by Alec Waugh
In the hall of the Hotel Omayyed there are advertisements of five-and-a-half-day flights from Amsterdam to Java, and there is a vast mural of Syria, showing in relief its links by air and rail and motor with the continent. And on the desks in the writing-room under the glass are 1939 instructions as to the dates on which you can post air-mail letters to Saigon.
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O.C.P.
Deraa was the Hauran’s headquarters of the O.C.P. There were in addition five depots to which villagers could bring their wheat—at Ezraa and Ghasale, at Mohaggé and Fiq and Bosra Eski Cham.
It was the duty of the Wheat Commissioner to supervise at these depots the weighing and guarding of the wheat and barley, to ensure that the villagers were being paid their due, and that the wheat that they bought was clean. It was also his task to publicize the scheme, to visit the various villages, interview the local headmen—the Moukhtars—explain the scheme to them, convince them that they were being squarely treated, show by his presence that the British were behind the scheme.
The Wheat Commissioner had to move in close liaison and cooperation with the French Services Spéciaux officer for the district, which was not always easy, though in the Hauran it proved to be.
His main assignment, however, was to see that an agreement was reached between the chief notables, the Mohaffey of the district, the O.C.P. representative and the French S.S. Officer, as to the amount of wheat and barley that the region was able to produce. This figure was intended as a minimum. No cereals could be sold except through the O.C.P. But the Damascus merchants were anxious to lay up large stocks as capital; the villagers were anxious to stock their cellars. The scene was set for a black market. It was in the immediate personal and selfish interest, both by villagers and merchants, to fix the figure as low as possible. As long as they themselves had their cellars stocked they did not mind if the inhabitants of Damascus starved.
Provisionally the Hauran had been fixed at 50,000 tons. The notables said that twenty to twenty-five thousand tons would be the maximum. As a member of the Wheat Commission he had to adjust these estimates. That was his chief assignment. It was not an easy one.
It was, in fact, impossible for anyone new to the country to form any idea in the course of a few weeks as to the productive capacity of the region. It was not a simple problem of mathematics, of deciding how much ground there was under cultivation and then of estimating the average yield for such a season as the one which was now concluding. Grounds were measured and yields assessed by a complicated system which was different in every village. The nomenclature was a mixture of Arabic, French and Turkish. You never knew on which system, old Turkish or older Arabic, or modern French, the assessment was being made. You could not find out how much land there was. Some notables when questioned would produce calculations based on Rubbahs, and the Rubbah varied in every village. There was the dunham which was supposed to be a tenth of a hectare, but was quite often forty square piques, a pique being seven-tenths of a square metre, which is not the same thing. Usually, however, measurements were given by the moud. But the moud is not a square measure, but a weight, 18 to 20 kilos of wheat or 14 kilos of barley, the land over which a moud is sown being designated as a moud. Since different soils required different thickness of sowing the measurement of the moud varied in consequence, not only from village to village, but from field to field. No accurate assessment of the yield was in fact possible. One might discover how many mouds had been sown in a certain village, but in order to assess the yield you had to know how many mouds had been produced to every moud that had been sown. The obvious way to discover this was to mark off a section of a field, gather all the wheat from it, thresh it, weigh the result and then work out a simple sum in arithmetic on the formula, “if four square metres produce so much, then a moud, which is so many times four square metres, will produce this much.”
It was impossible, however, to make such calculations because you did not know the area that in that particular field would have been covered by a moud. That you could only know if you had supervised the actual sowing several months before.
Before he had been in the Hauran a week the British representative on the Wheat Commission had realized that there was no means of forming an accurate estimate, that it would be a questioning of bargaining between the 50,000 fixed by the O.C.P. and the notables’ first bid of 20,000.
As a Wheat Commissioner he had a car and an interpreter at his disposal. Every third day he would spend in Deraa: making out his report for the Director-General, supervising the weighing and the payment, rechecking the wheat for impurities by taking a large handful between his hands, tossing it over and seeing how much sand lay between his palms.
He knew that there was cheating going on, that the black market was being fed. Every day, stories would be brought to him of someone having boasted in the coffee shops of the fortunes that he was making at the scales. He knew that there was no way of checking on these stories. He only hoped that by looking important, by making occasional “scenes”, the prestige of his uniform would deter a few of these malpractitioners. He would stand there and look grim and suddenly interrogate someone whose face he did not like and hope that he was performing some useful service.
Then there would be long conferences in the Hotel de Ville: the Mohaffey whose Mohafizat was subdivided under Quimmaqams who in their turn ruled over the village Moukhtars, received visitors every morning and afternoon in his long hall of office. Very often for a whole day the notables would sit there counting over their beads, waiting for their turn. Everything was done in public. Every so often, cups of coffee would be produced, or, when the weather was very warm, iced, very sweet lemonade, rather like sherbet, its centre congealed like snow through which you sipped the liquid.
Usually he would find there on his arrival two or three notables from the neighbouring villages waiting to argue out with him their village’s contribution to the scheme.
Morning after morning they would go over the same ground. The matter was a pressing one. The wheat had to be collected before the rains began, but an Arab considers it bad manners to hasten the conclusion of a bargain. Courtesy demands that a fortnight or so of preliminary bargaining shall precede the actual signing of any document. The points of their arguments would be reached through the media of elaborate courtesies. They would pay tribute to the efficiency and honour of the British race. They would wish a speedy and complete victory for British arms. They would express their appreciation of the honour that Mr. Churchill had paid them in sending so distinguished an officer to assist them in their deliberations. They would enlarge on their good fortune in having in Monsieur le Mohaffey a statesman of such experience and judgment to direct and control those deliberations. They would reiterate their devotion to the Allied cause. They would remind the British representative of the contribution made by the Arabs to the victory of 1918. If the French representative was there they would refer to the many benefits that the Arabs had received from France.
Then and only then would they produce their own particular contribution to the discussion, the fact that in their village they had only received six mouds of wheat for each moud sown, and that it was consequently impossible for the Hauran to provide more than twenty-seven thousand tons.
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UNEXPECTED SNAG
To every scheme, no matter how carefully it has been worked out, there is, when it is put into operation, one quite unexpected snag: something that could not have been foreseen or planned for. The snag on this particular occasion was the shortage not of money, but of paper currency. No notes had been printed since the French occupation. Those notes that were flimsy had started to disintegrate, and since the British occupation the amount of money in circulation had been quadrupled.
When it came to the point of paying out in the course of a single week many thousands of Syrian pounds, usually in small denominations, it was found that, ample though the gold reserves at the banks might be, there were simply not enough notes avai
lable. Urgent demands were cabled back to England for the printing and dispatch of adequate quantities of paper money, but during the first weeks of the scheme one of the chief problems of the commissioners was the providing day by day of sufficient notes to meet the demands of each separate depot.
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HAURANI LANDSCAP
It is a plain sheltered by the mountains of the north, a long, broad, undulating plain that rises every so often into a protuberance on which a village stands.
One of the chief granaries of the Roman Empire, its villages have been built on and over and out of the ruins of Roman houses. Everywhere you will see signs of Rome—stones with Roman inscriptions support the flimsy fabric of a mud-built cottage. Columns will rise unexpectedly out of a dingy side street. Sometimes the head of a column showing a few feet above the ground will demonstrate to what extent succeeding generations have superimposed layer after layer of mud and rubble on the original Roman site.
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BOSRA ESKI CHAM
There is nothing as you approach it to distinguish it from any other village on the flat boulder-strewn plain of the Hauran. For miles it has been the same: field after field of low-growing wheat and maize, the earth showing red between the stubble where the crops have been cut or the ground left fallow for the season. In the fields there is the animated noise of harvest. Where the ground is barren an occasional group of Bedouins sit idle under their long, low tents. There are no trees, no gardens, there is nothing green. Along the road are stone shelters like sentry boxes to protect the guardians of the fields in winter. Camel trains laden with wheat, led by small boys on ponies, go by with a jingling of bells: four or five camels, their long necks seeming to move in and out of their loads. The villages are low, greyblack one-storied buildings of mud and boulders, peaked by the spire of a minaret, surrounded hedge-wise by a succession of low brick walls. Inside these walls the wheat is being threshed. A pony or a mule is driven round in circles, drawing a broad flat board, on which stands the driver—a child or an old man. A fine yellow dust rises as the wheat is tossed into the air. Mile after mile, village after village, it is just the same. Bosra as you approach it looks in no way different.
And then, suddenly, you come upon the ruins of a high Roman arch, and there is a long avenue of high, grey willow trees and the road is paved unevenly like a side street in Pompeii, and there are columns lining it, two to three feet high, and on your right and left are the low walls, like hedges behind which the wheat is threshed, and ahead of you is a town that has been built literally out of the ruins of a Roman city.
For fifteen centuries Turks and Arabs have been using for their own purposes whatever masonry has lain to hand. A succession of tall columns will run diagonally across the street. Stones with Latin inscriptions are let into the mud-covered walls of hovels. A huge artificial lake is fed by rainwater from the hills. A mosque that is supposed to contain the footprint of Muhammad is flanked by a Roman temple. An Arab fort has been constructed out of and about a temple. The Roman theatre and the cloistered galleries remain, one style has been superimposed upon another. As one civilization has collapsed its successor has made his own use of what was left. But there are no guides, no sixpenny entrance fees and no one is trying to sell you postcards.
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CHEIK SAID
It was important once. Its name is marked in capitals on early twentieth-century maps. Now only some three hundred persons live among its ruins. They are a heterogeneous collection. Many of them are negroid. Some are almost white. They are the exslaves of a rich potentate who died in Damascus in 1942 at the age of ninety. On its summit, instead of a minaret, is the ruin of a temple to Pharaoh from which a bust and the statue of a lion were taken for the museum at Beirut. There is a domed bath with steps leading to the water which is reputed to have been Job’s. The tomb of Job is supposed to lie in the ruins of the Turkish sérail, two miles away.
It is unlike the other villages: or rather it has a garden effect that the other villages are without. One can picture it as a rich man’s pleasure ground. There are vines and fig trees and cows ploughing up the ground. The Moukhtar took his English visitor into an orchard. He spread a bright carpet under a tree. While the children went back to the house to fetch coffee and fruit and eggs, he dilated on the meal that he would have prepared for his guest had he had sufficient warning: vast cauldrons of rice there would have been, and a roasted sheep and yes, there would have been champagne, in honour of his English guest.
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THE HAURAN IN THE BLACK
When a Haurani has money he does one of three things. He kills an enemy, marries a maiden or runs off with a friend’s wife. The net cost of the amount payable in recompense to the victim’s family is about the same.
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THE MOUKHTAR
The villages are farmyards, little else. There is no sanitation, there is a large central pond usually of Roman origin where clothes are washed and cattle drink. The houses are gaps in a mud wall. There will be a pen or two for the hens and cattle. There will be a roofed-in pen or two for the family. The village women do not wear veils. They are shapeless bundles of old clothes, with blue tattooing on their chins and lower lips. The children roll about happily in the dirt.
Yet in the house of the headman, the Moukhtar, in even the smallest village, there is a sense of leisure, of culture, of gracious living, of inherited immemorial manners. His reception room, though it is only a roofed-in cattle pen, will be high and cool. There will be carpets on the floor and stools and cushions arranged against the wall. In the centre there will be the ashes of a fire where coffee has been made and where the coffee pots still remain. Old men will be puffing at narghiles, very old men who sit there day after day, doing nothing, rarely speaking, but whose age entitles them to be present when the Moukhtar receives his guests. People will drift in and out. There will be much shaking of hands. Children will squat in the doorway and stare inquisitively, but without offence, at their strange visitant.
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ARAB HOSPITALITY
One is always offered something. Either coffee or curdled milk: usually it is bitter coffee that is surprisingly refreshing, of which one only takes a sip. The cup is replenished, until by a turning of it between your hands you indicate that you have finished. The Moslems do not drink alcohol, but they usually keep a bottle to offer to their guests. It is wiser, unless one knows the house, to decline the offer. What is offered one as a sweet local wine may turn out to be a neat tumblerful of Damascus brandy.
At no matter what hour you arrive you will be offered food. If you have nothing else to do, but only if you have nothing else to do that day, you will accept. The preliminaries are endless. “We will go out into the fields,” they say, “we will measure off so many square metres of ground, we will pluck the corn, thresh it, weigh it, and then you will realize that this land only produces five mouds to each moud sown and that if we agree to yield you twenty-five thousand tons we shall run the risk of finding ourselves without any reserve store for a bad winter. We will do that; then we will return here and you will find lunch ready.”
But you will not find lunch ready. The Arabs do not divide time into separate divisions like hours and parts of an hour. Besides, it is bad manners to be in a hurry. For an hour, for two hours, for three hours maybe, you will wait. You will pay elaborate compliments. You will acknowledge and reply to elaborate compliments. On the manner in which you accept and make these speeches will depend, you are well aware, that particular village’s reaction and response to a scheme on which the welfare and security of a whole countryside depends. The scheme will be judged by your behaviour. You have to make the effort. But you strain your ears listening for the approach of food.
Water is brought finally and the Moslems will perform the ablutions that precede their prayers.
At last the meal is set out upon the floor. The Arabs sit upon their heels and it is bad manners, it is more than bad manners, it is an insult, to point the sole
s of your feet at anyone. It is not easy unless one is practised or very supple to sit upon one’s heels. One curls oneself up as best one can. Fortunately the meal does not last long. There is a great deal to eat, but the moment the food arrives, all conversation stops. You help yourself with your right hand to what is set before you. There will be two kinds of rice and curdled milk and several sauces. There will be a salad or two cooked in vinegar, and cucumbers stuffed with rice; there will be chicken, and possibly a whole roast sheep stuffed with roasted nuts and rice. There will be flat, grey-brown bread with which you will scoop up the sauce. The host will help you to the choicest morsels. The eye of the sheep is a great delicacy. As a tribute to your importance he will extract it for you and pop it into your mouth with his own fingers. It looks repulsive but is mercifully tasteless.
After the meal a servant brings you a bowl of water and soap to wash in. In the richer villages you are also offered scent for your hands and forehead.
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ARAB GESTURES
Michael Arlen once asked the first Lord Birkenhead for advice on how to make a speech. “Get a table in front of you,” Birkenhead replied, “have something to hold on to so that you won’t distract your audience with awkward gesturings with your hands.”
The old school of actor complains that the modern actor has never learnt how to use his hands: that all he can do is to tap a cigarette against a case and light it.
An Arab when he is listening will keep his hands busy with his beads. He draws back the beads in twos with his left thumb then pushes them forward with his right. But when he speaks he amplifies his meanings with a series of effective, eloquent and often unexpected gestures. When he enumerates a succession of points he will hold out his hand, its back facing his audience, and draw back his fingers one by one into his palm. When his wishes to beckon anyone towards him he will stretch out an arm, his fingers pressed together, and make a gesture of drawing the person to himself.