A Reed Shaken by the Wind

by Gavin Maxwell

  In a few years’ time that young tribesman whose urgent silhouette I shall carry in my mind’s eye as a symbol of the marshlands will be driving a lorry if he is lucky, pimping in the back streets of Basra for white employees of a western Petroleum Company if he is not.

  The frog chatter that night was the loudest that I had heard. The ground was mainly dry round the house, but there were a few pools of water close to the walls, and from these came a babel so loud that it was necessary to raise one’s voice to talk in the house. Some of the louder and more cynical frog voices were of such volume that it was difficult to imagine them produced by creatures less than the size of a football. When someone passed by the pools outside there was a sudden quiet in the foreground, in which one could hear the steady roar from the distant reed-beds.

  After midnight there was unceasing thunder all through the dark hours, the peals continuing for minutes at a time all round the horizon, and heavy rain streamed through the roof of the house. It began to clear in the morning, and there were windy gleams of sunshine on the scattered water. In the afternoon, when the skies were bare above a rainwashed landscape, we went out again to look for pig, this time in company with five other canoes. Here, between Sijla and Jerait, the country varied from dry desert, where there were traces of recent nomad shepherd encampments, to open water with high reed islands. I travelled in a canoe paddled by two Suwaid, and the fleet soon scattered, so that I knew the directions of the others only by the sound of shooting.

  Before that day I had had no conception of the numbers of wild pig that lay concealed in the reed-beds. Like hunting spaniels the five canoes harried them from the thickets until all around us they were galloping over hard ground, swimming in droves through the wide blue lagoons, or standing as dark hulks at the edges of the ochre reed islands. At one moment I could count forty-seven within rifle shot of me. After half an hour I was almost in tears of frustration. Thesiger had lent me his rifle, but I had no means whatever of communicating with the two Suwaid, who, wild with excitement, seemed to think it as easy for me to shoot while the canoe rocked and plunged under the urging of their paddles as if it were motionless on terra firma. Again and again, exactly as I pressed the trigger, the canoe would lurch over to the deep thrust of a paddle and the bullet slam into the water a few yards from us. Then the two Suwaid would steady the canoe for just long enough to give me a deeply reproachful look. When I did at length remember their word for “stop” the results were still more disastrous, for they interpreted the word not as “stop paddling” but as “stop the canoe”, and they would begin at once to backwater with a frenzy of strokes that almost tipped me over the side. Standing in the lurching canoe with field-glasses, camera, and revolver all hung round me, clutching the rifle at the ready, I felt like a wobbly Christmas tree, and when the rifle fired it was as if a cracker had gone off unexpectedly. Had it not been for my last three shots of the afternoon my reputation for total inefficiency would have spread quickly through all the surrounding villages. From the direction of Thesiger’s canoe, hidden from us by the reed-beds, four half-grown pigs swam in line ahead, crossing our bows a hundred and fifty yards away. As the two Suwaid spotted them and were about to give chase, I saw beside us a little island of mud a few inches above the water. I leapt to it from the canoe, and, starting with the leader, I managed to pick off all four pigs as they swam. To a more sophisticated audience the effect of this display would have been marred by the fact that I fired only three shots, the last killing two pigs simultaneously as their heads came abreast, but to these people, imbued with traditions of economy, this accident was an enormous enhancement. They became wild with excitement, and, leaping ashore to the island, they began to war dance round me, yelling out a chant that, had I been able to understand it, would no doubt have done much to restore my self-respect.

  Altogether I had killed eleven pigs with no fewer than thirty-two cartridges, while Amara had shot the same number with fourteen, and Thesiger had killed one with a shot-gun.

  A duck-hunter had arrived home a little before us; he squatted by the coffee hearth with his bag lying before him, the feathers singeing in the fire. There were two purple gallinule, two garganey, four pintail, and some coots. Two of the pintail were alive, half in the fire, their heads resting on the headless neck-stumps of the dead.

  After that day we were once more among the sheikhs of the outland waterways bordering on desert and cultivating land. The first of these was a young man no less than six feet three inches tall; tall Arabs are so very rare that he seemed a giant. One eye was entirely closed, giving to the face an habitually inscrutable expression. I had by now calculated that, apart, perhaps, from the nomads, one man in every fourteen or fifteen had either lost an eye or suffered from advanced eye disease.

  Here, in the crowd outside the mudhif, an old man in a red turban and an ancient khaki coat reaching to his knees carried in his arms a child of about eighteen months. Its face was barely distinguishable as human, the whole skull, down to a point across the cheek-bones, so deeply crusted as to resemble the dried skin of a toad. The eyes were slits in this crust, defined by crimson streaks of the colour that is left by a red Biro pen, continuing across the bridge of the nose in a deep fistula; the cheeks, swollen to the size of a football, were covered with thick scales. The mouth, though quite inhuman, was red as though with rouge. Once I thought I saw a movement within the eye slits; otherwise there was no apparent trace of life. The old man took this terrible creature away after Thesiger had reiterated that he could do nothing for it, and presently he returned alone. The children edged away from him; then, trying to persuade a ten-year-old to dance, the man laid a hand upon his wrist and tried to pull him from his comrades. The child screamed and struggled, and bit the wrist that held him; then suddenly choked and spat.

  The next sheikh, Abdullah, was fat and benign, and occupied our horizon for the best part of three days. Unlike most mudhifs, his had an atmosphere of cheerful informality, and was dominated, numerically and otherwise, by children. One of these, a fifteen-year-old boy called Daoud, was a superbly accomplished dancer, of a grace, speed, and contortion that the Performing Flea might perhaps emulate in five years’ time. He had a far greater repertoire than any other dancer I had seen, and by now we had seen many, yet despite this the only eroticism that appeared in his dances was in those that were anecdotal. He danced for an hour, and when he sat down Abdullah, who had clearly appreciated the performance to the full, muttered something about going to look for a lost buffalo calf. Summoning Daoud to help him, he disappeared into the pitch-black night outside. Twenty minutes later they returned, the sheikh a little breathless and perspiring, but looking pleased and contented. The boy Daoud was smirking; the buffalo calf was not mentioned.

  The evening ended with a war dance whose chorus was in praise of Thesiger,

  He does not want a buffalo

  He does not want a hundred sheep

  But his rifle and dagger are deadly.

  We moved no more than two hundred yards the next day, to the mudhif of Abdullah’s brother. Here a holy man in a white turban extended finger-tips in greeting and disdain, and left immediately, presumably to wash his hands; an elderly Sayid took his cue, and I could almost feel him shrink from the touch of the unbeliever. Immediately after a lavish lunch, agonising pains seized Amara’s belly; he was in such distress that he could not speak, and he writhed and groaned while Sabeti, to my surprise, began to cry. After a time the pain began to wear off a little, and, doped with opium and belladonna, Amara fell asleep. Sheikh Abdullah, who had come with us to his brother’s mudhif, seemed to identify himself deeply with Amara, and was soon curled up and snoring heavily opposite to him. He was still asleep when Amara recovered enough for a journey of another few hundred yards to a magnificent mudhif of fifteen arches on the opposite bank of the stream, but here Amara collapsed again. Abdullah arrived after us, newly awoken from a couvarde not unlike that of North American Indians who go through a simulated confine
ment when their wives are in labour; he chirruped at Amara, and getting no response he settled down to disconsolate chatter among the rich pillows.

  It was a dragging afternoon. I sat next to an English-speaking schoolboy, who asked me, “Are you a very brave man? How far is it from London to Liverpool? How many pigs can you kill?”, and, finally, written down for a written reply, “Are you very like us? I ask you.” I did not know the answer to any of his questions.

  In the evening Daoud danced again. One of his dances was the tale of a man who had seduced another’s wife in the reeds and was hauled before the government authorities; they got all the names mixed up and ended by punishing the wrong man. Here, I saw, was the common denominator of the dances that made fun of holy men and of the attitude of prayer; it was a simple mockery of authority.

  Another was a dance of fish-spearing; a stranger came on the scene, ate the fish as it was cooking, and was murdered by the spearer. A third man, a policeman, arrived and accused the killer, who brushed the whole matter aside, saying, “He must have been dead for days; and anyway why bother about trivial rubbish of that sort?”

  After all the dancing was over Sheikh Abdullah looked frustrated, as though he wished he had lost another buffalo calf, or perhaps several. He consoled himself by talking of a neighbour who, he said, had four wives and forty-six concubines, and satisfied six of them every night.

  Chapter Ten

  I WOKE the next morning giddy and with a slight fever. It was the only sickness that I suffered throughout all the journey; for three days I felt unsteady and stupid in the daytime, and at night my dreams were of things unhappy and far off. Thesiger, too, was unwell, and lost his voice; our symptoms were perhaps related to Amara’s collapse the day before. We had moved a mile or two to another stone fort, and here I was saddled for nearly three hours with the headmaster of the local school. It would have been a difficult enough time had I had my wits about me; in the dull state to which the fever had flattened me it was little less than torture. Thesiger introduced him to me as a gesture of kindness, thinking that it would be a relief for me to be able to speak English to somebody. After the first few minutes of deadlock, he sent a boy to fetch from his house The Oxford University Top Book. This proved to be an English Primer, complete with pictures of cats, mats, and other monosyllabic riff-raff dear to the nursery. For a solid hour he read aloud from this volume, infinitely slowly, and “putting in the expression”.

  “Is the cat on the table?” he read slowly and probingly. “No!”—archly—“the cat is under the table!” “Is the boy work-ing? No! He is play-ing with his elder sister’s dug!” At this point I interjected: “Doing what?” and he passed me the book with an aggrieved air; there was a picture of a child in shorts playing with an Aberdeen terrier. The primer had not been prepared for use in a Muslim country. At last he closed the book and said sententiously, “Of all the c’s that werbi this c that. Yes?” Seeing me look blank he repeated it, and then wrote it down. I took his English—Arabic dictionary and found the word for “quotation”. “Is it a quotation?” I asked. He nodded enthusiastically. “I think,” I said painfully, “that there must be something missing.”

  He turned to me with a sudden brightness. “My father is underground,” he remarked with an air of surprise, by way of changing the conversation. It was clear that we should always be at cross purposes.

  Two days later we drove by car to the town of Amara. Thesiger had sent a messenger to order a taxi, and it appeared magically on the opposite bank of the stream to the mudhif at which we were staying. There was no sign of a road anywhere; for a mile or so we bumped and zigzagged across dry uncultivated land traversed by waterless irrigation ditches, and when the road began it was at first a barely perceptible track on the hard mud. Gradually the track grew higher and became a straight mud road running parallel to the bank of the watercourse from which we had set out. On our right, as we drove north, a vast marsh with lagoons of open water stretched away for many miles; then this gave place to green patches of half-grown barley and wheat, and limitless acres of mud desert dotted with isolated palm groves. We passed many of the Beni Lam nomads, either encamped in black tents with their great sheep flocks spread over seemingly pastureless ground, or on the move with almost as many little laden donkeys as there were sheep.

  The town of Amara, at the end of the ten-mile drive, did not live up to the beauty of its name. Yellowish brick and corrugated iron; perpetual peeling enamel advertisements for popular western products; dirt and refuse; everything, after the wide clean skies and astringent life of the marshes, seemed to me shoddy, mean and ugly. We paid courtesy visits to the muttaserrif, or provincial governor, and to the Chief of Police, and we visited the American Mission where I was impressed by Dr. Nyekirk, a craggy, rock-jawed young American with a handshake like a gorilla; it was to him that Thesiger sent from the marshlands patients whom he was unable to treat himself. We lunched, at a building something between a fort, house, and palace, with one of Mehsin’s grandsons, the son of that Dakhil whom Aboud had killed in a shooting accident. Our host was doing his national service as a private soldier; according to custom, however, a payment of £50 had reduced the obligatory period to three months.

  Very few of the marsh tribesmen do national service at all. They have their own ingenious way of dodging conscription; they will pay a neighbour to borrow a child who is obviously below the requisite age, and this child impersonates the boy who is to be called up. This, though absolutely safe for the recruiting official’s first visit, breeds some confusion when he returns, say two years later. Another child is borrowed; sometimes he is even younger than the previous one. The official expresses wonder and amazement at the ingenuous Peter Pan, and a dispute begins. It ends as such arguments are best settled; a little money changes hands, and the incident is closed.

  We returned from Amara to another village, to which Hassan and Kathia had transported the tarada in our absence, and from there we began to work back, by a different route, to Dibin. The weather was like April in England, with a fresh gusty breeze and the sun shining whitely between glinting showers. The waterways led at first through pastoral country, where encamped nomads tended great herds of cattle and sheep. This was the one moment of the year when the land has a strangely vivid freshness, a tenderness of green that transforms the flat grey wastes into brilliant acres of young grass growing in watery soil. Upon it grazed sheep of all colours, but colours of a peculiar richness, piebald, skewbald, black, brown, and white, and with them were great numbers of Jersey-coloured cattle; as it began to rain the attendant cow-herds, instead of adding more clothing, took off their dish-dashas and were naked, with their garments folded into bundles on their heads. A cantering colt splashed at the water’s edge, bucking and throwing up his heels in the same exuberance of spirit as the herd-boys who danced in the light gleaming rain; above them the air was rustling with the passage of migrating birds, straggling mile-long flights of little red hawks, green-and-bronze bee-eaters, and the winking black and white of avocets and stilts. Away to the south of us a great flock of wild geese were spiralling down to alight, the golden bugles of their voices drifting thin and clear across the intervening miles of marsh. As we went farther the waterways became choked by a floating carpet of white and gold water buttercups, so thick that in places whole lagoons were completely covered, without an inch of visible water. “There are two pronounced seasons,” Thesiger had written in the article that had led me here, “summer and winter, for spring and autumn last only about a month.” This was the spring, and it was more glorious than I had seen in any other land.

  Here we were in the country of the Sudan; once a great tribe, but now dwindling and scattered, for the building of the Kut barrage had affected the fortunes of all these people dependent upon the distributaries of the great river. We stopped for the night at the fort of Sheikh Hatim ibn Saihut, in a palm grove where salmon-pink hoopoes flitted among the branches. It was a building of a type new to me, a vast low st
ructure of mud and brick with walls four feet thick. The reception room was pillared at the centre with three smooth palm trunks, each carrying a square pediment at the summit, where they supported a ceiling of palm beams with reed matting showing between them. In place of the abominable European arm-chairs of most sheikhs’ reception rooms there were long seats of dark wood with arms at their ends, and on the floor were scattered a profusion of rich rugs and carpets.

  Here we heard news of the controversy between Nasr and Salman. It was rumoured that Nasr would lose his case in Baghdad, and that the Government would restore his property to his father. Sheikh Hatim told us that Nasr had appealed to him and to many other sheikhs for help, but they had all given him the same reply. They had told him that if he would throw himself on his father’s mercy they would go with him and intercede for him, for that was the only course that could retrieve anything of his lost honour. Hatim said again and again that it was outside anyone’s experience that a son should defy his father to the unthinkable point of seeking Government aid against him.

  After we lay down to sleep the room in the fort was noisy with the courting of swallows, whose mud nests plastered the palm beams and pillars; all through the night they sang and made love, the clear silver bubbling of their voices loud in the darkness. The beam of an electric torch would silence them for a moment; they would draw guiltily apart like lovers in Hyde Park caught in the beam of a car’s headlights, but as soon as the light left them they were at it again, vocal and irrepressible.