A Winter in Arabia

by Freya Stark

  We pushed on beyond ’Urr to Sm, last village of the Tamimi, who live there with the Manahil in uneasy fellowship. It was the boundary of the well-ordered lands. A demand for blackmail, half-heartedly pressed, showed that we were coming to the edge of Harold’s truces. As we drove back, a bedu waved his gun to ask for news of the world. “No news,” said our Somali. “No murders, no news,” he turned towards me to explain. He had the journalistic mind.

  * * *

  The little Rugby succumbed under the insertion of a new radiator which its constitution was not strong enough to bear: it was the parable of the new wine in old bottles: but after five days in Tarim we were given a handsome car, with green and yellow tassels draped over the speedometer to obscure all useful information, and Abdulillah, an old Somali friend, to drive us to Seiyun.

  On the way we stopped at a ruin-crowned spur on our left called Sanahye, a heap of crumbled mud with pieces of stucco still left in roofless rooms; the walls had been rounded at their base as is still the fashion in the primitive houses of Du’an. While the Archæologist examined them, Alinur and I did our best to lure the more noisy part of the population from interference with her labours. They were ’Awamir beduin, and had a bad reputation when I was there before, but now, thanks to the “English Peace,” were ready to show how pleasant criminals are when not engaged in crime, and took us to their well, a circular shaft dry-walled as deep as one could see. It was sunk to water-level on the plain, a hundred feet below. These immense wells are characteristic of the Hadhramaut which, even in ancient times, seems to have got its constant supply of water from underground, and to have reserved the canalizing works mainly for the preservation and distribution of flood waters in spring.

  When we had looked over the crumbling edge, the population took us to their mosque, in whose ruin a wooden minbar with date carved upon it gave the presumable age of Sanahye’s prosperity. It belonged to the year A.H. 693 (1293 A.D.). The script was not completely clear and the schoolmaster came to help, an ancient man nearly blind and all grey to his sparse chisel beard and formless shirt, and the agate bead or Sawwama he wore round his neck against toothache. The population looked at him with affectionate veneration while he pronounced the words after me, pretending to be reading them himself: indeed, he was almost too blind to read anything at all, but doubtless knew enough of the Quran by heart to keep his flock in their appointed ways. They evidently loved him for himself and murmured with pleasure when I pressed half a dollar into his unexpectant hand. They were an agreable nest of robbers.

  With only two more antiquarian pauses, one at the town of Mariama, a late and uninteresting ruin, and the other at a valleyside spur, we reached Seiyun. Here the splendours of Sayyid Abu Bekr’s new house, which I had seen beginning, had blossomed into what their owner must feel sadly now and then is almost a hotel. All travelling Europeans, including every member of the Air Force, stay there, except Harold, who prefers, when he can, to live with the sayyid in his old and less sophisticated home. Here we too spent some days enjoying ash-trays and velvet chairs, mosquito-netted beds, and the hours of Big Ben on the wireless, with electric light splashed round us in a regardless way—till nine o’clock, when it went out. A row of little bulbs runs round the court, each one supported on a pseudo-Greek column, as it were Atlas with a pingpong ball upon his shoulder. Gone is the Eastern charm of Seiyun and its pleasant conversations with Leisure all around. Only the bath, an Eastern institution by birth, has retained its oriental delights; the white tiles are gently tilted so that soap and water, used to wash with, pour away, and one steps, clean and happy, into a tepid jade-green lake, eight feet by eight and almost to the neck; and splashing there, looks at oleographs of Adam and Eve and Aphrodite, arranged to meet the level of the eye, the composite efforts of the Ancient and Modern worlds.

  Sayyid Abu Bekr, with his fine and gentle manners, came to see us, and in the evening I would take one or the other of my companions, plaintive because they “did not like parties,” to the harims I knew, to meet again the sayyid’s lovely wife, and the singers from Ghurfa, and the Learned Sherifa, affectionate as ever and very pretty with her full red lips and dark eyebrows, in spite of enormous black-rimmed spectacles on the very tip of her nose. Her plump little hands still waved about in explanation of such exciting things as the difference between a noun and verb, or the relations of the heart to the five senses, of which she probably knew more than most theologians: and in her own house she showed us, reverently and without touching it, for she had not washed her hands, a page from the Quran copied on parchment (“the skin of a gazelle”) in beautiful Cufic, written—and who would contradict her?—by the hand of ’Ali Abu Talib himself, and sent as a present to her brother by the Imam Iahya of Yemen.

  One more thing we did which I remember with pleasure, for I had meant to do it and been prevented by illness before, so that it came in the nature of a victory over accident and Fate. There was a rumour that reservoirs of water existed in the side valley that runs to the jl between Seiyun and Mariama. Here, after the date harvest, people of both places go, with kids or sheep to roast, and spend the day fulfilling some dim rite whose meaning is forgotten. For they have no saint or tomb to worship in this valley, merely the enduring presence of water, active there since the landscape first was made. When we climbed to it, an hour or so above the flood-swept gravels of the plain, we found no cisterns, but three pools scooped in the high limestone valley by the action of time alone; a few plants grew there, rushes and tufts of grass with feathery plumes, and lithab trees (ficus salicifolia) against the smooth white boulders. The limestone shelves lean, eaten away, long and narrow, above the upper pool; the higher shaly slopes lie thick with flint tools, polished yellow or black or iridescent, or curdled white like milk when they happen to have fallen and have never moved from the spot on which they fell. Cliffs surrounded this place in columns, like great piers. The stones were still cold to touch in the sun—the earth had not yet warmed itself though it was ten o’clock in the morning: over the motionless water there was a humming of small flies. “La voix aigue des insectes s’élevait dans le silence de l’univers.” Hearths of the beduin were scattered on the shelves, and little cairns built by pilgrims at their annual feast. They sit in the shade, and kill a hundred sheep or more in the day, and shoot off their guns at sunset and return, binding the ages of their world unconsciously together. The Scientists climbed on, while I wandered to the lower pool and paddled, watching the struggle of curiosity in the hearts of newts and frogs. They came with small movements to see the pale feet in their pond. The newts had Humpty Dumpty bodies with eyes near together at the top; immense tummies and two tiny legs, like financiers in need of exercise, and brown-black tails: but the frogs were handsome like medieval pages, with stripes round their legs, and vague black speckles on their backs. There were other creatures too—a tiny violent ribbon worm wriggling emotionally from its tail, and crimson dragon-flies. Into this antique world unchanged and peaceful a bedu came walking along the rocks above. Almost naked, his shawl thrown like a scarf on his shoulder, a white wand horizontal in his hand, he walked uphill without effort on bare feet, and when I called stood stock still like an animal surprised. Then he moved on furtively and swiftly, and lifted his arm in greeting as he vanished.

  On the 25th of November we left for Shibam.

  THE DIARY

  SHIBAM

  November 25, 1937.

  “Wer sich behaglich mitzuteilen weiss,

  Den wird des Volkes Laune nicht erbittern.”

  (Faust.)

  No one in their senses would say, “I have spent ten years in Holland and therefore I know all about Bulgaria”; but it is a fact that seven people out of ten will assume that a visit to Morocco opens out the secrets of Samarkand. The East is just East in their minds, a homogeneous lump, and I take it that the fault lies with the printers of maps, who give to almost every state in Europe a page to itself, while they separate the infinite variety of Asia only by faint l
ines of pink and green and yellow. Perhaps it is for this reason that our archæologist, who has spent years in Egypt, is disappointed to find Arabia different, and wishes to see as little of its natives as she can. In the happier deserts of Egypt one sits, she says, in one’s tent through solitary evenings in a silence broken only by the cook, who, in elastic-sided boots, announces dinner at the punctual time provided with a clock. But this, alas, is far from the deserts of Egypt. Qasim has no clock, though he does possess a pair of tennis shoes for smart occasions; and as for tents, there is no place here where in fifteen minutes they would not be crowded to overflowing. Nor can one shoo these people away and still be welcome among them; the very corner-stone of their democracy is a general accessibility. Officials who visit here know this and act upon it, and how should we—unofficial guests on a new venture—not bow to the customs of the land? We are but a pioneering expedition in a country where the habits of archæology are unknown. We cannot indulge that theoretic benevolence toward natives that takes no personal trouble and stands no wear of contact.

  * * *

  Poor Alinur is ill. On the day of our departure from Seiyun she appeared with a septic throat swathed in scarves and a pathetic look in her eyes, brown and guileless like those of a retriever. She is the unselfish member of our party, and sits in the uncomfortable; middle of the car, submerged in bundles. By the time we reached the piled-up houses of Shibam she was nearly speechless. Here Harold was supposed to have arranged for our reception. No visible sign of his efforts appeared, but this meant nothing at all in a country as casual as the Hadhramaut. Harold is trying to avoid bombing the Se’ar tribesmen, who have stolen forty-two camels; being very busy, he had in fact omitted to write to the owners of my former bungalow, who presently appeared with hurt feelings and distant manners, only after being sent for.

  We sat cross-legged in a small columned room washed by the sunlight of the wadi, high on the city walls, in the house of Ba Obaid1 the same active, kind, unshaven little man I had left lying at death’s door with a large gall-stone three years before. He had refused the assistance of the R.A.F., who offered to transport him to Aden, but was instead rubbed by his family with ground glass and butter till the stone came out. Alinur, rather sick, listened without enthusiasm to this medical epic. While he told the story his brother bustled about to prepare their own house in the suburbs, and I wondered uneasily which of the many delicate causes that ruin eastern relationships could possibly have wrecked my friendship with those other two, Sa’id and Husain. Lunch came—eggs and bread and honey: they brought us mattresses and pillows, and left us alone with the flies. When the afternoon was cool, our house stood ready: they trailed us towards it across the sandy wadi, tumultuously assistant with lamps and carpets and every sort of oddment one could need. Before two hours were out Alinur was installed in an upper room, a supply of drinking water in goatskins from the far side of the wadi had been ordered from Sa’d the donkey man below, and most of our host’s retainers were tactfully evicted. The Archæologist, under this first shock of genuine Arabia, is outraged to the very depth of her well-regulated heart. I have promised to keep her, as far as possible, separate from the inhabitants of this land; but alas! what will she make of a country whose chief if not only charm lies in its people? We cannot be completely isolated, like European delicacy in cold storage.

  November 26. “Tot congesta manu praeruptis oppida saxis.”

  (Georgic Bk. II.)

  The best of our house is its view. From it we see the whole of Shibam just opposite, the Sultan’s palace striped white and brown, the minaret, and the whitewashed gateway on a rise busy in the sun all day with its medieval traffic. It is an entrancing view, a Memling or a Dürer come to life, with nothing yet to mar its slow-built harmony since, by a merciful law of nature, we are debarred from seeing our own selves walking about in it. It is less of a fortress town than when I last saw it, partly because the gates are open and the houses lit at night for Ramadhan. Through the dark, sounds of feasting and laughter come out to us from its walls: figures pass behind the lighted lattice-work: our sleep is broken by bands of visitors across the sandy stretch below, or by the drummers who walk beating their tattoo to tell the population that the dawn is near.

  The house itself is a little mud-built castle, full of sudden steps and with a balustrade terrace to every floor, and stands alone in a small suburb of detached residences under the cliff

  “Whose high and bending head

  Looks fearfully on the confined deep”

  towering above us in white tiers in the moonlight. The ground floor is a small family mosque, where our hosts come of an afternoon to pray, spread their carpets on the terrace, and sit with a few old servants to wait for the sunset gun and their hookah. They are too busy, they tell me, to live here for more than a fortnight in the year: one would hardly have imagined the business of Shibam, going in and out of its gateway on slow strings of camels, to be of so city-like a nature. But this morning I have been watching, from the windowless twilight of Ba Obaid’s shop, the figures of the buyers silhouetted against the door among comestibles in baskets. Three hooded women were helping with advice while a rough bedu from Hureidha bought ginger, coffee husks and dark molasses, and poured them mixed and without wrappings into his indigo shawl; and the operation, branching off into various discussions on politics and the prices of food, must have taken twenty minutes. Ba Obaid is a quick and nervous little man: his expeditious dealings held up at every moment by the leisurely customer, whose day was all before him to do with as he liked, were amusing to watch, like an ox and a polo pony yoked together in one team. One wonders how his impatience can have survived the wear and tear of fifty years or so of Arabian commerce.

  On the second floor, Qasim’s kitchen and my bedroom are installed. The Scientists are alone in the two best rooms above, with carved lattice-windows which, like most beautiful things, exact their price, for they let in the mosquitoes. The beauty of our moonlight, too, is mixed with a concentrated smell of donkey from the stable below; it seems to grow in potency with the advancing hours of night, and reminds them of typhoid, which is a pity, for it might just as well awaken happier associations, such as the beginning of the Christian religion. The donkey smell, if they only knew it, is one of the best of the Hadhramaut smells.

  Meanwhile we sacrifice ourselves on the altar of hygiene by drinking boiled water. It comes from a well under the northern wadi cliff, far from any habitation, and is safely enclosed in a goatskin, so that I secretly think the boiling unnecessary, especially as it causes the salt to precipitate: what that means exactly I do not know, but the effect on our tea is loathsome.

  There are two schools of health in these countries. To my mind, with so many microbes about, and of so unknown and violent a character, it seems a waste of time to try to avoid meeting them. The thing to do is to disinfect oneself at frequent intervals in order to make oneself less acceptable to them than the many other lodgings they can find. This I do with care, pouring iodine on cuts, inhaling menthol before going to sleep, and swallowing things like kaolin and charcoal after a more than usually picturesque meal: I cannot help hoping that by this means I make myself almost as disagreeable to a microbe as the smells of its own native Shibam are disagreeable to us. It cannot enjoy living in a constant reek of menthol any more than one does onself. But as for not eating, or drinking or touching things, when every dusty mouthful of air we breathe is full of disease anyway, the psychological result would be so demoralizing that almost any risk is preferable. I am not a very good advocate, having had most diseases at one time or another, but the wisdom of the Arabs is concentrated in the old story of King Solomon and the Angel of Death. This is the story as Sir Sydney Cockerell told it me, who first heard it from Wilfrid Blunt: it is found in one form or another all over the insanitary East.

  A man, walking in the streets of Jerusalem, saw the Angel of Death staring at him in a pointed way, as he thought. Having gone to King Solomon, to ask his advic
e, he decided to absent himself from the Angel’s vicinity, and departed for India. Now the Angel used to come at intervals to visit the king, and on his next appearance, when they had spoken for a time on this and that, King Solomon said:

  “I should be much obliged if, when you walk about in the streets of my city, you would take a little care how you look at my people: they are apt to recognize you and to feel discomposed.” And he told him of the man who had been afraid.

  “Indeed,” said the Angel of Death, “I will remember what you say. But as for that man, I was looking at him with no unlucky intention. I was merely surprised to see him in Jerusalem, for I have been ordered to fetch him from India in three weeks’ time.”