The Nile, swathed in luscious green

meanders purposefully

between the dunes and escarpments;

a great, animate presence

couched between its high banks

be-jewelled with viridian islands,

glassy rapids and tumultuous cataracts.

This spot evinces a geologic pre-history

of violent, toppled worlds

where glutinous lava and fire,

live and  lithe, once monstrously flowed

over the land, filling in the valleys

and the river-bed itself

 with its detritus, on its inexorable way,

gushing from the spouts and moley-hills

as the Earth shifted in its posts.

 

Here, the basalt still stands in black cliffs

the snaked trail of its blistering passage

marking limits for house, pasture

 or date-grove now;

walls and boundaries not made by man, but the limits and edges set

by congealing layers of slithered rock.

 

From alongside these riverine villages

with their palm and mango orchards,

fishing boats pull up on shingly shallows

in the shade of tamarind scrub

their nets bleached by the sun;

here and there monolithic chunks of rock

rise from the desert floor as if carved,

as if some surveying daemon

with a knotted measuring rope and nebiu

had set them out, duly squared

on the rim of the desert;

guardians of the sacred river.

to be indwelt by gods and kings.

 

Wading through the powdery sand drifts,

passing the clutter of cemeteries

clustering at the base of Jebel Barkal

ancient and contemporary,

the locals gather after prayers

 on Fridays, for family picnics;

 many clamber to the top

and then set off, running down

the sand-clad western face

as if gravity was up-tilted

 - in giant whooshy, sliding steps,

jellabias billowing sails, with arms flailing

all the way down, like on skis, joy-riding:

from distant, zoomed-out dots

tumbling breathless and laughing

to tip out full-scale and size

onto the flat and holy ground.

 

Under their feet, in the carved temple

primordial beings still reign

with a scraggly tourist troop queuing

to pay homage or take selfies.

A hunched man, perched on a rock

plays a harmonica, halo’d by the sun

as it falls in a golden blaze

behind the peaked pyramids to the west.

A donkey, with three children aboard,

their skinny legs dangling

scuttles off home-ward;

some young men linger, kicking around

 their football in the gathering dusk

while our sand-bogged vehicle,

at last lurches out of the clutches

 of its rut, thanks to a kindly gaggle

of passing helpers, all smiles and cheers

 - in the way of how,

in these edgeless wildernesses

people can appear out of nowhere

as suddenly as they vanish.