A Reed Shaken by the Wind

by Gavin Maxwell

  At the darkening we went across the two-hundred-yard-wide river to a house of Sabians upon the opposite bank. The great majority of skilled work in Southern Iraq is done by Sabians, and we wanted two things repaired; Hassan had finally succeeded in breaking the fishing spear which had first broken my nose, and I had lost the chain ring from the end of a pocket knife to which I was particularly attached.

  Even now there is still much to be discovered about the Sabians, though their communities extend far into accessible territory.

  In all there are perhaps ten thousand Sabians in Iraq. Their name is that of a religion, not of a race, and it is neither Muslim nor Christian; though, together with those and the Jewish faith, Mahommed classed them as “People of the Book”. Christ they look upon as a perverter of the truth, and he has no place in their religion, but John the Baptist they regard as a teacher of great wisdom, for they regard flowing water as the life-fluid, and with it are bound up all their elaborate rituals and customs. Thus they cannot live in the marshes, where the water is static, but on the rivers that surround them; and only the more secluded ones at that, for they seek privacy for their rites. (Once I told Thesiger of a cocktail party in London where in a momentary dead silence a voice went on loudly with the last words of a sentence. “… and only copulate at two o’clock in the morning, in running water.” “Ah,” said Thesiger, “Sabians”; but in fact the speaker had been describing some species of wildfowl.)

  The Sabians, or Subbi as the Arabs call them—and the word has its root in the idea of immersion—have a script of their own, known only to their priests, and it is not uncommon to find fragments of pottery inscribed with their holy writings. Their religion has not spread beyond the frontiers of Iraq, and outside their own country they are known chiefly for their silverwork, a closely guarded process whose result has the appearance of a photograph reproduced on smooth silver.

  The two Sabian craftsmen to whose house we went that night were father and son, and apart from the difference in their ages were as alike as Tweedledum and Tweedledee, with whom they had in common, also, a certain squat solidity. Both were very short men with full patriarchal beards, that of the father white and that of the son black; both had a certain nobleness and placidity of expression, and both wore wire-rimmed spectacles with completely circular eyepieces. They wore long white robes, European jackets, and the red check headcloth that in other parts of the Middle East distinguishes a Sunni from a Shi’a, but which in Iraq is worn only by the Sabians. The house which we entered was also the workshop, and against the matting wall between the reed arches lay a handful of tools and a varied collection of scrap metal. The old man began to work on my knife, and as I watched him I was reminded vividly of somebody else.

  When I was a child my family had a gamekeeper whose hobby it was to work with small mechanical things, and for this he had a genius that might, had he been born into a different milieu, have made of him a great inventor. Nothing broken but Hannam could mend it, from a wrist-watch to the axle of a car; no engineering problem was of too complex invention for Hannam to overcome it. When I was sixteen he made for me the only really efficient silencer for a .22 rifle that I have ever seen, and I remember his telling me then that he had discovered how to make a total silencer for a shot-gun, but that he would never make the invention public because it would be murder. All this intricate work he carried out in a primitive shed which he had built from hammered-out oil cans. He was comparatively well equipped with the tools of his trade, but that he could handle them at all with those great horny hands was a perpetual miracle. I remember his thumbs as having the general appearance and degree of mobility of the big toes of a giant who went habitually barefoot, and when he was working with soldering irons I have seen the smoke curling up from them and smelt the tang of singeing flesh while he was unaware of any discomfort. Between one of these thumbs and a correspondingly unsuitable forefinger he would try for long minutes at a time to pick up some tiny screw that eluded him, and to aid him in this seemingly impossible task he would adjust a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles, the very counterparts of those that the Sabians wore, whose enormously thick lenses showed that their function was not to correct the vision but only to magnify. The comparison was extraordinarily complete; the spectacles, the big horny inept-looking hands, the innate dignity of bearing and gentle courtesy of manner. In such a community Hannam would have been among kindred spirits, though he would have had little patience with the rituals of religion. One day the Minister of the kirk met him on the road and reproached him with his habitual failure in kirk attendance, but Hannam replied good-humouredly: “Na, na, Minister, we’re the dodos, and we maunna fall oot wi’ each other. The next generation will have no use for either your profession or mine.”

  Like Hannam, the Sabians were satisfied with no less than perfection in their work; and, also like Hannam, they would accept no payment for it, though this, I think, was in deference to Thesiger’s reputation as a benign power.

  Early next morning we went on down the Chahala, broad, slow-running, and dreamy, reflecting a blue sky on a pale satin surface and fringed at both banks with reed houses and scattered palms. There was a mudhif every few hundred yards; the sheikhs here were two a penny, or, as one of the canoe boys put it in characteristically vivid phrase, “each one in the fundamental orifice of the next”. After an hour we stopped at the mudhif of Yunis ibn Hafudh, a villainous-looking young man whom I would have wanted neither as friend nor enemy. The mudhif was bright with cushions and carpets spread by numerous and very black slaves; the rugs laid near to the door in the places of honour were garish and gaudy with aniline dyes and crude designs, but farther back and hiding apologetically in the shadows were a pair of old and really magnificent carpets, each some twenty-five feet long and ten feet across. One was worn in places, but the other was perfect; I know little of rugs, but these I could see were certainly worth quite a few hundred pounds. Thesiger followed my gaze.

  “Fine, aren’t they? I’ve often noticed them. They don’t value them at all; it’s modern trash they like, and if they’ve got money that’s what they furnish their houses with. Don’t admire them or he’ll give them to us, and it would be embarrassing—I never accept presents in the marshes.”

  The talk, for some reason that I forget, turned on birds, and here was another astounding example of the superstitions filling the heads even of wealthy people like these who not infrequently visited the big westernised cities. Yunis questioned us quite seriously as to the existence and geographical location of the bird who can carry away the roc who is carrying away an elephant. How simple and exciting life would be, I thought, if one could seek these miracles in the external sensory world without recourse to the dismaying miracles of science or where the human mind has cliffs of fall, frightful, sheer.

  After a time the talk turned on a matter that I could not understand, and I began to look out through the mudhif entrance. A tame gazelle grazed some thirty yards away; on the opposite bank of the river a strikingly beautiful little girl was pasting dough into the inside of a conical mud oven. Her features were almost perfect, and unadorned by any tattooing; the regularity of the bone structure in itself would have been beautiful without the addition of those glorious eyes, the golden skin, and the blue sheen on the flow of her straight hair that fell like a dark sheet of falling water to her shoulders, without the delicate lips and the expression that still held the sweetness of childhood. She was, I thought, the most beautiful child I had ever seen; then, as she straightened from the oven, her bright blue cotton dress outlined her small high breasts, and I realised that to these people she was not a child, and was in fact almost marriageable. She might have been twelve years old, but small for that age.

  Sabeti, sitting at my shoulder, had noticed my absorption. “Helu, Gavin?” he whispered, nudging me, “t’arid?” “Na-am, helu,” I replied coldly. The image of that superb little creature in the arms of some loutish Ma’dan was not wholly pleasing.

  Neare
r to hand, just outside the entrance of the mudhif, a large reddish-coloured sheep, uncouth and comfortable-looking, lay munching with gusto from a pile of cut green hashish. Someone, a child perhaps, had twined a blue ribbon in the wool of her neck. She chewed the cud with her mouth open, and belched more than once; she appeared to enjoy what she was doing very much. As I watched her a man came round the corner of the mudhif carrying unsheathed a big curved knife. He grasped the sheep by the wool of her neck and dragged her protesting but still munching out of my line of vision. Thesiger had told me that this was a hospitable household who would probably kill a sheep for us; somehow it seemed to me unthinkable to eat that preposterous old harridan with her oafish and confiding ways, and that if I were required to swallow one mouthful of her I should be sick. She would still be munching as the knife slit her throat, and then she would die very slowly until at last she was choked by her own blood, and the blue ribbon would be sodden with it. Thesiger was unsentimental about animals, so I kept my thoughts to myself and ten minutes later the man with the knife reappeared, carrying under his arm a huge pile of freshly cut hashish. At his heels trotted the egregious ewe, marvellously intact, uncouth and voracious as ever; in a kneeling attitude she began immediately upon the replenishment to her larder which was set before her.

  Our evening meal, however, was ruthlessly chased to a standstill before our eyes, but tasted none the worse for it. We had gone on a mile or so down the river to Mutashar, part of a straggling ribbon development on banks that were now of drab mud, unrelieved by any growth. There was much traffic on the river here, big dhows with forty-foot masts, whose full sails did little more in the still thundery air than counteract the river’s current against them, so that the labouring men on the towpath, grotesquely naked from the waist downward made no more than some two miles an hour. Then the rain came, and the surface of packed mud between the houses became in a moment a puddled expanse of slippery clay. Here, still outside the marshes, there were no reeds to be thrown down as sand is thrown on any icy road in an English winter, and in a few minutes patches of water had formed, into which the big drops of the thunder shower splashed and sizzled.

  The rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun, but it left an interesting terrain for the capture of our dinner. With the end of the shower poultry had come out from the shelter of their owners’ houses, and were regarding with obvious discontent the unscratchable surface around them. We were sitting in a mudhif from which the covering reed matting had been rolled up for the first four feet all round, so that the overhead structure formed a canopy, as it were, leaving unimpeded vision on all sides. Our host called a boy to him and indicated a splendid and extremely inedible-looking cock who picked his way majestically among the puddles. He was a very remarkable bird, and would have commanded more than passing attention in any farmyard. He had the vivid colouring of the wild Indian jungle fowl, more familiar to most people now through nineteenth-century prints of cock-fighting, but he was as big as a Rhode Island Red and his spurs were four inches long.

  The boy beckoned another, and the two of them began to close in upon this gaudy fowl with cautious squelches through the mud. He realised their intention at once, and early lost his dignity, his steps becoming short and uncertain, his neck craning from side to side in little nervous jerks. At length he undertook a flurried rush, his fright bursting from his throat in staccato hysteria. One of the two boys bounded to cut him off, slid, and came down on his face in the mud. By the time he had recovered himself the cock, with the second boy hard on his heels, had disappeared round the corner of a house. The hunt was out of our sight for perhaps a minute, though a swelling babel of shrill cries told that the cock was holding off the challenge. At length he shot into view again, leading by a full ten yards a rabble of a dozen or more children of all ages armed with sticks or reeds, splashed from head to foot with mud, and skidding in wild pandemonium at every corner. A girl dashed out from her house trying to head off the quarry, lost her footing and went over on her face with her sole garment round her shoulders and her round golden posteriors bare to the sky. Round and round, in and out among the houses laboured the panting procession, the cock still holding his lead and the pack behind him growing every minute. At length two or three pi-dogs, gradually stirred by the commotion out of their flea-scratching lethargy, began to harass the fugitive in a half-hearted sort of way from the flanks and the front; and the cock, now panting and exhausted, suddenly sought sanctuary. It was a cruel chance that he sought it in the heart of the enemy camp. The pack was out of sight behind him as for perhaps the twentieth time he legged it across the open space outside our mudhif, and, outflanked by a yapping cur, he made a sudden dive for its shelter. He stood among us in the half light within, gasping but quite motionless, the splendid green plumage of his tail trembling lightly. I would have accorded him the sanctuary that the dim light and the arches seemed to demand, for even the humblest mudhif is a little like a cathedral, but our host leant over with a laugh and scooped him up; he left the mudhif with the cock in one hand, swinging by the legs, and a curved marshman’s knife in the other.

  At Mutashar we were near to the edge of the permanent marsh again, and only a few miles from Dibin. Someone in the mudhif had recently returned from there, and told us that three days ago the eagle owl had been alive and well. We reached Dibin the next evening, and as the permanent marsh closed round us again, greener, denser, and more confined than it had been three weeks before, I realised that I welcomed it, and that some part of me had fretted for it during our stay among the cultivating people. I could have made the marshes my home, but never the unfriendly wastes of mud and irrigating channels that surrounded them.

  We went to the mudhif. The scene had changed much since we were last here; Dibin seemed no longer a mud island in a great lake on whose surface grew scattered and withered sedge, for the new verdure of soft and bending reed leaves grew everywhere to within a stone’s throw of the houses, and a few hundred yards away, where the passage of boats had not hindered their growth, a canoe and its standing occupant became quickly hidden among them.

  No one referred to the eagle owl, and after a little time I inquired for it. I thought the people looked a little furtively at each other. It was not well, they said, had not been well for two days. They brought it to me. Those three weeks since I had seen it had made the changes that as many months would have made for a human prisoner in Buchenwald or Belsen. There was no flesh at all upon the breast, and the great blade of the bone stood out like a knife through the feathers. The feathers were coated with hardened slime and filth, and someone had pulled its tail out; one eye was inflamed and partially closed. Its crop, however, was full, and bulging with some soft squashy matter. It had grown dark in the mudhif, and I carried the bird out of the circle of the firelight and set it down in the deep shadows between the feet of the farther arch columns. I was angry for the humiliation of something beautiful and savage, angry as I would be for these people themselves when they became humiliated by the soiling contact of our modern civilisation. They felt none of this, any more than the people of the oil fields felt it for the tribesmen who drifted in to them and put off their dish-dashas for soiled and shoddy western clothes, their primitive convictions for soiled and shoddy western ideas that fitted no better than their shabby suits. The sight of all humiliation is unbearable to me, and I have often regretted my ready ability to identify myself with animals as well as humans, bringing as it does a sharing of too much misery.

  I came back to the circle and asked what they had given the bird to eat. What I had told them, they said; a few birds, bats from the roof of the mudhif, and sometimes a little fish. Then I asked what its crop was full of at the moment. Thesiger did the translation for me, and he was infected a little by my anger, for he had a feeling for creatures of prey. They said they did not know, for the woman of the mudhif had fed it that day. I went back to the owl with a torch. It had brought up the contents of its crop, and was very obviously dying. At fi
rst I thought that it was some kind of meat that lay on the ground beside it in the dim light of the torch. Then I saw what it really was; it was date pulp. The woman came into the mudhif just then, and I went back to the fire and told Thesiger about the dates. Thus driven into a corner this shocking female confessed unashamedly to having forcibly fed that great bird of prey first with whole slabs of doughy Arab bread and then, when it looked rather unwell as a result, with a mush of pulped dates. Probably it had never had a morsel of flesh since we left Dibin. “And I suppose,” Thesiger concluded a summary of her mental powers, “that if you had a captive lion you would feed it on grapes and hashish.”

  The great bird died a few hours later, draggled and contorted. Poor humiliated eagle of the silent glittering night, wings clipped, tail pulled out, stuffed with bread and dates until it died squalidly on the ground, stained with its own excrement, in a dim corner of its captors’ dwelling, one great orange eye still open and staring out to the stars.

  I brooded over the owl. Part of my tension, I recognised, was due to the removal from me of a promised shred of responsibility; I should have had the well-being of a living creature to care for, a little outlet for my restless and frustrated energy, an object for the desire to protect something that is always strong in me. I felt an unreasonable hatred for that witless woman with her show of bustle and competence, and contempt that even her avarice had not mastered her stupidity. Thinking of these things, I was not trying to understand the conversation around me when the words “celb mai” caught my ear. “What was that about otters?” I asked Thesiger.