Return to the Marshes

by Gavin Young

  At Jasim’s village, Awaidiya, white moonlight lay on the curved rooftops like a blanket of snow. After the gale, several of the smaller houses had a lurching, stricken look. When we reached Jasim’s small, cock-eyed mudhif he welcomed us and, refusing tea, we threw ourselves down in our blankets and slept like the dead. With dawn, the wedding ritual began. The village was quick with life. The Fartus gathered excitedly round their sheikh. Men and women in mashhufs emerged from every lane in the reeds, chattering and grinning. All the men were got up to look their fiercest, their chests criss-crossed with bandoliers, rifles in their hands, daggers in their belts; the women in anklets, bracelets, head-decorations which tinkled and chinked as they moved. Jasim controlled everyone and everything, welcoming, organizing, his voice low and gentle, his tall, bowed figure at the hub of things, waving his battered cigarette-holder like a conductor’s baton. When everyone was present, at Jasim’s command we all embarked in a swirl of haste, and a long, jostling, rocking, convoy of boats wound off through the reeds to the village of Al Qabiba where Nasaif’s wife-to-be waited with her family.

  The celebrations at Al Qabiba continued through the day. The tribal standards were raised on a large ishan and the men began the hosa, the tribal war-dance that precedes marriage or battle. The tribesmen stamped and hopped rhythmically in a circle round the great flapping flags of green and black. They fired their rifles over their heads so that the air sang with bullets. Men snatched off their headcloths and waved them hysterically; and the women, their hair, shoulders and arms glinting with silver decorations, ululated shrilly in the background. Then, with the fever of the occasion still upon them, the entire tribe took to the boats again and with much shouting, singing and random firing, returned to Awaidiya.

  I travelled in Jasim’s tarada with old Jasim himself and Nasaif, his newly-wed son, who flushed and sweated with excitement and embarrassment. The young bride, a demure figure with a Mona Lisa smile and lowered eyelids, travelled in front of us with her father and a large mashhuf heaped with her possessions – brightly coloured mattresses, cushions, an old wooden bedstead, a chest of drawers with one foot missing. As we sped erratically along, Jasim, the veteran of several tribal wars and fights with the Turks and the British, called out ‘Foq hum! Foq hum! Onto them! Onto them!’ – the battle cry of a sheikh urging on his men in a charge – and the firing redoubled.

  The night – momentus for the Fartus – was long, and for hours Jasim’s small and overflowing mudhif roared with shouts and songs and laughter. A number of people were obliged to sit outside. Inside, in a minimum of space, several young men danced the sinuous, solo dances of the Madan to the throb and click of hand-drums. Jasim himself sat quietly puffing at his cigarette-holder, gently content, until Nasaif, according to custom, rose, scarlet in the face, excused himself and stumbled out of the mudhif. Followed by a cacophony of ribald comment, he was expected to go home, consummate the day’s marriage and signal that happy achievement by firing a single shot from his house. In the mudhif‚ while we waited for him, desultory conversation continued in an atmosphere of anticipation. For a time the whole village hung in almost audible suspense. Then: ppranggg…! And cries and song burst out again as Nasaif’s single shot echoed across the Marsh.

  ‘Is your shotgun loaded?’ Jasim called to me through the hubbub. ‘Let off a couple of barrels into the roof here.’

  ‘But the holes will let in the rain.’

  ‘Never mind. Let the rain come in. The holes will be a souvenir of Nasaif’s marriage and your visit!’ I put two barrels of number five shot into the roof to great applause. The holes were still there when I left the Marshes four years later.

  *

  Good times. And there were other times – so many that they are unaccountable – that were good without something special like a wedding to enhance them. I mean all the ordinary evenings spent sitting with my Arab companions in small mudhifs or smaller houses, sleepily listening to the unceasing conversations about local affairs – crops, prices, a recent murder, a newly hatched blood feud – or to hilarious stories and to the songs which, unlike much of the sad singing that charmed the reed-beds, were often robust, even jolly, and sometimes had choruses that everyone could join in.

  At Al Qabab there was a particularly fine singer called Jahaish (little donkey). ‘Yes, yes,’ his enraptured audience cried between each verse. ‘Beautiful. Give us more, more.’

  ‘Do you sing, Hafadh?’

  ‘Hafadh sounds like a frog. Don’t ask him.’

  ‘What about an English song?’ someone would ask at last.

  ‘Oh, I don’t sing.’

  ‘Don’t the English sing then? Give us a song.’

  ‘Sing, sing, sing!’ – at least ten people would be shouting, the canoe-boys in the lead. There was no refusing them. So I croaked out ‘Three Blind Mice’, which one or two had already heard from Thesiger. It proved to be a great favourite. Sometimes in the months to come, on a distant lagoon you heard an Arab voice carolling ‘Three blind mice, three blind mice, see how they run, see how they run….’ Only the passage about the farmer’s wife was inclined to be badly garbled.

  When we spent the evenings indoors, the low-burning dung-fires or the pressure lamps flung deep shadows like great mysterious wings across ceiling and walls, and the darkness enfolded us in a comforting cloak of intimacy. Bats, restless in the evening, flew up into the roof, hooked themselves there upside down and, hanging like wicked fruit, went to sleep. Thick coffee was ground and we sucked it up noisily drop by drop; tea was brewed and re-brewed. Outside you heard the wind and the dogs, the splash of a paddle, a shout of ‘Who’s that?’ Round the fire the age-old Muslim oaths punctuated the talk like hiccups – ‘By Abbas, I tell you, it is true’… ‘By Hussein’… ‘By God’… ‘By your honour.’ (Disaster, it is said, will surely overtake the man who breaks the great oath ‘By Abbas’ – the Abbas, that is, who is nicknamed ‘Abu’l ras el harr, the Hot-Headed One,’ son of Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law and nephew, horribly killed at Kerbela.)

  At length, one by one, people straggle off to their own homes. Those who are left roll their cloaks into pillows, spread out mattresses if there are any, and stretch out under a single blanket. If they have them, they draw their rifles in beside them, entwining an arm in the sling in case of thieves. The fire is damped down and the ashes scattered. A small hurdle is set across the door to keep out the buffaloes. The lamp is turned out. A few murmurs of sleepy conversation. Someone scratches an importunate flea. Then you hear the sharp, teasing whine of mosquitoes and it is time to wind your kefiyah round your head and cheeks and draw the blanket over your head. And sleep.

  I was still working in the Basra shipping office. But I was going more and more to the Marshes. I was not skimping my office work but there was a great danger that soon I might begin to. My heart was with the Madan. I could think of nothing but them. So presently the fateful day that had to come finally came. I had joined up with Wilfred Thesiger for a spell, and we had spent an exciting time shooting pigs, sometimes from the canoes, at other times flushing them on foot from their shelters on the banks of the dykes. At the end of it, we returned to a village where the hospitality was outstanding – not grand, but lovingly offered; the best sort. That evening Thesiger and I sat idly gossiping on a bright orange rug stretched across the rush-strewn buffalo-platform of our host’s small house. Our companions sprawled around us talking quietly to some visiting men of the village. It had been a very hot day. Now the breeze was a benison; but I was far from happy. I had to start back to Basra next morning. Hafadh and Ajram would go with me to buy medicine, new cloaks and a cartridge belt for Sahain, and then return. I was not sure when I would be able to visit the Marshes again.

  Thesiger turned to me. ‘Well, have you decided what to do? Are you going to try to be a director of a shipping firm in twenty-five years’ time? Or will you resign, take your chance and stay here and then go to Arabia as you told me you wanted to?’ He was right. The qu
estion had to be faced. Better to face it today.

  The Marsh Arabs I knew so well by now looked across at us and grinned, not knowing what was being said. The two taradas gently rolled and nodded in the water alongside. Skeins of belated duck passed overhead. Though I had no money of my own to fall back on if I resigned from my job, only one decision was possible.

  ‘Well,’ said Thesiger, ‘will you stay with the Arabs?’

  I said, ‘Yes.’

  Our host came out of the house and, smiling, motioned us in to take coffee.

  ‘Yes,’ I repeated. ‘Of course.’

  Many months later, I faced Hafadh and Ajram and the rest in Sahain’s house and wondered how to say goodbye. I was going to leave Iraq for a time to travel in the southern valleys of the Hejaz mountains. I could not stay forever, year in, year out, in the Marshes. But the farewells were not easy. It was a question of keeping misery under some sort of reasonable control.

  ‘Goodbye, Sahain. I’ll be back.’

  ‘Soon, God willing. Don’t forget us.’ Sahain pumped my hand up and down between both of his. ‘Don’t you forget me,’ I said. We stood on the rushes outside his front door. There was quite a crowd there.

  ‘Will you look after this, Hafadh?’ – I handed him the Mannlicher-Schönauer we had shot the pigs with, the bandolier and the remaining ammunition. This is for you.’

  Hafadh was overjoyed. Tears ran down his face. ‘If he doesn’t look after it, I’ll beat him,’ Sahain said, smiling.

  Then I left them. Presently the tarada dipped through the reeds towards Sayyid Sarwat’s guest-house and on my way to Basra and the outside world. It was not a happy moment.

  10 Wild Beasts, Cattle and Creeping Things

  The bird and animal life of the Marshes combines with the lively, lusty Marsh Arabs themselves to ensure that the region is not a mere beautiful, stagnant backwater of the world. It lies on a major bird migration-route, and the birds and animals of the area add a thrilling dimension to the beauty of an already extraordinary landscape. Recently one particular animal from this region became world famous, and made its owner an international best-seller, so perhaps that small and humble mammal should take precedence here over grander beasts like the lions or wild bulls that the sporting kings of Assyria pursued about southern Iraq, or the huge wild boars which still infest it.

  I met this unusual animal through a coincidence. In February, 1956, I returned to Basra for a short visit after two years wandering in south-western Arabia. The first day I decided to call at the British Consulate-General. There, to my surprise and delight, as I walked through the door of an ante-room, two Marsh Arabs who I recognized instantly as Ajram and Hasan bin Manati, sprang up and ran forward, grinning, to greet me. Behind them, a slim Englishman with long blond hair, wrestled intently with a struggling sack that seemed to have a life of its own. Presently he looked up, smiled, and said, ‘Hullo. Please excuse me. My name’s Gavin Maxwell. I see you know these two. They’ve just brought me this down from the Marshes. Stand clear a second. There’s something very interesting in this bag and it’s coming out.’ Almost at once a very small otter emerged from the sack and peered about. Maxwell picked it up and began stroking it and talking to it soothingly while Ajram, Hasan and I looked on. This baby otter, about six weeks old, flew with Maxwell to London next day. He christened it Mijbil and it soon achieved notoriety in his best-selling book, Ring of Bright Water, but only, alas, after its death at the hands of a Scottish roadworker.

  Mijbil was Gavin Maxwell’s second Marsh otter cub. The first – a female – was found by Wilfred Thesiger in the eastern Marshes and Maxwell paid five dinars for her (then worth about five pounds.) He called her Chahala after the tributary of the Tigris near which he first saw her. She had webbed feet, was about the size of a kitten or a squirrel and had a ‘stiff-looking, tapering tail the length of a pencil’. But Chahala died quite soon of a sudden and mysterious fever she contracted in the Marshes and Maxwell, miserably, watched her tiny corpse float away in water carpeted with white and golden flowers. So Mijbil came to take her place, and his darker fur and flatter tail proclaimed him, Maxwell said, ‘a very important otter’ – in fact, as it turned out, of a species new to science (Chahala had been a ‘conventional’, European otter). And when Mijbil had been examined by the zoologists in London, he assumed a new official, scientific name: Lutrogale perspicillata maxwelli. Otters of the Maxwell and European kind still abound in the Marshes. They are particularly common round the lagoons, such as Zikri, Dima or Barkat Baghdad, where they breed in February and March. Marsh Arabs spear them if they can and sell their skins in the towns.

  Lions roamed the edge of the Marshes until relatively recently, though whether the last lions were shot during the First World War or not long before it is not clear. Sumerian relief carvings show, in brilliant detail, lions attacking cattle, or heroes, including the great Gilgamesh, grappling with them. The Assyrian kings seem to have been pathologically opposed to all lionkind. They organized large-scale lion hunts and lavishly decorated the halls of Nineveh with sculptures depicting lions at bay and transfixed by royal arrows. The Assyrian ruler, Ashurbanipal (668–627 BC), who went after them relentlessly on horse or foot, pronounced the lions of the Marshes to be so numerous as to constitute a pest. By his time killing them had assumed some religious significance since Ashur, Nergal, Ninurta and Ishtar were all patron gods of lion hunting.

  Henry Layard (later to become Sir Henry Layard, the first excavator of Nineveh and Nimrud), the man who had commented on the beauty of the Marsh maidens and the reed architecture of southern Mesopotamia in 1843, also reported that the local inhabitants engaged in ‘regular lion hunts on the banks of reed-and bush-lined streams’. One day, resting with some Arabs travelling from Hawaiza to the Shatt al Arab near the great swamp full of high reeds and salt water, he was suddenly aroused by the firing of guns and by loud cries. ‘I jumped up,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘thinking we had been attacked by marauders; but I soon perceived a large lion trotting slowly away. He had been disturbed in his lair by the people of the caravan searching for better water…. The shots fired fortunately did not take effect, for had he been wounded he might have turned upon us and done no little mischief. As it was, he disappeared and we saw no more of him.’

  Layard remarks of the lions of Khuzistan and Mesopotamia that they are formidable animals, capable of carrying off a full-sized buffalo; a bold claim. He adds: ‘Buffaloes are said to beat (a lion) off by placing themselves back to back, and meeting their assailants with their bulky foreheads and knotted horns’. He describes a lioness (or was it a lion?) shot with a matchlock as measuring 10½ feet in length, its body tawny and light yellow, its mane dark yellow and black. And lions were not only to be found on the bank of the Shatt al Arab and the Tigris. Travelling north from Zubair near the Hor al Hammar, Layard says that to his Arab companions ‘every bush appeared to be a lion’. Lions continued to haunt the bushes for many years. One or two aged retainers of Thesiger’s friend, Sheikh Falih bin Majid of the Albu Mohammed, told us in the 1950s that they remembered hearing the deep, guttural roar and heavy grunting cough of lions carrying across at night from the Amara area. But, in 1976, when I asked the venerable Sayyid Sarwat, who grew up at Qalat Salih and whose age – though a trifle uncertain – must be the far side of eighty, if he, too, heard those roars, he replied, ‘No, I’ve never heard any myself. But my father often talked of seeing and hearing lions hereabouts.’

  The almost landless Marshes themselves are not, of course, an attractive prospect for many animals. But wolves still roam the dry Beni Lam country north of Amara; Thesiger saw several. Honey-badgers, too, are occasionally seen there and so are wild cats and hyaenas. Ajram swears that hyaenas of a striped variety attack sleeping children and even adults as near to urbanization as Mejar. And Amara tells of a hyaena that tore a man’s face away while he slept, and relishes the final gruesome detail: ‘the corpse could only be identified by its clothes.’

  L
eaving aside domestic animals like water-buffaloes, cattle and dogs, by far the most common animals in the Marshes themselves are the wild pigs. These are so prevalent as to represent a veritable scourge. They are enormous beasts, as big as donkeys, measuring 3 or 4 feet at the shoulder, and weighing 300 pounds and more. The British traveller called John Jackson found some just north of Qurna in 1797 and was amazed, as well he might have been. ‘The country here is very little inhabited, being wet, swampy and covered with reed and willows. I fired at a crane among the willows; and instantly, a large herd of wild hogs rushed out, some of them of such size that at first sight I could scarcely believe they were hogs. Their colour is deep red.’

  Wild pigs are as numerous as rats in a farmyard. Related to the European and Indian boars but much bigger, they have infested the Marshes from the beginning of recorded time. Sumerian carvings show men hunting pigs with spears, a dangerous undertaking considering the immense weight and power of these creatures, and their habit of turning and charging. A hunter, armed only with spears, would be at a terrifying disadvantage in any encounter with an aggressive pig. Without a high velocity rifle or heavy shot a man would be very lucky indeed to avoid being knocked down. He would then either be rolled on and savagely bitten (by a sow) or (if it were a boar) ripped up the belly by slashing razor-sharp tusks.

  Boars have charged mashhufs in shallow water, shattering the wooden sides and hurling their occupants overboard. They do most damage among Marshmen and cultivators who stumble on them when they are lying up in reeds or high corn. Sows are particularly dangerous in the spring when they sprawl in their nests suckling their young. Apparently immobile with lethargy and their own weight, they can spring up with horrific agility and literally fall on an intruder in furious defence of their piglets.