كبري المتمة : صور حصرية

Quote: Now turn back to Metemmeh, poor, blind-walled, dead Metemmeh. And first, between camp and town, stand a couple of crutched uprights and a cross-bar You wonder what, for a moment, and then wonder that you wondered. A gallows! At the foot of it a few strands of the brown palm – fiber rope they use in this country, and one, two, four, six, eight human jaw-bones. Just the jaw-bones, and again you wonder why; till you remember the story that when Sheikh Ibrahim, of Jaalin, came here a week or two ago he found eight skulls under the gallows in a rope – netting bag. When he took them up for burial the lower jaws dropped off, and lie here still. If the jaws could wag in speech again- but we must try not to be sentimental. If we are, we shall hardly stand the inside of Metemmeh. So blank and piteous and empty is the husk of it. These are not mere mud hovels, but town houses as Sudan understands houses- mud, certainly, but large, lofty rooms with wide window-holes and what once were matting roofs. Two that I went into were even double-storied; no stairs of course, but a sort of mud inclined plane outside the walls leading to the upper rooms. Another house had a broad mud – bank forming a divan round its chief room. Now the beams were cracked and broken, and the divan had been rained on through the broken roof; shreds of what once may have been hangings were dangling limply in breeze. At the gateway of this house - once an arch, now a tumble of dry mud - was a black handful of a woman’s hair In every courtyard you see the miserable emblems of panic and massacre. Ride the gate – there lies a calabash tossed aside; a soiled, red, peak – toed slipper dropped from the foot that durst not stop to pick it up again; the broken sticks and decayed cords of a new angareb that the butchers smashed because it was not worth taking away. And in every courtyard you see great patches of black ashes spreading up the wall. Those monuments are recent; they are the places where, only days ago, they burned bones of the Jaalin. The dead camels and donkeys lie there yet, across every lane, dry, but still stinking. A parrot-beaked hairy tarantula scrambles across the path, a lizard’s tail slides deeper in a hole; that is all the life of Matemmeh. Everything steeped in the shadeless sun , everything dry and silent, silent The stillness and the stench merge together and soak into your soul, exuding from every foot of this melancholy graveyard – the cenotaph of a whole tribe, fifteen years of the Sudan’s history read in an hour. Sun, Squalor, stink and blood: that is Mahdism. Press your bridle on drooping pony’s neck; and turn and ride back to the river, the palms, and the lances. God send he stays to fight us

(عدل بواسطة SAIF MUstafa on 05-15-2009, 03:54 PM)