A Winter in Arabia

by Freya Stark

  ’Ali, the origin of all this vexation, now came up in a demented manner and begged me to return. He seized my donkey; “We must go back,” was all that he could say. I slipped out of my saddle and tried to continue in my direction, but he caught my wrists. I was so angry by this time that a whole army of the Sons of Himyar would not have persuaded me to stop but I could not disengage myself from the delirious ’Ali. One of the bodyguard, a tall man with a silver armlet, came up to say that things would be bad if we turned round.

  “By God then, get me out of the hands of this man,” said I.

  He pulled, ’Ali pulled: released but lacerated, I finally walked on hand in hand with the soldier, while the noise of the battle grew loud and then fainter behind us. I avoided looking back. A panting blue bedu presently came up.

  “There was something of a fuss (rabsha)?” I said.

  “A little rabsha,” said he, casually, and let the subject drop.

  I longed to ask after my old Uncle but thought it wiser not to speak.

  The donkey was brought, I mounted and rode in silence, listening to ’Ali, now recovered, indulging in an oration to the crowd behind me.

  “She will go on,” I heard him say, “until you kill her. And then the aeroplanes will kill us all, and what would be the good of that? Did you not hear how, when I begged her to return, she answered: “There is but one hour of death?”

  This was pure invention but it sounded well.

  We now rode over the jl in pensive silence, with about thirty of the beduin behind us, and a rather doubtful future before, until we came to a basin where water poured over white rocks into jade-green pools in the sun. There in the shade of an overhanging boulder we settled to a tacit truce to eat.

  Luckily there were dates enough now, and—regardless of ’Ali’s feelings—I told him to deal them in handfuls among the thirty men. My old Uncle had reappeared, jaunty and apparently rejuvenated by the events of the morning. Under the divine influence of food, friendliness grew. I am quite convinced that to share food, either his or yours, is the quickest way to make the beduin friendly: I have tried both ways now, and have noticed the difference every time; and the fact that the town Arab never shares is no proof to the contrary, for he is, on the whole, far more disliked than a stranger by the beduin of his land.

  When we had eaten our dates I showed the Beni Himyar how to make powdered milk, which they none of them dared to drink, and then asked them to rest out of sight in the shade of their rock while I bathed in the stream. No greater sign of trustfulness could be given, and it acted in a kindly way.

  To me also it was soothing to lie in the sunlit water and hear its small noise in the noonday silence of the hills, solitary as Paradise except for the thirty beduin behind their rock. Frogs and newts and fishes, and a yellow and black barred butterfly darted among the reeds: in that coolness I lay thinking of the baby Dart in summer on the moors. All sudden sweetness, the call of a bird at sunset, the kitten-soft blossom of the samr, the voice of water, touch one with a knife-like sharpness in this hard land; and how should man also not be hard, living from year to year on the bare surface of his rocks? When I returned I found that ’Ali was getting rid of most of the beduin by sending them with a letter to ’Azzan: he did not tell me that he lured them to go with promises of bakhshish from the Sultans, a fraud I would not have allowed; but it was pleasant all the same to have a lesser number to deal with. Only eight and our escort of four soldiers remained: I sent back the donkey and mounted Sultan Husain’s good trotting camel instead.

  We now rode at a swinging pace across the jl and watched the wall of Kadur draw near like a breaking wave, until, at the base of its enormous cliff, we came to pre-Islamic names, scratched in rude large letters on a face of rock, where the track becomes alpine in its steepness. Even these camels of the Beni Himyar, incredibly clever as they are at climbing, stumble and groan here as they mount. I got off and puffed up slowly; over the landscape beneath me our cliff trailed its shadow like a gown. ’Azzan and its white towers showed in the east with the Kaut small and flat as a mirror behind them; to north and north-west were wrinkled, rusty hills picked out with shadows; white boulders of streams of Kadur wound into Wadi Habban. The long wadis in the north coiled, in the south they died in mists and sands of the sea. A great longing came over me to follow the old incense road, to go to Shabwa, through Wadi Jardan—Ptolemy’s Gorda—which must, I do not doubt, have been the ancient highway. Inscriptions are there, the beduin said, and pointed to small villages in sight. They laughed at my slowness and sat waiting on ledges with bunches of scented gummar in their hair, their guns against their knees; they ran with the same elastic ease up hill or down; at intervals they let me drink from their water-skin, a saffron-tinted and distasteful water, trickling it out into the palm of my hand, which they taught me to use as a funnel. It took us one hour and three quarters to climb from the base of the cliff. Then, by a slope of rubble with the drop on either side, we reached the remains of a gate, and a wall of small stones, narrowing to the top, which, the beduin said, runs, breached and ruined, round Kadur. It must have been not a fortress, but a great fortified enclosure, dominating the Meifa’a roads, and there are many ways up to it, the beduin say, both from the east and from Habban. Through the few remaining rectangular blocks of the gateway one steps into a new landscape of round shoulders and flat stony spaces, and deep clefts filled with trees and water-holes, and finds the whole area scattered with flakes and flints of prehistoric men. Ibex must have been abundant, for their outline is frequent, notched on flat limestones polished by the wind. But the ruins themselves for which we had come so far were scarcely worth the trouble, for they were but shells of rough stone houses, impossible, I should think, to date, built along the edge of a ravine. We left them till the morning and descended to camp in a valley, under a tree they call labakh (ficus sp.), with edible pointed nuts and bright green leaves. I collected a branch of it but ’Ali lost it, for he took no interest in botany and thought it unnecessary for others to do so.

  It must not be supposed for a moment that he was dejected by our tussle of the morning. Far from it. So pleased was he at my success that he continued to congratulate me, dwelling with joy on passages that any normal man would have been delighted to forget. To bear a grudge to one so unself-conscious would be impossible, and we spent an amiable evening, though the beduin came at intervals in private to ask why I did not send away my sayyid and go exclusively with them.

  There were twelve of them now. The heights of Kadur are scattered with the children of Himyar. Into these hidden valleys, they said, no foreigner had come, and they made us just as welcome as if they had always wished for our presence, and built three fires, in the bottom, on the boulders, and brought a sheep and a goat and roasted them on stones. There was any amount of dry dead timber lying about. The night was cold. The little chirping creatures that sing on the jl, were here also. “Like locusts,” said ’Ali, “they hang on trees by their hind-legs and are so frightened that they chirp all night. Only the monkey is as full of fear as they are and moves always from place to place and wakes quite far from where he went to sleep.” I found myself doing this in my sleeping-sack, trying to find comfortable hollows on the ground. The under-branches of the trees were fire-lit against the stars. ’Ali brought two small naked children who had appeared out of the landscape, and laid them in the warmth to sleep under a cloth beside me. In this place, so stony, so secret and so ancient, there was a friendly feeling of high remoteness, cold and still. The pole star shone down the valley, and the only sign of Time was the swinging of the Plough about it from the right-hand slope to the left.

  Next morning we saw the ruins of the village, we saw the ibex outlines and two lines of slabs on end, possibly a tomb, on the flat above us, drank a bowl of fresh milk brought from invisible flocks, and descended again to the everyday world below.

  Here trouble began, for I had spent my last money, and had also promised half a dollar for each man who
went with us to Kadur; they could only get this present by coming to ’Azzan, and none would trust the other to fetch it. So they hung about us like bulldogs—while ’Ali—feebly hoping to shake them off—said that we had no food. His methods with beduin were infelicitous; you would have thought he might have known by this time that a bedu can starve far better than we.

  “Is there no food at all?” I asked.

  “Hardly any,” said he, reluctantly. But we had it out and it proved still to be tolerably sufficient for a meal, and the beduin—pleased to see this attempt against hospitality frustrated—squatted happily under the rock by the green water, to which we had returned. One old man only still stood grumbling before me, and presently—working himself to a frenzy—turned to his tribesmen and the listening hills and asked them why they let foreigners, dogs and sons of dogs, loose into their land. “Give me my money,” he said.

  But the audience was now mostly on the side of the stranger, who had no liking to be called the child of a dog. “My money,” I said, “is a gift, and I give it to those who are pleasant in their speech.” The Beni Himyar were rousing every arrogance of the West.

  “Pleasant?” said the old man, whose face would by now have been purple if it had not been dark blue to begin with. “Never will I be pleasant to Unbelievers, the curse of Allah upon them.”

  “You have eaten my food,” said I. “Now you can go. All these shall have their present when we reach ’Azzan; but the uncivil tongue gets no reward. What sort of behaviour is that to a stranger?”

  The beduin looked down in an embarrassed circle, while ’Ali and a soldier led him off and pulled his white beard, a thing I had never seen done before. I learned afterwards that they quietly bribed him to go as soon as they were out of earshot. ’Ali’s political ideals are those of appeasement. When I reproached him for pandering to a bully, he merely laughed and said that it was better; and it was only long after that I learned that he had never, till that last moment, paid for the dates which belonged to the old man, whose moroseness was therefore understandable though ill-directed—for how could I possibly guess that a complaint against my religion was really a demand for the payment of ’Ali’s debts?

  As I rode down the short ’aqaba from the jl, already tolerably weary of continuous strife, I saw the whole male population of Lamater village drawn up with their guns to intercept us. ’Ali, riding pillion behind me, twittering with the conscience of his yesterday’s fraud upon him, turned the camel’s head and got a start, avoiding the village, down the wadi on the way to ’Azzan. But they soon came up with us, cheerfully anxious to extract blackmail if they could; they jogged alongside in small groups of eight or ten, and if we tried to trot away, banged the withers of the camel with their rifles, so that it jerked and bounded, and made me stop at last by telling me of an inscription at the turn of the wadi on a ledge.

  ’Ali showed every symptom of approaching intractability, and the thought of more trouble with him, and the fatigue of twenty-two hours of camel in two days with a saddle that rubbed, together with the nagging of the beduin renewed by fresh reserves in an unending stream, all so acted, that I suddenly felt tears rolling down my cheeks, a spectacle which sobered ’Ali in one instant. I was allowed to climb among a jubilant crowd to the ledge and photograph the inscription, which had been put there by the Himyarites who restored the walls and irrigation ditches of this wadi in the year A.D. 540 or thereabout. It is an unknown inscription, and escaped the notice both of the Landberg expedition (who were never able to wander far from ’Azzan) and of Capt. Miles who followed the Habban wadi in 1870 and was told, as he passed, of the ruins of Kadur on his left.

  We now rode with, before us and behind us, an endless scattered stream of dark-blue figures in small groups hand in hand, swinging their skirts and rifles along the flat space that ends in the distance with the towers of ’Azzan. When we got there I slipped through my door and left Nasir to deal with the tumult and found the Sultans rejoicing over the success of our adventure at Kadur. To them in their day-to-day fight, it was a victory over the beduin; prestige, it appeared, had been maintained. “And if you had turned back,” they said, “no one in this country would have believed you when you said that you belong to the nation of the English.”

  Chapter XV

  THE SULTAN’S CARAVAN

  “My feet upon the moonlit dust

  Pursue the ceaseless way.”

  (SHROPSHIRE LAD.)

  THE ORIENTAL IDEA EXPRESSED BY ST. JOHN THAT CHAOS IS the beginning of all things except Speech is true in a lesser way of Arab journeys. By the middle of next morning signs of bustle began like small waves to lap around us, a last effort to extract money was made by all who could force an entry to my room, and at two o’clock Sultan Husain saw me on to a camel which knelt in the dust, in sight of the roofs and battlements and ladies of ’Azzan. They all had gathered to watch the caravan depart. Sultan Husain paused to write the names of his four worst enemies on a scrap of paper, so that I might not forget them in Aden, then arm in arm affectionately with Qasim he walked before me to where, in a busy group of farewells, our seven camels stood together. No one yet seemed to know who was going and who was staying. Nasir and his brother came walking down, with rifles on their shoulders and sandals on their feet: Ahmed, the Sultan’s brother also, dressed gaily in green and mauve and yellow, a bunch of scented mauve-tipped herbs tied with a yellow leather fillet in his hair. A handful of the bodyguard was there, some going and some staying, their cartridge-belts replenished round their waists. And now the Old Wolf arrived pushing all help aside and climbed on to his camel as it stood; having settled himself well above the mattress, saucepans and coffee-pots that made his luggage, he opened a black umbrella and went on. Untidily we broke away and followed, growing as we went, for the merchants of Hauta (which is the trading town, ’Azzan being the fortress only) had heard of the strong caravan, and their camels and slaves were descending by the bend of the stream with bales of tobacco to join us.

  Down the wadi we went, under the northern gate of Naqb, whose shallow buttresses looked from their mound upon us as in their day they have looked on many a caravan. Here indeed we were travelling as the ancient merchants travelled, their bales wrapped probably in the same sort of sheets of plaited palm leaf, desert coloured, as these that now bulged one on each side of the bobbing camels, in a long line that caught the sun.

  Ruined villages on gentle rises across the low, ribbed sands of the seil-bed also caught the light. All here was ruined except the mud forts of the Ba Rasheid in the distance, who make perpetual raids: small cairns on the mounds about us marked the places where the law-abiding villagers try to snipe them when they come. This stretch of Meifa’a should be an area of rich and lovely gardens, and possibly was so in the days of the Indian trade: the water is there for the asking, at sixteen to twenty-five feet below the surface of the ground. But now, of its 360 wells, nearly every one is fallen in and ruined; the villages are shells of houses mostly empty and dead enclosures of untended fields. Far on our left we passed Jl ’Aqil and Raida, and Mansura with a few more people inside it on our right: rich with rak and samr trees, with uth’ub (Pluchea Dioscoridis Dc) and the long flowered qaf (Prosopis Spicigera L) and a’ta (Calligonum comosum L’Herit) fluffy with red seed balls, the landscape glowed in the quiet light of evening. But it was a stricken land, and its peace only the deceiving silence of countries desolate in war. No dogs barked near the villages; no children rushed to meet us; poverty and death hung in the solitary air. When we had ridden four hours we turned left from the wadi through sandy hillocks, and camped by a depopulated village called Dhaheri, where a few miserable peasants lingered and took the Sultans to sleep in a house.

  The rest of us settled here round quickly-built fires in the darkness in a sandy hollow alive with camel-ticks, surrounded by trees. Qasim made my bed; Nasir came out of the house with a basket of rice and meat and sat to eat with me by the light of a lantern; and I slept till Qasim woke me with hot o
valtine at one-thirty under a high cold moon. We had a long and unsafe stage to go.

  The caravan was gathered already when we joined it at two o’clock, waiting dimly under a moon that scudded through pale clouds. We were supposed to be quiet and show no lights, for the country of the Al Dhiyaib lay close at hand, but there is something beyond mere human unobtrusiveness in the silence of a camel caravan with its soft padded feet in the night. Among the waiting shadows Nasir came up to ask me how I felt, and bent to take a drink of milk from my naga (she camel), whose foal ran loose beside her, in and out among the head-ropes like a dog. The Old Wolf had started; word was passed from one to another; the caravan like a snake uncoiling shook out its silhouette against the moonlit sand, and every camel-man tied his rope to the tail of the animal before him, like one of those long lines of fishing boats you see ploughing up the straits of Euboea into the early dawn.

  So we too walked through the sand-dunes and bushes, drawing away from the stream-bed of Meifa’a towards the left. From the derelict houses one dog only barked as we passed. Dhaheri is the last village, we had sixteen hours of uninhabited country before us. Those who rode settled in to their baggage as you settle on your deck-chair for a day’s cruising, arranging their shawls and soft objects around them, and resting on arms slightly bent like springs to break the constant jerking of the road; the bodyguard, twelve of them, walked with rifles here and there beside us; the camel-men, with their heads down, went crooning to themselves. As the morning light began to show faintly, ripples of talk would waken, up and down the caravan; it is a creature that has moods cheerful or morose of its own, apart from the beings who compose it, and feels sleepy or tired or hopeful according to the moments of its day. At five-thirty, after three and a half hours, word came that the Old Wolf had stopped. We too swiftly dismounted, gathered thorns for a fire, and were drinking tea in a few moments, for all knew that the time of rest was short before us. I slept on my sheepskin and woke at eight to find that we were starting already. The young Sultans had bought the day’s meat from some beduin and were handing it round, freshly roasted, in rations to be eaten as we rode.