Late in the morning we arrived in company with the migrating villagers at the mud island which was their destination. Abu Malih, it was called, “The Father of Salt”; there was so much salt in the soil that the water around it was brackish. There were several hundred yards of flattened earth a yard or so above the level of the water, and every inch of them seethed with human activity. Many of the people had come before us, some of them on the previous day, and there were houses in every stage of construction. All along the banks were drawn up the canoes of the earlier arrivals, and men and women were struggling up the low banks, bent under the load of their cargoes. More canoes arrived every minute, and soon the shallow water at the side from which they had come began to look like a car park outside an English race-track.
As each party arrived and off-loaded their canoes, they would make for the piece of land on which they had staked their claim and at once erect on it, by draping reed matting over an upright canoe-pole, a temporary shelter some four feet high. Into this the women carried the cooking pots, and each family had a fire of buffalo dung burning outside the entrance within minutes of arrival. The men and boys laboured to and fro between the canoes and these temporary tents, and before unloading the building materials they would bring up all the household’s possessions and stack or scatter them before the entrance to the shelter.
It was possible, in this confusion, to see objects not commonly visible in the dim interior of a stabilised house, and there seemed little variation between the property of one family and another. The most intimate and valuable possessions, such as bangles, clothing, and money, are housed always in a big wooden chest with a domed lid, usually studded with iron or brass, which is normally kept in the women’s half of the house. These, as they stood on the bare ground beside the building sites, were the largest solid objects amid a gaudy jumble. There were cushions; blankets of the flaring orange-red that is perhaps the most characteristic of all man-made colours in the marshlands; rugs; an occasional quilt; pots and pans; baskets and trays of close-woven bulrush; fishing spears, and bitumen-headed clubs. Somewhere in each pile lay a corn-grinder, two six-inch-thick discs some two feet across, working on the principle of the upper and the nether millstone, but here the necessary weight was supplied not by stone but by bitumen. A few families owned porous clay water-containers such as are common to houses on the river banks outside the marshes, a long vessel tapering to the lower end and supported by a four-legged wooden stand; and many, too, a clay tray on three legs for burning buffalo dung. Here and there, among the possessions of the few families that owned two or three sheep, were flat ground looms, and wool, raw, spun, and woven, always in the several shades of brown that are the natural colours of the animal. Thesiger told me that he believed there were no local dyes, and that the rugs were made either by the Beni Lam, a pastoral tribe at no great distance, or brought over the frontier from Persia. Most of the weaving in the villages is of the thin hard woollen cloaks that every man wears in the far Eastern Marshes.
The women squatted in the entrances to the shelters and busied themselves with cooking rice for their men or with suckling their babies, and looked out over the stacked household goods to the intense activity all about them. Some of the houses were already complete and looked as if they had stood there for years; some were skeletal frameworks of a gold lighter in tone than the deep blue sky behind them; some were stately rows of straight outward-leaning reed columns, plumed and feathered at their summits, not yet bent together to form arches.
I was able to watch each stage of the building; and to time it, too, for several houses which were not begun when we arrived at 10.30 were complete when we left two hours later. Three or more men worked on each house, and they began by digging, with a spade much like the peat-cutters of the Scottish Highlands, two parallel rows of holes for the feet of the reed arches. Into these holes, two and a half feet deep, they set the base of the long twenty-foot columns in such a way that they leaned outward from the floor-space at an angle of about seventy degrees. Next they made from cut and bound reed bundles a tripod five or six feet high, to be used as we would use a step ladder. Standing on this surprisingly firm and rigid structure a man would reach up and catch with the foot-edge of a spade the upper part of a reed column, bend it down to his own level, and hold it there while he or an assistant reached for the other half of the arch. These two he would bind securely together with twisted lengths of sedge leaf, and move his tripod along to the next column. When the row of five arches was complete, the slenderer bundles of horizontals, fourteen of them in all, connected the whole structure into an integrated anatomy ready for its covering of reed matting. Two hours to build a house—a practical and inexpensive method of prefabrication.
The bustle of building went on for the whole two hours we were there, for new arrivals streamed in incessantly. Through this golden bone-forest of reed columns and house skeletons wandered parties of bellowing buffaloes whose precious dung the children collected as it fell, running with it to the site of their new home. Some of the small boys were naked but for a silver collar set with rock turquoise, the blue stone that has power against the evil eye; they raced and scampered among their preoccupied elders, and splashed and chased each other in the shallow water about the margins of the island.
Though we were able to stay no more than two hours at Abu Malih, I had been fortunate, for not once in his five years among the Ma’dan had Thesiger seen a village in the process of erection.
We could travel only eastward or southward, for there was little marsh water to the north of Abu Malih; one could walk almost dryshod from here to the town of Amara, some thirty miles to the north-west. We kept on due east towards Persia, and we were within a mile or two of the frontier before we turned back on our course. We were now in the territory of the Suwaid, enemies of the Faraijat; we had learned at Abu Malih that there had recently been an exchange of buffalo raids, each raid and robbery followed by a counter-raid into the other’s territory.
At Mekri, the next semi-nomad village of buffalo people, the foothills of Khuzistan were crouched and tawny on the horizon. They were far off, for here the marshes extend many miles into Persia, but it was strange to see at last an horizon above the level at which one stood.
I remember Mekri in particular for the great beauty of some of its people, the regularity of their features and the perfection of white and even teeth. In the Suwaid villages there seemed, too, fewer people suffering from eye diseases, possibly fewer in all the Eastern Marshes than in the Central. Among all the Ma’dan the teeth usually appear to be either very bad or very good; they clean them with salt, and the worst mouths may be no more than the effect of negligence, but at Mekri the standard was so near to perfection that the plainest face could be transformed in an instant by a smile. One child I remember in particular; the curve of lips no less perfect than the teeth they covered; the column of the neck from straight slim shoulders, the long shaded eyes that held the gentleness of the gazelle’s gaze. There was something moving in the composure of those small shapes wrapped in the hard brown woollen cloaks; in the softness of the faces and the harshness of the work-worn hands; so vulnerable within that armour of beauty.
The very last of these villages, the extremity, as it were, of our eastern journey, was Kirsuwa, a village of no more than seven houses, and it was almost waterless. We had reached it, as we had come to Jeraiwa a week before, through ankle-deep waterways that often petered out into dry land; and a hundred times, it seemed, we had turned back from these blind alleys to make yet another wide detour leading us away from our destination. In the end we had to leave the tarada several hundred yards from the houses and walk.
What little water there was here, and it was all that the people had to drink, was literally the colour of pea soup. It lay in small puddles and patches, green, with a dense buff-coloured scum at the edges; in the largest pool, perhaps a hundred yards from the houses, lay a dead buffalo, the hair gone from the stretched hide, through which
the white ribs had burst. Two black-and-white crows were excavating the interior with enthusiasm. The flies had become noticeable at the first of the nomad villages; here they were pestilential.
We could go no farther than Kirsuwa, and we turned back westward over the same course, through Mekri and Jidaid and on, still farther west, to the large land village of Baidha. Here there were big trading boats, and the waterways were alive with many types of craft loading and unloading. My eye had now grown long accustomed to the wide treeless horizons of the marshes, and accordingly magnified into disproportion any object intruding on the bare skies; here I mistook for a full date grove a verdure that revealed itself on closer approach as half a dozen scrubby dwarf palms in the compound of a mudhif. We spent the night there as guests of Ghaghban bin Faleh, son of Faleh bin Fahut, one of the greatest sheikhs of the area. In this mudhif there was electric light, and the thumping of the single-stroke engine that produced it took me further back than the few weeks that I had been out of the civilised world; back to childhood and Scotland and the moorland house that had been my early home, where through drowsy summer days that same sound had made a background to a world of sunshine. There were crickets on the floor of the mudhif, and during the evening their thin singing was shrill above the chatter of the frogs and the dull thudding of the machine.
I used to find these long evenings in mudhifs wearisome, for even when I could understand a little of a conversation I could never join in it, and the easy atmosphere of the common houses was, among the majority of these august people, subdued by formality. It brought me a belated sympathy for a man whom I had known during the war, who had a nervous breakdown because, he said later, I and a brother officer had ignored him. He was a promoted Quartermaster Sergeant, stationed with us as Quartermaster in one of those remote houses on the West Coast of Scotland where agents such as Odette carried out a certain stage of their training before being parachuted into enemy-occupied territory. He was a colourless little man with whom, apart from the accident of educational differences, I doubt if I could have found much in common; and with my other colleague I conversed, I suppose, from a background of tastes and interests that he did not share. So callously unobservant were we that the first symptom we saw was, as far as we were concerned, the last; he appeared one morning at breakfast stark naked and flourishing a service revolver—moreover he was, for some reason that now eludes me, spattered from head to foot with green ink.
I wiled away the time that evening by studying the details of the magnificent mudhif, a building that, in striking contrast to the houses at Abu Malih, had taken a hundred and fifty men three weeks to put up. The floor space was sixty-five feet long by twenty wide. There were nine arches, fifteen feet high, and each tied with a hundred and twenty double rings of rope—nearly five hundred yards of rope to every arch, for the average circumference from the yard-thick base of the columns to their tapering tops in the dim ceilings was not less than six feet. Beyond the arches lay the horizontals, a hundred and twenty four-inch-thick reed bundles tied every four inches of their whole length. Another thousand yards of rope. These horizontals continued to within three feet of the floor, below which there was a bare skirt of matting that could be lifted to relieve the heat. A veritable palace of reeds.
As we journeyed north-west the next day we passed through low marsh country where there were patches of green grass and tenuous tentacles of navigable water. The ground and the air were alive with birds of all kinds, and there were small scattered flocks of Sacred Ibis; for some reason it was one of these, rather than hosts of more edible fowl, that the canoe boys demanded should be shot for them. The ibis were, however, wise and wary, and not one came within eighty yards of the tarada. The crew chattered at me to shoot at every bird within a quarter of a mile, and eventually, more to put an end to this nuisance than with expectation of ruffling so much as a feather, I fired at a single ibis passing a full hundred yards away on our flank. To my utter astonishment it fell stone dead; it was not until some time later that I realised that the cartridges had got mixed up in my pocket, and that I had accidentally used one containing LG shot, six huge pellets intended for pig shooting.
Kathia leapt from the tarada and ran splashing through the ankle-deep water to collect the ibis. When he reached it he drew his curved knife, took his direction from the sun, and, pointing the bird’s head to the general quarter where he believed Mecca to be, he began to slit its throat. A cry of dismay came from Hassan—Mecca, he called to Kathia, was much farther to the south. Kathia reorientated himself and began again. This time he was stopped by a yell from Amara, who judged Mecca to be somewhere between the two points so far chosen. Kathia became hopelessly confused, and began to spin like a top, the gashed throat of the dead ibis dripping blood east, west, south and north. Amid cries of derision he returned sulkily to the tarada, to be greeted by the flat statement that no one could possibly eat that ibis now. Kathia threw the bird angrily to the bottom of the canoe, and the argument about it was still active in the form of desultory repartee when some half an hour later we passed an old man herding buffaloes on the bank of a waterway. Someone suggested giving the ibis to him, as he would not know that its head had been aimed many degrees off-course when the throat was slit. Kathia tossed it to him with a lordly gesture of largess, but as he did so Hassan began a malicious explanation of why this particular ibis was not lawful food. The old man did not trouble himself with the dispute, merely remarking that in his opinion ibis were quite inedible in any case.
So scrupulous a following of religious custom with so complete an absence of religious observance—for very few of the Ma’dan know more of prayer than is necessary for their buffoonery of it—must be rare in any religion. It is in the matter of food that this aspect is most striking among the marshmen, for they are hedged about with taboos that make no concession to convenience. I never learned, during my short stay among them, the full list of appetising birds, beasts, and fishes that were unlawful meat, but I knew enough to puzzle how these restrictions had begun. The various species of plover that offered a constantly easy target when we were short of food were all unclean; and I had imagined the taboo to extend to all the family of wading birds, until Sabeti chided me one day for not shooting at the bird they call gus-gus, the bar-tailed godwit. The fishy-tasting pigmy cormorants, no larger than a pigeon, and the great African darter, are both clean; pelicans, which I am told taste little different, are unlawful.
Among fish, catfish are unclean, and all that are shaped like eels, and all shellfish. A pig is of course impossible to any Muslim, but all grazing beasts are lawful. Thesiger told me that beliefs as complex and seemingly without reason are held by the Bedouin of Arabia, among whom it is permissible to eat the Desert Fox but not the Steppe Fox.
The following day I learnt just how difficult it can be to kill a wild boar. We had come to the village of Sijla just before the light began to fade, and took the tarada at once to look for pig, accompanied by a young Suwaid in a flat hunting canoe so small as to resemble a water-ski. The country here was all shallow water and bulrushes, with an occasional open lagoon. The rushes were nowhere very thick, and one could see through them to a distance of perhaps a gunshot away. Every now and again we flushed a purple gallinule, the great gaudy blue and purple fowl, as big as the biggest of domestic hens, that takes the place of water-hens in the marshes. The Suwaid found a pig but moved it; we could hear the splosh of its galloping, and we gave chase, the crew paddling with a frenzy of effort. We could not catch up with him while he was in his depth, but should he reach water deep enough to have to swim we should overhaul him easily. We came to a lagoon and he was swimming in front of us; as he reached the shallow water at the far side and his body became visible he was no more than twenty yards from me, and broadside on. I fired one cartridge of LG at his heart and the second at his neck, but he seemed to feel neither. He crossed a belt of foot-deep water among bulrushes, and then he was swimming again and the tarada came up on him fast. When we
were no more than five yards from him I took the .45 Colt and fired at the back of his neck. I used the whole magazine of thirteen cartridges, and there was no question of a miss, for the impact would have shown in the water. The first seven shots made no impression on him whatsoever; at the eighth he submerged, but after a moment he came to the surface again, still swimming strongly. He showed no signs of feeling the next four of those massive bullets, though I could see each one thud into the matted hair; the thirteenth, and last, chanced to break the spinal column, and then he died instantly. Little hope, I thought, one would have against a charging boar who clung to life like that one.
The half hour’s return to Sijla is one of the images that, together with the clamour of the frogs and the black chevaux de frise of reeds on sunset skies, I shall carry longest in my memory of the marshes. The sun went down now in a muslin of clouded yellow and dove-grey etched with strings of homing ibis, and against it glided the silhouette of the young Suwaid poling his hunting canoe with a fishing spear. So narrow was his tiny craft that he stood with one foot in front of the other, as much a part of it as a horse’s body was part of a centaur. The figure moved with a classic grace, the dish-dasha tied around his loins accentuating the slimness of the torso; he leaned backward as the haft end of the spear entered the water, then bent from the waist as he drove down on it with the swift, smooth urgency of the long thrust, a movement as controlled and fluid as that of a ballet dancer. Each time as he straightened again for the next thrust on the other side of the canoe the five points of the spear were black against the sky; the taut silhouette and the slim, dark sliver of the canoe carving in utter silence through the shining liquid sky and sunset-coloured water. Above him a single star began to glitter bright as the moon.
A Reed Shaken by the Wind Page 16