‘And one day we’ll wish we were back here like this,’ old Allen said. ‘Curious, isn’t it?’
It is curious, for now, twenty years later, staring out from the ship in the darkness towards Eil, I wished I could have written to old Allen and told him he was right that night. I wished right then I could be looking down on Eil from the hills again as we did the day after the storm, the bush around us steaming in the sun, Eil, three or four tiny white buildings below us surrounded by green patches of cultivation, and the blue Indian Ocean washing up to it. Actual green, fresh, glistening gardens in which we knew there would be melons and sweet potatoes, and nearby, most precious of all, that beautiful, refreshing living water from the sweet spring.
‘Taste it,’ I said to old Allen, handing him a mess tin full of the spring water, and he drank it down, saying, ‘My God, that’s good, son. That’s really good.’ Here was water you did not have to pour six times from cup to cup until a few tired bubbles formed in it, as Doctor Ammanato had taught me up beyond Wal-Wal. He used to pour the water from one cup to another, fast, until a tiny semblance of life came into the dead, cloudy liquid, but even then when you drank it there was no life in it. Old Allen and I drank the Eil water, and then tried it out in the whisky we had with us. Once, with Jack, that best companion for long marches and dreary bivouacs in rocks, we had drunk water so bitter, so astringent it might have been the juice of aloes, that the mouth puckered up inside and the guts refused to work calmly for a couple of weeks after we got out of that place to another waterhole. A hot wind was blowing one evening while Jack and I had smoked under our sheltering rocks and had discussed whether we should finish the last of our one bottle of gin we had saved during the march. We had nothing to go with it but that bitter, angry water from that hole nearby. When we poured the water into our gin the mixture turned navy blue.
‘Some kind of chemical reaction,’ Jack said. ‘Still, there’s a taste of gin at least.’ I have never been able to discover what could have been in that water to produce a navy blue drink.
The sweet potatoes from the garden at Eil, dipped in the lumps of rock salt and eaten from the hand, and tea made with the spring water which had no treachery in it; unforgettable, and melons, and Jeb nuts given to us by an old Arab who tended the gardens there.
I never forgot Eil, its peace, its isolation from the blood feuds and the casual ferocity inland, and the sound of its friendly waters in the white stones so close to the ocean. Every traveller has one treasure, one place he has found in which he would like to spend one year, and mine is Eil; better than Gavai, better than Lamu, farther out of reach, in fact forgotten, Eil remains in the memory as a tiny oasis on the rim of that savage world of camels, waterholes and spearmen under a merciless sun.
The blue lightning was now quivering all over the dark coast, and the ship was gliding through the sea with only a faint throb of her diesels quivering in the deck under my feet. I could see one tiny speck of yellow light on that black coast, and I wondered if half a dozen Somalis were sitting round it, their nightfire, over which they talked genealogy and history and camels.
I was going to Kenya but now I wished it was to Somalia I was going instead, in search of Jibreel and Hassan and Hersi and Mohamed Saad, and Kadija, and other dispensers of wus-wus and to find out how they had fared, and to travel across those wildernesses again, unarmed this time, and to live with the Midgan hunters for a couple of months and collect all their lore before it vanishes forever.
Chapter 9
MOGADISHU; Mogadoxo of the Portuguese, Hamar to the Somalis. I could see it faintly a couple of miles off in the blue-grey dawn mist which was slowly lifting from the ocean. The ocean rolls smoothly here, like heavy liquid glass, blue, purple, green, white marble streaks running in it and fluxing in sudden patches of hissing foam. Somali fishermen in their tiny canoes disappeared slowly in the deepening valleys of smooth water, and rose again just as slowly as the ocean swelled and flowed on past them. There was a fruffing sound as a school of tiny fish scuffed the glistening blue skin of the water, turning the surface of the sea into a glittering, blinding million fragments of a broken mirror as the first sunflare was caught in it. I could see the small white buildings of Mogadishu now, and strained my ears in the hope that I might hear the wild, passionate cry of the muezzin who used to wake me from the sweating tropical sleep with his holy anger. ‘Get up! Get up and pray! Get up, all of you sleepers, and pray.’ And the sleepers would rise, and stumble to prayer, ‘Allahu Akhbar, the Compassionate, the Merciful,’ and, low voiced, take refuge in the Lord of the Worlds, and from the Slinking Whisperer, from the devil, and from men, for a time. And one then saw the red fiery anger of the sun beginning to fill the sky, and marvelled again at the devotion of Islam, its fixed, never forgotten regular prayers which I had seen said by the sophisticated and the simple on rivers in Burma, among rocks in India, in the ancient gardens of Kashmir, and in the farthest corners of the deserts beyond Mogadishu. But I could not hear the muezzin as the ship moved nearer to the coast, only the thin cries of the fishermen in the little boats as they sighted the schools of fish.
Now I could smell Mogadishu in the growing heat, sharp, almost rank, salty, mingled with incense and woodsmoke, like the smell of fresh camel milk in a smoke-cleansed gourd.
I was anxious to see Somali faces again, those lean, serious faces with the large black eyes, the skin brown, or black, an expression of strain, tension, a certain curious readiness in every face, as if listening for a magic word, the eyes watching always as if to see the unexpected. I wanted to feel again that strange almost electric energy they possess when in a crowd, when arguing, when laughing, when moving towards hysteria or quarrel, or decision after urgent discussion. And as the sun rose I could feel that sharp, stifling heat again. If the skin has a memory mine awoke then. It began to tingle as the sun struck it, as if suddenly startled by real heat again after years, and the sweat came as if by command. Once more one’s eyes screwed up, narrowed as I stared across the glaring water at Mogadishu, at the three ancient tramp ships lying at anchor in the slow swell, the rumble of their rusty winches the only sound.
I began to wonder now if I did want to see Mogadishu again, if I did want to hear the harsh Somali language again, if it was any use to walk up those streets again after twenty years. It had assumed the power of a longed-for paradise, once, as the months went by up in the wilderness, and had seemed the greatest place on earth when one got there, ragged and slightly crazy, driving in the heavily laden truck straight to the club, knowing that that marvellous old Colonel of ours would forgive one brief appearance in dusty rags at the bar for that one longed-for drink, the first on leave.
‘Here’s another shagbag come back for a drink,’ someone would shout at the crowded bar. ‘I heard you’d shot yourself long ago. Come and have one.’
Were those circles of Italian bayonets of every kind, a pedigree of blades, still on the walls of the Duca d’Aosta’s Club which we had used so well? The bar would be gone now, swept away in this new free Somalia where bars would be taboo, gone with the Kafir, the infidel. How one drank when one could get it at that time. How one would drink again like that if one had to live that life again.
‘Pronto, signore,’ the old Italian bosun said to me, smacking his frayed leather gloves together. ‘Ecco il motoscafo.’ He pointed to the huge motor barge wallowing towards the ship, the same barge of twenty years ago, battered, ragged motor tyres hanging all round her as buffers, Somalis in bright checked lungis waving from the stern. The bosun pointed to the big green canvas bag on the deck, ropes leading from it up to the ready derrick. It could take about ten men.
‘As soon as you’ve seen the police, signore, I’ll sling you down to the barge,’ the old bosun said. ‘Here are the police now.’
These tall Somali policemen in their greenish khaki shorts and tunics were friendly and courteous as they dealt with my permit to go ashore. I went with them into the saloon and handed them my passport. I think
it must have been the first Irish passport they had ever seen. The three of them bent over it to inspect the golden harp stamped in its cover.
‘Ah,’ one of them said. ‘La Repubblica d’Irlanda.’ He smiled. ‘Republic? Good.’ He liked republics. And then one of the other policemen dashed off a written permit which allowed me to go free in Mogadishu for three hours.
Swinging high over the water in the canvas bag the fierce sun held me now and the sweat came out of me in a rush, soaking my thin shirt. A dozen lean Somali hands reached up and steadied the bag as it reached the deck of the barge. They were all laughing, greeting me, friendliness itself. The nakuda of the barge was fat and solid and black, a brightly coloured skull cap on his head.
‘Jambo,’ I said to the nakuda, guessing he would know Swahili with that shining blackness of his, a coast Swahili-Arab if ever I saw one. ‘Uhali gani?’
‘Jambo sana!’ he replied, offering me his big hand to shake. He said his news was good, his life untroubled.
‘Cigarette?’ I offered him the packet.
He smiled, telling me he was longing for a smoke, for he had come without any, having been working since two o’clock that morning. He sat down beside me in the stern of the barge and began to ask me questions about my voyage, the ship I had come in, my job, my plans.
‘How many passengers are in that ship?’ he asked me, pointing up to the towering white mass of the ship from which cases of wine were being lowered into our barge.
‘Hundreds,’ I told him.
‘I always wonder how they feed so many people for so many days,’ he said. ‘I have never understood it. You’re going to eat those. Do you like those?’ He showed me sacks of blue-brown spiky restless lobsters which were waiting to go aboard the ship.
He spoke real safi Swahili, and it was wonderful to hear and speak that beautiful, mellifluous tongue again, here in the heat, smoking a cigarette with a descendant of the slavers who had worked this side of Africa almost as hard as the whites at the other side.
‘My Swahili is rusty,’ I said, yet it was coming faster now, the mysterious machinery of memory working for my nervous tongue, stirring the files where lay the vocabulary in the rust of eight years. But we never forget a language we have used, and enjoyed using.
‘We are oiling it now,’ the nakuda said, smiling. ‘To talk is the best oil for the words. Describe the journey here, the places you saw. Were you in Italy? Egypt?’
He wanted to know the speed of the ship, how many days it took to come from Italy, shaking his head, saying, ‘Everything is going faster the older I get.’ What did I think of all the changes taking place in the world these days? Take his son, now. His son now read books in Italian and English and wanted to go to Europe and become a doctor. What with? How? He was laughing. ‘The young men nowadays don’t seem to worry about money. They write a letter to some foreign country and expect a shower of money for their education. Ashore then,’ he pointed to Mogadishu, ‘they’d go without food now for education. School, school, school, that is the word you hear every minute of the day. I suppose if I had been to a school I would be in an office now with a small boy bringing me cups of coffee every time I rang the bell. I have never seen anything like the madness about education that is going on in these times. They would eat a book if you gave it to them, some of the young men nowadays.’ He got up and uttered an angry rush of Arabic curses at one of the crew who had fouled a rope leading from the cargo sling. ‘That’s another one driven mad with the books,’ he said, nodding at the young Somali who had fouled the rope. ‘He wants to sit in an office.’
‘All is ready,’ the Somalis shouted from the front of the barge. Four young Somali policemen were coming down in the bag now. They landed and came and sat down beside me, inspecting me, and then questioning me. The conversation with these young men for the next quarter of an hour confirmed everything the old nakuda had said about the passion for education among the Somalis today.
‘Are you coming here to teach?’ one of the policemen asked me.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Only to look round the town for three hours. Why? Are you expecting a teacher?’
‘More than anything we want teachers,’ they told me, each butting in on the other as they talked in the way I remembered the Somalis talked when they were interested, hastily, urgently. ‘More than anything we want teachers of English.’ So far the conversation had been in Italian, none of them knowing Swahili. ‘Could I speak English?’ When I said yes, they beamed and began to try out their English, and as usual with the Somalis, without fear of hesitation, vying with each other for the longest sentences.
‘We want many school here to teach English,’ they told me. ‘It is the language everybody in the world must know now. We want teachers to come here, plenty of them.’ Then they began to praise a certain Englishman who was now in Mogadishu teaching English. They could not praise this man highly enough, telling me that he even made jokes and imitated various ways in which English is spoken throughout the world. He was a wonderful teacher and they only wished they could find more like him to come to Mogadishu and help the Somalis get ready for the world of today. As the fever of their pleasure in this talk got hold of them they came and sat round me and I saw that particular and likeable Somali urgency again, that thrill in self expression, that longing for every kind of information which could keep the talk flowing fast and bright. They began to try out long words, eyebrows raised for my nod of assent and understanding of their pronunciation, then racing on with the sentence. Sometimes one of them would sit back and sigh, with pleasure in this success in experiment, meanwhile thinking of new sentences containing new and longer words. They were all from the Mijertein, and when I told them I knew the Mijertein they were delighted, and hurled questions. Did I know the Daror, the Nogal, Alula, the Haud? I did? Tell us all about your time in the Mijertein, they said.
The pride the Mijertein tribes take in being of the Mijertein, the most barren of all the Somali deserts, is as if that territory was the garden of Eden itself. They always speak of it as a place in which you can get anything and everything, in which a man wants for nothing, in which men know the meaning of plenty.
Down south, on the Juba where the trees drip bananas, lemons, pawpaw, where the thick soil pushes up every kind of vegetable, where the small, fat, black men can eat chicken, eggs, beef and have never been without a drink of water, I have heard Mijertein askaris sneering at all this, and telling the local ‘slave people’ that until they see the Mijertein they do not know what living is.
And in the Mijertein you would have to kneel down and pray to a single blade of grass to come up, and cry on it every day to help it live.
I could not help laughing as these young Mijertein tribesmen in police uniform spoke of their wilderness with exaltation, and yet I was touched again at this loyalty. What these Mijertein people meant was that up there you got the finest camel milk, and for the nomads there is no greater praise of a howling wilderness than that.
The policeman stood up and shook hands with me as I got ready to land from the barge, all smiling. I asked them how they liked running their own country now.
‘We are proud,’ they told me. ‘We have a lot to learn and a lot to do, but we will do it. We need help and friends. Tell everyone you meet outside our country that we want their help and friendship. Tell teachers to come and teach us.’
There cannot be anywhere in Africa such ready and hungry people, with such swift minds, waiting to read their way out of a thousand years of dependence on the camel, and the spears that had ensured its possession.
Chapter 10
THE FIRST THING I SAW when I stepped on to the jetty from the barge was a camel, scrawny, evil tempered, stupid, faithful, a load on his back, being led by a small boy into the massing whirl of cars and motor-cycle taxis beyond the wicker gate at the end of the dock. I tried to feel some kind of affection for the camel, to forgive them all through this one behind the small boy, but it was no use. I hated them still. I
remembered how one of them had broken out of that long stumbling line in the heat one day, Jaysee’s gramophone and records tied on its back (which I had promised so faithfully to transport up into the Shag for him from Mogadishu) and then how the camel had, in one of those mad furies which overtook them, rolled on its back until it had smashed all of that precious load. I had raced after it, the askaris streaming behind me, a pistol in my hand and an overpowering desire on me to murder it, to lecture it first, and then shoot it. Not quite as stupid as the horse, the camel is all right to work with once you have got into his rhythm, his sauntering stumble, but the hardest work I know is trying to walk at the same slow pace as the camels in thick sand, after the long, difficult ritual of the loading, the camels kneeling there and bawling while the grain is poured out for them on the sacks laid out reverently in front of them by the askaris. ‘Toog, toog, wario,’ the askaris used to croon to them.
It was cheering to know, standing on that jetty, and smelling camels again, that one would never work with them anymore.
There was a Somali waiting for me on the jetty, and his anxiety to take me over, to guide me, made me feel that he must be a police agent, for I had never seen a Somali dragoman before in Mogadishu.
Warriors: Life and death among the Somalis Page 5
