by Mary Morris
“If we hurry, we may,” said Awwad doubtfully.
We still had, I found, two valley ravines to dip into—Mlah, and Sobale, our wadi of the morning. They were delightful places, with the charm of things which live for their own pleasure, serving no utilitarian end of man, like the loveliness of childhood, free of conscious purpose. These cradles of valleys had the same innocent happiness about them. The waters had scooped them with a rush and left visible traces as one scrambled from ledge to ledge, undercut by the violence of the past. Little tufts of wild palm grow there and a great variety of shrubby trees, that keep their branches low, not to emerge into the wild currents that sweep the jōl above. You go steeply down and steeply up the other side, and the slow-footed camels take their time; and, in a blank space of the map, the existence of these ravines makes it impossible to guess even roughly how long a journey will take across the jōl. I was finding it just double what I had been told.
Awwad was anxious now, and tried to urge Robin and the unresponsive Ahmed with unavailing words: lengthening blue shadows began to lie to the east of every mound. In the emptiness a curly-headed lad from ’Azzan had appeared, flapping in sandals made of a ragbag of leathers stitched anyhow. I have read somewhere that the people of ’Azzan wear these to brush away scorpions from their path. However this may be, the young lad adopted us and took matters in hand. He trotted singing behind Robin, with a sharp stick in his hand: Robin understood. Awwad and a black cousin of his, with guns upon their shoulders, joined the chorus. Robin trotted, while his master sloped behind us begging the company in vain “to have a heart.” I laughed; even Robin enjoyed it; the jōl now was flat as a landing-ground with limestone snouts pushed here and there along it. The sun dipped and blackish clouds sailed from the east with spots of rain. At this moment we came to an edge and saw Romance in the varied light of evening— a little castle, walled and towered, in an island of ’ilb trees gilded by slanting shafts of sun. The long barrow of Awwad’s Himyaritic ruins was there beside it; two more towers among trees on the left; and on the southern horizon, improbable as some medieval background, a cluster of five towers, the fortress of Hajlein.
As we climbed down the blocks of limestone Awwad’s baby son toddled in the path to meet us: his father picked him up on to the shoulder that had no gun. The little family of the castle were at the gate. The place looked poor and bare when we drew near, but strong, built of small jōl stones laid flat and stuck with mud, the central keep with battlements crowned with brush wood, and brushwood also round the outer wall: inside it were pens built with low roofs for cattle.
The only two women of the place, the precarious bride and a sister, took me by the hand up shallow slabs of steps to the guest room in the keep—a good room, old and black and low. Its door was carved, its small windows one foot by eight inches shuttered with thick blocks, the ceiling sustained by a tree-trunk column. The men hung their guns and cartridge belts on pegs about the walls. Two palm mats and two black strips of goatwool were all the furnishing, except a hearth for coffee dug in the earthen floor. Here a bedu soon sat down with husks in a mortar, and beat with an alabaster pestle picked from the ruins nearby. His hair, with a fillet bound around his brow, flared out above his shoulders, his big nose and thin mouth made him look like some medieval page. The smoke from the fire curled through a hole in the ceiling. The restless wind, pushing against the tower, as the darkness fell showed the wisdom of small windows. When the camels were tethered and my bed made in one corner, our party gathered here—’Ali and Qasim, three camel-men, Ahmed and the lad from ’Azzan with the men and women of the fort in a circle. They talked, and spat at intervals on to the middle of the floor. On the outer edge Awwad’s small son rolled about playing with a toy—a tin bucket with Charlie Chaplin stamped in gaudy colours. Awwad did not know where it came from. “Is it a man or a woman?” he asked, “or what is it?” Apart from my bed, it was the only touch of Europe in our sight.
* Jōl: barren plateau in the Arabian peninsula.
REBECCA WEST
(1892–1983)
When Rebecca West (Cicily Isabel Fairfield) traveled with her husband, H. M. Andrews, through the provinces of Yugoslavia between the two World Wars, she encountered and wrote about ethnic fears and prejudices among the people she met. “There was imminent the Balkan feeling of a shiftless yet just doom,” she wrote in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, a meditation on the destiny of modern man, with a haunting relevance to events today. An insightful, sensitive observer of the Balkan people (“their choice of destiny might be made on grounds so private as to mean nothing to any other human being”), West was especially equipped to write of the dark, inscrutable side of these peoples, who are now engaged in brutal civil war.
The following excerpt is about Mostar, a Muslim town bombed extensively during the current war. West was a writer of novels, histories and criticism, but she received her greatest praise for Black Lamb. She was educated in Edinburgh and died in England.
from BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON
MOSTAR
I was so wearied by the rushing rain that I slept, and woke again in a different country. Our road ran on a ledge between the bare mountains and one of these strange valleys that are wide lakes in winter and dry land by summer. This, in spite of the rain, was draining itself, and trees and hedges floated in a mirror patterned with their own reflections and the rich earth that was starting to thrust itself up through the thinning waters. We came past a great tobacco factory to Metkovitch, a river port like any other, with sea-going ships lying up by the quay, looking too big for their quarters. There we stopped in the hotel for some coffee, and for the first time recognized the fly-blown, dusty, waking dream atmosphere that lingers in Balkan districts where the Turk has been. In this hotel I found the most westward Turkish lavatory I have ever encountered: a hole in the floor with a depression for a foot on each side of it, and a tap that sends water flowing along a groove laid with some relevance to the business in hand. It is efficient enough in a cleanly kept household, but it is disconcerting in its proof that there is more than one way of doing absolutely anything.
Later we travelled in a rough Scottish country, where people walked under crashing rain, unbowed by it. They wore raincoats of black fleeces or thickly woven grasses, a kind of thatch; and some had great hoods of stiffened white linen, that made a narrow alcove for the head and a broad alcove for the shoulders and hung nearly to the waist. These last looked like inquisitors robed for solemn mischief, but none of them were dour. The women and girls were full of laughter, and ran from the mud our wheels threw at them as if it were a game. Moslem graveyards began to preach their lesson of indifference to the dead. The stone stumps, carved with a turban if the commemorated corpse were male and left plain if it were female, stood crooked among the long grasses and the wild irises, which the rain was beating flat. Under a broken Roman arch crouched an old shepherd, shielding his turban, which, being yellow, showed that he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca.
The rain lifted, we were following a broad upland valley and looked over pastures and a broad river at the elegance of a small Moslem town, with its lovely minarets. It was exquisitely planned, its towers refined by the influence of the minarets, its red-roofed houses lying among the plumy foliage of their walled gardens; it was in no way remarkable, there are thousands of Moslem towns like it. We left it unvisited, and went on past an aerodrome with its hangars, past the barracks and the tobacco factory that stand in the outskirts of any considerable Herze-govinian town, and were in Mostar, “Stari most,” old bridge. Presently we were looking at that bridge, which is falsely said to have been built by the Emperor Trajan, but is of medieval Turkish workmanship. It is one of the most beautiful bridges in the world. A slender arch lies between two round towers, its parapet bent in a shallow angle in the centre.
To look at it is good; to stand on it is as good. Over the grey-green river swoop hundreds of swallows, and on the banks mosques and white houses stand among glades of tre
es and bushes. The swallows and the glades know nothing of the mosques and houses. The river might be running through unvisited hills instead of a town of twenty thousand inhabitants. There was not an old tin, not a rag of paper to be seen. This was certainly not due to any scavenging service. In the Balkans people are more apt to sit down and look at disorder and discuss its essence than clear it away. It was more likely to be due to the Moslem’s love of nature, especially of running water, which would prevent him from desecrating the scene with litter in the first place. I marvelled, as I had done on my previous visit to Yugoslavia, at the contradictory attitudes of the Moslem to such matters.
They build beautiful towns and villages. I know of no country, not even Italy or Spain, where each house in a group will be placed with such invariable taste and such pleasing results for those who look at it and out of it alike. The architectural formula of a Turkish house, with its reticent defensive lower story and its projecting upper story, full of windows, is simple and sensible; and I know nothing neater than its interior. Western housewifery is sluttish compared to that aseptic order. Yet Mostar, till the Austrians came, had no hotels except bug-ridden shacks, and it was hard to get the Moslems to abandon their habit of casually slaughtering animals in the streets. Even now the average Moslem shop is the antithesis of the Moslem house. It is a shabby little hole, often with a glassless front, which must be cold in winter and stifling in summer, and its goods are arranged in fantastic disorder. In a stationer’s shop the picture-postcards will have been left in the sun till they are faded, and the exercise-books will be foxed. In a textile shop the bolts of stuff will be stacked in untidy tottering heaps. The only exceptions are the bakeries, where the flat loaves and buns are arranged in charming geometric patterns, and the greengroceries, where there is manifest pleasure in the colour and shape of the vegetables. There are, indeed, evident in all Moslem life co-equal strains of extreme fastidiousness and extreme slovenliness, and it is impossible to predict where or why the one or the other is going to take control. A mosque is the most spick-and-span place of worship in the world; but any attempt to postulate a connexion in the Moslem mind between holiness and cleanliness will break down at the first sight of a mosque which for some reason, perhaps a shifting of the population, is no longer used. It will have been allowed to fall into a squalor that recalls the worst Western slums.
The huge café of our hotel covered the whole ground floor, and had two billiard-tables in the centre. For dinner we ate the trout of the place, which is famous and, we thought, horrible, like fish crossed with slug. But we ate also a superb cheese soufflé. The meal was served with incredible delay, and between the courses we read the newspapers and looked about us. Moslems came in from the streets, exotic in fezes. They hung them up and went to their seats and played draughts and drank black coffee, no longer Moslems, merely men. Young officers moved rhythmically through the beams of white light that poured down upon the acid green of the billiard-tables, and the billiard balls gave out their sound of stoical shock. There was immanent the Balkan feeling of a shiftless yet just doom. It seemed possible that someone might come into the room, perhaps a man who would hang up his fez, and explain, in terms just comprehensible enough to make it certain they were not nonsensical, that all the people at the tables must stay there until the two officers who were playing billiards at that moment had played a million games, and that by the result their eternal fates would be decided; and that this would be accepted, and people would sit there quietly waiting and reading the newspapers.
Here in Mostar the really adventurous part of our journey began. Something that had been present in every breath we drew in Dalmatia and Croatia was absent when we woke the next morning, and dressed and breakfasted with our eyes on the market square beneath our windows. It might be identified as conformity in custom as well as creed. The people we were watching adhered with intensity to certain faiths. They were Moslem, they were Catholic, they were Orthodox. About marriage, about birth, about death, they practised immutable rites, determined by these faiths and the older faiths that lie behind them. But in all other ways they were highly individualistic. Their goings and comings, their eating and drinking, were timed by no communal programme, their choice of destiny might be made on grounds so private as to mean nothing to any other human being. Such an attitude showed itself in the crowds below us in a free motion that is the very antithesis in spirit to what we see when we watch people walking to their work over London Bridge in the morning. It showed too in their faces, which always spoke of thought that was never fully shared, of scepticism and satire and lyricism that felt no deed to have been yet finally judged.
It showed itself also in their dress. Neither here nor anywhere else do single individuals dare while sane to dress entirely according to their whim; and the Moslems keep to their veils and fezes with a special punctilio, because these mark them out as participants in the former grandeur of the Ottoman Empire. But here the smallest village or, in a town, a suburb or even a street, can have its own fantasy of costume. The men go in less for variations than the women, for in the classic costume of these parts the male has found as becoming a dress as has ever been devised for him. The stiff braided jacket has a look of ceremony, of mastership about it, and the trousers give the outer line of the leg from the hip to the ankle and make it seem longer by bagging between the thighs. But the women presented us with uncountable variations. We liked two women, grey-haired and harsh-featured, who looked like Margate landladies discussing the ingenious austerities of the day’s menus, until a boy wheeled away a barrow and we could see their long full serge bloomers. Other women wore tight bodices and jackets and baggy trousers, each garment made of a different sort of printed material, such as we use for country curtains; but though these wore the Moslem trousers they were Christians, for their faces were unveiled, and they covered their heads loosely with what we know as Paisley shawls. The Moslems slid about black-muzzled, wearing their cotton wrappers, which were usually striped in coldish colours, greys and slate-blues and substanceless reds, except for those who wore that costume one sees in Mostar and not again when one leaves it, unless one’s journey takes one very far: to Turkestan, I have heard it said.
The costume is as stirring to the imagination and as idiotically unpractical as any I have ever seen. The great point in favour of Moslem dress in its Yugoslavian form is a convenience in hot weather, which in these parts is a serious consideration, for even in Mostar the summer is an affliction. The cotton overall keeps the hair and the clothes clean, and the veil protects the face from dust and insects and sunburn. This is not true of the heavy horse-hair veil worn in the real East, where the accumulation of dust is turned by the breath of the mouth and nostrils to actual mud, but the light black veil of voile or cotton does no harm and a great deal of good. There is, however, no such justification for the traditional Mostar costume. It consists of a man’s coat, made in black or blue cloth, immensely too large for the woman who is going to wear it. It is cut with a stiff military collar, very high, perhaps as much as eight or ten inches, which is embroidered inside, not outside, with gold thread. It is never worn as a coat. The woman slips it over her, drawing the shoulders above her head, so that the stiff collar falls forward and projects in front of her like a visor, and she can hide her face if she clutches the edges together, so that she need not wear a veil. The sleeves are allowed to hang loose or are stitched together at the back, but nothing can be done with the skirts, which drag on the ground.
We asked the people in the hotel and several tradesmen in Mostar, and a number of Moslems in other places, whether there was any local legend which accounted for this extraordinary garment, for it seemed it must commemorate some occasion when a woman had disguised herself in her husband’s coat in order to perform an act of valour. But if there was ever such a legend it has been forgotten. The costume may have some value as a badge of class, for it could be worn with comfort and cleanliness only by a woman of the leisured classes, who need not
go out save when she chooses. It would be most inconvenient in wet weather or on rough ground, and a woman could not carry or lead a child while she was wearing it. But perhaps it survives chiefly by its poetic value, by its symbolic references to the sex it clothes.
It has the power of a dream or a work of art that has several interpretations, that explains several aspects of reality at one and the same time. First and most obviously the little woman in the tall man’s coat presents the contrast between man and woman at its most simple and playful, as the contrast between heaviness and lightness, between coarseness and fragility, between that which breaks and that which might be broken but is instead preserved and cherished, for the sake of tenderness and joy. It makes man and woman seem as father and daughter. The little girl is wearing her father’s coat and laughs at him from the depths of it, she pretends that it is a magic garment and that she is invisible and can hide from him. Its dimensions favour this fantasy. The Herzegovinian is tall, but not such a giant as this coat was made to fit. I am barely five-foot-four and my husband is close on six-foot-two, but when I tried on his overcoat in this fashion the hem was well above my ankles; yet the Mostar garment trails about its wearer’s feet.
But it presents the female also in a more sinister light: as the male sees her when he fears her. The dark visor gives her the beak of a bird of prey, and the flash of gold thread within the collar suggests private and ensnaring delights. A torch is put to those fires of the imagination which need for fuel dreams of pain, annihilation, and pleasure. The austere yet lubricious beauty of the coat gives a special and terrifying emphasis to the meaning inherent in all these Eastern styles of costume which hide women’s faces. That meaning does not relate directly to sexual matters; it springs from a state of mind more impersonal, even metaphysical, though primitive enough to be sickening. The veil perpetuates and renews a moment when man, being in league with death, like all creatures that must die, hated his kind for living and transmitting life, and hated woman more than himself, because she is the instrument of birth, and put his hand to the floor to find filth and plastered it on her face, to affront the breath of life in her nostrils. There is about all veiled women a sense of melancholy quite incommensurate with the inconveniences they themselves may be suffering. Even when, like the women of Mostar, they seem to be hastening towards secret and luxurious and humorous love-making, they hint of a general surrender to mortality, a futile attempt of the living to renounce life.
