For a Dinka child in Southern Sudan, horses are not faraway fantasies nor furry friends. The drumming of hooves means approaching death and destruction.

Or so I have read.

This winter, I was stuck at La Guardia Airport, flight delayed by a storm, with nothing to read - an intolerable situation that I set off to remedy. At the Hudson News stand there were a whopping ten books to choose from - eight with the giant metallic lettering of best selling thrillers, and one with a pinkish chick-lit look that my eyes slid over before reaching the bottom shelf occupied by,d the tenth, a trade paperback with a cover of baked orange, cryptically titled What is the What.. I picked it up and opened it in the middle. The annoyances of my own journey were instantly triviallized and forgotten.

"It was like a shadow made by a low cloud. The shadow moved quickly over the land. The rumbling was horses. I saw them now, men on horses, bringing the land into darkness.

"From our hiding place, we watched the storm overtake the town. All was dust. Some horses carried two men. They rode camels, dragged wheel carts behind them.

Horses burst through the grass to the right and the left. They were coming from all sides, converging on the center of the town."

Like Star Wars, this story began with the loss of a home, an orphaned child cast adrift in the world, but this was no fantasy hero. This was a novel, granted, but based on the real-life recollections of Valentino Achak Deng, one of the "Lost Boys" of the Sudan, as told to author Dave Eggers.

The scene I had randomly opened to was a raid by the Murahaleen, the mounted Arab tribesmen who surrounded the Dinka village of Marial Bai. The Murahaleen killed most of the men and many of the women. Children were easier to take captive and sling over the back of their mounts. A few escaped by hiding in the bush, like Valentino Achak Deng, as they watched their families killed, mothers raped, their cattle herds stolen, and their homes burned. All over Southern Sudan, the same story unfolded, and the survivors began to straggle on foot across the desert towards Chad.

Horses make only a fleeting appearance, but after digesting the story and looking up some background when I returned home, my mind returned to its usual groove. I was curious what kind of horses the Murahaleen rode. After all, raids and slave taking required speed and endurance.

I learned that the horses of Sudan are mostly of the Barb type, small and maneuverable, and like other horses of the desert, bred for swift attack and endurance for the getaway. The Murahaleen use camels and jeeps as well, but it is the horse that has the speed and agility to run down someone on foot through any terrain.

The Murahleen who have terrorized the Dinka tribes of Southern Sudan in the last decades are nothing new. They came from the Baqqara, nomadic cattle-herding Arab tribes had been an periodic threat in the past, sometimes with the collaboration of neighboring tribes who coveted water or grazing lands the more sedentary Dinka controlled. Still, trade was generally more profitable that raiding, so peaceful relations were the norm. It was when money and weapons, allegedly supplied by the government of Sudan, were infused into the situation that the Murahaleen became a major scourge. The net result of their campaigns was to drive the Dinka off the land where oil reserves have been found.

Similar raids are occurring in Darfur, carried out by a group called the Janjaweed, the northern equivalent of the Murahleen. A documentary, The Devil Came on Horseback, made using photos and footage taken by an American soldier, Brian Steidle, who was stationed in Sudan, has recently been released on DVD and Netflix.

When we romanticize the war horse and the fiery desert steed, it is sobering to think that in other parts of the world, this is far from a nostalgic memory and very much a grim reality. It is not the horses that are at fault - they are simply tools in the perennial conflict between nomads and farmers, escalated and manipulated to the level of genocide.

What is the What is the story of a charismatic survivor, though its journey is dark. I recommend it highly, both for its storytelling and for the insider's view it gives of the conflicts that are defining Sudan.