A Winter in Arabia

by Freya Stark

  There round the walis’ tombs they gathered, and then scattered, visiting their own familiar dead. It is a fine sense of drama that so brings them in holiday attire to mingle their small living handful with the unobtrusive headstones, unwalled and uncounted—a recognition of Life and Death, inextricably neighboured. In that wide mortal space about the domes, the smallness of our town became apparent, its inhabitants so largely scattered in the world. For a day or two they have thrown aside the remembrance of their poverty, hanging ever on the sheer edge of starvation: the sight of them, so bravely dressed, among their tombs was infinitely touching. Poverty, not lovely in itself, has a splendour about it when it puts on a gallant show, whether it be a clerk in decent black, or a sayyid immaculately gowned with scarce enough food to last him half a year: in their humble way, like her who broke the box of ointments, they uphold the meaning of life as they see it, above its mere necessities.

  When the visit to the tombs was over, the banners led back to the Mansab’s door, pausing at cross-roads here and there while the Mansab and Elders stood with open and extended palms and prayed. We then returned to our houses, and I spent the afternoon with the children, who came to be photographed and to dance on my terrace, to the young American’s delight.

  * * *

  Alinur made a sauce for a plum-pudding in the evening, and we feasted our visitor with our only bottle of champagne, which ruined our reputation for abstinence and sent the Archæologist’s temperature up again with surprising rapidity.

  The American is going in a day or two up the wadi to ’Amd to survey. His news is not good. His cars are imprisoned in Mukalla by the Humumi, who hold the road; they have now murdered a local governor, a respectable man, and there are signs that the trouble may spread. As for us, we are marooned, but the R.A.F. will no doubt have cleared the road by the time we are ready to go. The Archæologist’s illness has put a stop to all excavation for the time.

  February 13.

  “From where with flutes and dances

  Their ancient mansion rings.”

  (MACAULAY: Battle of Lake Regillus.)

  The day after Zina is devoted to visiting. The Mansab goes round to the various houses where his sisters are settled and sits there over glasses of tea. The servants and dependents visit the sayyids on this day, the sayyids themselves having done their visiting on the afternoon of Zina. On the last day of the feast, which was yesterday, the beduin come to town.

  Alinur and I again got up to the sound of a stray paraffin tin used as a drum. In the old days, before the young men of Java had weaned the hearts of the beduin from the sayyids of Hureidha, a vast crowd used to pour in from the neighbouring wadis on this last day of the feast. But now it is only a poor little contingent from the few settlements of our valley to the south. From the palm-tree distance they advance, a small dark crowd, and stop at intervals to recite a poem and wave their guns in the air, till the Mansab’s secretary appears from the town to meet them, on a white horse painted with bands and rings of henna, and beside him the rival Mansab, whom nobody ever talks about, on a pony as small and unobtrusive as himself. These two come caracoling rather timorously from the brown cluster of the town, meet the advancing beduin with mutual recitations, stand, while the guns with their old barrels wound in silver are discharged over our heads—and then shuffle all together, singing, towards the houses. There in the Mansab’s majliss they sit, while their wives and daughters visit the Mansab’s wife.

  It was Alinur’s first view of a room completely carpeted with black and silver-spangled female forms. As we advance towards the hostess, friendly hands put our feet into invisible spaces; people we know smile, through the deafening clamour: conversation is impossible. The Mansab’s wife, a kind plain woman, resplendent in striped brocade, has bells on her toes and anklets, and a mane of silver bells from her coral headdress to her shoulders: in a gratified murmur which ripples through the loudness of the talking, she rises to dance to her guests. The Singer of Hureidha beats the drum called hajir, which has red patterns painted at each end; her eyes are done with kohl in a theatrical line that sweeps to the temple and gives her an idol look. Other women beat small drums about the size and shape of a man’s collar-box: they hold them shoulder-high and look at each other with delighted faces in the appalling noise. Among the general black, the sayyid ladies stand gorgeous in colour. The Mansab’s sister is near me, pinning false plaits with silver hooks over each ear to help out her own shorter hair in the dancing.

  “Don’t you get giddy?” I shout as she totters back after the performance.

  “You should not ask,” said she. “It is not thought well to feel giddy—but I do all the same.”

  Our Ne’ma is there in the dress we gave her, her chin beautified with a smear of green like a small beard; she too is swinging long tails with eyes shut and a look of agonized ecstasy. Every colour is splashed on the women’s faces: one lip green and one red is the most arresting. The dance is Rishi, done with the top of the body and the hair: the Safina, done two by two and hand in hand, with almost imperceptible movement, stamping of feet and jingling of anklet bells, there is no room for here. Our hostess smiles in a resigned way as we leave her; she has to sit in the clamour for the better part of the day.

  * * *

  The feast is drawing to its close, and in the sunset we stroll down to see the dancing before the Mansab’s home.

  On either side of the carved door a wide whitewashed bench runs along the wall: the Mansab and his friends sit there and anyone else who can find room, and because I am still delicate, a carpet is brought to spread upon it. Round our feet the children squat in a semi-circle, showing gold-embroidered tops of skull-caps as they look away to the performers; and behind them are the mass of townsfolk and slaves, the visiting beduin and their rifles on the outer edge; in the distance, against walls of houses, black shrouded ladies well out of any possible danger of being able to see anything at all, and little girls in their flowered dresses on a small knoll, where the houses open to an outline of cliffs two miles away. The crowd merges with the dancers; three drums are there and the cook, who is master of ceremonies with a stick in his hand. They begin the Sharh al-’Abid, Dance of the Slaves.

  Two hold hands, moving quickly back and forward side by side, or in a circle, one forward and one back: this goes on till a third comes out, places his hand on the others, and one of the two gives up his place. The music is played on the mizmar, the plaintive and melodious music of the African slaves.

  The Qatni then begins. A poet stands out and sings a verse taken up by the audience: “I left my loved one in the Wadi al’Ain.” They dance this in groups, visiting each other, rather like the lancers, to a quick exciting tune.

  The Bara’a of the Yafe’i then comes with knives held up, as I had seen it already in Shibam, and then the Sharh Dhaheri, two parallel rows of men facing each other. Abdulla, the old watch-mender, is the poet, he stands between the rows and gives the verse:

  “I called upon the Merciful and the gates of God were opened.”

  The two rows repeat it, the poet retires, the one line advances to the other, raises hands over head as they meet, bows nearly to the ground and withdraws: they do this several times, till the other line takes it up in turn. At intervals the verse is changed:

  “May the flood come from Ghaibun and bring prosperity.”

  Or

  “May the Mansab grant us gifts, to buy us clothes.”

  The music is spacious and rather sad: the dance like “Nuts in May.”

  The Sharh of Sur in Oman comes next: these dances are all local and every region has its own. This is a war dance with sticks for swords. The two performers come across the stage singing a wailing wordless tune and stand before a line of ten men with sticks; they then fight, leaping at a distance from each other. They trip each other up by sweeping the stick (sword) from behind along the ground; the menaced one springs clear; they kneel opposite each other and fence; when they get too close, one of the
bystanders with his stick leaps between and again does so when, at the end, the victor holds his dagger over his enemy’s body on the ground.

  The dances become pure comedy in the Sharh Saibani, and the cook’s assistant, the man of the tam-o’-shanter, appears with a pink-and-red futah draped coyly over his head and hides behind a line of clapping hands. His suitor, hunting behind them, drags him out: he—or she—follows in a bashful fluttering manner: the little grey beard sticks out from the pink garment in a waggish way. When another dancer appears, the lady goes gaily from one to the other in a manner not exclusively Arabian.

  The comic was a great success, and having added a striped futah petticoat to his trousseau, became a Somali wife with a Somali husband also draped in a futah, a crook-handled stick in his hand. They danced and quarrelled, but what they said was probably too Rabelaisian for the Mansab to translate.

  His colleague from Meshed nowappeared among us, beaming with smiles, his own feast over a day or two before. We settled again to watch a juggler from Yemen. This was a sad-looking creature dressed in rags, who amused the crowd by pushing a dagger into his eye, over the eyelid I suppose; it seemed to go in nearly an inch and when he pulled it out again he had to rest his eye for a moment or two, covering it with his hand while his ragged old grey companion beat on a crooked sheep-skin tambourine. The sun had sunk meanwhile, and the crowd was thinning; the time for prayer was at hand. The two Mansabs, cross-legged on the bench beside us, rose to go. The rough dark man with the mizmar, with blue serge coat buttoned to his neck and a purple turban, walked away, playing a sad little tune, while the children followed. The feast was over with the last ray of the sunlight, and the call of the muezzin from the mosque.

  February 14.

  “How better far at home to have stayed

  Attended by the parlour maid.”

  (R. L. STEVENSON.)

  I spent a domestic morning trying to teach Qasim to iron out my companions’ shirts, which are of the severe kind invented by tailors to proclaim the equality of woman, and, like most hieratic garments, look wrong when crumpled. When Qasim has done with them they look worse than before; he uses his iron like a battering-ram: the Scientists seem to have thought of laundries as a feature of the Arabian hinterland, and look plaintively at his dilapidated efforts: but they did not teach him when they had him in idleness in Seiyun all to themselves; and now, as well as being busy, he is in love, and has also developed a boil like bubonic plague under his arm and has cut it with a penknife.

  * * *

  Otherwise the day was peaceful, apart from a visit from the Mansab of Meshed at 8.30 a.m. He appeared in his shabby white chemise, his green-and-red velvet sash across one shoulder; he has pinned on to it the Nizam of Hyderabad’s star, with the Mansab’s own name carved in the middle: 120 rupees monthly to go with it. The Mansab has travelled in India and Egypt. In Cairo, sitting in the lounge of the Continental Hotel, he was distressed one day to see an American woman at the next table in short sleeves in the (to the Mansab) cold winter weather: “How can you stand it?” he said to her in his cheerful Arabic, pinching the naked arm which was close beside him. The outraged husband called for a dragoman; Sayyid ’Aluwi who was present, and told me the story, confounded himself in apologies; the Mansab himself patted the irate husband on the chest, roaring with laughter.

  He came in beaming as usual this morning, his curly grey beard bright and clean as water over the dingy gown.

  “I will send you a new velvet ribbon from London as a present, Mansab,” I said.

  He looked at his ancient adornment with a pitying affection. “It is no longer beautiful,” he admitted, “but it belonged to my grandfather.” It has probably been worn for about a hundred years.

  * * *

  All the performers of the feast have been to call, on the tacit assumption that some small present would appear; it is like the Christmas box in England. We too have accomplished our holiday duties and visited all the harims of our acquaintance, our Mansab’s mother among them, whose foot I dressed. She refused to have it done again until I myself appeared, and as she lives up at least eighty steps and my heart is not yet quite well, there has been much delay. She lives in the house that once belonged to the Saint of Hureidha. On the very top, opening on to the roof, is the room he lived in and the mihrab by which, peacefully praying, he died. A little niche screened with glass on his terrace enabled him to sit in the cool air on summer nights and read his Quran. An atmosphere of brightness, of cheerful sunlight, inhabits those empty rooms. On a floor below, the Qadhi keeps his books. Two cupboards hold them all, and we sat and looked them over on the ground, a jumble of all sorts with manuscripts among them, their ink gone brown with age. There is a local history written in the fifteenth century by a man of Shihr: I photographed it, but the Qadhi cannot let me have it to copy because, he said, it belongs to his orphan nephews, and there is a canon against the lending of the property of orphans.

  In the late afternoon I took Alinur to see the Mansab’s sister, Fatima, the elder one, who lives in an old house on the ridge above us, high over the town. From her roof one looks away to the R.A.F. landing-ground in the north; one can see how the palms grow, in patches surrounded by banks for irrigation; one can see the roofs of the mud houses with all their domestic details spread below so that a competent censorship can be kept over one’s neighbours; and one can see our house too, with Qasim struggling as usual to keep children out at the door. As we stood watching the lengthening shadows in the wadi, a man and a boy climbed the stony knoll behind us that overlooks the town. They beat on a tin for silence, the man raised his arms and, in a high shrill voice, called to the listening houses: “Hear the voice, hear the voice,” he called. “All men of Hureidha, there is mud in the Tajrub canal: go to clean it, for the coming of the seil (the flood).” He repeated each sentence twice, and then walked down. Fatima listened, hiding behind the parapet, as she had no veil on. All general news is published in this way. When we climbed down, her sister was wrapping herself in a yellow gown for prayer, a saffron colour made by dipping cotton stuff in the dye of the Yemen plant called wars. Her head, too, she covered, and looked like a Greek figure in her draperies, and knelt and rose in a corner of the room, while we sat by the whitewashed coffee hearth, hung with plates of Victorian landscapes, and chatted over the events of the feast. Our little town has now returned to its quiet ways.

  February 15.

  “The hungry sheep look up and are not fed.”

  (Lycidas.)

  Our milk is brought to us by the young Se’ar bride whose wedding in the hillside cave I watched the other night. They are nice people. It is their tribe that has just been bombed by the R.A.F. I went to see them some time ago to ask what they felt about it, and found that they had been listening to the explosions with the most philosophic detachment. The fact is that, by establishing a rigid code in this matter of bombing, we have turned it into a sort of warfare which the medieval courtesy of the Arab can understand; when the affair is over, the R.A.F. are usually invited to come to the punished area and collect their unexploded missiles, and the question is considered at an end.

  Many of this tribe come down to our wadi; their pilgrimage is to Qabr Salih and to Meshed, and the Mansab there has influence among them. Our own old Se’ari lives with a small herd of black-and-white goats in the cave where they had the dancing. He spread a piece of sacking for me beside him in the warm dim twilight of his home. The young daughter-in-law came in with the goats from pasture. She has a snub nose tattooed at the bridge, and a new thaqila, the heavy dangle of coral and silver which attaches the veil. She has not yet learnt to keep it from falling forward over her face.

  “Come and dine with us,” she said.

  The fact that one lives with one’s goats in a hillside makes no difference to hospitality.

  But to-day a catastrophe has overtaken shepherds and shepherdesses. Our Mansab, needing money for public works, has impounded all animals—goats, sheep, donkeys
and camels—found browsing in the neighbourhood, and releases them only on payment of a dollar per head. This ingenious arrangement has a double advantage, as it not only produces money, but also discourages the eating by goats of everyone’s young plantations; the Qadhi’s best palms have all been nibbled away, and this perhaps hastened the Nemesis. By the time of afternoon prayer, 120 dollars were collected, and about 125 animals for whom the owners cannot pay, are abandoned on a compromise: the proceeds to be spent on the levelling of the streets of Hureidha. But a wail of sorrow rises on all sides. The impounded creatures are not fed, so that their owners must find dollars quickly or they die. The bride asked, weeping, if I would liberate hers. I drank the milk, she said. Nine are impounded. I have given her four dollars, and have been besieged all day by unhappy shepherdesses bringing their last little trinkets to sell. It is a harrowing affair.

  * * *

  Sayyid ’Ali has returned to us from a holiday. He has two wives, one here and one, whom he loves better, in the wadi a two days’ journey away, with whom he spent the feast, and has brought me back, as a present, a leather bag with tassels, of the sort they carry about here when they go visiting, filled with coffee berries.

  February 16.

  “First was the world as one great Cymbal made

  Where Jarring Windes to infant Nature plaid.

  All Music was a solitary sound

  To hollow Rocks and murm’ring Fountains bound.”

  (MARVELL.)

  Alinur, wandering about to map the irrigation, has found fossil plants embedded in tufa in one of the side wadis—data precious for the ancient flora of this land; in the flat below she has found flint tools bedded in wadi gravel, and pebbles of tufa with them, washed from the upper site. By this means the gravel can be dated, and the tufa also, since it must belong to the same paleolithic age as the flints which lie beside it: it is an exciting discovery, and we are now going up all the likely side valleys, one after the other. I have been to one, but nothing came of it; the next, called by the inspiring name of “the Drip,” had fossils enough, imprisoned in great boulders. It was a considerable drip in paleolithic times, now perpetuated in stone round a semi-circle of overhanging cliff where the scree slope of the valley begins. The sun visits this place in early morning only, and there is an antique privacy about it: three earthen jars, half buried, overgrown with moss and maidenhair and bright leaves and white flowers, hold the few drops that still trickle from above, squeezed out of the incumbent wall of jl. An old tin mug is left there for all to drink from, and a few remains of fires. Among white boulders below grows the tree called ban drooping with thread-like leaves and pale pink flowers. The overhanging cliff is rounded like cobbles by weathering; the devious course of water in its heart can be traced by bunches of clinging shrubs whose roots creep in crevices to drink. There must once have been an amphitheatre of dropping springs; the tufa is honeycombed with hollow petrified tubes made by the splashing drops; they cling like bee-cells to the rocky wall. There is a feeling of natural worship in this shade. It must have been too wet for human habitation, and the flint-men, Alinur thinks, lived further down or in caves along the neighbouring ledges.