LITMIR.BIZ

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directly above my head, in unconscious imitation of my position. It skittered away as I reached for my mobile phone blinking on the bedside table: 6:00 a.m. I had slept only a couple of hours since my taxi had deposited me in darkness at the White Star Hotel in Lira but felt wide awake, my body still on US time. I staggered to the bathroom, rinsed my face in water, wrenched open doors giving onto a balcony and stepped out. The street lighting was so sparse that the only detail I retained from the drive in was a giant ‘WELCOME TO LIRA INTERNATIONAL CAPITAL OF CULTURE AND SCIENCE’ banner slung across the airport road. I wanted my first view of the city.

      But there was to be no grandiose panorama. My room lay at the back of the hotel and I found myself gazing instead across a flat plateau fringed by a jagged mountain range over which the sun was rising, thawing the thin layer of frost crusting a russet and dun patchwork of ploughed fields. A gentle wind was ruffling the tawny savannah grass that lapped around the hotel, setting off the rhythmic chirruping of invisible crickets.

      My nostrils crinkled as I caught an unfamiliar aroma – a mixture of chilli powder, cumin and ginger, I guessed, and the scent of roasting coffee. There were other, less appealing, elements: the acid tang of what might be mule manure and petrol fumes from badly maintained cars. So this, I thought, was the smell of Lira.

      I craned across the balcony railing and looked north, registering that the escarpment lay above the cloud cover, which stretched across the horizon like a lumpy quilt, neatly tucked in at the corners. How high up were we, then? Two thousand metres? More? I spotted a hawk fluttering above the plains in the chill layer where a cerulean sky merged with the navy of deep space. There was a giddy feeling of gravity defied: both of us – woman and hawk – were suspended far beyond the reach of ordinary mortals.

      Suddenly overwhelmed by nausea, I bowed my head, dry retching as the clot of grief and rage that had stoppered my throat since I’d lost Jake bubbled up. I spat once, took a deep breath and closed my eyes. The cold air was as invigorating as a lungful of alpine oxygen, the sun on my face a caress. Something about being so close to eternity was waking me up. After months of lethargy I felt a brisk sense of purpose. An unfamiliar sensation stirred inside: hope. Like generations of sinners, mavericks and reprobates before me, I’d joined the Foreign Legion, exiling myself from my own. And that self-banishment felt good. Winston was right. I should have done this sooner.

      Extracting a shawl and two thick box files from my luggage, I arranged myself in a tangle of wool at the balcony table. I’d once prided myself on being a meticulously briefed lawyer, but if there was one lesson recent personal history had taught me – and we’ll come to that – it was that you can never really prepare. While serving my notice period with Grobart & Fitchum, I had focused exclusively on mundane tasks: selling the car, notifying my landlord, settling utilities bills. When a package from Winston had arrived, containing a fold-up map, three chunky history books and several files of background information, I had not taken up the proffered invitation. I had a few hours, now, to get some overdue homework done.

      ‘THE PLACE’, someone – presumably Winston – had written in red felt tip on the first file. It began with a photocopied page of a 1999 Bradt guide to the region, one paragraph highlighted in yellow. ‘Sanasa lies slap bang on the border between the tiny state of North Darrar, Africa’s newest nation, and the giant Federal Republic of Darrar, which reluctantly conceded independence after a David-and-Goliath war of secession. There is nothing of any interest here to the ordinary tourist.’

      The next document was a rather florid account by an English writer called Hugh Winterdale, who had toured the Red Sea coast in 2000 as part of a series of travel books baptised ‘Forgotten Places’:

      The port of Sanasa, 550 kilometres north-east of the highland capital of Lira, is little more than a long curving jetty of giant coral bricks, stacked like pink sugar cubes to keep the sea at bay.

      A sultan held sway here for a few hundred years, doing deals with Ottoman traders and Egyptian bureaucrats, and that period left behind crumbling coral ramparts and a few gracious town buildings, whose delicate wooden verandas now slump earthwards. The Italians left behind a delightful openness with strangers and a liking for pasta and strong coffee. As for the British, they only took away, removing anything in the port made of metal, to be used in other, more important, colonies.

      East and west of here lie terminals with ship-to-shore mobile gantries and yards piled high with orange containers. As Africa enters the twenty-first century, these modern ports will come to play a vital role in the continent’s revival. In contrast, Sanasa, which only exists because the coast here – with the help of a little excavation in the 1870s by a Swiss adventurer – forms the deepest harbour for 200 kilometres in any direction, boasts very little in terms of equipment. Things are done the old-fashioned way. Three rusty cranes loom over the harbour, and when a ship docks, they cluster above the vessels’ innards, picking over the cargo like feeding storks. To a chorus of male shouts, hooks descend, cargo slings are attached, sacks of grain and cement are lifted and deposited on the harbour front, morsel by painstaking morsel. A brigade of whippet-thin stevedores then springs into action, T-shirts stained with sweat, loading the sacks by hand into the Isuzu trucks lined up in anticipation.

      But such moments are becoming ever rarer. A well-used port makes for dark, polluted waters. Sanasa’s are an inviting, translucent blue; zebra fish nibble and flit around greasy anchor ropes. Container vessels increasingly bypass Sanasa, leaving it to process the occasional, surreptitious dhow. Painted sky-blue, these tiered schooners waft in laden with sugar, cheap Chinese plastic sandals, the odd microwave oven and state-of-the-art 4x4. Not an inch of space is wasted. By the time they depart, the dhows have been transformed into smelly, bleating vessels of animal distress, loaded to the gunwales with goats and camels destined for the butcheries of Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

      ‘Wordy but helpful’, someone had scrawled in the margin.

      Sanasa’s remoteness, its very inefficiency, lends it a particular advantage. Rarely coming to the attention of officials in Lira, it is popular with smugglers, petty traders, who do their calculations in their heads, and livestock owners, who ignore frontiers as they follow routes established by nomadic forefathers. It makes for a rich mix of languages and faces, a polyglot blurring of nationalities and customs.

      For most of the day, the town sits stunned into near-imbecility, paralysed by the joint assault of light and heat. Pock-marked mongrels lie by the whitewashed trunks of old neem trees, tongues out, stomachs pumping like pistons. The only sound comes from the cawing of the crows picking for forgotten fish scraps along the cement jetties, crunchy with salt crystals. It is in the evening that Sanasa stirs. Under the arcades, harbour workers sip cold Coke, relishing the bracing zing of ammonia from the sea and providing a running commentary on the comings and goings from the town’s lone brothel. Urchins dragging adult-sized flip-flops trawl, half-hearted, for custom, carrying neon-coloured plastic basins of hot peanuts. They stand uncomplainingly, ignored, absorbing the gossip of the baritone-voiced adult world. As a velvet night descends, the spot-lit bars and restaurants, each with its dizzy halo of insects, become helpful landmarks for residents accustomed to manoeuvring the streets as much by feel as by sight.

      I turned the page, expecting more, but the passage ended there. Winterdale’s creative juices had clearly run dry.

      Next came some photocopies of unclassified cables between a US deputy ambassador in Lira and the State Department, dating back to the early 1990s. One highlighted snippet read:

      Sanasa is merely one of a handful of settlements whose proximity to a poorly defined colonial border is a potential source of strategic concern. Yet when Western diplomats raise the issue with officials in either capital, their concerns are laughed away … The line is that the governments established by the two former rebel movements now running Darrar and its progeny, North Darrar, are ideological soul-mates, with near-identical, progressive agendas. ‘We’re brothers!’ officials will often tell embassy personnel. Families in the border areas, they say, are interconnected by marriage, friendship and commerce and barely know themselves where the frontier begins or ends. ‘Who needs a border when there’s trust on both sides?’ is a refrain we often hear in these parts.

      But, evidently, the picture was not quite

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