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felt like a lifetime had passed since then. I knelt down and trailed my hand in the river.
I could hardly believe that this was the same water that had emerged out of that muddy
crevice months before and thousands of miles away.
The police were still watching. I let them. I didn't care.
Ahead, the river widened even further as it made its final push to the sea. I'd imagined
I would see it by now - the glittering expanse of the Mediterranean had lingered so long
in my imagination - but the horizon was concealed by a concrete wave defence, obscuring
all sight of the sea. All I could do was follow the road. Soon, with the town diminishing
behind, the road petered out, the palm trees and fields slowly disappearing until only a bar-
ren waste-ground stretched out in front of me. Bunkers and barbed-wire trenches pitted the
land, as if left over from some long-forgotten war.
I heard the sound of waves: stronger and stronger, crashing against the other side of the
flood defences, seemingly growing angrier at my approach. This wasn't how I'd imagined
the expedition would end. I'd been dreaming of an idyllic palm-fringed beach - but, in-
stead, I tramped into a militarised no-man's-land. I supposed it would just have to do.
Readying myself for the final walk to the concrete barrage, I looked back over my
shoulder. I would walk this last few hundred metres alone, but behind me a growing crowd
had started to keep pace: not just Turbo, and not just my police minders; here were oth-
er guards in uniform, journalists, generals from the army - even the governor of Beheira
province had descended for the expedition's final moments. Like every other governor I'd
met, he was dressed in a black suit and shades that made him look like a clichéd movie
mafioso. Whatever I was about to achieve by setting foot in the ocean, he wanted to be
part of it.
The path narrowed. Now, it was nothing but a thin streak of tarmac leading up to the
wave break. That thick line of concrete had become my entire world: the end of the river,
the end of a continent - and, for me, the end of a very long walk.
As I approached it, I didn't hear the journalists baying behind. I didn't hear the police-
men, nor Turbo shouting his encouragement. The truth was, I was only half here. The rest
of me was scattered, back across Africa, back along the river from which I had come. From
which, in a sense, all humanity had come. Images were flickering through my head, the
faces of all the people who had made this journey so wonderful: of Boston and Amani,
meandering in the Nyungwe; of the porters who had abandoned us in the Tanzanian bush;
of Moses and the AIDS orphanage in Kasansero; of the absurd reception on the shores of
Lake Kyoga. I saw myself tramping with swollen tongue and lips through the heat of the
Bayuda, with Moez and Ahmad and Awad lurching behind. I saw the frightened faces of
the civilians scattering in Bor, the hordes of refugees making the best of it in their make-
shift camps at Minkaman. And there, hanging in my memory, were the faces of Matt Power
