The Pink Spider

By R.Z. Sheppard

AFRICAN CALLIOPE: A JOURNEY TO THE SUDAN by Edward Hoagland Random House; 239 pages; $10

It would be a neglect of the obvious to write about America without mentioning Tocqueville, or Africa without a nod to Conrad. Those authors are not only fixed points to steer by but fetishes that protect a writer from foundering in swamps of detail. Edward Hoagland does not get around to his ritual reference until page 91 of African Calliope: A Journey to the Sudan: "Far from learning something new about the black-white torque that is such a misery in America, here I was freer of it. But the other reason why I had come to Africa, instead of to another southern continent, was that on the contrary, it was not a clean slate, not neutral ground. The myth of blackness, darkness, this 'land of sorrow,' might be a sounding board. 'Before the Congo I was just a mere animal,' Joseph Conrad said."

Before the trips in 1976 and '77 to the Sudan described here, Hoagland, 46, had left his spoor in the wilderness of British Columbia, the wooded mountains of Vermont, the scrub of Louisiana and the streets of New York. He carried a supply of solitude in and a supply of observations out. In his essay (Walking the Dead Diamond River) and travel books (Notes from the Century Before), he displayed a gift for elegy that made the city as remote as the boondock, and a knack for seeing the familiar for the first time. In Africa, it is the unfamiliar that moves him. After flying, bouncing and sliding around the continent's largest nation, Hoagland learns more than he needs to about Dinkas, Turkanas, mercenaries, missionaries, coups, assassinations, the green monkey disease, the protein value of dura soghum, going without bath water ("I lay in my sleeping bag, cleaning my toes with my toes") and how a country runs on a trickle of gasoline: "So scarce that even when I was being chauffeured in a Ministry of Trade auto, the driver turned off the motor to go downhill."

Hoagland does not burden the reader with a false sense of wonder or an exaggerated sense of adventure. He conveys what he learns as something that a middle-aged man should already know: months of wandering in a hard place make one sick, lonely, itchy and tired. "I was weary," he writes, "of the whole African calliope -- that nagging, pulsing musical din that has been reverberating strongly without letup for thousands of years before you arrive and will be continuing without any respite for sickness or fatigue long after you have left the earth."

He hears the din in Khartoum where the Blue and the White Niles meet and in a southern Sudan sapped to a "hopeless torpor" by epidemic. The specific character and hardship of a place are conveyed with arresting brevity. On the hard desert of the Muslim north: "It depressed me to see the starved, tethered donkeys outside suffering while the fat ones ate, and the thirsty chickens dashing for a chance to peck at our spit." In the river town of Gelhak he records the visual cacophony in Polaroid prose: "We saw a man with a monkey's nose; and a woman whose feet were reversed, her toes pointing back wards. More turbans and tarbooshes now, more Arabs, as well as the eggplant-black Dinkas, and purple Nuer with carved stripes that circled their foreheads under the hairline, and Shilluk with beadlike cicatrices stretching from ear to ear."

Hoagland's footsteps are hardly the first to fall on East Africa from the outside world, any more than were those of Sir Richard Burton, the demonic Victorian explorer and scholar of the forbid den who infiltrated hostile cities dressed in native robes and speaking fluent Arabic. By contrast, Hoagland drifts in and out of stagnant backwaters, a rumpled, skinny fugitive from L.L. Bean whose spoken English is hampered by a bad stutter. He is as puzzling and exotic to his hosts as they are to him, one of a long line of white hunters and note takers whom the wags of Juba on the White Nile call pink spiders. Only this one writes a blue streak.

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