Away among the shepherd tribes to the east, Ghadbhban, who had spent his life in exile from the land that he regarded as his own, heard of his brother’s doings and of the final successful negotiations with the government. What Faleh could do, it must have seemed to him, he could do too, so back he came to the island that had by now played so large a part in his family history, and with an armed band he was now following his brother’s example of loot and levy. Only last week, we were told, he had successfully held up a large cargo boat coming up the Euphrates with a cargo of dates and rifles.
I thought again of the insoluble problems of this intelligent and benign government; of how quickly the diplomatic handling of one problem could lead to another.
When we left Sahain we were right outside the marshes, in a land of semi-inundated rice fields, where every islanded strip of mud was thronged with a multitude of birds: storks, herons, egrets and great flocks of wading birds. Among them stood the ubiquitous eagles, strangely ignored by the press around them, as though they were indeed the purely heraldic symbols that their stylised attitudes suggested.
We came in the late morning to Umm el Gaida, a large village of Sayids on both banks of a wide channel. With these people Thesiger had had little contact in the past, finding them aloof and inclined to distrust the presence of an unbeliever, but our treatment was very different now. His reputation had spread year by year, and by now it had reached here, for from both banks Sayids called to us to come and eat with them.
Throughout our journey I was struck by the boorishness of western hospitality by contrast with that of the Arabs. If a stranger rings a doorbell in Europe, he must produce some very good reason before he can get into the house at all, much less eat there as a guest; yet in the lands where there are neither doors nor doorbells the stranger is not asked the reason for his presence, and to hesitate in setting food before him would be shameful. In the parable of the Good Samaritan it is possible that the significance of the travellers passing by on the other side has been missed; it had to be on the other side that they passed, as though quite unaware of the thieves’ victim, because had they acknowledged the other’s presence at all there would have been no alternative to the actions of the Samaritan.
Both the European’s boorishness and the Arab’s profligate hospitality may be no more than separate manifestations of the will to power, but the first must mean security only for the individual, the second for the race.
We stopped at the mudhif of an important Sayid, and even a spectacled white-turbaned priest from Naija treated us with courtesy, and did not, as did most of those whom we met later, leave the building as soon as we had entered it.
The meal was lavish; a boy who went to school in Amara dismembered the chicken in front of me. “Here,” he said as he handed me a morsel, “I am eating you.” “Feeding me, you mean,” I said. His fingers worked busily in the gravy-covered carcase. “Yes,” he repeated in happy preoccupation, “I am eating you. I eat you very large.” Like the boy at Sahain he understood no word of the language he was speaking.
We had intended to leave the village that afternoon, but we had gone little more than a quarter of a mile upstream, the houses still on each side of us, when another Sayid called to us from the bank to come and drink tea with him. Thesiger declined at first, saying that we were expected far ahead by nightfall, but he was so insistent that we ended not only by drinking tea but by staying the night with him. He was so extravagantly polite that it struck me that he must want something from us, but, Arab fashion, it was some time before the request emerged. I was beginning to understand a little of the language now, and could often follow the gist of a conversation provided that it developed along orderly lines. After the formal greetings and a little small talk he asked Thesiger about his doctoring, and whether he was carrying medicines with him; then he added that there were some people here who would be grateful for his attention.
In due course these prospective patients appeared, a group of a dozen or so boys who held their dish-dashas awkwardly away from their bodies. This was my first sight of the appalling effects of native surgery, and what I saw made me feel that Thesiger fully deserved his position of minor deity among the marsh peoples. These boys had been circumcised no less than three months before by a wandering professional, and the results were sickening. The magic powder had done its work, producing degrees of inflammation and sepsis so great that it seemed impossible that they could ever heal. Our host produced these unfortunate children by way of persuasion, for he wanted his own son circumcised, and was unwilling to entrust him to the perpetrator of these surgical outrages.
The appeal, made by a Sayid to an unbeliever, was the highest possible mark of confidence and acceptance; as a gesture, however, I saw it rivalled later during our journey, when one of the professionals themselves, a little shamefaced, brought his son to us with the same request.
This was the first community of Sayids that I had visited, and since previously I had only seen them singly and away from their kind, receiving from the common people the exaggerated deference due to their status—(everyone rises when a Sayid enters a house, and no man should ever precede him or otherwise turn his back upon him)—it was something of a shock to realise that they were after all part of a strictly secular hierarchy, descendants of a man who had never claimed divinity. Thus it was with a sensation of anomaly that as we sat round the fire that evening I noticed the number of pistol holsters visible as bulges or edges beneath the garments of our host and our fellow guests; the same sensation as I remember when I saw photographs of the fabled, stately figure of the Glaoui drawing an automatic against his assailants in Morocco; almost as if the Pope were to open fire with a sub-machine-gun upon a group of Protestant heretics.
For some days we pottered about the cultivating lands and the outskirts of the marshes. We stayed sometimes in primitive reed dwellings whose floors, littered with straw and buffalo dung, were transformed in a space of minutes after our arrival by the laying of many carpets and cushions; sometimes in sheikhs’ mudhifs or forts. One of these, I remember, was pockmarked with bullet-holes and chipped masonry; it had withstood some ten years before a lengthy siege from Mehsin’s men, who came on in waves and at last retired leaving sixty dead before its walls.
But it is nights in the reed houses, whether in the marshes or on the banks of the waterways, that I shall always remember best; and, with all their discomforts, the image they bring is one of nostalgia. I remember the pain of massage and its intolerable prolongation, and I remember nights that were hopping with fleas, but I remember, too, the proud curving silhouettes of the canoes and their reflections on moon-whitened water, the moon gliding through troubled cloud and the village women wailing for the dead; the fresh wind blowing through the house all night with the smell of rain upon it; the night sounds and sweet breath of the buffaloes at the end of the house. I used to wake in the night and take in these sights and sounds with a curious intimacy, like memories of childhood, as though they were things once known and forgotten.
At Hadam, a huge reed village standing in newly flooded seasonal marsh, we were told that the surrounding country was swarming with wild pig, and that a child from a neighbouring village had been severely gored the week before. Here I had my first experience of a different kind of pig hunting.
Some half a mile from the village rose a low tumulus island, whose highest point, where it ran up from sloping banks to a small cairn of turf, was some thirty feet above the water. At the foot of this we drew up the tarada, and as we walked up the slope I saw that this had been a burial island, for through the grey-brown dried mud showed everywhere pieces of broken ochre-coloured sherd, bright wedges and chips of green and blue glazed pottery, and loose human bones. On the cairn at the top a dark eagle stood motionless until we were within twenty yards of him.
From the summit of the island we searched the seemingly dead landscape with field-glasses. On every side the water stretched away to the horizon, broken here and ther
e by spits of still-dry mud, scattered bulrush stubble, and an occasional dense reed-bed. It was a landscape in two colours, the pale diffident blue of sky and water broken only by the drab of mud-reach and reed. It was strange how empty and lifeless this composition appeared to the naked eye, and how teeming it became through the lenses. Wherever there was a spit of dry ground hordes of small wading birds scurried hither and thither; some of the apparent islands revealed themselves as rafts of densely packed sleeping duck; a particularly opaque reed-bed was recreated as an immobile battalion of purple herons; and a small mud hump a quarter of a mile away showed itself suddenly as the enemy—a sleeping wild boar.
This was the first opportunity I had had to examine one of the wild pigs at leisure; and the bulk, compared with the insignificant creatures that I remembered from Kiplingesque pictures of subalterns pig-sticking in India, or from Teuton steel engravings of a fur-collared Kaiser Wilhelm drawing bead upon a pig as it scuttled across a woodland ride, seemed no less than grotesque. This beast was as big, in round terms, as a donkey, but infinitely more solid and massive. There was none of the sparse bristly hair that one associates with a pig; this animal was as shaggy as the shaggiest of dogs, long matted hair of a pale-mud colour, showing dark streaks and patches where it divided between the tangles. He looked eminently able to kill a man.
We walked down the slope of the island and began to wade towards him, for the depth was not continuous enough to give passage to the tarada. The water was numbingly cold, not much more than ankle-deep, but below it one’s feet sank into another four or five inches of stiff sucking mud. After twenty yards I had discarded my shoes, which had been chosen to slip off easily when entering a house, and after fifty I was at least that distance behind Thesiger and Amara. It was not only that the legs of my trousers would not stay rolled up—the others had only to hitch up their dish-dashas round their waists—but as soon as I had removed my shoes I had found that the invisible mud bristled with a spiny stubble of burnt reeds as sharp as porcupine quills. It was like walking over a fakir’s bed of nails. Every two or three yards one of my feet would slip into the deep prints of an animal or human who had gone this way before, and as I staggered to recover my balance the other sole would come down firmly and with my full weight upon the spikes. I dropped farther and farther behind, while Thesiger and Amara, the former in rubber commando boots and the latter with the horny and insensitive soles of a lifetime barefoot, strode on as unfalteringly as if they walked on smooth dry land.
They were within a hundred and twenty yards of the boar—though I was still double that distance—before he got to his feet, stared truculently, walked a pace or two away, and turned to stare again. Thesiger planted his long fork-topped stick in the mud, rested his rifle upon it, and took aim.
At last I was comforted for my disgrace among the coots. Thesiger, who is an excellent shot, and Amara, whom he had taught and who was also capable of an impressive performance, each missed the boar three times. The seventh shot struck him in the ribs but did not bring him down nor noticeably slow his progress. We watched him as, far beyond reasonable rifle shot, he trotted on and on through the shallow water until at length he disappeared into the thicket of a reed-bed fully half a mile away.
We followed him. For another half an hour I struggled with the suck of the clay, the slide into indented footprints, the needles of the spiny reed stubble; then, as we neared the tall reeds, the water became thigh-deep and the mud below it softer still. Thesiger halted for a conference with Amara, and I was able to gain a little ground.
Here, where the reeds were in places thick enough to hide a wounded boar, were the typical circumstances for a charge. We floundered forward warily, weapons at the ready, but as I surveyed the party from my ignominious position at its rear I felt that in the event of the pig breaking cover our greatest danger would not be from the pig but from each other. Amara had separated from Thesiger and was now wading at right angles to his course, his rifle horizontal and pointing straight at me, while Hassan, who from solicitude had maintained a mid-way station between them and me, zigzagged about brandishing a Colt .45 automatic whose muzzle menaced each of us in turn.
The boar, however, was not in the reed-bed, and when we emerged at the other side he was standing broadside in shallow water a hundred yards away. Thesiger and Amara fired simultaneously, and this time he died as big game should, shot cleanly through the heart.
This was the only boar, of the many that we killed, of which I had a chance to take a single measurement. He lay dead in water a few inches deep, and I stretched a tape-measure from one of the fore hooves while Amara held it taut at the shoulder. The height was forty-three inches, and though he was old and his tusks were ingrown, curling into the flesh below his eyes, he was, I am certain, smaller than many that we saw and some that we killed. Smaller than the boar that later came very near to killing me.
Near Hadam we met with the first open hostility from a member of a sheikh’s family. The sheikh himself, though he was polite enough, was unprepossessing, a little like Mehsin stripped of his dignity. His son was an aggressive young man who wore a gigantic solitaire diamond ring, and who looked to me from the beginning as if he intended to make his presence felt in some way.
When we had eaten, the villagers began to crowd to the fort to be doctored by Thesiger. He had been working for perhaps half an hour, on the hard ground surrounding its walls. He was treating a girl of about fourteen when the sheikh’s son came hurrying from the fort, crying to the people to disperse, and to Thesiger that it was an unspeakable shame for him to doctor a girl of their people. He used the worst of all words for shame. Thesiger was naturally angry; the drugs that he used cost a great deal of money, he risked infection himself, and he worked hard for the people. The sheikh himself followed his son and intervened, telling Thesiger to pay no attention and to treat anyone he would, but the atmosphere was unpleasant and ambiguous. Thesiger closed his medicine chests and we retired to the shabby darkness of the fort’s reception room. Neither the sheikh nor his son followed us, but after some minutes an ambassador appeared in the form of a negro retainer begging us to examine his entirely healthy child.
Though the incident was not serious it was a reminder to me of the Muslim attitude towards women. By the stranger the women are simply ignored; they should neither be inquired after, nor greeted, nor looked at. The taboo extends to asking after a man’s family, because this automatically includes his womenfolk. In Iraq the women are not veiled, but among the primitive people they will very seldom allow themselves to be photographed, and they keep so alert an eye upon the camera that it is almost impossible to take them unaware. The young girls are often vividly beautiful, with the enormous liquid eyes that have been so often compared to those of a gazelle, a delicate golden skin, and hair that—when it has not been dyed with henna and twisted into an ugly elaboration of many short plaits—is usually arranged in a short fringe over the forehead, fine, blue-black, and gently waving; but at some time during adolescence the complexion often becomes disfigured by one or more scars from the disease known as Baghdad boil. At about the same time, too, their faces are tattooed, not elaborately, but enough to impair a beauty dependent upon purity and simplicity. The tattooing does not vary much and is always the colour of blue-black ink; almost always it involves the eyebrows, sometimes as a line parallel to but above their own, sometimes following a line from which the hair has been plucked. The lines of the tattooing are always straight, destroying for ever the tender and moving planes of young frontal bones and temples; a thick line drawn downward from the centre of the lower lip over the point of the chin imposes a further impression of rigidity. This line sometimes extends down over the throat and between the breasts, with right-angle extensions outward over the torso, each line ramified by small projections like the teeth of a garden rake. I glimpsed this once or twice through a momentary accidental exposure, and I do not know how far down the body the tattooing customarily extends. The hands and wrists
always carry the same rake-like pattern of straight lines, and often the palms and fingernails are dyed with henna. Though a woman’s everyday working clothes are black as a crow—the abba that corresponds to the man’s dish-dasha, and differs little from it except in the round collar line and the greater mass of material—girls and young women often wear the gaudiest possible colours, vermilion, electric blue or multi-coloured floral designs. If the cut of the garments were more pretentious they would seem garish and shoddy, but the extreme simplicity of the straight falling lines flatters these cheap imported materials from India and Japan. Young girls have no headcloth; they simply wear the outer black cloak draped from the head rather than the shoulders and from under it they look sideways at a strange man with a doe-like allure and mistrust, but older women wind what appear to be several black cloths round their heads, an unidentifiable mass that gives a bulky effect like a big turban, and extends down the sides of the face and under the chin. Loose ends of this cloth hang to breast level, and often contain charms and other odds and ends knotted into them.
Women often carry enormous loads of decoration in precious metals or semi-precious stones, ear-rings of silver or turquoise, sometimes a heavy silver nose-ring in one nostril only, multiple bracelets, finger rings, and anklets. Whereas a man or a boy wears rings only on his right hand, women display them on both. Perhaps the strangest adornments are the heavy anklets of bright raw silver apparently shaped on in situ as a permanency, and appearing so bulky that it would seem impossible for the wearer to walk without acute discomfort. They are of the shape of a cylindrical horse-shoe, open and turned slightly outward at the Achilles’ heel, but the aperture is little more than an inch wide, and though I speculated much about it I came to the conclusion that they could not be removed without cutting through the metal.
A Reed Shaken by the Wind Page 11