by Freya Stark
In the afternoon came the Qadhi with a new manuscript, and presently, talking of this and that, told me that he thought of opening a small shop in Hureidha, “for the passing of time.”
“What will you sell in it?” I asked.
“I have not yet thought of that,” said he, drawing a small sheet of paper from his breast. “But I have begun by writing a poem to hang by the door on the day that it is opened. I will read it to you. It is the shop, you must understand, that is represented as offering a welcome to its customers.”
The Qadhi promised to send me a copy of this poem, but he has not done so. “It would be a delightful thing,” I said to him, “if more people began their business ventures in this way. In our country we have yearly meetings of shareholders, when an account of all that has happened is read out: and why should it not be done in verse?”
“I should enjoy that,” said the Qadhi. “When the Sultan came here I had prepared nothing, and my brother the Mansab asked me to speak, and I stood there and made up four verses straight away. And I made verses too for my schoolboys when our school was open.”
He looked at me earnestly with his gentle eyes, a little tilted towards the temples: a light comes into them as soon as he talks of books.
“I did not like to weary my children by saying just: ‘do this, do that’: so I used to make them wish to do things by writing a poem about it.”
“They must have been very happy with you,” I said, wondering what the effect would be in an English classroom.
“Yes. It is a pity we have no money for the school. The valley is so poor. When I have a little that I can spare I buy a book or a manuscript, for there are numbers lying about in people’s houses, and eaten by moths, and when I see that, I cannot bear it, but buy them, whatever they may be.”
When he had gone the place’s poverty came home to me even more than usual, for his sister, the pretty gay one who lives next door, came in, bringing, secretly, a lot of little trinkets of silver to sell. It is hard for them all, for the Mansab is like the vicar of a parish, and he has to be generous always, though quite poor. As she stood up to leave, shoving herself into the white dust-sheet for the street and trying to find the little square hole for her face, she apologized for coming. “We all have our needs,” she said.
And the next need was indeed a more difficult one to meet, brought by a young peasant woman, who, throwing her veil back and showing the prettiest triangle of a face imaginable, asked for a charm to bring her husband back. He loved her and they had two children, and she had left him and his house in a fit of temper, and now could not go back until he sent for her and he showed no sign of doing so.
“And can’t you go back and ask to be forgiven?”
“We could not do that,” she said.
“Would it do if I wrote you a letter to send him?”
“We do not do that,” she said.
Nothing but magic could help, and she went sadly away.
These women all come in with apparently the same identical soft brown eyes—and then, when their veils are raised, all sorts of different faces appear.
The only other news to-day is that our poor little Salim’s cough gets worse and worse and he complains of a “long worm inside that bites his liver.” I tried to nourish him with a sandwich of Marmite, of which he took one bite and leaped up and was sick.
I have also been told that Qasim receives ladies at night, and how one can deal with that I do not know; but I think I shall keep his pay from him till we leave this place, for he seems to spend it at a very great rate.
January 16.
“Partout, dans la vallée bien ouverte, la jeunesse timide et charmante de l’ année frissonnait sur la terre antique.”
(Le Mannequin d’Osier.)
It is strange how even in a land where scarce a thing is growing, a sudden benediction comes, and lo, the spring is there.
So it was yesterday morning, or at least it was so to me, for I went for the first time these three weeks out from among the brown houses of the town to see the Moongod’s temple, now fully excavated and already abandoned. I had meant to try the hour’s ride, but Abdulillah stepped providentially out of space from his green-tasselled car and offered to take me. Sayyid ’Ali came: Qasim seized his white coat with the gilt buttons and leaped in: the Mansab’s son boarded us in the High Street, and I snatched up little Husain, who was the only infant about, for a joy-ride: he was far too overcome to say a word of thanks, but in silence turned his face towards us at intervals from the seat in front, with an expression of such ineffable ecstasy that that alone seemed like the springtime of the world.
But the spring was everywhere. Intangible yet, it lurked like a promise in the sharpness of the air, in the milky transparency of the sky, in the buzzing of an early bee and the faint pink pea-flowers that sprang from their small bushes in the sand. It washed with a secret beauty the brown town on its brown hillside, and threw its fugitive illusion even on the ancient ramparts of the wadi, making their implacable outline tremulous in the soft arms of air. Life, that mysterious loveliness, was moving; and even the sandy wastes flutter and stir as she passes. The little wizened spy from Yemen, who has been for some days in Hureidha and does not like our presence there, blinked his eyes in the sun as we passed him on our way. The Archæologist was digging out a small mud house a stone’s throw from the temple: I watched the baskets of earth handed from boy to boy in line against the sky like an Assyrian frieze, and then climbed towards the abandoned temple on its mound, small but conspicuous, a human landmark in the flatness of the wadi.
It is really three temples, for it has been built and rebuilt three times, and even the earliest is far too late to throw any light, as we had hoped, on the origins of the South Arabian civilizations; its first good walls of dressed stone were followed by more and more careless building, and the old inscriptions, used as mere slabs, were thrust by later workmen into the walls and pavements, as they came; the stone itself out of which they are cut is soft and bad, and crumbling already under the feet of the beduin of the Ja’da who come to visit and wonder. But it is the first temple to have been excavated in the Hadhramaut and the second in South Arabia, since the plans brought by Halévy and Glaser were taken from ruins above ground. The first temple, dug by M. M. Rathjens and von Wissmann in 1928 at Hugga in Yemen showed the use of columns and of windows; what this one will show is of course not yet apparent, nor do I mean, in this slight notebook of mine, to enter on scientific preserves. But its excavation is an impressive piece of work; two stairways run up to it south and west, and below it is the scoop of the artificial basin, the pond or Karif, a pre-Islamic name still used in the Hadhramaut for this sort of water-hole.
I stayed a short time by the ruins wishing that Alinur were not away mapping, for she would have told me the details of the three weeks’ labour with her usual kindness. Some travelling Ja’da climbed up and held their camels on the edge, and asked whether these people were before or after the Children of Qahtan; they have an aptitude for history, if one takes the trouble to explain it, because of their interest in their own past.
When we came home I pressed a few plants I had collected and asked Husain, still ecstatic from his ride, to put a heavy box on to the books with which I covered them.
“That is impossible,” said he.
I thought he meant it was too heavy, and said: “Nonsense.”
“But,” said Husain, “one should not put anything on top of a book. The word of God may be inside.”
January 17.
“But O, this dust that I shall drive away
Is flowers and kings,
Is Solomon’s Temple, poets, Nineveh.”
(V. MEYNALL.)
Mubarak, the Nahdi, who is paid three and a half dollars weekly to guard the excavations and all that belongs to them, lives in the hillside on the northern wadi slope, in a cave that was once a tomb. In its dim walls are the horizontal niches scooped for the bodies of the dead, useful now to hold M
ubarak’s goods. Our dig is on his land and we were recommended to him by a ten-year-old friend, an imp called Ja’far, who happens to be his feudal suzerain. “He will give you no trouble,” said this small laird with his minute hands in the pockets of what was once someone’s European coat. “He belongs to me and I have told him to treat you well.”
Mubarak is the most good-natured creature anyway, and, living on sufference, surrounded by Ja’da, is not in a position to make anything difficult to anyone; it is only because of the English peace that he can count on the safe and quiet possession of his own waterless strip of ’ilb trees and plough. His two naked boys were working on it this morning, manœuvring the plank-like machine with which sand is shovelled for the dykes that guide the waters to the ploughland. This plank has a shallow wooden border on three sides, and scrapes along, guided by one bare foot and drawn by a camel, and gathers the sand with it as it goes. When the flood comes tearing down the scree from the cliff above, over the necropolis in which Mubarak has his home, the strip of sand below, where his ploughing now looks like the scratching of a hen on a dustheap, will blossom into crops of melons, sown in the mud and ripening as it dries, till summer again burns the same blinding and waterless sand.
To the cave itself you descend by rough steps of boulders, through a door that lets in the tempered light. A few strips of goat-wool matting and a sand-strewn floor, a slanting pole to hang water-skins, guarded from rats by a bunch of thorns at the lower end; a few vessels, three naked children with lovely eyes and lashes, and a cat as small, wild and graceful as themselves, which they deposit at intervals, struggling, in my lap; and the wife whom I knew already, who sat holding my hand and fed me with melon seeds—such was Mubarak’s home.
“And I hope you and the two harim will come to dine here soon, and if our cooking is not good enough, Qasim can cook the dinner for you.”
The slope is full of caves, one above the other, under the cap of the limestone where two strata join. One of them is to be excavated, and the tent will be moved to-morrow to this wadi-side. In the plain below, the ancient people had their gardens; the main channel that fed them can still be seen, a broad avenue of sand outlined with boulders. Ploughing there, Mubarak finds palm roots buried. He was uneasy, because of the map Alinur is making; and only reassured when I reminded him how the sand is covering already the temple of the Moongod: “In three years’ time, there will be no sign of it left: but the Harim’s map will remain, and travellers who wish to find the ruins will read it and will know the place. And that is why we make the maps.”
I had ridden over late in the morning, when the workmen had gone. No one was available to lead the donkey, till the small Muhammad, who has the beautiful mother, saw me and leaped at the chance of missing school. He led the donkey by a chain, which he would throw without warning on its neck whenever he had thorn to pull out of his foot: I had no stirrups, so the donkey and I both struggled for equilibrium when this happened, till Muhammad took the chain again and trotted on, saying at intervals: “I am not tired, I am strong.”
Sick men came running as we went: peasants came up to shake hands and greet my reappearance: an old man spurring along sold me a bronze spear from Mekka. It was pleasant to be alive again at last in the friendly open world. As we came in I met again the spy from Yemen, who puckered up his sour little face swathed in a white turban much too big for him. The Qadhi says: “He is not much of a spy, for he tells us what he thinks of our land, instead of finding out what we think of his.” When I reached our door my heart was giving some trouble, and I have had to rest it and see people from my bed again.
January 19.
“Il n’a pas l’intelligence assez large pour concevoir que l’intérêt n’est pas seul à mener le monde.”
(M. BARRÈS.)
I spent yesterday tracing Alinur’s plan of the dig, a lovely work, full of delicate and careful detail, that has taken days and days of labour to collect. While I was at it Harold and two R.A.F. aeroplanes descended, but the landing-ground is an hour’s ride away; I did not even hear them, and they had no time to stay. It is a disappointment. The donkey boys who rushed to their assistance have been fined; they did so without permission, but in lonely places in South Arabia descending aeroplanes may need help and certainly need transport. It is this miserable precedent of Egypt, where people possibly respond to fines; here, as a matter of fact, they have very little influence. The beduin, whose off-hand independent speech is taken for impertinance, never last more than a week or two at our dig; we could not think of excavating in purely tribal country to the west. But the peasants are philosophical: one man had to have his wage reduced because of bad work: “a blessing upon you,” was all he said. Another, sent off because the present site is small and requires less labour, merely remarked, “so much the better.” Half dollar a day is to them the difference between poverty and riches, yet they treat it in this airy way. The Archæologist says that all they do is done for money, but this, I am privately convinced, is untrue, not only of them but of almost every human being in this world.
* * *
’Ali, in the evening, brought back the Seiyun news, where it appears that the last attempt at conciliation has collapsed. The heart of the Se’ar chief, who came down to Shibam for a conference, failed him at the last moment, and he fled from the house he was lodged in, back to his valleys, through the W.C. window, on the eve of Harold’s arrival. As they will not restore the stolen camels, their villages, alas! are to be bombed to-morrow.
In our own valley the trouble is settling down. The Ja’da, who have decided to keep the peace, congratulate themselves on their virtue with a smug regretful air. But the wretched woman who has caused it all has been tortured with hot irons in her sides and nose to make her confess, and is being taken to Seiyun. The tribe feels the whole matter a disgrace and did not let her come through the town; she is kept in private by her own relations.
* * *
This afternoon I received a scribbled paper from Sayyid ’Ali to say that all sorts of objects have been found in the new cave, whose digging has begun. He is a scamp, but it was nice of him to think of writing; and in the evening all the boys came rushing excited to my terrace with baskets full of pots. They are rough and ugly, but they have pre-Islamic letters scratched on them, which will presumably help to date them: one has the word “mt” (he died), incised upon its edge. And two sheep are to celebrate the occasion.
January 20.
“Death is now the phoenix’ nest.”
(SHAKESPEARE: The Phoenix and the Turtle.)
A few drops of rain have fallen, and thin and melting clouds drift like browsing herds over the jl northward toward the Se’ar country out of sight.
I set out to walk to the palm groves in search of flowers to press. Six children playing on the slope ran to join me, Husain and Salim among them.
It was a pleasant morning. We called the shepherdesses in their witchlike hats to come and help with the names of the flowers. It is not a simple matter, for the names vary from district to district and what is the Courage of the Wolf in one wadi, is probably the Mother of Grasses in the next. The shepherdesses know them, and know their uses, and which are liked by camels and which by goats; rumran (Heliotropium undulatum Vahl), whose leaves are chopped to put on wounds; dumma’ (Jatropha sp. off. spinosa Vahl), wild gooseberry, good for snakebites; deni (Euphorbia aff. dendroides L. Spurge), used for sticking the soles of sandals; and ’ishr or ’alas (Capparis spinosa L. var. montana), with whose milk or leaf respectively the inside hairs of water-skins are scraped away. The feathery ra’ seed (Aerua javanica Juss) is used for stuffing pillows and that of the ’ishriq (Cassia holosericea Fres., a Senna), eaten by human beings; senna (Cassia acutifolia Del.) and saqrab (Corchorus antichoras Raensch—a “Jew’s Mallow”) are purgatives, and hawir (Indigofera argentea—wild indigo) is used for dyeing. You wash your hair with soap of the sakhbar grass (Cymbopogon schoenanthus L. Spreng) and your hands with the powdered leaves of the kh
oteka. Sesame seed is boiled till thick and drunk for colds. The root of the harmal is good for the stomach, and its leaves, when mixed with kohl, make a medicine for the eyes. The ban tree (Moringa aptera Forsk, gaertn.) leaf cures snakebite; its seeds, soaked in water, reduce swellings; and the lithab leaf (Ficus salicifolia) poisonous to camels, is used in sesame oil as a flavour. As for the ’ilb (Zizyphus Spina Christi) tree, its uses are innumerable, and the Jinn live in it, and comb out and beautify the hair of those who fall asleep in its shadow. All these things the shepherdesses know, and some of them we found out this morning.
There were no flowers at all under the palms, but many among stones in the open, thorny scrubs mostly with blossoms bright and fragile, that fall as one picks them; and because the thorns are so thick and the flowers so delicate, the pressing is an almost impossible business.
Samr (Acacia vera), misht (Anogeissus Bentii Baker), habadh (Zizyphus Hamur Engl.) and hawarwar (Indigofera Argentea L.)—small trees in their own thin shadows, stood on the flat ground in the open, and goats browsed among them. On the sand-bank that surrounded the palm groves the shepherdesses sat, their eyes alone showing through their face-veils, for they are village girls. From Hureidha came the youngest of the Children of Muhsin, riding his donkey bareback. We sat and watched his approach. “Donkeys,” said Salim, “are bad animals. The camel, when its master falls, is sorry: but the donkey laughs in its heart.” The braying of the ass is always called laughing here.
The Child of Muhsin had seen me from his high tower as I passed and followed with his maligned animal in case I should be tired. He joined our botanical party, and we sat with the shepherdesses on the bank, looking down into the lattice shadow of the palms, green and pale as water, and out over the open, with Hureidha small in the distance like a landslide at the bottom of its cliff. A wide peace filled the wadi, and that etherial feeling that comes before the spring is there. The clouds had vanished in the north, a few birds hopped about. In its pale windless sunshine, in its almost colourless repose, the world seemed good. A dull sound, a distant explosion deadened by the waves of air, reached us; the children and I looked at each other: