by Bryher;
The first stage of our journey was by train to Salerno where we spent the night. I read about its university in the guidebook but was too young to realize that it was the place where something of Arab medicine and science was absorbed by the West during the early Middle Ages, although the name stayed in my consciousness; it had a flavor of its own like a small, wild grape. The following day we took the train once more to a station in the marshes and then drove to our destination in a fly-spotted, broken carriage, I saw the white oxen first with squeals of joy but the only human inhabitant was the custodian who was shaking with malaria.
We sat on the temple steps to eat our lunch and I was scolded for trying to catch a lizard, “It might be a snake.” My father took photographs and in one of them I am standing beside a column, plump and happy, with the usual narrow fur tippet tied round my neck in spite of the heat. Paestum is far more interesting today. The museum is full of beautiful statues, the mosquitoes have been destroyed, the roads uncovered under the amazing walls but I shall never forget that first impression of loneliness and melancholy. It was like some wretched corner of a Troy half buried in sand.
The South. Something new happened every moment that I was there. How could I go through such experiences unmarked?
THREE
Nobody ever gets over their first camel.
When we landed at Alexandria after a voyage from Naples in December, 1903, I had been extremely seasick for three days; most humiliating behavior for a would-be cabin boy. I refused lunch, I did not even want the large, Jaffa orange that somebody had given me, everything swayed from the motion of the ship. Suddenly from the window of the train that was taking us to Cairo, I saw a camel and its foal. They were strolling with great dignity along the road, the baby’s flanks were a mass of curly wool and I remembered having read somewhere that they could scratch their ears with their hind legs. I recovered at once, I knew that I was going to enjoy myself and that whatever happened, nobody could take away the fact that I had seen a camel in its native land.
There is nothing left now of that Cairo of almost sixty years ago. Europeans were rare; there were a few judges at the law courts, some merchants and a handful of tourists come to winter in certain sunshine in spite of the cholera that had raged earlier that season and of which they were probably unaware. Otherwise it was a city of the Khalifate, crowded, noisy, magnificent with color. From waking until the moment when I was dragged protestingly to bed, I stood on the terrace and watched the crowds, except for those glorious moments when we mingled among them ourselves. The men wore robes, either of white or strange, soft colors, clove, the red of a nectarine if a ripe fruit were cut in half and less amber than the shade of the Persian tea that I saw them sipping from glasses whenever we went into the bazaars. The water carriers in the indigo cotton of the poorer people pushed between smart carriages. I was fascinated by their howl (did it mean water?) and by their bloated, goatskin bags. I almost fell over the parapet whenever the syces raced by, their short, scarlet waistcoats embroidered with gold gave an impression of butterflies. Europeans told us that these boys died young; it was the dust, the exertion of running in front of the swiftly moving dog carts and then having to wait after sunset in the sudden cold for their masters.
The city itself was a gigantic maze. Streets were here today, tomorrow even Ali, our dragoman and my firm friend, could not find them. The air was thick with scent, roses and jasmine, or with a heavy mixture of castor oil, straw and camel dung. To my delight, one of these grave animals, as her carriage squeezed by, tried to snatch a floppy leghorn hat from a frightened tourist’s head. We often had to wait while strings of donkeys turned down alleys hardly wide enough for a dog, the bright green fodder of their loads bursting out of inadequate sacks. There were scribes with brass inkpots sitting majestically on stools outside the coffee booths in the manner of their predecessors during the days of imperial Rome. We drove along the narrow streets of the opium smokers, I did not find the odor of hashish unpleasant as most people do but the curled-up figures lying on scraps of carpet did not impress me as being happy. (Europeans may have good intentions but they are not always wise. They stopped the drug but doctors have told me since that far more harm was done physically by the substitutes that people found than by the occasional pipe that had been all that the majority of smokers could afford.) I preferred the storytellers. You could see that the audience was living inside the tale, it was one, Ali said, from The Thousand Nights and a Night, not only from the expression on their faces but from the slow way their sleeves moved as if in trance whenever they reached out to take a glass of sherbet or water with a ring of lemon in it from the polished trays that small boys, exactly my own height, carried round to the absorbed and staring figures.
It was still the world of the camel and the horse. I cannot remember seeing a motorcar either then or during a second visit the following winter. We spoke of caravans in no romantic way but as somebody now might book a ticket at an airport. How often we drove slowly down the Street of the Saddlers! It was a traveller’s oasis, the place where he could buy anything from the soft, red, beautifully ornamented saddles used at ceremonies to the tough, leather bridles for the riding camels. That man with a black fur cap had ridden here with his goods from beyond Teheran. The trader there, Ali explained, no, not the man in white but the merchant who was talking to him in the brown striped burnous, he was from Damascus. There was a Negro with a great basket from Nubia or even Khartoum. This bazaar was both the goal of the journey and the point of return towards the home that many would never reach. We like to read of the tents of the Bedouin but let a man’s donkey go lame, let him not have enough to pay his share of the tribute money and he would add his bones to the whitening heaps in the desert once the tribesmen and the jackals had finished their work. There were the additional perils of influenza, smallpox and plague in the crowded inns as well as the constant risk of robbery; an engine may not be so picturesque but people do not realize what they owe to the aeroplane and the car.
The shops that we visited were still Oriental palaces instead of the tourist stores full of goods from Birmingham that they became a few years afterwards. Everything was leisurely. We talked. Presently a single carpet was unrolled, its red as soft as when Persian hands had knotted the colors a century before. I was not interested in rugs, I preferred the man who was putting a puzzle together from cubes of ivory and blocks of ebony wood. He sat in a corner while a group of small boys round him polished bowls and whispered to each other in brief but eager grunts.
How kind the merchants were to me; perhaps it was because I asked them the Arabic name of every object that I could reach. They clapped their hands, a cushion was brought, it was much easier for me to sit cross-legged in front of them than on a chair and they taught me to bargain in the Eastern manner which was, as it should be, an art. We spoke an English patterned upon Arabic sentences and full of foreign words. First I must not want the article for which I bid. To desire it was to lose it. This was rather too difficult for a nine-year-old, so I compromised by choosing something for a friend! I picked up a little bowl and asked the price, the classic beginning. Hearing the sum, I laughed incredulously, a guinea, why, it wasn’t worth two shillings. A servant brought in a tray full of tiny cups of thick coffee that must be sipped but never drunk. I fingered the bowl again as if by chance and offered the equivalent of three shillings in piasters. They taught me to feel with my mind across to their own, neither moving my face nor showing any interest until the touch of thought to thought was as actual as the turquoise hilt of the sword that I hoped my father would buy. It is a common trick in the East and easy to learn with the unstiffened mind of the child.
After a time, the merchant would clap his hands again and a servant would bring in dishes of Turkish delight in all the colors of a dragoman’s robe. I knew that I must take one piece only and make it last. Had I tried mint tea? I should have a glass some other afternoon. That matchlock there, it was from Afghanistan, how much did I
think that it was worth? I touched the bowl idly, as a favor to me they would sell the little toy for ten shillings. I smiled, and they gave me silk to hold, so thick and white that it stood up by itself, or explained that carpets hung on walls, only ignorant Europeans spread them on the floor and imagine, trod on them, without even taking off their dirty shoes! I took another sip of coffee, stared at a prayer rug and waited. There was one special moment when, without its seeming to matter, my lips must offer the piaster more.
Sometimes I won, sometimes I lost. They scolded me, shaking their heads and not letting me have the bowl if I had been impatient or had let the right instant pass. Occasionally they praised me and added a present, telling my father that he ought to leave me with them for a time to learn their art. Oh, I thought, what a splendid idea! I was perfectly willing to remain because what was England but a tiresome place where I was usually cold, added sums up wrongly on a sticky slate or went for long, monotonous walks? Here I had words to taste that were as strange as any Turkish sweetmeat, Aleppo, Beirut, Isfahan, All the tongues of the Levant rang in my ears and I fell in love forever with Arabian calligraphy, with the beautiful letters shaped like crescent moons, scimitars or flat-bottomed boats. I should even like arithmetic if I had an abacus with colored beads like that scribe in the alcove. How much they gave and taught me, treating me as one of themselves, in that Cairo that was so near to Napoleon’s Egypt, and so far, so very far, from today.
Something happens to a Western child partly brought up in the East. It is not a matter of languages, they are forgotten, alas, within weeks of a return to Europe although it is said that there are about a thousand main words and as many more derivatives of Arabian origin in English. It is rather that such children understand the people around them instinctively, with emotion instead of reason. They are not worried about sanitation or any Western ethics; the superstitions, stories, noises and colors belong to their own level of development and are accepted with joy. They have their privileges; these come neither from wealth nor caste but because they are able to read and write and are assimilated therefore into an adult world instead of into some arbitrary age group. The tale a sheikh muttered to his donkey boy, the gossip round the well, is theirs within a matter of moments and completely according to their choice they may, or may not, pass the information on to their parents. The chasm between East and West is greater today than it was in 1900 because, strange as it may appear, democracy widens the gap, it cannot close it. The West has reached a high degree of literacy. It refuses to understand that millions not only do not want education but are actually afraid of it. Eastern rulers are the twins of the barons of King Stephen’s time. They exult in power, they delight in ostentation and boasting while their followers live under the yoke of a fanatical puritanism that often goads them into senseless massacres. Once the English grasped this difference but the Americans are so sure of the superiority of their own ethical system that they actually believe that if they could impose it upon Asia all discords would vanish! Of course there are intellectual and highly trained minorities but these are few. Development has to come from within the Orient itself and if we can help, it is by providing more sewers and fewer books. It is useless offering chunks of our alien civilization to the cruel, shifting, mighty and barbaric East.
We observers were few in number but we formed a special class within the human race (a subclass if you will), our age limits were between three and eleven, our purpose, to be messengers between two continents that had otherwise few points of contact. We were more than interpreters; two personalities, the native and the secret agent, mingled in our blood, we watched events around us but made reports entirely to ourselves. Perhaps our force came from motion? If in maturity we identify ourselves with some foreign land it is because of a variety of psychological factors. We children never had to choose. We skipped between our countries as if we were at play. Our judgments were sometimes faulty but we grasped, more often than not, facts that officials could not see because of their preconceived opinions. They had policies while we had love. This is possibly not so valuable as is sometimes supposed but it may last longer than oil.
My first religious experiences came in Egypt. I had been well grounded in Bible stories and the inevitable Line upon Line and was often taken to the Protestant church near our home. We had gone to some services, on special occasions, in the Italian cathedrals. Both had seemed remote, a part of the particular grown-up world to which I never wanted to belong where “you must do as you are told” was all that seemed to matter. Islam was different. I understood a mosque at once. Perhaps it is worthwhile trying to analyze the impact of Moslem thought upon a European child because its power is growing rapidly in Africa and I was at the uncomplicated level then of, say, the river tribesmen today. First of all, every man prayed for himself under an open sky. There were no pulpits, no sermons, no confusion. It was natural to ask for water in the desert, to give alms to the beggar and protect the stranger. Even Ramadan was not like a European fast. We were free to eat what we wanted as long as there was not light enough “to discern a white thread from a black” in the sky, afterwards what was it but a test of endurance? “Trust God and tie thy camel” were the words of a leader, adventurous and practical. Phrases have their original meaning for children; they are not yet soaked with cynicism or association. I thought that “In the Name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate” was the most beautiful invocation that I had ever heard. (Yes, I am aware that the pedants prefer another translation but I cling to the phrase that I then knew.) There is no quality greater than compassion even if I chose it first because of a personal hope that if I were particularly naughty I should not be sent to bed without my supper. Above all, there was no insistence upon mildness or contemplation. Islam asked direct tasks from its simple followers and was rewarded with fanatical devotion.
Why were we allowed to attend a ceremony of the “dancing dervishes”? Some earlier travelers had reported seeing them but this was the last year, they told us afterwards, that non-Moslems were allowed to watch the genuine rite.
We were perhaps half a dozen Europeans, placed behind a rope at the side of a huge, dimly lit chamber. I did not need Ali’s whisper to recognize a Descendant of the Prophet, I had seen his green turban. The leader chanted the Koran, his companions occasionally answered him. They had been praying and fasting for twenty-four hours. The dervishes stood in a circle in fluted robes, not unlike some elongated Albanian kilt. I thought of Ramadan and wished that I could keep the fast to prove myself as tenacious as an Arab. Quietly, as if the first white sail were fluttering from a mast, a dervish began to turn, so slowly that he hardly seemed to move. Another robe trembled, then a third until all were following in a grave circle. Something began to whirl in my own mind, I was not myself any longer, in a moment I might reach a state beyond my senses. It was in no way incomprehensible, I was on a journey and very, very happy but I was neither where my body was standing nor quite in the air.
Before the climax of the ceremony somebody took my hand and we, as unbelievers, stole quietly away.
My mother admired Sir Richard Burton and lent me the biography that had been written by his wife. One of my aunts had met him at dinner, “a very disagreeable man but handsome in an ugly sort of way” (precisely what an aunt would observe!), and it was natural that Burton should become the hero of my childhood. He had been brought up abroad just as I had been, he was a swordsman and I had begun to fence, he defied authority with joy and my greatest wish had been granted to him, really to pass at will from one nationality to the other. Had he not transcribed sixty words of monkey language and teased a solemn colleague with faked antiques? I plunged as deeply as I could into the Arab world through books, his Medinah and Meccah became a carefully studied manual of conduct while I dreamed of an Arab pony and sleeping out in a tent. I missed discovering Lady Hester Stanhope until I was grown-up but I grabbed my father’s copies of the aloe-bitter novels of that great Englishman, Marmaduke Pickthall, althoug
h they really were above my head. I still remember some scenes from them vividly but in general I could not understand what they were about. It was only when I was older and read the strange story of his life that I appreciated his gifts. Why has he been forgotten, especially at this time when people are so interested in the East?
At ten I preferred A Short History of the Saracens by Ameer Ali. I soon knew the Khalifs, the differences between the Sunni and the Shi’a or the story of the Assassins almost by heart but of all things in the world it was a chapter on taxation that filled me with enthusiasm. I tormented my parents asking how much this or the other thing cost. They did not know that I contemplated taking over an island or an oasis and that I was worried about the expenses of soldiers and roads. Even today although I grumble about paying more than anyone around me, the mechanics of taxation and the science of “costing” fascinate me, in spite of a lack of technical knowledge. People say that I absorbed my interest in finance at home. This may have been true at the start but it also developed from my historical reading. The cost of moving an army excited me almost as much as its battles. I was, at the time, precisely ten years old.
The East is childhood or age; it is never the middle years of planning and anxiety. It can be unspeakably cruel. I knew a man whose friends had had the head of a relative tossed inside their door. Study the Arab tales; the unattainable jewel is neither wisdom nor beauty but something beyond their experience and that is, justice. And justice is also the passionate wish of the always Kafka-like child, adrift in an incomprehensible world. The Orient has had to flatter and bribe during the thousand years that it has taken the North to batter out its concepts of equality and freedom. They may not meet; yet there has always been a close relationship between England and the East. The form of a Mycenaean dagger was carved at Stonehenge. King Alfred received a gift of drugs from the Orient, the contact continued during the Crusades and from the end of the eighteenth century to 1939 it would have been difficult to find a town in Britain that had not sent some citizen out to India. Many never returned but those who came back brought new words and spices or, in another sphere, equally unfamiliar philosophical influences. We have so thoroughly assimilated those elements that they have become part of our birthright just as we have left the Orient with a memory of “English justice” and officials who were isolated from family feuds and could not be bribed with gifts.
