A Winter in Arabia

by Freya Stark

  * * *

  Alinur, whose throat I have been wrapping round with fomentations, is convalescent.

  November 27.

  “Greift nur hinein ins’s volle menschen leben!

  Ein jeder lebt’s: nicht vielen ist’s bekannt

  Und wenn ihr’s packt, da ist’s interessant.”

  (Faust.)

  There is little sleep to be had in our small house. A bat flits through the carved lattices, a child cries with a voice that never stops: Qasim says he can tell by the sound that its pain is in its left side, which is very clever of him. The nights are watchful anyway in the latter end of Ramadhan. We have decided to stay a week in Shibam, since no work can be begun till the fasting month is over. Its moon has shrunk to a white shred in the sky, and all men’s thoughts now turn to it: if they long to drink or eat or smoke they lift their eyes towards it and say: “Only eight days more to the end of the moon.” Nobody is quite sure whether it is eight days, or nine, or ten. And in my heart I find it rather pleasant to depend on anything so unregulated.

  * * *

  This night I dined with Husain and Sa’id. The cloud between us has been happily removed by diplomatic questioning of Iuslim, my old servant, and Husain comes in again as he used to do and sits cross-legged on the floor helping with Arabic letters, one knee as a rest for the paper and his bare toes wriggling in the agony of composition. He is all curves, spotlessly clean and smart, with an embroidered scarf flung over one shoulder and several gold teeth flashing in his smile. Iuslim comes too, either with him or alone. When the sunset gun goes off, Qasim appears holding a bowl of dates and shares a mouthful with the assembled company, to keep them all going till their evening meal is ready. Salim too has been, who nursed me in my illness. I went to take a present to him, in a tenement house of our suburb which he shares with many other families. He is a butcher, and very poor, and the houses of his street are all mud, unadorned with whitewash: I climbed through a dingy entrance up many invisible dark steps with small landings: until Salim’s door opened, and we stood in a tiny room swept and carpeted, with a coffee hearth, and a mortar and two or three cups upon it. Little else in the room, except a pretty wife and a blind sister and a quilt to rest on, but it opens on to a terrace balustraded so that the women may be there invisible and sleep on its coolness in summer: the wadi lies open below, and the beehive panorama of Shibam; and if I had to live on Salim’s income I would rather be there than in London. He was pleased to receive me, with the selfless hospitality of this land, and he had asked a neighbour in to share the occasion, a hideous man like the Barber in the Arabian Nights, who gave to our little party an eighteenth-century touch of the grotesque.

  But to-night I have been among the rich with Husain, who came to fetch me after sunset in his car. It cannot get into Shibam, because all the streets are too narrow, but he has built a white garage with stucco columns just inside the gate of the town. The night had fallen, and lights were lit; the houses leaned away from each other towards the stars; at Husain’s door, reached by winding ways, a servant waited with a lantern, and led up many steps to a white room with green niches, a Venetian mirror on the wall. Here Husain and his three brothers settled for a few moments in avid silence to their hookah, after the day’s fast; and presently took me to the harim above, where the wives and sisters dallied with samovar and tea things spread about them on the floor. They are pretty, all with full under-lip,

  “As if a bee had stung it newly.”

  Husain’s wife, her loose and flowery pink brocade tucked in a silver girdle, looked like one of those Egyptian heads painted on mummy cases as she sat with one knee up and one flat on the ground, attending to the tea. Her mass of small plaits was divided by a parting down the middle, and two subsidiary partings at right angles to it, one at the front and one at the back: from the front, one or two ringlets, not plaited, fall over her ears. I have counted 212 plaits on the head of a small girl. The whole effect looks very like the mummy headdress; but Husain’s wife is pretty and alive and spends half a day every fortnight arranging and oiling her curls. Her eyes are brilliant and strange: when she is interested she opens them so that the iris shows in a full semi-circle against the white. When she rises, the trailing gown, short in front and gathered to the girdle, gives a slanting effect of quick motion; it is charming to see the women come in and greet the company assembled on the floor: they do not straighten themselves between one greeting and the next, but walk very gracefully in a stooping position from hand to hand as it reaches up to them, trailing their gowns among the teacups which, like small coracles in the wake of a steamer, have to do the best they can. If the person to be greeted happens to be absorbed in conversation, the newcomer, still stooping, snaps her fingers as noisily as she can to draw attention, and having obtained her hand-kiss, moves on. The ceremony goes all round the room, until the circle of the slaves is reached—a rather difficult boundary for the ignorant foreigner to be aware of: her business is not to kiss hands to the slaves, but, when she is seated, to let them in their turn come and snap their fingers to kiss their hands to her.

  I felt happy in this friendly atmosphere. They invited me to stay, and showed me the room where Doreen slept when she came, in a brass bedstead netted with pink tulle and decorated with ribbons. The brothers and I sat round a central dish of rice with eleven planets of excellent dishes round it. After I had climbed to another feast of cake and tea with the ladies upstairs, I walked back with Husain in the darkness. The tall houses were all lit up: a whispering and a gaiety goes on behind their high illuminated lattices through the sleepless nights of Ramadhan. As in a well the medieval streets lie silent in the stench of their open gutters: no tread makes an echo in their dust. A moan of prayer came from the lighted mosque as we passed it; camels and donkeys were couching in the square; a soldier sat at the gate, wide open in the moonlight. It is kept open late in Ramadhan. When we reached our home across the wadi, Husain followed me in to chat, for the night was still young: he walked straight upstairs to the Scientists, who greeted him coldly, for they had just thought of going to bed. I led him away, puzzled, to my room where Qasim makes tea. In the few moments at his disposal he too had been puzzling Alinur by explaining that sore throats in the Hadhramaut are due to “the changing of the stars.”

  November 28.

  “There are two causes, it seems, of deterioration of art.

  And what are they?

  Wealth and poverty …”

  (PLATO. The Republic.)

  To-day I spent happily but dustily photographing the carved doors and windows of Shibam, and incidentally discovering its industries. They are poor enough, for a city of this size. The making of pots, the dyeing of cottons, the traffic of the lime-kilns comprises the whole. And the pots are still made here without the potter’s wheel.

  They are made in a village nearby called Hazm, under the southern cliff from which the petrified red earth is taken that the potter likes; he mixes it with straw and uses a bit of waste ground by the village to set up his zirs or water-jars, which are built in tiers from their base. Each tier must dry before the next is built above it, and there are about eight to a zir and each takes half an hour to fashion; the old man goes round backwards at a semi-run smoothing the wet earth between the palms of his hands. One can see his pots standing there parti-coloured, drying a few days in the sun before he stands them in his oven, an open place with a mud wall round it and a few holes for a dung fire below. Apart from the zirs, the pottery is rough as can be, and rudely painted—not so good, they told me, as the produce of Sif and Tarim, the only other places in the country where pottery is made.

  The dyeing is a more elaborate industry and was important in Shibam before the development of foreign trade. It used to be done with hawir (wild indigo), a shrub of the jl ravines which needs no boiling. Some beduin still use and prefer it, because they say it is warm to wear while foreign indigo is cold; but the latter has now been adopted by the towns, and is the only dye in Shibam.
The whole industry centres in one tall house where the dyer and his womenfolk, who assist him, live. They were busy to-day polishing their tall cups and dishes for the approaching feast of Ramadhan; tinned cups like chalices, most beautiful in shape, were shining in the sun. The paraphernalia of their work is one brass cauldron, two feet or so across, decorated in ribs of metal that run alternate ways: here all the stuffs of Shibam are dipped, and dried on the roof high over the murmuring shadow of streets below; and then sent to be pounded by the pounders who sit, naked to the waist with mallets of wood, in a little house built for them outside the gates. They blow water on to the stuff at this stage to give it a shiny surface, and it is then brought back to the dyer for the roq or polishing, which makes it glossy by rubbing between smooth stones. So prepared, it is the foundation of all the peasant and beduin gowns, the men’s shawls and the women’s black overdress of Sif, Hajarein, and Hureidha. I cannot say that I like it. All the trouble that goes to its making only results in an appearance like the cheapest Manchester cotton made shiny with gum, and the blue comes off on everything it touches.

  As for the lime-kilns, that is a cheerful business which goes on everywhere. The lime is burnt in small mud huts with dung fires in the lower compartment. When it is ready, the labourers mix it with water and beat it with poles. They work in gangs of ten or twenty, beating from alternate sides and singing as they whack it, a mess like bad rice pudding on the ground.

  November 29.

  “Che fan qui tante pellegrine spade?”

  (PETRARCH.)

  The most amusing people come to my lower room. I have made friends with the mercenaries who garrison the square watch-tower of the jl. Three of-them at a time live there to guard the town. They are dependent on Sultan ’Ali of Qatn, now reinstated as governor of Shibam. When they are not on duty—and they very rarely are—they lounge with a gay Renaissance air, their ringlets out round the edge of their turbans, their daggers decorated with cornelians, their garments striped and gay, a sprig of the scented rihan stuck over one ear or a twig or two of rak, which they use as tooth-picks at odd moments, straight up in their turbans.

  I happened to admire a silver armlet one of them was wearing as he sat in the gate of Shibam, engaged with a pointed stick stuck into a cartridge-case, like a Lacedemonian, in combing out his hair. Pleased to have anything about him admired, he came back with me to bargain for the sale of the armlet, and since then hardly a day has passed without a visit from one or other of these rather disreputable acquaintances whom Qasim disapproves of. They are handsome and fearless, and give a great deal of trouble. They are quite a different type from any that one sees about here, and one can tell them by their slim and snaky grace, their thin mouths and long faces, often lengthened still further by a small tuft on the chin, their handsome eyes and swaggering carriage. When I leave my room, I find three or more squatting round the door. They have come either to “look,” or simply to complain of the toothache which, I have to explain, is due to a worm inside which only doctors can kill. They like to talk of their home in the hills, a ten days’ journey away.

  There is a house, they say, not far from a place called ’Afifa, on the door of which is written the Unity of God. In it is a table of brass. It is guarded by soldiers, and when the old year joins the new, the table begins to hum.

  Qasim, who is helping to explain, quivers all his ten fingers to illustrate the noise.

  “When this happens, all of us who hear it go to the house and sacrifice some animal—any sort of animal. We eat the sacrifices,” say the Yafe’i, “for the table only requires that blood should flow. Then it stops buzzing. If it does not stop, it is a sign of trouble all over the world.” It sounds Totalitarian. This year it went on for three days without stopping, until the world-situation was relieved by their united sacrifices.

  These mercenaries, who are scattered all over the Qu’aiti lands, have been a thorn in the side of quiet people for years, and now they look with anxiety on the local police that Harold is recruiting. They themselves are enlisted through headmen of their own, who pocket most of their wages and encourage them to make up the loss on the population of their district. It is only a matter of time, till the local troops are formed, for them to be returned to their own highlands. Qasim, with the natural feeling of an Arab of one district for an Arab of any other, has no good word to say for them.

  * * *

  Qasim appeared to-day in the new futah (loincloth) I have given him for the feast, arranged like a ballet skirt with butterfly wings under his naked young torso, a sprig of sweet-smelling rihan in his turban. He looked like an apparition of Youth in the frame of our dark stair.

  He has a cheerful nature and an engaging liveliness in his opinions. The delicate shades of distance, whereby a servant is kept as a servant and not a family friend, are wasted on him: he emerges buoyant from every snub, with mere pity in his heart for us elderly irrational females. But Alinur he considers with affection, since she alone has some notions of cookery. On modern commodities such as camp-beds, he looks with scorn—“comfortable for the dead,” he says.

  This is my week for housekeeping, and I usually find him and his assistant in a far corner of the kitchen squatting over a book of qasidas while the meat, boiling itself to toughness, bubbles in the middle of the floor. A servant in England would be abashed when surprised in literature, but Qasim leaps up delighted to show his poems, beautiful in red and black script. To have him and us in the same house, is like the Orient and Occident under one roof. The Orient does not get much done: it looks upon work as a part only—and not too important a part at that—of its varied existence, but enjoys with a free mind whatever happens besides. The Occident, busily building, has its eyes rigidly fixed on the future: Being and Doing, and civilization, a compromise, between them. There is too little of the compromise now. Too much machinery in the West, too little in the East, have made a gap between the active and contemplative; they drift ever more apart. Woman hitherto has inclined to the eastern idea—the stress being laid on what she is rather than on what she does; and if we are going to change this, taking for our sole pattern the active energies of men, we are in danger of destroying a principle which contains one-half the ingredients of civilization. Before ceasing to be, it is to be hoped that our sex will at least make sure that what it does is worth the sacrifice.

  Meanwhile I have just found Qasim straining the soup through an ancient turban that has seen better days. He says he washed it first.

  November 30.

  “We all dwell in one country, O stranger, the world;

  one Chaos brought all mortals to birth.”

  (MELEAGER. Greek Anthology.)

  Sometimes, struggling here between Scylla and Charybdis, East and West, I cannot avoid a small occasional feeling that the red tape of archæology is being treated too much like vestments of the church by a churchman. Our archæologist is a ritualist. But I can think of her also in happier moments —far from this alien background—when in stillness of museums, walking along the careful paths of learning, she traces with honest ardour elusive footprints of facts; climbing, laden with honours that come of long fruitful devotion, from the theory of yesterday to that of to-morrow. Her qualities are trained in formal ways; how should she not be offended by casual methods which Arabs understand; but how could they understand her constant silent disapproval?

  We are in a proud country still new to Europeans, the first foreigners to live in its outlying districts for any length of time; and the hope that I cherish is that we may leave it uncorrupted, its charm of independence intact. I think there is no way to do this and to keep alive the Arab’s happiness in his own virtues except to live his life in certain measure. One may differ in material ways; one may sit on chairs and use forks and gramophones; but on no account dare one put before these people, so easily beguiled, a set of values different from their own. Discontent with their standards is the first step in the degradation of the East. Surrounded by our mechanical glamour,
the virtues wrung out of the hardness of their lives easily come to appear poor and useless in their eyes; their spirit loses its dignity in this world, its belief in the next. That this unhappy change may come here as else-where is only too probable; but it will be no small winter’s achievement if it does not come through us.

  December 1.

  “Breathe music, O Pan that goest on the mountains, with thy

  sweet lips, breathe delight into thy pastoral reed. …”

  (Alcaeus of Messene. Greek Anthology.)

  Iuslim last evening brought a singer of Qasidas.1 He was a self-conscious little man, followed by a huge piper with a squashed hook nose, by a tall negro in a green futah with a drum, and a small negro boy. These all filed in to where I lay in bed with sciatica, as it happened. They squatted in a row and wrapped their shawls round knees and shoulders—they call this the “Arab chair”: and a small audience of Iuslim, Qasim and the gardener’s family gathered to listen too.

  The piper is an expert both with the single pipe, the madruf, a plain reed from the coast with four stops on one side and one on the other, bound with metal at both ends, and with the double pipe or mizmar, a lovely little instrument made of the inner tubes of an eagle’s feathers. The whole thing is about seven inches long and one wide: the parallel tubes are bound together with gilt wire between each of their five stops, and there is a sort of joint at the top made of the wrappings of a leather thong, where two smaller reed pipes are fitted in, about two inches long. The feather tubes are semi-transparent, like old horn. The small reed pipes give a great deal of trouble to fit and try and take out. Pieces of paper must be chewed and inserted, and thin rods, which are kept ready tied on with string, are used for poking through when they are clogged—and even in the middle of the song the piper stops to fiddle with his reeds, leaving the song to carry on solo. But otherwise he led the singer with his melody, and, playing all the time, bent his head towards him to show when the tune changed; while the singer, holding his ear shut on the side of the drum, listened to the pipe, his hand curled round his left ear to hear better, his face puckered in agony on the long-drawn note which falls to a low refrain. When the verse is ended the pipe goes on; the singer bows his head between his arms, joins his hands above as if in prayer, and marks the time with fingers opening and shutting gently. The piper’s cheeks swell out and show the length of his Arab face, for even when he blows hard as he can the face does not get round but only pear-shaped. The tall negro sits cross-legged, the little round drum carelessly balanced on his knee, one slim leg and beautiful foot and ankle projecting from his futah. He looks like a ballet negro, far too big for the drum, which he beats nonchalantly, with the tips of his fingers and the lower cushion of the thumb alternately, looking round at us meanwhile with an amused good-natured face. The little negro boy, hunched and absent-minded between him and the singer, makes it look more like a ballet than ever.