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Roughly halfway through Season of Migration to the North, the unnamed narrator is making his way back to Khartoum in a lorry after a two month visit to his home village. His descriptions of the harsh journey are interspersed with recollections of his conversations with his friend Mustafa Sa'eed. In the hope of learning more about Sa'eed's mysterious, disturbing past, he decides to write to Mrs Robinson, the woman who looked after Sa'eed when he was a schoolboy in Cairo and stood by him during his trial for uxoricide in London:

I shall write to her; perhaps she can throw some light on things, perhaps she remembers things he forgot or did not mention. And suddenly the war ended in victory. The glow of sundown is not blood but henna on a woman's foot, and the breeze that pursues us from the Nile Valley carries a perfume whose smell will not fade from my mind as long as I live. And just as a caravan of camels makes a halt, so did we. The greater part of the journey was behind us. We ate and drank. Some of us performed the night prayer, while the driver and his assistants took some bottles of drink from the lorry. I threw myself down on the sand, lighted a cigarette and lost myself in the splendour of the sky. The lorry too was nourished with water, petrol and oil, and now there it is, silent and content like a mare in her stable. The war ended in victory for us all: the stones, the trees, the animals, and the iron, while I, lying under this beautiful, compassionate sky feel that we are all brothers; he who drinks and he who prays and he who steals and he who commits adultery and he who fights and he who kills.

Salih, Tayeb. Season of Migration to the North. 1966. Trans. Denys Johnson-Davies. 1969. Intro. Laila Lalami. New York: NYRB, 2009. pp. 92–93. Emphasis added.

To what war is the narrator so abruptly referring? I am not even sure whether this is a literal war or a metaphor, though that could well be a false dichotomy.

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The war is a metaphor for the ferocity of the sun beating down on the narrator as he makes his journey.

The metaphor is introduced at the start of the chapter, when the day's journey begins:

There is no shelter from the sun which rises up into the sky with unhurried steps, its rays spilling out on the ground as though there existed an old blood feud between it and the people of the earth.

The sun is introduced as an antagonist, as an enemy against which the travellers must contend. In the following passages then sun is described as "indefatigable" and as "merciless", and a few paragraphs before the text quoted by the OP:

The sun is the enemy. Now it is exactly in the liver of the sky, as the Arabs say. What a fiery liver! And thus it will remain for hours without moving - or so it will seem to living creatures when even the stones groan, the trees weep, and iron cries out for help.

I have bolded the final words, which are echoed when the sun finally sets and releases the travellers from its impact. In the metaphor the narrator is using, sunset and the coming of night corresponds to the war ending in victory:

And suddenly the war ended in victory. The glow of sundown is not blood but henna on a woman’s foot

This phrase is repeated, and emphasised, with an echo of the text I emboldened earlier;

The war ended in victory for us all: the stones, the trees, the animals, and the iron

By surviving the day, the stones, the trees, the animal and trees, as well as the travellers, have succeeded in defeating the sun.

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