In Praise of Savagery

by Warwick Cairns

  It was the end of the monsoon when we went, and we travelled the city in a motor-rickshaw, passing streets where women hitched up their saris and men their trousers, shoes tied together at the laces and hung around their necks to wade through water up to their knees, and still the rain came down, slantwise. Past sodden roadside shanties of cardboard and tarpaulin we went, weaving and swerving on the potholed tarmac, in and out of the heavy traffic when we could move, though for much of the time we were stuck in jams, eye-level with grease-encrusted lorry axles, and shuddering corroded exhaust-pipes that pumped black diesel-smoke into our faces, while beggars thrust mottled fingerless hands through the window-flaps at us.

  We drove down roads of huge walled houses where the rich lived, outside which teams of Untouchable women swept dirt from the gutters with palm-fronds; and on through business districts and a street where the flow of suited men on their way to work parted to avoid a naked and skeletal sadhu rolling over and over on his side. Incense and prayer wafted from temples to many-limbed gods and goddesses, and music blared from the rickshaw-driver’s transistor radio.

  The size and scale and strangeness of the place took the woman’s breath away as much as they did mine.

  ‘But,’ she said, pronouncing the word Yorkshire-style, ‘but when I’m here, the world suddenly makes sense to me. That’s the only way I can describe it. It just makes sense.’

  ‘How’s that?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’ve never lived here. I couldn’t live here. But when I walk down the street and everyone looks like me, it just feels … well, as I say, it feels like the world makes sense.’

  Thesiger never thought of himself as anything but an Englishman, though he had no great love of the place itself.

  ‘I find the English countryside dull,’ he said, ‘and uninteresting. I mean, you’re not exactly going to come face-to-face with a rhinoceros there, are you?’

  I would have asked Andy then what it felt like to be a ‘black white man’ from South London among black black men from Africa. Or rather, I don’t know if I would have asked him, but I wonder now how I would have felt in his position. Would the world have made sense to me, at last?

  Or were they as foreign to him as they were to me?

  I wonder how deep the ancestral ties go. I wonder what it means to arrive, for the first time in your life, in a place where the people all look the way you look.

  We slept the night by the cooking-fire, with a cool breeze blowing across our faces and the camels bedded down in a thorn-bush kraal.

  A Blessing

  The next day we rose just before dawn. In the cool of the early morning, while the camels were being loaded, Frazer and I set off together to make up for time lost the previous day.

  ‘Let’s go now,’ he said, as we got out of our sleeping-bags. ‘Get going before the sun’s properly up. That way if it hits you like it did yesterday, we’ll have covered a lot of distance before it does.’

  ‘Good idea,’ I said.

  And it was.

  Brothers.

  Magnetic fields of relationship shifting and readjusting.

  Me, I’m the eldest.

  Frazer, he’s good at competitive sports.

  I do non-competitive ones, mostly. I’ve always tended to lose, and lose quite badly, whenever I’ve tried the other sort.

  ‘We need to cover the miles,’ he said.

  As we left, the old Rendille woman rushed out from her camp, which was a little way from ours, and took our hands, holding them up and spitting on each of our open palms in turn.

  This, Osman told us later, is considered a blessing among the Rendille.

  We walked for an hour at a time, heading for a distant line of low trees that Osman had pointed out to us, pausing for ten minutes or so every hour to take a little water from our bottles; and in this way we covered a lot of ground before the real heat of the day.

  Andy caught up with us after a couple of hours and we walked together, seeing a pair of giraffes and numerous antelope.

  Antelope, by the way, is the plural form of ‘antelope’.

  And, indeed, the singular. It just is. Some words are like that.

  I used to think it was anteloe.

  ‘Home, home on the range,’ was what it sounded like, in the song, ‘where the deer and the anteloe play.’ And also, from the same song, I learnt that the word ‘seldom’, when spoken in that particular place, had a uniquely discouraging effect. ‘Where seldom is heard a discouraging word,’

  I didn’t actually know, at that time, what ‘seldom’ meant. Or discouraging, either. But I understood the currents of relationship between them, at least.

  Or at least I thought that I did.

  I wonder sometimes how much of what I know is like that.

  Wrongly intuited, I think the expression is.

  And how much of what I believe.

  The answer is, I just don’t know.

  I don’t think any of us do; except, perhaps in retrospect.

  Except, perhaps, in wonderment at what we see as the monumental wrongheadedness of the unspoken assumptions of previous generations. How could they have believed such things? Done such things? What were they thinking of?

  And even then, perhaps we only think we know.

  ‘The truth is great,’ as Coventry Patmore’s poem goes, ‘and shall prevail, When none cares whether it prevail or not,’

  And I picture the wash of water against stones at the water’s edge, beneath the overarching sky. Absence and emptiness.

  Just before midday we reached the trees, which marked the edge of a dry river-bed. The leaves were green and gave shade, and we waited beneath them for the camels to join us.

  When they reached us we ate a lunch of dried goat, and sat drinking sweet tea while the camels grazed. By ‘sweet’ I mean sweet as in a bag containing about a pound of sugar being emptied into the saucepan and stirred around to make a kind of viscously delicious syrup—that kind of sweet, rather than ‘actually, I take two teaspoons’ which passes for sweet among normal people where I live, or ‘would you mind putting five in mine, missus?’ which passes for sweet among builders.

  After lunch we set off again, but all together this time—not least because the grass and bushes around the river-bed were a known haunt of lions. Or lion.

  I think that the jury is out on the correct plural form of the word; but for Wilfred Thesiger it was always lion. Except that he pronounced it laahn.

  Upon leaving this place, we crossed into land that became rapidly and markedly hotter, drier and more sparsely vegetated as we went.

  The next water, we were told, was several days away, at a camp used by various tribes and their herds.

  The Hangadaala Takes a Walk

  Several days further on, they made their camp beneath two trees by the edge of a low river-cliff on the plain by the side of the Awash River, where crocodiles basked in great numbers in the water below. There the Asaimara found them, and came in large numbers to welcome Miriam Muhammad back to his country and his people.

  They brought and killed two oxen, and Thesiger’s party caught a dozen large catfish, and a great spread was set out in the Hangadaala’s honour, while some twenty men formed a circle, shoulder to shoulder, and performed a janili dance, clapping their hands and chanting to a varying rhythm, and invoking the powers of the janili, a man renowned as a soothsayer. This man rose to his feet and entered the circle, where he stood on a sheepskin laid out for him and he covered his mouth and eyes with his shamma, or shawl. The chanting grew louder and the clapping faster, but none moved their feet, although all the dancers bent further and further forward. Then, quite suddenly, the janili began to speak, out loud, in a voice quite unlike his own; and at this the clapping and the chanting instantly stopped.

  Slowly, very slowly, he raised his right arm, a finger outstretched, and pointed directly to where Thesiger sat.

  All eyes turned to the Englishman.

  ‘God speaks to
me of this man,’ said the janili.

  ‘God speaks to me of this man,’ chanted the dancers.

  ‘This man, this foreigner who has entered, unbidden, the lands of the Asaimara …’

  ‘This man,’ the dancers repeated, ‘this foreigner …’

  The soldiers surreptitiously checked their rifles. Each of the fifteen of them had been issued by the Government with just fifteen bullets each.

  There were, by now, several hundred Asaimara in the camp, all waiting to hear what the janili had to say.

  The mathematics were not favourable.

  ‘God,’ said the janili, as the dancers echoed his words, ‘has sent this man to us. He has brought us back our Hangadaala. He has averted for us a great trouble with the Government. But for his visit, they would have come and fought with us. Let us welcome him into our land. And let us conduct him safely onto his destination.’

  And with this he turned back to the circle and the clapping and chanting began once again.

  Later on Thesiger was introduced to a much-scarred old man who had been shot in the upper arm above the elbow and the bone shattered, and who had, besides, several spear wounds, all of which were in the process of healing. This man, he was told, was the sole survivor of the deputation of old men recently sent to the Adoimara, the deputation who had been welcomed with singing and dancing, feasted and then set upon. He had, perhaps, heard the story?

  He had.

  Not that the Asaimara had any intention of doing any such thing to Thesiger or to his party in this case, he was hastily reassured; for had he not brought them their Hangadaala? And for as long as Miriam Muhammad remained free, and safe and sound, then for that long would they be welcomed and given all possible assistance to ease their passage to Aussa.

  Thus it was that that night, in the dead of night, after the feasting and the dancing, after the janili’s prophecies and the meeting with the massacre-survivor, Miriam Muhammad decided to leave Omar’s tent, in which he had been staying, and to take a walk in the cool night air.

  Deep Water

  Perhaps it was to do with Miriam Muhammad’s powers to find and bring water to his land; perhaps it was to do with the lateness of the hour, or the darkness round about; or the befuddling of his senses by age or by the excesses of feasting, but whatever the reason, he walked straight from the tent and over the edge of the river-cliff, falling fifteen feet down and landing with a splash in the deep waters of the Awash, waking the lazy crocodiles on the river’s edge, which, sensing prey, dragged themselves down into the water and began to make their way towards him.

  The Hangadaala came to the surface and called out, splashing with his hands and feet as he tried to outswim the beasts.

  The noise alerted the Abyssinian sentries, who, rushing over to see what the commotion was, and realising who had fallen, and the consequences for them all if he were to be eaten, dived in and dragged him out, just as the crocodiles were almost upon him.

  The next day, Miriam Muhammad announced that he no longer intended to travel onto Aussa, as had originally been planned. Instead, he would go to his home village, a few miles away, and remain there.

  Nothing that could be said would persuade him otherwise.

  But he wished Thesiger and his party the very best of luck.

  In the Midday Sun

  The sun climbed high into the sky over the barren land; and as it did so, so my strength left me; and with my strength my spirit also, and I felt a great weight of depression upon my shoulders, and a sense of pointlessness and worthlessness.

  My throat was drier than I had ever known it, and sore and ulcerated with it. We had little water between us, and thirst was constant and all-consuming, and besides what we carried there was no more to be had until we reached the wells. Each hour I allowed myself a small mouthful from my bottle, but it did little to help.

  The walking, meanwhile, was monotonous and endless on these days: hour after hour with no shade and little to be seen but sand and stones and the occasional low thorn bush.

  I had begun, also, to lose my appetite, particularly in the heat of the day. All I wanted was water, cool water, and I could find no pleasure in food, nor any point in trying to get it down.

  As a result I began to lose weight, and to lose it quite dramatically. Each day I would wake up noticeably thinner than the day before, so that my shorts, which had fitted at the start, began to hang on me and I had to tighten my belt by a notch at a time, sometimes twice in a day.

  A Collective Decision

  For reasons that he could not fathom, Thesiger had been sick all that night, violently sick, and the tent reeked of it.

  He was awakened by a soldier at the tent-flap, calling his name.

  He had been calling his name for some time, this soldier, and also prodding at his foot.

  He rolled over and pulled his covers around him, calling to the man to go away and to come back later.

  The soldier half-turned as if to do so but two others behind him nudged him in the back and pointed into the tent. There was a brief, urgently whispered conversation between them with a number of gesticulations, and then the first soldier knelt down and put his head through the tent door.

  He apologised for any inconvenience he might be causing. However, there were important matters that needed to be mentioned, and changes to the situation to be taken into account. He was speaking on behalf of the entire company, who had discussed the matter at some length and all come to a collective decision, which they were quite certain about.

  It was, he said, to do with the matter of Miriam Muhammad.

  This matter was problematic, in terms of the guaranteeing of safe passage, and the passing through hostile territory with—as the gentleman himself knew—no more than fifteen rounds per head. Which was not many—not many at all. Being a shooting man himself, the gentleman would no doubt be all too aware of that fact. And all things considered, it would be best not to continue with the expedition, under the present circumstances, but perhaps to go home and come back another time, when Miriam Muhammad had changed his mind.

  Either way, he said, the soldiers had decided among themselves that they would proceed no further, and that was their final word on the matter.

  Built for Miserable Weather

  One day we set off around dawn, as we always did; but as we walked on through the morning the sun did not rise as it had before—or rather, it did, but the sky was overcast and the weather cool, and grey clouds began to gather, low in the sky.

  The darker and more slate-grey the sky became, the more my mood lifted and the more I felt the energy and the enthusiasm flooding back into me. I found that when I walked I did not get tired, as I had before; nor did my head feel light and dizzy or my throat sore; and everything, even the sand, seemed to take on a new fascination.

  Even the constant raging thirst of the desert, and the meagre supplies of water we carried with which to quench it, seemed matters of little consequence; opportunities, rather, to talk endlessly about the lemon sorbets we would consume when we went home, and the glasses of ice-cube lemonade and suchlike.

  What were those tracks? What made this bush lean so, when there was no wind?

  And also food, and what was for lunch, and indeed for dinner?

  Dried goat and ugali, was it? Who would have thought?

  But beggars, as they say, cannot be choosers.

  Now, onward.

  I am built for miserable weather, I think.

  I think that I am built for grey skies and for drizzle, and for the rain plastering my hair to my forehead and dripping off my nose onto sodden clothes.

  And the soft earth and the smell of woodland, also, and the mossy pools by the wayside.

  I remember.

  I remember, once, the foot of a wooded bank, and the ground deep in autumn leaves, russet and yellow, and sitting still, very still, and hearing a rustle and a commotion among the leaves a little way up, and a woodmouse, it was, came scurrying down, and lost its footing an
d rolled, once, twice, three times, to land at my feet. It shook itself, and looked up at me. Black eyes, like small beads. Whiskers. Front feet, pink, pushed out forwards, ready to spring back. For a little while we remained fixed, just so; and then there was a rustle higher up. I flicked my eyes up, briefly; and in that instant the woodmouse had darted away.

  It went, I think, into a bramble bush a little way down; but I cannot be sure.

  It did not rain.

  It did not rain but that was fine.

  It was all fine.

  We walked well for five hours without stopping and covered a fair amount of ground, and as we went we saw the shape of a mountain appear at the horizon.

  Mount Kulal.

  Goat tracks in the sand, meanwhile.

  A while later, two men in loincloths in the distance, carrying spears.

  Further still and we came to a cluster of thorn trees, where goats and sheep were gathered in great numbers around a deep well, where seven men passed up water hand to hand in tin buckets, singing their water-song.

  This place was called Intahe.

  The Wells at Intahe

  There was grazing for our camels to be had by the wells at Intahe, and the desert before had been lacking in it, and so, although it was only mid-afternoon, we made our camp there, while they ate their fill.

  Our Rendille whiled away the time exchanging news with the men at the well, and with playing a game that involved a wooden board carved with two rows of cups, between which stones were moved.