever, I’ll be here.”
“On the money?” asked Douglas, clasping her hand.
“On the money,” she said, and they turned and followed Suleiman, striding into the trees.
Maroor
“DO YOU SUPPOSE war to be here what wars are elsewhere?”