at the hospital. They saw a knot of people clustered around the door to the medical ward and went to have a look. Inside, the old man lay on his side on the floor, his eyes open and still. The bedsheets were still wrapped tightly around him from his shoulders to his feet, which didn’t make him look like a mummy so much as like a giant larva with a human head. Whether he’d fallen out of bed or had deliberately thrown himself to the floor, it was impossible to say.
Ulrika, dressed in her uniform, stood over him, speaking quietly to Manfred in German. The doctor nodded, instructed a couple of Nuban aides to remove the corpse, and came outside.
“So, gentlemen, gut schlafen?” He rubbed his beard with his knuckles; the nurse must have summoned him before he’d had time to shave. “You slept well?”
They said they had.
“He will be taken in the Land Rover to the village near where you found him.” Manfred cocked his head at the aides, lugging the body through the door. “We will hope that is where he came from, so we don’t have to search all over for his people. We also hope”—he sent a stern look at Douglas—“that some true emergency requiring the vehicle does not arise while it’s gone. What a pity if someone were to die who doesn’t need to because of this. I trust that the next time, if there is one, that you find someone lying in the bush, you will go on.”
“Don’t think so,” Douglas said after a silence. “I understand what you’re telling me, but I don’t think I’d be able to do that.”
The response didn’t surprise Fitzhugh in the least.
A BIG MAROOR, Suleiman called their journey. Maroor meant “trek” in Sudanese Arabic, but “trek” suggested an organized migration from point A to point B and did not describe the circuitous wanderings upon which Michael Goraende led them for the next twelve days, westward into ranges called the Heibans, the Moros, the Limons, then north, east, south, north, and west again across unpeopled plains, up and over rock-strewn trails steep as staircases. They paused for a day’s rest at Michael’s headquarters, secreted within an isolated valley, and then made a short hike to New Tourom and St. Andrew’s mission.
Throughout the trek they traveled at night as much as possible to escape the crushing midday sun and the government Antonovs, ceaselessly prowling the unblemished skies. In the mornings, while Douglas and Suleiman surveyed for landing strip sites, Fitzhugh interviewed shopkeepers in the village marketplaces, asking how much they had sold in the past and how much they were selling now, and made careful notes of the dwindling stocks of soap and salt and cooking oil. He inspected household granaries where winnowed grain was stored in clay jugs. He went into the fields where men threshed grain by beating it with long, heavy wooden paddles, and he made more notes as they spoke about lack of rainfall and this year’s poor harvest and the raids that had driven them from valleys, forcing them to sow their crops on the stony mountainsides. They pleaded for seed and oil presses and implements. They complained of headache, bellyache and, Fitzhugh suspected, purely imaginary ailments and asked for medicine. He borrowed scales from village merchants and weighed small children and took their heights with his tape measure to determine if they were suffering from malnutrition. All in all, assessing the Nubans’ needs wasn’t difficult: they needed almost everything.
He slept through the blazing afternoons, and when the sun set, Michael would rouse him and Douglas and they would set off to the next town. They drank tepid water flavored with the iodine of their purification tablets. They ate doura and more doura and Fitzhugh notched up his belt until he ran out of notches. Maroor, trek? It was more an ordeal, never more so than on the night of the thirteenth day, when they pressed on to Kologi, the chief village of Suleiman’s tribe. They’d left a town called Kauda just before sundown, following an old road through an undulating plain. Michael set a murderous pace, hoping to reach a mountain named Jebel Gedir and its surrounding hills by daybreak.
A full moon rose, bright enough to turn the night into a colorless imitation of day. The scattered acacia cast distinct shadows on the whitened grass. Venus was pinned above the horizon, spreading thin petals of light so that it earned its Arabic name, El