Years later, Frobenius reflected on what Arach ben Hassul had said: “The storyteller began by saying that For (the first lord of Dar For) was son of Napht, and Napht was son of Habesch (Abyssinia), but Habesch and his brother Masr (Egypt) were said to be sons of Kasch.²⁵³ It is not hard to realize that Napht or Napata was the first lord of what is today Nubia (which reached its height at one time with Meroe). But it is very curious that Kasch (which inevitably brings to mind the Kushites of the Egyptians, and of the Torah) is specifically described as lord of Kordofan, hence of a region that today is a desolate land that has become the home of nomadic marauders of more or less knightly tradition.” El Obeid, the largest city of Kordofan, was where Frobenius had heard the story of the ruin of Kasch. There the men sit for hours in coffee shops and talk about prices and harvests. Nothing else seems to exist for them, nothing seems to have happened before those monotonous conversations of theirs. “I have never been to a region of Africa where the landscape is so uniform and speaks so little of the past as in this central region of the lands of the Nile.²⁵⁴ And I have never seen a population that has such a scarce insight into things, that is so unmoved, so indifferent to questions about where we come from and where we are going.” But that desolation, which separated ancient times with a thick veil, was one day visited by the breath of stories: that breath came from “eastern Kasch,” from Arabia felix, and perhaps even farther away: from the western coasts of India.²⁵⁵ One day it had brought the doctrine about the ritual killing of the king, one day it brought the story of the ruin of Kasch and the aroma of the Thousand and One Nights.

Years later, Frobenius reflected on the “paideumatic” phase to which the history of the ruin of Kasch belongs: “The legend of the ruin of Kasch has to be late, very late.²⁵⁶ It is the memory of a state of things long vanished: a memory of that time when men, with total abnegation that went as far as sacrificing themselves, ‘enacted’ the destiny of the stars. It belongs, however, not to the age when that attitude was flourishing but to the time when it was already on the wane—when this feeling in men had become dim and everyone was beginning to yield to the need to form concepts, at the expense of their vitality. All in all, this is already a depiction. The idea of what is historical has taken life here. This creation portrays, to some extent, the process with which crucial parts of the field of civilization have dissociated themselves from everything else and have entered into profanity. It is a most singular creation, and I am unable to quote anything else like it in any part of world literature.”