A Reed Shaken by the Wind

by Gavin Maxwell

  “I think we’ve got you that otter cub you said you wanted. This fellow comes from that village half a mile away; he says he’s had one for about ten days. Very small and sucks milk from a bottle. Do you want it?”

  I said, “It sounds exactly what I wanted, but I think we’d better not say anything definite. It might be the owl over again; probably they’ve been giving it methylated spirits.”

  The otter’s owner said he would fetch it and be back in half an hour or so. He got up and went out; through the entrance of the mudhif I could see his canoe glide away silently over the star-reflecting water.

  Presently he returned carrying the cub, came across into the firelight and put it down on my knee as I sat cross-legged. It looked up and chittered at me gently. It was the size of a kitten or a squirrel, still a little unsteady on its legs, with a stiff-looking tapering tail the length of a pencil, and it exhaled a wholly delightful malty smell. It rolled over on its back, displaying a round furry stomach and the soles of four webbed feet.

  “Well,” said Thesiger, “do you want her?” I nodded. “How much are you prepared to pay for her?”

  “Certainly more than they would ask.”

  “I’m not going to pay some ridiculous price—it’s bad for prestige. We’ll take her if they’ll sell her for a reasonable price; if not, we’ll get one somewhere else.”

  I said, “Let’s make certain of getting this one; we’re near the end of the time now, and we may not get another chance. And after all the prestige doesn’t matter so much as this is your last visit to the marshes.” I saw this fascinating little creature eluding me for the sake of a few shillings’ worth of prestige, and the negotiations seemed to me interminable.

  In the end we bought the cub for five dinar, the price to include the rubber teat and the filthy but precious bottle from which she was accustomed to drink. Bottles are a rarity in the marshes.

  Most infant animals are engaging, but this cub had more charm per cubic inch of her tiny body than all the young animals I had ever seen. Even now I cannot write about her without a pang.

  I cut a collar for her from the strap of my field-glasses—a difficult thing, for her head was no wider than her neck—and tied six foot of string to this so as to retain some permanent contact with her if at any time she wandered away from me. Then I slipped her inside my shirt, and she snuggled down at once in a security of warmth and darkness that she had not known since she was reft from her mother. I carried her like that through her short life; when she was awake her head would peer wonderingly out from the top of the pullover, like a kangaroo from its mother’s pouch, and when she was asleep she slept as otters like to, on her back with her webbed feet in the air. When she was awake her voice was a bird-like chirp, but in her dreams she would give a wild little cry on three falling notes, poignant and desolate. I called her Chahala, after the river we had left the day before, and because those syllables were the nearest one could write to the sound of her sleeping cry.

  I slept fitfully that night; all the pi-dogs of Dibin seemed to bark at my ears, and I dared not in any case let myself fall into too sound a sleep lest I should crush Chahala, who now snuggled in my armpit. Like all otters, she was “house-trained” from the beginning, and I had made things easy for her by laying my sleeping bag against the wall of the mudhif, so that she could step straight out on the patch of bare earth between the reed columns. This she did at intervals during the night, backing into the very farthest corner to produce, with an expression of infinite concentration, a tiny yellow caterpillar of excrement. Having inspected this, with evident satisfaction at a job well done, she would clamber up my shoulder and chitter gently for her bottle. This she preferred to drink lying on her back and holding the bottle between her paws as do bear cubs, and when she had finished sucking she would fall sound asleep with the teat still in her mouth and a beatific expression on her baby face.

  She accepted me as her parent from the moment that she first fell asleep inside my pullover, and never once did she show fear of anything or anyone, but it was as a parent that I failed her, for I had neither the knowledge nor the instinct of her mother, and when she died it was because of my ignorance. Meanwhile this tragedy, so small but so complete, threw no shadow on her brief life, and as the days went by she learned to know her name and to play a little as a kitten does, and to come scuttling along at my heels if I could find dry land to walk on, for she hated to get her feet wet. When she had had enough of walking she would chirp and paw at my legs until I squatted down so that she could climb up and dive head first into the friendly darkness inside my pullover; sometimes she would at once fall asleep in that position, head downward with the tip of her pointed tail sticking out at the top. The Arabs called her my daughter, and used to ask me when I had last given her suck.

  I found myself missing Chahala as I wrote of her, so I set down my manuscript book and pen and went to the open door and whistled, and out of the sea fifty yards away came Mijbil, Chahala’s successor, and galloped up over the sand and pranced round me like a puppy, and then came in with me and went to sleep on his back on the hearthrug. Mijbil was a very important otter, of a race quite new to science, and that discovery might never have been made if Chahala had not died; but still I think I would rather she had lived and Lutrogale perspicillata maxwelli had remained incognito, for in assuming my name and remaining my constant companion for a year he took too much of my heart.

  We left Dibin next morning, through a country filled with a bewildering host of migrating birds, and spent that night at the mudhif of Haji Mahaisin, on the Agra. A few hundred yards from us, on the main waterway at right angles to ours, stood the imposing fortress of Nasr of evil repute. For some years past he had been strengthening it, so that now it appeared impregnable to men armed only with small arms. The compound was heavily encircled with barbed wire, and against a flame-coloured sunset the silhouettes of armed slaves showed where look-outs had been posted at various points on the wall of the fort itself. The government had established a precautionary police post hard by the wall of the compound, and police sentries with sub-machine-guns patrolled the entrance from the river front and stood guard over the big white motor launch that was tied up there. I should not have cared to have joined his brother Jabir in an attack on that fort.

  I soon found that the cub Chahala was restrictive of movement and activity. Carried habitually inside my pullover, she made an enceinte-looking bulge which collected the whole village round me as soon as I set foot outside the door; furthermore I could no longer carry my camera round my neck as I did normally, for it bumped against her body as I walked.

  We moved in short journeys; the next day, I remember, we lunched at a village where there was a malarial epidemic, and there was not enough Paludrine left in our stocks to treat a tenth of the people who required it. That night we reached the fort of Talib, half-brother of Nasr and Jabir, who as a boy had opened fire on the Sayid deputy whom their grandfather, old Salman, had sent to reason with him when he rose in protest against the favouritism shown to Nasr. We did not stay there, however, for Talib turned out to be away in Amara, being tried for the alleged rape of a merchant’s daughter, a trial from which he eventually escaped with a petty fine. No one seemed to have the keys of the fort, so we stayed at the mudhif of Sayid Qadhim nearby.

  That evening Thesiger and I discussed the prospect of weaning Chahala. We both felt that she should be old enough to eat solid food, and I felt that her rather skinny little body would benefit by something stronger than buffalo milk. However, I underestimated the power of instinct, for I thought that she would not connect flesh or blood with edibility and would need to be introduced to the idea very gradually. The best way to do this, I decided, was to introduce a few drops of blood into her milk to get her used to the taste. This proved to be extraordinarily naïve, for while I was holding the bodies of two decapitated sparrows and trying to drip a little blood from them into her feeding bottle she suddenly caught the scent of the red m
eat and made a savage grab for the carcases. I think that if I had not stopped her she would have crunched up bone and all with those tiny needle-like teeth, and we took this as evidence that she had already been introduced by her mother to adult food. I took the carcases from her, much to her evident fury; and when I gave her the flesh from the breasts cut up small she wolfed it down savagely and went questing round for more.

  “Finish with milk,” said Amara with a gesture of finality, “finish, finish; she is grown up now.” And it seemed so, but, alas, she was not.

  The next night we spent at the mudhif of a somewhat unusual sheikh. He was a young man in his middle twenties, and one of the only two feminine-type homosexuals that I saw in the marshes. It is true that the marshmen, in common with many other Arab peoples, are not very selective in their direction of sexual outlet; all is, so to speak, grist to their mill, and the long years that many a youth of the poorer people may have to wait before he has acquired the bride price of three buffaloes, coupled with the tremendous taboos attached to intercourse with a girl of the village, make casual homosexuality general. It is not, however, the outcome of any exclusive leaning in that direction, and no shame is attached to it; I have heard young married men discuss quite openly whether they would rather sleep with their wives or with some particular boy, and usually reach the conclusion, after some argument, that they would prefer their wives. This sheikh, however, was something quite different; he was the feminine type that in England would be described as a pansy. He wore a dish-dasha of bright sky-blue, a pale beautifully cut European jacket, white buckskin shoes, two symmetrically placed gold teeth, and, surprisingly, a wide eyebrow-moustache. The little finger of his right hand was dyed with henna to the middle joint, and on the finger next to it he wore two heavy gold rings, one set with diamonds and the other with a single sapphire. From his shoulders floated a diaphanous blue gauze bisht edged with rich gold embroidery.

  He received us not in a mudhif but a sarifa, the small rectangular and often ornate reed house which many sheikhs maintain to entertain their personal friends in an atmosphere more intime than that of the mudhif. This sarifa was richly furnished in execrable European taste; the sofas and chairs were of the same type, mass produced in Basra and Baghdad, as are to be found in every sheikh’s reception room, but their upholstery was more flamboyant, an imitation velvet brocade with a pattern of big white fleur-de-lis on a blue ground. A heavy modern silk carpet covered the floor, in whose riotous pattern a heavily laden camel could be distinguished mistrustfully inspecting a group of chamoix on a nearby alpine peak, while farther off something that could be none other than a moose gazed with obvious dismay into the veiled face of a Tuareg who was menacing it with what appeared to be a sub-machine-gun. In the extreme foreground a green parakeet preened itself oblivious of its ecological insecurity.

  The sheikh’s fancy fell on Sabeti, who squirmed with embarrassment, and, I think, pleasure. Probably he had never been ogled like this before, for he was a very plain young man with a big nose and an habitual air of apology. The sheikh draped himself on the arm of a chair and chattered and ate nuts from a little leather bag and flashed his gold teeth, and Sabeti sat cross-legged on the floor and gazed up with a moonstruck face that would undoubtedly have infuriated his wife.

  I saw only one other womanish man in the marshes, and he was an extreme case, a transvestist. He was a robustly built man with no physical abnormality, who dressed as a woman, lived with the women, and did woman’s work. He followed us about for some time, requesting us to perform a surgical operation that would make him a complete woman—a formidable task indeed, for he was at the moment a very complete man. Thesiger told me that the comparable situation among women was not rare, some women assuming a complete masculine role and dressing as men, and that these were approved by the men as being a stage in advance of normal womanhood.

  Presently the sheikh left the sarifa in company with a muscular Ethiopian slave, who, I was told, was one of his stud of stallions, employed at a nightly fee which another slave confided to our crew, and which seemed wholly inadequate for the work.

  That night was one of the few, during the whole journey, that I passed in acute discomfort. The sarifa was partially open at ground level, and over the zoological fantasy of the silk carpet tore an icy wind which only the chamoix could have endured with equanimity. It was bitter, and it blew all night. Thesiger and the others were rolled tightly in their blankets, but I had to leave the side of my sleeping bag open to allow exit to Chahala, who sensibly took shelter in the warmth behind my body. I lay shivering and listening to the jackals howling in the distance. I remember that a slant of weak moonlight came through the lattice and fell on Amara’s face; he was sleeping with his lips drawn back from his teeth to the gums, an expression of hatred so intense and yet so static as to appear inhuman.

  During the slow icy hours between midnight and dawn, hours when the brain may sometimes outrun the plodding of reason and escape from habitual and safe corridors of thought to catch perilous glimpses of truth, some part of me was trying to interpret and give meaning to my presence here in the night and the cold on the bank of a strange river. I tried to think of the name of the place where I was, but I found that I did not know it, nor could I now project a map in my mind. I turned, and my eyes came back to the grinning mask of Amara’s face in the moonlight. I must be here for some purpose, I thought, for those who wake at night in desert and in jungle to see the stars at strange slants in the sky have some goal before them, some enemy to conquer before returning home. The lines that drew them here would form some plan on paper, a firm design that showed the growth and aim of their endeavour, a geometry that expressed the journey of their lives. I tried to see my own like this and saw it as a doodle on a scrap of paper beside a telephone, formless, full of heraldic flourishes and ignoble retreat, with here and there a random line running far out on to the blank page; and at the end of one of these I lay now listening to the jackals skirling at the moon. What went ye forth for to see? A reed shaken by the wind?

  In the morning we made a very short journey to the mudhif of Sheikh Jabir, whom three weeks before we had met at Dibin preparing to make war on his brother Nasr. The mudhif was on the bank of a narrow watercourse with land on one side of it and palms in the distance, a humble and untidy building speaking of poverty in striking contrast with the aggresive fortress of Nasr. He seemed a different man now from him who had led the war dance at Dibin, for though the issue was still in doubt it was rumoured that things were not going well for Nasr in Baghdad, and that the government would give a decision against him. Jabir had lost the wolfish and distrustful expression that he had worn when he was raising the tribesmen; he seemed assured and confident now, and he greeted us with great courtesy and friendliness.

  We went out in the afternoon to shoot pig, and as we left the mudhif with Jabir in the tarada with us a passing canoe hailed him.

  “There is news from Baghdad—Nasr is finished! Allah be praised!”

  “Allah be praised,” replied Jabir quietly. He said nothing else, nor did he refer to the subject again, but his mind must have been full of it, for his whole future had changed. Before, he had been a sheikh only in name; now he would have money and lands and position and many of the army of slaves that had belonged to Nasr. I thought of Nasr’s future, and because I did not know him and his vices were nothing to me I could pity him. He would be a hunted man now, a fugitive, without friends or money or property; driven perhaps like Aboud who had killed Dakhil in the shooting accident, to live beside a police post in the country of his enemies, until one day the police protection would not be enough, and his body would be found in a muddy channel.

  I remember that afternoon particularly for the splendour of the sky. Against a background of the deepest blue great elongated cotton-wool clouds fanned out over us like the fingers of a giant hand; they seemed as solid a structure as the banks of the watercourse or the high prow of the tarada. We went downstream through id
yllic palm groves with blossoming acacias and willows and the spring of delicate new grass, and on into recently inundated land, where the reeds were thin and short and green. The whole air here was a jewelled kaleidoscope of colour; a myriad bee-eaters thronged the reeds and the air above them, each one of this horde as gorgeous as any humming-bird. They darted low over the water with glittering glint of electric green, soared up to show the blinding sheen of copper beneath their wings, alighted in gem-like array upon the reeds that bent to the water under their weight. It was as though a rainbow had suddenly come to pieces and filled the air with irresponsible fragments.

  Chahala slept in my pullover, and because of her I remained in the tarada with Jabir when Thesiger waded off to hunt for pig. It was impossible to be bored with so much to look at. Scattered pelicans drifted on the water, immobile as stuffed birds; overhead wheeled a restless pack of some five hundred clamorous stilts, a weird urgent clangour something between the calling of wild geese and of seagulls, haunting and unfamiliar as the tang of a strange spice.

  Among the copper iridescence of the bee-eaters’ wings the kingfishers flitted, halcyons of chestnut and blinding blue, and pied kingfisher of staccato black-and-white; they hovered with their bodies held upright in the air, and their heads, below the vibrating wings, craned intently downward to peer into the water; they dived swift and arrow-like in a vertical plunge. Against the blue sky the pale bulrush tops looked like raw wool on the spindle of an old spinning-wheel, and above them flew, with the infinitely slow wing-beat of a giant, a single Goliath heron, a bird that stands nearly as high as a man.

  We went home in the evening to Jabir’s mudhif, through waterways only a few paces across and with hard banks at their sides. The canoe boys were infected by the glory of the evening, and towed the tarada as fast as they could run, so that the thrust of the long craft in the narrow channel piled at our sides smooth rushing walls of water that were blood-coloured with the stain of the sinking sun. From the banks ahead of us yard-wide soft-shelled terrapins, or mud-turtles, plopped into the water in noisy panic.