In the mid-afternoon the sheikh rose for prayer, muttering the verses softly under his breath, while Gaudaan, his camel, stirred in the dust and frisked at the occasional fly. Later he went over to her and removed the annual crop of camel fluff for his pillows, taken from the worn patches on the animal’s back. That night, my first in the desert, there was an ihtifaal, a celebration, in a relative’s tent. In the fading light of day the sheikh’s sons led me to a large black goats’-hair tent that was pitched in the soft sand. Seated inside, on coarse but richly coloured rugs, were about forty Jordanian Bedu in various states of repose. Each wore the traditional red-and-white headcloth above a neatly trimmed moustache and pointed beard. A fire crackled noisily in their midst while old and encrusted kettles stood by. The Bedu rose to greet us in turn, their formal movements following a prescribed pattern. To me, a stranger brought in by a guest, they were courteous and welcoming, shaking my hand firmly. But with those that they knew they would bow slightly, grasp hands and make a strange kissing sound, their lips sometimes touching the other’s cheeks. Then they would flick their right hands briskly up to their hearts, to signify that, praise be to God, their hearts were happy.
The greetings were a welcome distraction from the fact that we were all ravenously hungry and thirsty. Since this was Ramadan, the month of fasting, I had decided that afternoon that I must fast with my hosts. They had not insisted on this, in fact they had said from the outset that they quite understood if as a Christian I wanted to break the fast during the day, but if so, could I please do it discreetly behind a rock somewhere. But I felt it would be impossible for them to accept me if I started sneaking off behind rocks: it would throw up a barrier between us and I would never know what it was like to fast in the desert in the height of summer. So now, as the last light vanished from the gathering, I could sense the tension in the air as an exercise in forbearance began. Brimming bowls of cool water and apricot juice were placed before us on the sand, but no one could touch them until the words ‘Allahu Akbar!’, ‘God is the greatest!’ were uttered by the muezzin of the Al Husseini Mosque in Amman, broadcast over the radio to a nation of very hungry Muslims. I could see that to these desert Bedu such discipline and self-restraint were second nature, and they talked and joked to speed the dragging minutes. Water was poured over our hands in preparation for the feast by silent, veiled women while Sulaiman, the host, strode amongst the seated guests, his silver inlaid dagger flashing from the hip.
At last the moment came and giant trays were brought in laden with a dish called mansaf. Each was so heavy it took two men to carry it. Mansaf is a traditional Jordanian Bedu feast consisting of chunks of mutton scattered over a huge pile of rice and unleavened bread, then drenched in scalding hot milk and fat; it tastes better than it sounds. The food was divided into four trays, with about ten of us feeding from each communal tray. I rolled up my sleeves and ploughed in with the right hand but it was now so dark it was almost impossible to see what I was eating. My greasy fingers searched the tray for meat, but things kept slipping, squid-like, from my grasp. The man next to me was offering me various parts of the sheep’s anatomy, and although I think I was spared the testicles it did feel rather like a practical class in biology.
No one spoke until they were sated. Then, as abruptly as they had scrambled to the loaded trays, everyone left off eating and rose, muttering their thanks to God, and went outside the tent to rinse their hands. Collective prayer followed, the final one of the day, with the Bedu all facing due south to Mecca. Now began the ceremony of the tea and coffee. First the tea was poured into tiny glasses with handles. It was so tooth-rottingly sweet it made my teeth grate, but I was glad of the liquid since my mouth was gritty with sand from the unleavened bread. Then a handful of Yemeni coffee beans was brought out from a bag and emptied into a flat, long-handled pan. These were roasted over the fire until they turned a rich, dark brown and then placed in a heavy brass mortar, where they were pounded with a pestle until they were crushed to a powder, which was mixed with boiling water. The coffee, once brewed, was poured in a thin stream from a curved Oriental pot into golfball-sized cups. This pouring is an art and undertaken with some panache, I noticed. It is acceptable to drink anything from one to three cups of this thin, bitter-tasting Bedu coffee. When the drinker has finished he lets the pourer know by shaking the cup vigorously from side to side with his right hand.
While some of the guests returned to their tents or drove off into the night in their battered pickup trucks, the rest of us stayed up chatting around the fire. The Bedu had an inexhaustible supply of questions to ask about my country, but eventually I could stay awake no longer. One of the last things I remember thinking was how at home Thesiger would have felt here and how I would enjoy recounting it to him when I got back to London. (When we next met up he was duly delighted to hear that this Bedu life still survived, largely as it had for centuries, in the deserts of Jordan.)
I awoke just before sunrise to find I had been covered with a blanket where I lay, full and contented after last night’s feast. I was now being tended to, as if convalescing, by the daughters of the family, who brought me glasses of sweet tea. I had expected Bedu women to be shy and withdrawn with strangers – certainly those I had seen in the Sinai had barely uttered a word in front of me – but the sheikh’s svelte granddaughter was openly friendly without being flirtatious. Her dark eyes shone with each smile and her hair fell down to her waist in two separate plaits, joined together at the ends.
In the late afternoon we set off for Baarda, another encampment, set amidst the ever-changing patterns of this intensely beautiful desert. It had rained in April and Wadi Rumm’s pink sands were sprinkled with green bushes and short tufts of yellow grass known as sif souf, so that from a distance the valley floor looked almost verdant. Tonight was another feast and once again I felt privileged to be amongst these hardy desert people. I recognized some familiar faces from last night: Hammad, the tracker with Jordanian Special Forces; Sabah, the kindly elder son of the sheikh; and Farid, who was both deaf and dumb yet whose face somehow bore strength and nobility. I greeted them in turn then took my place on the rug beside the fire, glancing around me at the rows of lean, hawk-like faces turned chestnut brown by the desert sun, the glint of teeth both white and gold, listening to the crackle of twigs on an improvised hearth and the bleat of goats outside the tent, scolded by black-shrouded women. I took in the quick flash of an upturned hand, questioning, voices raised, squinting eyes reflecting the flickering light of the fire, hardened feet drawn up under white robes and tucked into coarse woven rugs. Feeling totally at ease here, I tuned in and out of conversations, trying to keep up with this very pure, classical Arabic, perhaps one of the closest forms there is to the language spoken at the time of the Prophet Muhammad 1,400 years ago.
We ate well that night, feasting on lamb cooked in milk and spices. But twenty minutes after the dish was served I found the rice still too hot to touch with my fingers due to the scalding juice poured over it. The Bedu had no such worries and most of them finished long before I did. In the sated aftermath of dinner I asked them about the Abu Tayi, the traditional enemies of these Bani Zallabiya of the Howaitat tribe. A few decades ago these blood feuds would have led to raids, reprisals and wars, but now, God be praised, they said, such times were over. I asked if anyone could recite qaseed, verses of ancient Arabic poetry passed down by word of mouth from one generation to the next. Faces cracked into broad grins and gnarled fingers pointed at a man called Sheikh Ali. But Sheikh Ali, it seemed, would not be drawn. Tonight he was hirdaan, angry with his wife, and not interested in entertaining anyone.
At Sabah’s suggestion we climbed into the pickup truck and went in search of livelier company. Pale jerboas (long-tailed jumping mice) bounced across our track at intervals, frozen for an instant in the headlights. Sabah was perplexed. We had reached the campsite where he had expected to find friends, but instead there were just traces of habitation. I spotted a distant light on
the horizon; Sabah said it was a star; I disagreed. We drove towards it and it disappeared. Sabah said that it had never existed and we disputed again, good-naturedly. It turned out to be a small encampment at the foot of a mountain, Jebel Sirdaan. A shepherd named Shayih and his wife Umm Sheeha welcomed us and we joined them round their fire on a soft carpet of compressed goat dung. Shayih was very unhappy; at dawn that morning a wolf had come and taken one of his sheep. We were now deep in the desert, close to the borders of Saudi, and such predators were common here. I could see how hard it would be to sell the idea of wildlife conservation to the people who eke out a living in these tough conditions. Years later, when we were in Dubai, someone spotted a rare Arabian leopard up in the mountains on the Omani border. The villagers immediately put together a hunting party and went and shot it.
As we sat chatting beneath the stars, Umm Sheeha caught a huge and harmless beetle – nicknamed Abu Gasim – between her fingers, while her husband played the rababa, a basic stringed instrument, singing in a thin and plaintive voice of love and marriage amongst the Bedu. We lay in the open on the sand, staring up at the vast and awe-inspiring panoply of stars, listening to the wind sighing in the bushes. Every so often shooting stars would arc above us, sometimes fast and bright, extinguishing themselves in less than a second, and sometimes travelling slowly and deliberately across the galaxy, as if choosing their course with care.
That night I dreamed of wolves. In fact I slept little as it was cold and I was glad of the suhur, the second meal of the night during Ramadan, eaten at three in the morning. We drank glasses of tea flavoured with fresh goat’s milk and ate fluffy cakes from a nearby market across the border in Saudi Arabia.
In the morning I proposed we climb Jebel Sirdaan, and when I found my worn boots slipping on the rock I discarded them and climbed as the Bedu did, barefoot. (For the record, I could not conceive of ever emulating T. E. Lawrence and walking barefoot on the burning sands in summer. The pain must have been unbearable.) From the top, the desert had a freshness and purity that would later be erased by the overwhelming blaze of heat and light. Illuminated by the still slanting rays of the fast-rising sun, sandy trails snaked away across the valley floor from Shayih’s encampment, reaching distant black tents that sheltered beneath rose-coloured mountains. On the way back down I caught sight of something that surely did not belong here. It was a lizard of dazzling blue, about a foot long and moving quickly over the rocks. Nicknamed Ibn Akhu, meaning ‘His Nephew’, its scales were such an unnatural, almost chemical blue that it was as if someone had caught and spray-painted it for a joke.
Back in Shayih’s tent we were all parched with thirst, and since he and his wife could not make up their minds whether they were fasting or not they insisted we drank some water. A tin bowl was fetched, filled with greenish water, with a couple of small bugs swimming contentedly in its midst. ‘Ishrib! Ishrib!’ implored Shayih. ‘Drink!’ Was this a test? I wondered. But Sabah was drinking deeply and it would have been rude to refuse, so I swallowed my misgivings along with the brackish liquid. Umm Sheeha invited us to share their flabby bread dipped in a bowl of melted goat’s butter. This too was a challenge, as the flies gathered in swarms, commuting between the sticky bread, our faces and the surrounding goat dung. We talked of fidelity and trust, both qualities the Bedu value highly. In their tough, desert world there has never been any place for dishonesty, something which always attracted Wilfred Thesiger to their company.
Sabah needed to make a trip through the hills to distant Aqaba, so he handed me over to his father’s family, camped in their tents in a nearby wadi. I asked to fit in with whatever the family were doing and they obliged, assigning me to shepherding duties. The first day did not go so well. A goat trod on my face before dawn and I found it hard to get back to sleep after that. Ayd, Sabah’s younger brother, roused me at six thirty and scolded me good-naturedly for ‘lounging in bed so long’. At seven we moved out with the flock, about eighty sheep and goats, taking them to graze in the shadows of cliffs and small mountains. There were four of us: Ayd, his sister Hilal, his younger brother Muhammad, and me. There was also a donkey for carrying water and Shauhaan, a fast Saluki hunting bitch, in case we came across any rabbits.
For thirteen hours we wandered in the stifling heat through a landscape straight out of the Twenty-Third Psalm, drifting with the animals over the pink and yellow sands, winding through gorges where the dust kicked up by over three hundred cloven hoofs made our teeth grind and scrape. Sometimes Hilal would reach into the saddle pack and take out a shabaaba, a flute, and play Bedu shepherd songs as she sat side-saddle on the donkey with her embroidered dress swaying in the hot breeze. I never tired of looking at the desert here in Wadi Rumm. Always there were stupendous crags, pitted with cavities like rotten teeth, always the sand was criss-crossed with innumerable tracks, of lizard, beetle, lark, snake, jerboa and goat. Whenever I have spent time in deserts I am always amazed at the abundance of life they support; it just takes time to find out where to look.
In mid-morning we watered the herd at a tiny dam of rainwater collected in the shaded crevice of a mountain-side. Getting up there from the valley floor was, I detected, something of a test of agility for the Bedu. Ayd, who was just nineteen, took off his shoes and said with a rather superior smile that I was not to worry, he would not be long. To his dismay, I followed him up there, barefoot after his example. But my turn to worry came when I was put in charge of shepherding the animals into the narrow watering hole. Two of them escaped and – horror of horrors – reappeared on a precipitous ledge about forty feet above me. I had visions of them tumbling to their deaths and my returning in disgrace to explain myself to the venerable Sheikh Hajji Attayig who had been so good to me. In the end we got the goats down by scaring them off the ledge with a shower of small stones.
The plan was to sleep off the hottest part of the afternoon beneath a rock ledge, but this was impossible due to the persistent maniacal bleating of one hoary old billy goat called Tees. (They were all named after the sheikh’s children.) Instead we sat on the ruined wall of a Roman castle that was stuck out there in the desert, and excluded from any guidebook I have ever seen. We returned just in time for Iftar, the breaking of the fast, with my clicking and scolding the animals in the Bedu way, much to everyone’s approval. The story of my irritation with the goat Tees had got around, and again and again I was asked to imitate it, describing in ever greater detail how we had all craved sleep and how this infernal animal had denied it to us. Each time a new guest joined the circle I was called on to entertain him. I was happy to oblige because the Bedu set great store by the way in which someone presents himself at these fireside gatherings. Storytelling could make or break a man’s reputation here: if he was dull he would be ignored and not asked for his opinion, but if he was lively and entertaining then his reputation preceded him wherever he went and he would become a frequent guest at the ihtifaal.
The Bedu placed a surprising amount of trust in me. After a few days I was sent off shepherding with just Hilal, the sheikh’s teenage daughter, for company, with no male chaperone. We soon developed an easy rapport, ambling along through this biblical scenery, chatting, with Hilal sometimes playing her flute. Perpetually short of sleep, we each took it in turns to watch the sheep and goats while the other slept. Shauhaan, the Saluki hunting dog, often slept beside me, and I was so incredibly comfortable embedded there in the warm sand that when I woke up it would take me a while to remember where I was. I knew that the desert was probably crawling with snakes and scorpions – I had once found a large black scorpion, fortunately dead, near where I slept – but I had yet to encounter a live one and I really did not worry about them much. That was about to change.
On my final night with the Bedu of Wadi Rumm there was a large gathering at a specially erected goats’-hair tent. It was the Eid feast to celebrate the end of Ramadan and everyone was in high spirits. Someone hooked up a lightbulb to the battery in their Toyota pickup truck, floodin
g the campsite with unnatural light. Unfortunately this also had the effect of attracting every bug for miles around, so that the sand was literally crawling with the things. Most were harmless and the Bedu seemed to have nicknames for each species. Then there were the shabat, the camel spiders, big, hairy, yellow things with massive jaws. They ran very fast, sometimes coming into our circle by the fire where the Bedu would lash out at them with their sandals. But the only time I saw the Bedu break into a sweat was over the snake. Ayd was padding barefoot around the edge of the tent, serving coffee to the guests, when he noticed its tracks in the sand. A frantic search ensued as we followed the snake’s trail around the camp, beating the ground with sticks. Then I spotted it coiling away into the bushes several yards to our right. The Bedu killed it swiftly in a flurry of flailing branches. Lying there limp and dead, it looked so small and innocuous that I questioned if it was even dangerous. The Bedu looked at me with grave faces.
‘We call it Abu ’Ashara Daqiqa, “The One Who Gives You Ten Minutes”. After that . . .’ They made a gesture of finality, brushing the palm of one hand against the other and looking up to heaven. I later found out it was a Horned Viper.
Despite our close encounter with The One Who Gives You Ten Minutes, I was sad to leave the desert. When the time came I said goodbye to the sheikh’s camp and caught a lift with some relatives to another Bedu tent halfway back to Rumm. There I spent the afternoon in the shade, playing games with the children while the bangled old women sat around talking, their heavily tattooed faces puffing on two-inch silver pipes. The children would try to bury my feet in the hot sand until I winced with pain and they would get a mild scolding from the women, which of course made it all the more fun. ‘Now you are a real Bedu like us!’ said one of the breast-feeding mothers proudly.
Blood and Sand Page 11