Seeds of Corruption. Sabri Moussa

he joined the mining engineer on a ship that carried them to his new life in the Darhib.

      Had it been forty or fifty years since then? And what had it finally led him to do but give his daughter a future that neither he nor his wife ever imagined. It was because of him that his daughter had come to the Darhib. He was the one who doomed her to be buried alive in the entrails of the very mountain that he and the mining engineer had claimed as their own. It was as if the mountain had exacted its own revenge against the men who tried to possess it.

      Like the mountain, the surrounding desert was the background of its own ancient drama. This desert was the habitat of the Baja tribe, the most ancient of African peoples. They had come here from Asia, ancient relatives and ancestors of Nicola's whom the poets believed were probably descendents of Kush sons of Ham who roamed the earth after the deluge.

      They had been pagans up until the time of Islam, and when they adopted it they maintained their nomadic ways and kept their language, so as to be worthy of that stubbornness they were so famous for. For in spite of the harshness of life in the desert and the aridness of the valleys most of the year and the dryness of the wells, they remained close to the land and survived, multiplying and breaking into branches and clans, among them the Bashariyya, the 'Ababida, the Bakhus, and the Banu Amir. They scattered to the wells and the water sources that had been the same since the time of the Pharaohs. Their weapons were a mere elongated sword and a shield, a spear, or a dagger. Their swords were made like those of the warriors of the Crusades. For pillows they used pieces of wood from trees, fashioned like King Tut's golden headstand, and they slept on the ground. They roamed through the mountains behind camels, sheep, and goats, pitching the tents which their women wove from palm branches of the doom tree in the pastures close to the Shalatin well in the land of Egypt, at the border of the Kingdom of the Sudan.

      In season, they would send their caravans southward into the Sudan, or westward to Qina where they would sell their camels and sheep and buy tobacco and seeds. The clans would contact each other, and delegates would stand in a circle agreeing on what to sell of the herds and what provisions and ornamentations needed to be bought. Then the delegates would get ready and mount the camels and lead their caravan along the trodden paths which their ancestors had leveled with their constant passing between the mountains. They could reach Qina on the Nile in five days and could reach the mountains of 'Ulba, overlooking the borders of the Sudan, in nine or ten days.

      And when the time of return drew near, the Bashariyya and 'Ababida and others who had remained in the desert all came forth to meet the caravan. They would wait, inspecting the horizon, hoping to glimpse the caravan. Want and denial would have exhausted them, but the desire for the coveted market goods sustained them until the caravan arrived. Then they would celebrate, and the desert would become like a city where everyone shared in the cigarettes, perfumes, sweets, and grains.

      During one such day, as the Bedouins sat in circles crosslegged, or on bent knees as if genuflecting in prayer, or leaning on one knee watching the horizon and awaiting the return of friends, a caravan of foreigners and high ranking officials and engineers, surrounded by a unit of the mounted Hagana armed with shotguns and whips, set out into the desert. From among the Bedouins they chose a few guides to lead the way through the mountains. And for a whole season, they proceeded to measure and inspect the mountains and ask their names and record all of this information.

      Then they all left and disappeared for another season, after which a second caravan came. This time the outsiders brought heavier equipment and began looking inside the mountains as if searching for a treasure, an important and mysterious treasure of which the Bedouins knew nothing, although they lived close to it all the time.

      At the beginning the Bedouins were filled with curiosity. Their curiosity was, however, not harmful. By nature they shunned strangers. They also refused to participate in digging into the mountain when those strangers tried to persuade them to do it. Some who were overcome by their curiosity worked as guides for the strangers, leading them into distant areas of the desert with their equipment and gear, to mountains and places that the strangers seemed to know by name. The majority of these strangers were foreigners, not of the same lineage as their ancestors in the upper regions of the South, or from the lineage of their descendants in the furthermost North. They were Westerners, men with red faces from beyond the sea.

      Through the contact between these few curious Bedouins and the foreigners, the foreigners' secret was discovered. It soon became known to all the Bedouins that their mountains contained minerals which the foreigners were determined to exploit.

      A certain Issa was one of the guides who had sold their intuitive knowledge of the mountains to the foreigners. It was Issa who had silently led Nicola's camel to the Darhib.

      Issa had stopped twice on that long-ago morning. The first time was when they were about to leave the home of the Sheikh in Marsa 'Alam, before heading toward the mountain of Sukra. Issa stopped on some pretense in order to study Nicola, who was staring like a child at everything that caught his eye in this virgin desert. Issa at that time was fourteen, but his tribe had already entrusted him with his own dagger as recognition that he had reached his manhood. Even though he was young, he was shrewd enough to see a difference between Nicola and the other Westerners. Unlike the others, who came to take, Nicola impressed Issa as one who came to stay.

      In those early days the mountains began to reverberate with the thunder of explosives and the hammering of tools. The mining tunnels became filled with workers whom the authorities helped bring from the Valley of the Nile to break the rock under the supervision of Western foremen. They set up a contradictory mode of life there which confused Issa completely. While the overseers and engineers camped in their elegant tents, drawing plans for the entrances to the caverns and passageways, with cooks to prepare their barbecued food, their fruits, and their canned vegetables, the workers in the caves and tunnels ate only what the overseers left for them. But the workers never complained. What attracted them to the hard work was the special wages: two piastres a day.

      Issa saw the workers once during a visit to a mine with his uncle Sheikh 'Ali, when the mine's owner, al-Khawaja, his Excellency Antun Bey, needed him for a job.

      They reached the mine at night while al-Khawaja was asleep, so they went to the workers' houses to wait until morning. They lit the gas light and Issa saw the workers' homes spread in a semi-circle, makeshift shacks made of discarded barrels, dried branches, and some rocks. It was difficult to imagine that human beings actually lived in them.

      Raised in tents made of the fronds of the doom tree, tents open at the sides to valleys and skies and filled with clear light, Issa was astonished to see men living under these conditions. He wondered how they could stay all day in the mines and then return to these huts. He was equally astonished by the predatory attitude of the men toward the mountains themselves—mountains that for him seemed as inviolate as eternity itself. Among the awesome masses of rock had grown a multitude of ores, each of which Issa saw and touched and respected for its own characteristic color and life.

      When the machines discovered the presence of those minerals, workers from the valley started digging into the mountain to reach them, and once they started they never knew when to stop. The inside of the mountain became a free-for-all. As long as the scaffolding held the tunnels open the workers kept mining, like machines themselves, machines whose only purpose was to create new passageways and causeways. Then they laid rails for wagons to carry the ores outside the caves, where camels were loaded to carry them across the desert.

      Issa got to know all about these men who came from the Valley of the Nile to the caves and tunnels of the Darhib. No sooner did he encounter a foreigner or see a caravan loaded with ore on its way to the sea, than a great anger would well up in his heart. It made him wonder about the treasures the men toiled so hard to extract from his own mountains, from his world and universe. Whose right was it? Who was the real and true owner?

      THIRD

      DAWN ROSE FROM THE DEEP VALLEYS BEHIND the Sukra and Hamata and Abu Ghusun mountains, from behind the Samyuki, Zarkat al-Na'am, Abraq, and Misrar mountains. It spread over the hills and plains, dissipating the night's darkness into clouds that curled over the flattened mountain tops.

      The light of the sun awoke