Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  Thesiger’s canoe was a tarada or war canoe, an aristocrat among the craft of the marshes, and so expensive that few other than sheikhs could afford one. Thirty-six feet long but less than three and a half feet at its widest beam, the tarada’s slender curving prow rose five feet from the water, enabling the craft to force a passage through the thickest reed beds, while its shallow draft enabled it to float in ankle-deep water. Only in the deeper water of the open lakes, where storms could brew up out of nowhere, was the canoe less than master of its element, for a sudden gust could send it to the bottom like a stone (a characteristic which gave Gavin some food for thought, for though he had spent much of his life on water he could not swim a stroke).

  Four crewmen – Amara, Sabeti, Hassan and Kathia, all marshmen known to Thesiger – were ready and waiting at the water’s edge. The tarada was loaded, and on a morning as cool and grey as an English autumn the two Britons stepped on board. The canoe turned out into the Euphrates, left the main river at Huwair and headed north for Ramla, the last of the dry-land villages before the great marsh. The journey of exploration through an almost unknown region and among an almost unknown people had begun.

  It was cold and blowing hard when they left Huwair – no colour anywhere, and the grey sky, unbroken by a single hill or tree, as immense as a sky viewed from a small boat far out at sea. ‘It was in some way a terrible landscape,’ Gavin wrote of that tentative first encounter, ‘utterly without human sympathy, more desolate and inimical than the sea itself … Here in the limitless stubble of pale bulrush one felt that no sheltering ship could sail nor human foot walk, and there seemed no refuge for any creature whose blood was warm.’ Ahead, very far away, he could see a few dark specks that marked the last of the palm groves before the edge of the permanent marsh. ‘The earth seemed flat as a plate, and stretched away for ever before us, vast, desolate and pallid.’ The wind tore a chorus of strange sounds from the sedge stems – ‘groans and whistles, bleats and croaks, and loud crude sounds of flatulence; if the devils of Hieronymus Bosch could speak from the canvas this would be the babel of their tongues, these the derisive notes of the trumpets at their backsides.’

  Gavin had been given the position of honour in the stern of the tarada. Though this provided him with the maximum leg-room, the ordeal of sitting cross-legged for hours on end left his lower limbs agonised, and every bone and muscle from the waist down ached and creaked. The relief of getting out of the canoe at a halt was usually short-lived, for within a minute or two he would be required to sit cross-legged again on the floor of some Marsh Arab’s reed house, and the agony would begin all over again. It was Thesiger’s immutable rule always to travel like a native of the country, and the party carried none of the usual paraphernalia of an expedition – no tents, camp beds, camping-gas cookers, tinned food or the like, nothing but their guns, cameras and minimal personal kit. For food and shelter they relied entirely on the hospitality of the Marsh Arabs and such edible fowl as they could shoot for themselves from time to time.

  Arab hospitality to strangers is obligatory and unstinted, but it is bound up with a system of etiquette and a code of behaviour which the stranger neglects at his peril. Part of Gavin’s painful process of adaptation to a primitive ambience and an alien society was to come to terms with this code, from the elementary rules (never use the left hand, which is considered unclean, for anything but unclean things, always enter a house barefoot, always place your right hand over your heart after shaking hands, belch after eating by all means but never – ever – break wind) to the elaborate rituals of Arab greetings and the free-for-all of the communal Arab meal. For Gavin, dining among the Marsh Arabs was a tricky business. The pièce de résistance was invariably a monolithic mound of rice surrounded by bowls of gravy, mutton, chicken and sometimes a whole boiled sheep’s head, and the only utensil was one’s right hand. Gavin found that sitting cross-legged put the communal rice pile a disconcertingly long way off, and by the time his hand had reached his mouth there was very little rice attached to it, so he had to resort to cheating, pouring gravy over the rice to turn it into an adhesive ball that could not disintegrate and fall to the ground.

  After the communal dinner came the long communal conversation – a double penance, for Gavin was obliged to remain cross-legged, while his ignorance of Arabic prevented him from joining in the conversation, a source of accumulating frustration throughout the journey. Nights were spent in spartan discomfort on the floor of the reed house with all valuables distributed beneath and about the body – for the Ma’dan are notorious thieves – while guard dogs howled and the wind scurried through the gaps in the reed walls. Mornings were occupied with Thesiger’s surgery for the sick and ailing – his return for the hospitality of the night before.

  Gavin was full of admiration for Thesiger’s competence. The marshmen were riddled with diseases – dysentery, yaws, ringworm, bilharzia, the list was endless. For three hours Thesiger would inject and stitch and anoint and hand out pills from his large medicine chests, and at the end of the session he would perform surgical circumcisions, which the marsh people found vastly preferable to the barbarous work of the professional circumcisers of the marshes. Gavin recorded in his diary:

  The number of people with only one eye.

  " " dog bites.

  " " pig gores.

  " " miscellaneous but horrifying ills.

  Four noseless faces …

  His view became a kaleidoscope of cataracted eyes, suppurating boil-craters, patches of angry rash on brown skins, wounds, and swollen genitals.

  So varied and infectious were the diseases of the marshes that Gavin was amazed that neither he nor Thesiger succumbed to any of them. Gavin was, however, the victim of a persistent assault by fleas and lice that attacked him in droves at night, and since it was the custom to sit barefoot in the tarada as if in a reed hut his feet were soon a mass of mosquito bites that never cleared. Thesiger, by contrast, was able to cover his feet by a mere flick of the skirt of his Arab dish-dasha, and as the weeks went by Gavin began to rue the fact that all he had to wear were the hopelessly inadequate European clothes he had brought from London. In fact, he did once attempt to dress as ‘one of the people’, as Thesiger recalled: ‘Before we set off for the marshes he asked me if I could get him a long Arab-style shirt and a loincloth like the Arabs wore. I said, “No, you’d look ridiculous if you dressed like the Arabs and couldn’t speak a word of their language.” Well, one day we left him at a sheikh’s house in the marshes and when we got back we found him dressed up like a sheikh! He had persuaded the sheikh to lend him the clothes, but instead of wearing the shirt long he had tied it up like a kilt, and my Arabs said, “If Gavin is going to travel around dressed up like that, we’re not going with him.”’

  Gavin had set off into the unknown full of enthusiasm for the enterprise and the strange world of the marshes. Even at the end, despite all the discomforts and difficulties, when he had learned so much and saw the marshes plain, he was able to declare: ‘I could have made the marshes my home.’ The marshes displayed a savage pristine beauty unspoiled by urban and industrial change. They also presented a fiercely barbaric exterior world which balanced his own warring interior, and provided a refuge where a man could be lost to the world and all its pressures and hurts and disappointments. Gavin was for the most part positively happy in the midst of the empty waters and choking reed beds of the true marshes. But the nearer the party came to dry or cultivated land the more disenchanted he became. Once, halfway through their wanderings, when they touched on the big town of Amara on the lake region’s northern edge, Gavin’s disenchantment turned to anathema at the sight of yellowish brick and corrugated iron, peeling enamel advertisements for Western products, dirt and refuse. Everything, after the wide clean skies and astringent life of the marshes, seemed to him shoddy, mean and ugly.

  The leisurely progress of the tarada as it was paddled through the lagoons and labyrinthine waterways gave Gavin ample time to observe a
nd record; what he saw and heard he jotted down in his pocket notebook as it happened. In essence his work was that of a reporter; but very often his reportage began to sing with the authentic voice of poetry. For Gavin even the reeds were a perpetual object of wonder, the landscape as weird as a Lost World. Birds were everywhere, at every level of the air, in primordial abundance and every shape of God’s creation, darting low over the water with glittering glint of electric green, then soaring up to show the dazzling copper sheen beneath their wings, ‘as though a rainbow had suddenly come to pieces’.

  But it was not just the visual imagery of the marshes that enthralled him. At dusk their aural dimension would come into its own with the tumultuous chorus of the frogs. ‘Those million million voices,’ Gavin recorded, ‘could turn the great marsh desert into a cauldron of sound seeming more limitless than the falling horizons themselves.’

  It was the nights that were most special for Gavin. ‘I remember nights that were hopping with fleas,’ he wrote, ‘but I remember, too, the proud curving silhouettes of the canoes and their reflections on moon-whitened water, the moon gliding through troubled cloud and the women wailing for the dead; the fresh wind blowing through the house all night with the smell of rain upon it; the night sounds and sweet breath of the buffaloes at the end of the house. I used to wake in the night and take in these sights and sounds with a curious intimacy, like memories of childhood, as though they were things once known and forgotten.’

  But Gavin began to grow weary that, amongst all these prodigal and unbounded symbols of natural freedom, he should find his own personal freedom severely trammelled. The rigid formula of the host-guest relationship was almost unrelieved, and in Gavin’s case it seemed a double host–guest relationship, in that he was the guest of a guest. In time he began to grow bored with the long wearisome evenings passed in conversation in which he could not take part. He continued to show a lively interest in every aspect of the reed dwellers’ culture – from their boat- and house-building to their water-buffalo economy, their pig shoots and war dances and erotic dances – but he had difficulty relating to the Arabs on an individual basis, and they to him. ‘Part of the trouble was that he was never able to get on terms with the Marsh Arabs,’ Thesiger recalled, ‘It wasn’t language – language doesn’t stop one relating to that extent. He just couldn’t get on net with them. They felt he wasn’t really interested in them, only in himself – and more interested in the birds and the otters than in the Ma’dan.’

  Gavin had difficulty relating to Thesiger himself, for this magisterially authoritarian, masterfully competent old-style explorer was in complete control in a world he knew and understood as if it was his own, and Gavin could only tag along, never quite sure what he was doing or what was going on. To Gavin, Thesiger was an awesome figure, tough as nails, never at a loss. To Thesiger, by contrast, Gavin seemed a curiously impractical person, always falling down or losing things or dropping his camera lenses in the water or breaking his nose with his spear-gun. Once, when it seemed they were likely to be stranded for the night, Thesiger gave Gavin two shotgun cartridges and told him to go off and shoot as many coot in a row for supper as he could. His reputation among the Ma’dan depended on how many he shot. ‘God help you if you miss!’ Thesiger warned him. ‘They’re all watching.’

  Gavin shot five coot with the two shots, and the crew were impressed. So was Thesiger, who looked ‘like a scoutmaster whose most oafish pupil had tied an accomplished and esoteric knot’.

  Later that day Gavin shot a duck, then failed to hit a single bird out of a flock of thirty or forty coots when the canoe tilted as he let fly with both barrels.

  ‘That little duck won’t go far among seven people, will it?’ Thesiger remonstrated with him. ‘Your name’s mud among these boys now.’

  As the journey drew toward its final weeks morale began to wilt. For a few days Gavin felt giddy and feverish, and Thesiger too was unwell and lost his voice. Gavin began to harbour grievances, to marshal trivial complaints against his companion. Thesiger was among friends and Gavin was among strangers, and he felt isolated, neglected and frustrated. Thesiger recalled:

  One day he was looking very sulky in the canoe and I said, ‘Oh Gavin – what’s wrong now?’ And he said, ‘Well, if you can’t see what’s wrong what’s the use of my trying to explain it to you?’ I said it might help if he did. So he said, ‘Well, if I was your guest in Scotland you might be expected to take a bit more trouble over me than you are here!’ ‘But you’re not my guest,’ I told him, ‘and this isn’t an expedition with a leader and a member, but two free individuals.’ So then he sulked a bit. He was quite a neurotic person, but on the whole he was affable enough and we got on pretty well considering, apart from a few contretemps when he was unable to cope.

  All this came to a head one day near the Persian frontier when Thesiger gave Gavin six cartridges and sent him into the marshes to shoot duck for supper. Gavin jumped at the chance to be on his own, stretch his legs and enjoy a modicum of personal freedom for the first time in weeks. It was an area of canals and dykes in seasonally flooded marsh – water up to his knees, soft clinging clay, burnt reed stubble and treacherous potholes of buffalo footprints underfoot. In this bare marshscape Gavin could see only one possible bit of cover, an eighteen-inch-high lump of earth about 250 yards away. He began to make towards it, and when he was some fifty yards away he saw another lump, and recognised it as a very large wild boar which was moving in his direction.

  Gavin understood his situation only too well. The boars of the Iraq marshes are huge and savage, and among the marshmen they take a terrible toll of deaths and injuries with their formidable slashing tusks. ‘My heart came into my mouth,’ Gavin recalled; ‘the boar was charging me, and we were all alone, he and I, two little dark specks out in the glittering waste of water.’ Gavin’s spirits were momentarily raised when he remembered he had a gun, then almost instantly dashed when he realised his ammunition consisted solely of duck shot, useless against a charging boar. He remembered Thesiger’s instructions for just such a contingency – wait till he’s almost on you, then shoot between the eyes and fall on your belly so he can’t get your guts.

  From Gavin’s perspective the boar seemed all shoulders and head, like a bull, and was throwing a white splash of water all around him. Feeling sick with fright Gavin brought the gun up to his shoulders and aimed between the boar’s eyes. It took him all his self-control not to fire at fifteen yards; at two or three yards he pulled the trigger, and at that split second the boar veered at the edge of a ditch and was hit not between the eyes but behind the shoulder, right over the heart. The enraged creature careered away from Gavin, and from the distant tarada he could hear an encouraging yell from his English companion which sounded like: ‘You bloody fool!’

  Gavin sloshed back through the mud to the tarada. Thesiger was in terrific good humour and the canoemen were chattering with excitement, and welcomed him back like a long-lost brother.

  ‘What a man!’ cried Thesiger. ‘Here he is, charged by a boar from an unprecedented distance, absolutely no right to be alive at all – and then, when he’s safe, he has to go and fire at it with No. 5 shot! You really are a bloody fool! Well, well! Do you know I became quite fond of you when I saw you were going to be killed? I realised I should definitely miss you when you’d gone … Extraordinary fellow – quite mad …’

  Gavin’s encounter with the wild boar changed his outlook. ‘Perhaps it was because I no longer felt myself to be so perfect a cypher; at last one living thing in all this alien waste of water and sky had really taken notice of me, had thought me important enough to be worthy of destruction. It gave me some ecological status, as it were, even to be the target of a charging pig.’

  Gavin’s standing as so much dead baggage on the trip, with no freedom of movement and no responsibility or essential involvement, had been profoundly irksome to him. Almost the only act of free will he could perform was to light a cigarette; even to go for a walk
was impossible, either because there was no land to walk on, or because savage guard dogs deterred the attempt. He was reduced to the level of a child, he realised, with all a child’s resentment and frustration. The long evenings spent studying a circle of forty firelit Ma’dan faces because he could not understand what they said lost its charm when he realised that each of the forty faces was studying his own. The wild boar, his brush with death, had changed all that. Now he was the object of a flattering interest. At last he was somebody. The journey continued in a less occluded spirit.

  At the village of Dibin Gavin had come across one of the most splendid creatures he had ever seen, an eagle owl with gold and orange plumage and vast eyes that burned with an intense orange glow. He agreed to pay the woman of the mudhif (reed house) three dinar for the eagle owl if it was still in good condition when he came back to Dibin in two or three weeks’ time. But on his return he found the once-glorious bird so starved it had almost no flesh on it. Its feathers were coated with slime and filth, its tail had been pulled out, and one eye was inflamed and partially closed. ‘I was angry for the humiliation of something beautiful and savage,’ Gavin was to write, ‘angry as I would be for these people themselves when they became humiliated by the soiling contact of our modern civilisation.’ The great carnivorous bird had been forcibly fed on slabs of doughy Arab bread and a mush of pulped dates. Gavin recalled: ‘It died a few hours later, bedraggled 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 captor’s dwelling, one great orange eye still open and staring out at the stars.’