Red Nile excerpt 1: a death

The winter winds had been born in the central desert; there they divided into spinning arms each hundreds of miles long. The weakest scythed into West Africa attracted by pressure troughs in the Atlantic. In Nigeria they became the dirty, dry, maddening, endlessly blowing Harmattan. The strongest arms broke away, rotated, divided and then divided again to spin across the desert north to Cairo in a chaos of gust and squall.

From southern Assuit to Cairo many of the winds spilled down from the desert plateau into the narrow valley cut by the Nile. From over the rooftops in Cairo they descended into the streets in moaning pulses that exploded on the ground into torrents of fine, dry, drenching sand that instantly covered the oven lid, transforming it to a brown mound.

From Cairo, the winds bubbled on across the delta to swirl over the sea. When they reached the beaches, the winds quickened, passing over the waves as beige and yellow clouds. As the clouds rose, hammers of clear air smashed into the sea mist. Some of the squalls bounced on the pressure and incoming sea breezes to return to shore in small wet furies.

The weather caused wild wave patterns down the Nile. From Assuit through to the delta and to the sea feluccas and tourist boats were rocked. On the Mediterranean into the Ionian Sea the waves were tumultuous at the mouths of the small harbours and bays. In Albania they blew from the port of Vlora over the mountain passes to Gramsch.

In Egypt trailing gusts drove the surfaces of marshes, lagoons and wetlands over coastal roads and into delta towns. The windowless cement hut in Raz El Bar where the dead engineer had holidayed before he retired was flooded. The waters left patterns of shards of cracked shells on the street in front of it. The road to the hut was littered with heaps of rubbish and piles of dead birds woven with reeds and small stones.

The evening before, the only fishing boat that had risked a trip out from the port of Raz El Bar had difficulty threading the narrow opening between concrete abutments to get back into the harbour. It surfed in high on the swells from the deep water, its hold empty, moving sideways until turning sharply, almost at right angles just as it reached the narrow harbour entrance. The boat hovered there an instant, seemingly on the spray and in the sky. It then jerked itself around, turning, keeling over, and knifed in close to tipping, with its masts at acute angles to the sea. The boat righted at the last moment, hurled into the calm inner harbour on a dying wave, scraping its sides on the jetty behind the seawall.

Because of this, the fish stall next to the cigarette cart in the Cairo street, the fish stall run by the family from Raz El Bar, was not to open on the morning of the explosion. There were no fish. The stall for cigarettes had therefore set up in its place.

On the other side of the Mediterranean blown sand descended over tourists in Delphi to their astonishment. Sand clouds were seen over the water opposite Vlora. They obscured from two Italian patrol boats a ship crammed with women and children which had below decks an additional cargo of newly manufactured small arms and ammunition. The arms would be landed secretly and then, as arranged, travel on across Europe to Ireland by railroad and ferry. Others would go on to West Africa. Police in several countries would exchange information about the markings on the barrels.

Hailstones fell on Jerusalem and some screaming howling was heard in the sewers under the souks in Alexandria.

To the proprietor of the Cairo market cart, the man who had pulled a cart from his home four kilometres away each dawn to this street for ten years, the man who had now just moved the cart slightly away from his usual place in order to be in a better spot, a lovely spot just where the fish cart usually was, the fish cart owned by the Raz El Bar family who had not come this morning as they had no fish, to this cart proprietor the sudden death of the retired engineer was miraculous. The death composed itself to him first as a note from an invisible instrument, as a sudden unfamiliar castanet sound, a drumming clatter, and a harsh wet whisper blended into one.