Sudan Tourist Nocturne

112 CHRISTA ROMANOSKY SUDAN TOURIST NOCTURNE When the cheetah is a little drunk scent of fresh palms, gunpowder, the landscape stretched between the C-shaped rim of mountain, something withers. In the dawn, the binoculars hover upon certain spots. Blotting acres of tin-roofed hutches, hospices, goats, the discarded world: glass-blown, fragile, colorless. The jeep jostles tourists. Look, they say: oryx, gerenuk, haboob of hooves over savanna. Then gone the tourists watch the pick-strummed silhouettes, how light unwinds not to be. Next stop: Merowe Dam, electricity, they sigh, point out the Nile relieved. The guide says, I have always seen, just what I always see, eats kisra, drinks water. Another fishes from his knee a guinea worm, he leans into his work, whispers what to the Sahara. Yawning holes to be had. He winds the worm around the gauze, the length, the months, 113 sun cresting, hitting the yellow tilts of village, all the graveyard elephants and their distance. The stomping can be felt for twenty-five miles, he tells the tourists, drinks and winds the worm a little more. ...