by Freya Stark
QASIM; TOGETHER WITH MOST OF OUR EIGHTY-ONE PACKAGES, arrived by boat, dressed in a check loincloth, white shirt and white and yellow turban whose end stuck up like a plume in the Aden way. The Master of Belhaven, who kindly lent him, unjustly said that he could produce nothing edible beyond stew and tea, but that he enjoyed beduin raids and early rising. He possessed a limited intelligence and a tender heart; his love affairs ruined many of our dinners. But he had that personal capacity for devotion nearly always found in Arab servants, and was ever ready to neglect a household duty for a classic poem, an endearing though inconvenient trait. He brought his bed, which was a blanket, and a small box to hold all worldly necessities inside it; and being sent out to market to buy our kitchen utensils for the winter, returned with a solitary curved dagger whose culinary advantages he pointed out to me with a guileless enthusiasm I found disarming.
Apart from Qasim, we engaged one other man only, an ex-bankrupt chauffeur who had wound himself round the heart of our experts by the deft way in which he handled their instruments. He was a man with cringing manners and one of those townee faces ravaged by emotions mostly bad. Doreen and I, who know good Arabs when we see them, disliked him at once, but took him, anxious to please the experts and convinced that his duration would be short. I gave him ten rupees to buy a bed and to console his family. But when the lorry actually came that was to transport us far from the green electric light and single boulevard of Mukalla into the dangers of the north, the creature’s chauffeur heart misgave him; the ten rupees, he presumably reflected, were anyway safely spent; he stood with his bedding clasped to his chest, deprecating, obstinate and dishonest, and—to my relief—watched us depart. Doreen, I am glad to say, eventually retrieved most of his ill-gotten capital by making him work it out in her kitchen.
We meanwhile, like full-blown roses clustered round the driver on the front seat of a lorry, sped ponderously along the new motor road towards Shihr and Tarim.
In the middle of the morning we rested on mats under dark trees in one of the royal gardens, a solitary oasis kept by a friendly African family of slaves1: and at noon launched again into the ocean of the sun.
Low ridges with watch-towers, now decayed, are scattered in the valley at whose wide end lie Shihr and the sea. A ruinous fortress stands there with round towers above a pink sandstone ravine. Leaving that on the east, you reach the gate of Shihr, whitewashed, with new-looking walls, recessed with buttresses inside in a small Babylonian way. Here in the lorry company’s office, we waited on mattresses on the floor among rows of cash boxes, whose clerks were all asleep for Ramadhan; until finally our crew was ready—a driver, four assistants and a comic called Bakhbukh. Dressed in somebody’s discarded tweeds, he seemed like a small dried nut in a large nutshell, his sad negroid face framed in an airman’s helmet. Two sayyids returning to their homes added themselves with bundles at the city gate.
Our lorry retraced its way along the trough of the valley and soon began to climb long broken ridges that lead to the tilted plateau of the jl,1 which soon sloped behind us, green after rain, in gentle headlands to the vaporous sea. Strings of camels burdened with rushes, descending, took the short zigzags while we took the long. In the sunset, on the western lip of a wadi that dropped to a shadow-filled bowl, we set up our beds and slept, among creeping wild gooseberry and flowering solanum that make the stones thorny and gay.
A curious thing happens on the jl—a constant bird-like twitter in the moonlight, a pleasant and companionable noise. Qasim said it was birds “who praise God,” especially towards morning, and we saw wings flit between us and the moon. But the voices sounded like crickets only more melodious, and went on continuous through the windless night. The moon was full quarter, the Pleiades and Taurus just above us. At about 3 a.m. the Great Bear appeared for half an hour, wheeling low over the horizon and the Polar star. My companions murmured that they heard footsteps; they made a small clatter of stones, unlike a wild animal. We lay for a long time and listened, watching the thorns and hill against whose silhouetted outline the low moon rested, for whose setting the prowler would wait. I blamed myself for a camp so defencelessly scattered, but nothing happened, except the hysteric yapping of a fox in the depth below; and when we next awoke there was an orange band of sunrise, the greater stars were fading into the gulfs where the daylight hides them, and the footsteps, which still pattered and paused on the hill about us, turned out to belong to four donkeys pacifically browsing.
At seven-thirty we left and took with us a bedu wounded in the foot by stones, one of the tribe that in three months’ time was to be at war with government, but cordial now. His friends, swaying from their camels, shouted greetings as we climbed to the empty topmost level of the jl.
* * *
Here all looked dead; the coral-like euphorbia called deni had not put forth its young green stars of leaf, though it was out already on the lower shelves we came from. The plain lay like a stripped athlete, streaked yellow and glistening in the sun. On the horizon, scarce emerging, lay the ridge of Kor Saiban and my former journey. Regretfully I remembered it, thinking how much is taken from the tenuous charm of the jl by rapid travel; its delicate and barren gradations, dependent on the slow transience of light, vanish into drabness under the strident wheels of cars. Even as I lamented, Providence sent a puncture, and gave us ten minutes in the heat of the morning, which the Archæologist improved to an hour by wandering after flints.
I was at that time enthusiastic enough to think nothing of even ten hours in the sun on behalf of a reasonably interesting Paleolithic object, and Alinur, the other Scientist, is the most unselfish of human beings: but the chauffeur and his five were not interested in stones. They had not been told to wait: all they knew was that the Archæologist, Edwardian and exotic in Arabia, had vanished in the brownness of the distance. Bakhbukh, with splayed gesticulating fingers, appeared at intervals as a delegate from the protesting lorry, which blistered slowly in a landscape devoid of shade. But what could we do? Even the rupee trick—by which Bakhbukh can turn one rupee into two if given the first one—is useless for finding Archæologists. With one to begin with, one might possibly produce a second? I put it to him and he looked at me with the sad eyes of a monkey who is being laughed at. In her own good time the lost one reappeared, a flint in her gloved hand. She gave no softening word. The crew, baffled by anything so monosyllabic, tumbled into the travelling-pen in which they lived. Bakhbukh made one Rienzi-like effort to express general disapproval from the rostrum that held our packing-cases, but the gears gave a jerk and precipitated him, with a last wave of his long splayed fingers, among his comrades, while the target of invective sat innocent below.
* * *
In the late light of the sun, when even the flatness of the jl throws long shadows from its truncated mounds, we were still racing like a toy train tied by the force of mechanics to the curves and caprices of our road. And we were still far from the Tarim ’aqaba or cliff, a zigzag affair which our driver preferred not to negotiate in the dark. Reluctantly, for he had brought no food for a second night, he began to look about for a place to camp in, and ran meanwhile through a naked land which he peopled with robbers. “They shoot from there,” he said, pointing to a circular mound arranged by nature like a butt at a sportsmanlike distance from the road. “Behold! two of them,” he added, as we passed a man and a boy in the dusk. Their fringed shawls were wrapped about them; they were leaning on guns, and looked far more like Italian opera than anything in the genuine brigand line has, a right to do.
“Do they always shoot from the same place?” I asked.
“Always.”
“And when was the last time?”
“They looted a lorry in the month of Sha’ban a year ago.”
“Indeed,” said I reassured. “How many came to loot it?”
“Three beduin.”
“Well, we are six men and three women and two sayyids. Couldn’t we deal with three beduin?”
“The sayyid
s are no good. The beduin only believe in their own mansabs” (religious heads of the tribes). “And we have no guns.” Our female presence; I regret to say, he brushed aside as being of no consequence one way or the other. He was bent on pessimism.
“Allah will protect us,” was all that one could say. For this particular night no supernatural exertion seemed to be required. But every good driver tries to see to it that, as far as his car and the beduin are concerned, it is “Never the time and the place, and the loved one all together,” and we agreed to drive on till we came to some open place away from the ravines where, just under the surface of the jl, these people live like their Stone Age ancestors in caves. And presently, sure enough, in the last of the daylight, we saw one of them—a little shepherdess trailing her black gown along the limestone ledges, walking home to her cave with her white goats behind her, as innocent and pastoral a vision as ever was distorted by the eyes of fear.
We for our part chose a shallow pleasant little ditch made to keep the floods from the road. There was no green thing visible on the floor of stones, no wind, no damp, the air was dry after Mukalla. Our lorry crew and the two sayyids sat subdued by the fact that they had no supper, while the Scientists busied themselves with the making of their beds. I always felt ashamed, for I never made my bed, but left that to Qasim who had, I thought, too little else to do and was humiliated if he stood idle while we worked. It made him happier to work and it made me happier not to; and saved me from that strange passion, akin to suttee, which soothes the hearts of women who do unnecessary household jobs and spoil their servants. All the same, it seemed horrid to stand by while my companions struggled with straps and pillows; I offered the idle Qasim; and then strolled despondently to our two sayyids, who sat by themselves near the crew of the lorry—for we were travelling on the assumption that East is East and West is West, in two separate worlds, of Ishmael and Isaac. It is regrettable, I reflected, that my heart is always with the Ishmaelites: and yet who else can ever live in comfort in Arabia? The sayyids were patient and pleasant people, not roused to petulance by the want of supper or by the fact that they had only a cotton shawl between them and the rigours of the night. One was an old man in a green turban, who had been away in Java for a year, and now spoke with charming happiness of three little sons and one daughter he would see after the year’s journey: the other was a gross bull-necked sayyid from Tarim, of the kind Chaucer disliked. He it must have been who lunched, for when I asked Qasim if the sayyids had eaten during the day (it was still Ramadhan) he answered that: “One did and one didn’t.” Our own tinned supper they refused, probably owing to the fact that a piece of lard had been discovered in the beans. Qasim had an infallible eye for pork. When Alinur was collecting geological specimens, he came up with a piece of striated limestone, curved in alternate pink and white, and handed it to me saying: “This is bacon.”
Next morning we woke to the sight of the sayyids at prayer, one behind the other in white gowns on the stones in the sunrise, and left at eight-thirty with the far rim of the Tarim wadi, a thin blue horizon, in sight.
Looking idly out as we travelled on the sea-like flatness, I suddenly saw a glitter in the sun, the shine that distinguishes a polished flint from natural stones that have known no human labour. For ages it lies where the man of the Stone Age dropped it, and still preserves intact that “old-world polish.” The lorry stopped, I tumbled out, and we found that indeed it was true; the black plain was strewn with flints, duskily shining where an artificial surface caught the sun; some were cores, some were flakes—the Archæologist explained how one can know them by the bulge where the flake came off; some were mere blocks, perhaps the raw material to which Paleolithic men climbed to fashion their tools when they lived in the shepherd caves below. They were all blackish, some quite black with a wind-made patina; they lay thick in clusters, pressed down by the fierce weathers of the jl, and covered the ledge we were on between two wadis; when we descended to a lower level we found only a few, possibly washed down from above.
In the elation of this discovery we reached the top of the Tarim ’aqaba, preceded, as ’aqabas are, by a cairn of white-washed stones. The road at our feet laced it in diagonal patterns remarkably perpendicular, and the great wadi below, tawny and winding, lay filled with light and lifeless, with markings of palm trees upon it, as a snake asleep in the sun.
The driver fixed his brake, the crew crouched to turn the wheels by hand at the hairpin bends; the two sayyids and the Archæologist, equally mistrustful of Predestination, got out and walked. At the narrow corners the crew demolished the parapet of boulders to let the wheels get round: I wondered no longer that we paid one rupee each for the privilege of cutting up the road. Our engine made strange noises, due, we found when we reached the bottom, to a yard of copper wire that had lost itself inside. All went well: but, as often happens, though the operation was successful, the patient expired soon after: in the wadi bed, where it was easy going we stuck and had to unload ourselves in sand.
Here we were in the outskirts of Tarim; a hot and fertile world of crops. The children and the peasants gathered with questions. Why is our Arabic so bad? And why do we drink water in Ramadhan? An old woman came in a green garment with a sheaf of maize stalks on her shoulders whose leaves were the same colour as her gown. She had seen me when I was there before. Would we take a picture of her, to send to her son in Java? He had left twenty-four years ago, a small boy—and there he was. He never wrote, but now and then she heard that he was well and hoped he would come back some day, for she had no other, and her husband was dead. She thanked us for our poor wishes with a gratitude for the kindness of words alone, which one is apt to forget after an absence from Arabia, and went her ways uncomplaining, a sad and gentle soul.
Chapter IV
THE TOWNS OF THE KATHIRI
“Our towns are copied fragments from our breast.”
(F. THOMPSON.)
AN ANCIENT CAR CALLED A RUGBY WAS PROVIDED FOR OUR pleasure in Tarim. It must have vanished long since from the markets of Europe and its continued capacity to go was so unscientific a miracle that it troubled the reasonable mind of Alinur. “It isn’t possible,” she would repeat at intervals, while the tomato tin that closed the radiator was shot off or jammed hard on to keep the boiling water down. But the little Rugby went, its wheels on either bank of a goat-path that meandered independently below it: “Über Stock und über Steine, Pferdchen brich dich nicht die Beine,” free apparently of all mechanic laws. A goatskin full of water hung beside us, from which small quantities were poured at intervals into its panting lungs. “You like antiquities,” said Sayyid Mehdar, our host. “Why not this car?”
He was a mild and kind little man, half Malay in looks, with a large underlip and a gentle expression. He had a good story about a tribe into whose wadi the R.A.F. dropped bombs some months before. One of these failed to explode: the tribe lifted it carefully, placed it against the gate of their enemies and neighbours, shot away the detonator from a safe distance, and enjoyed the result. Malaya, he said, was a more restful country but the Hadhramaut pleasanter, because so full of relations—a strange thing to prefer to a quiet life.
With him one afternoon I went to look for the ruins of Nujair, the last refuge of the Apostates when they fought in the early years of the Hejra against ’Ikrima and the forces of Islam. Nujair had not been identified, but I heard about it in the neighbourhood of Tarim, and we went in search of it eastwards, past the landing-ground and the crumbling four-towered fort where “the guardians of the aeroplanes” live, by a track beyond any capacities except those of the little Rugby, through Roghà and, a ruined village east of it to Mishta, where Nujair was supposed to be. The whole village turned out to help. It was only one row of houses, with the seil-bed on the other side and a minaret white and charming against the background of wadi Mishta which leads to the jl. No one there knew of Nujair till an old white-haired man came up and said he remembered it years ago, and climbed into the car to
guide us to a mud heap almost washed away from a base of what looked like pre-Islamic stone on a spur between Roghà and Hubaya, about forty feet above the track. It looks no more than a watch-tower, but, such as it is, the tradition and the name are there, though none but the last greybeard still remembers.
* * *
Three women were almost more than the holy city of Tarim could bear, and the sayyids kept away when we all drove out together. But they made things easy with village headmen and the drivers of donkeys and cars, who took us to Sne and to Husn al-’Urr, led by tourist curiosity, since they are places visited and described. There was a charm especially in the latter, our most easterly point in the Hadhramaut, for it is country that has obviously been falling back to wildness. North of Eint we went through Qusum’s dilapidated square, where an old wool carder sat in the sun; by the castle where the governor was sleeping “between four grey walls and four grey towers” piled like inverted tumblers at each corner, with overlapping decorations at the rims. The wadi narrows then, green with rk (salvadora persica), and grey with thorns; among the rk bushes the white goats feed, and run when frightened to their shepherdess who, under her high conical hat, a new-born kid in the crook of her arm, a sickle-knife in her girdle, her black dress and strips of coloured finery dim with rough wear, stands among them like a small and early goddess of their Arcadian world.
We came suddenly into the dip of Wadi Khun and saw it with the rarity of flowing water among weed-clogged shallows, full of frogs whose nostrils floated on the surface, their eye-slits powdered with gold. Minute fish, colourless as glass, rushed up and down like lines of London traffic; toads with black stained backs lay with closed lids on damp earth pretending to be stones. The river here is Life, and nourishes with the same fervid kindness the creeping weeds and small creatures and the half-naked Tamimi who live in huts on its banks and plant a few patches of millet and a thin fringe of palms round the well where they draw their goatskins full of water. Security must still be too recent for agriculture, for the river flows almost in solitude, wasting its blessing on unused lands, visited only by shepherds and fishermen who find here a surprising and excellent fish called sulaib, as much as two feet long. There was a time, however when it fed fields and gardens, and the traces of its irrigation lie over several miles of sand round the ruins of ’Urr. The castle emerges on a rocky mound, with the width of about half a mile of wadi on either side of it, so that from it, as Qasim said, “one can shoot at everything.” Van der Meulen has described it, and Harold Ingrams had just discovered a pre-Islamic inscription on the eastern wall which still stands, finely built. It was inhabited by Arabs and finally ruined and abandoned in A.H. 657 (A.D. 1298). Alinur and I, freed by ignorance from labour, watched the small figure of the Archæologist as she toiled in the sun below, round sandy bases where potsherds are found, picking up objects here and there. We wondered at her sure and clever way with stones, the product of knowledge, and at the long learning that alone can give such effortless familiar ease.
