A Winter in Arabia

by Freya Stark

  But the songs are charming, with none of the whining Egyptian twang about them. The notes hang poised and steady in the air like the eagle’s feathers they are made of. Some are songs of Musiffer, a poet of Shibam, or of Bedr Mutawairiq, prince of the Tamim, long dead but still famous in Seiyun; some are from the Ba’Atwah, who call themselves descendants of the Beni Hillal, and are still singers in the Hadhramaut. One song came from Hyderabad, sent by Salah Ahmed, and one from ’Abd al Haqq of Dammun.

  “How do you get hold of them?” I asked.

  The singer smiled, and scratched the air with his hand; it is his business to steal them as quickly as he can.

  Qasim, whose long lashes had been quivering to the music as he clasped and unclasped his hands in time, got up to make tea. The piper told me how he had helped carry me to the aeroplane when I was ill three years ago. In the doorway there suddenly stood a boyish apparition grey as dust, with big untidy turban, a staff in his hand. He brought a letter of welcome from Sultan ’Ali. There is always something dramatic in a letter that comes by a messenger: even in London it has a special charm: here, on the open threshold of night and the lighted room, the dusty figure seemed a very incarnation of the Unknown.

  * * *

  My last effort yesterday, before taking to my bed, was to go into the town to see about rice, sugar, paraffin, etc., for our approaching journey. But I found Ba Obaid far too busy to attend. Every merchant distributes 2½ per cent of his ready money to the poor at the end of Ramadhan. Ba Obaid’s shop was closed, and the poor, incredibly old and ragged, stood all about his stairs. So I went instead by the earliest mosque, which lies west beyond the walls, and made the circuit of Shibam among deep ditches and gardens from which it emerges, towering like a liner above the waves of palms. The east side is rubbish heaps, dotted over with stooping figures of the miserably poor who scavenge there: and thence one again reaches our southern slope, of open sandy wadi and the well below the gate.

  In the seil,1 Shibam becomes an island on a river that lasts a day or two, or even as much as a fortnight—an enchanted city imprisoned in water. As it is, it is lovely enough, with the loveliness possible only to things that die. In my bed I lie for hours watching the gate and all who pass. Caravans, dancers, soldiers lounging, the female water-carriers in trousers, herds of goats, little bright-gowned girls, women in white robes for prayer, sayyids in white overcoats taking their sunset walk, and never a wheel except on rare occasions when one of Shibam’s five motor cars goes in or out. There is no wheel in this country, except the clumsy pulley of the wells. The white of the city is gold when the daylight plays upon it. In the low morning sun the shadows show the batter of its walls, its long horizontal streaks of gutters, the oldness and crookedness of houses still beautiful in their crumbling and decay.

  I lie contentedly enough, and amuse myself with a book which Qasim, seeing me in pain, has brought me in his kindness. It is his most treasured possession, a life of the Prophet in big lettering on rough paper, brown-black on brown-white, with flowered borders and headlines with the name of Allah, the author’s name in a lunette at the top of every page, and the number of the page in a little flowered frame of its own on the margin. It gives one pleasure to handle anything done, even by mechanical means, with so much loving care.

  The book itself is written guilelessly, and tells the legends of Muhammad; how Amina, his mother, bore him without weight or discomfort, and in sleep saw the prophets month by month in turn, and in the last month the Prophet Jesus—for the substance of Muhammad, a drop from the River of Paradise, had been in the bodies of all the Prophets before him, beginning with Adam. And he was born already circumcised and with a rim of kohl round his eyes.

  I had got so far in my reading when an invasion of two neighbours, an old woman, and all our staff brought me back to the affair of my rings, which began a day or two ago.

  The old woman began it. She came while I was upstairs, and had to be shooed away, murmuring angrily that “she had only wanted to see us.” If I could have let her sit for five minutes and look at us from the corner of the room, she would have been a guest of the house and nothing would have happened: as it was she went muttering downstairs, saw my door open, walked in, and stole my rings. The one I most valued she left, because it has animals engraved upon it and is a talisman that saves one from the Jinn, but she took three others that I always wear.

  I was annoyed, for I hardly ever have things stolen. I asked the household, and Ba Obaid, and Husain what to do about it. They advised me to apply to a sayyid in Hazm whose business it is to retrieve what is lost. I sent Iuslim to see him. Iuslim, when he returned, told me that the sayyid had written on a piece of paper, and that the thief would become so unhappy, the rings would return of their own accord. Nothing further occurred for two days.

  I was then told that it might be advisable to supplement the sayyid’s talisman with a mention of the police. “It must be the old woman,” said Ba Obaid, “because she seemed agitated.” I was not so very sure, because in her place I should have felt agitated whether I had stolen the rings or not. But people know their own countries best; the old woman was sent for.

  She appeared, dressed for the feast, with finger-joints and palms yellow with henna and festal ringlets round her wizened old face. A stranger with a beard came too, to see fair play, and Sa’d the gardener to look on. The mention of the police left her indifferent. She had taken no rings, she said.

  “Well then,” said Qasim, “you will have to drink the talisman that the sayyid has prepared for you, and if you are speaking the truth nothing will happen, but if you took the rings you will swell out like this”—he made a balloon-like gesture in front of his own slim tummy.

  The floodgates of eloquence were now loosened. She stood with upraised hands, her rust-coloured dress and blue cloak draped about her like some Mater Dolorosa of a rather florid period, her voice rising in squeaks equally inspired by injured innocence and the prospect of drinking the sayyid’s charm.

  “It can’t do you any harm,” I said at last. “It is words of the Quran, and they only harm the wicked. I will drink too, so that you may not fear.”

  “Iuslim was in the house,” said the Impartial Bearded Man. “He might have taken the rings. He should drink.”

  “And I’ll drink,” said Qasim of his own accord. “We will have it all ready by to-morrow morning.”

  The old lady was drawn away, still protesting with raised arms. This was half an hour ago. Now Qasim and Iuslim have appeared from my terrace, the rings, tied with a twist of red rag, in their hands. The old lady threw them up as she passed through the garden below.

  December 2.

  “It is private life that governs the world.”

  (LORD BEACONSFIELD.)

  This morning, in pity for Alinur, I remarked that sickness is a woman’s difficulty in Arabia; there are microbes ever ready to fall on moments of weakness.

  “It may be so for some,” said the Archæologist in her limpid way. “I myself am never ill”: but she did not say it in the tone of gratitude such a dispensation deserves in this country—rather as if a head cold were a portion of Original Sin. In spite of being crushed by this Olympian attitude to weakness, I cannot help wondering why we should so often look upon health as a creation of our own, considering that we accept beauty as a gift from heaven: the same hand presumably fashioned our inner and outer tissues. But I did not say so, for there is something frightening about the very robust woman. I merely sent up a little prayer, that I might not fall ill first.

  Anyway it is, I believe, a fallacy to think of travellers’ qualities as physical. If I had to write a decalogue for journeys, eight out of the ten virtues should be moral, and I should put first of all a temper as serene at the end as at the beginning of the day.

  Then would come the capacity to accept values and to judge by standards other than our own. The rapid judgement of character; and a love of nature which must include human nature also. The power to dissoci
ate oneself from one’s own bodily sensations. A knowledge of the local history and language. A leisurely and uncensorious mind. A tolerable constitution and the capacity to eat and sleep at any moment. And lastly, and especially here, a ready quickness in repartee.

  * * *

  In the evenings, if I have no one below, I climb upstairs to sit in comfort except for mosquitoes—enormous creatures with white rings round their legs—that infest this region. Alinur, now recovered, is by the table with a book, in a comfortable domestic atmosphere; the Archæologist is on a terrace in the distance, with Time and Tide and the Spectator (very old) strewn about her. A lantern on her right hand and the moon on her left illuminate the neat blouse, and grey hair whose brushed waves still keep a faint rebellious grace of girlhood.

  December 3.

  “Politeness fell out of use as it always does in times of feminine emancipation.”

  (JAMES LAVER. Taste and Fashion from the French

  Revolution until To-day.)

  “Learning,” an old tribesman has been saying to me, “is wider than all things except the excellence of God.”

  This surely does not apply to our female education, too often founded on arrogance and spurred by jealousy of sex! It cannot be wise so to despise all grace of living that we attain a learning whose highest boast is merely that it rivals the learning of men! Far pleasanter is it to achieve wisdom for its own sake; to fill our pitchers, without this miserable rivalry, at elemental rivers where, in sight of a supermasculine infinity, we may remember humility and praise.

  To the Arab, manners are everything; he will forgive any amount of extortion so long as “your speech is good.” To us, since the end of the eighteenth century, they have become dangerously unimportant.

  Alinur, who spends her life among intellectual females, preserved by a love of flowers and her own natural kindness, has been saying that they are better than they seem. I am sure this is true, but what a poor sort of praise it is. There is some merit in seeming better than you are, an improvement induced by Art on the raw material of Nature; to be better than you seem is merely to inflict on fellow creatures short-comings which do not even exist.

  * * *

  The fast of Ramadhan is over, and the feast has begun.

  The gun went off after dark last night, and the new moon must have been visible at least an hour before, but its appearance has to be verified and confirmed by various elders. Sometimes it has been seen on three different days in the towns of Tarim, Shibam, and Hureidha, and the day of the feast has varied in each. The Archæologist, when I told her that the date was not yet certain at sunset last evening, looked cold disbelief: there is no denying it, the Hadhramaut calendar is quite unscientific. But who cares about that? The very steps of the servants are rejoicing through the house. Everyone has blossomed with lanterns or songs. Even from this distance the town has a festiveness smothered in its shadows. A bee-like hum of gladness surrounds it; the valley sand-bed is walking with lights. They cluster like fireflies through the gate and dance in dim shafts upon it; they throw tall shadows on the city walls. The houses are swathed in a dim luminous halo, except in windows where small bright spots move swiftly. From Sultan ’Ali’s palace, a pool of darkness, rifles flash reddish and green. The sound takes a second or two to reach us, while already its light has faded: and each dull explosion is greeted by thin voices of invisible people cheering in the town.

  December 4.

  “Behind him march the halberdiers; before him sound the drums.”

  (LORD MACAULAY.)

  Yesterday I fulfilled the obligation of the feast by visiting Sultan ’Ali of Qatn in his palace; he had arrived the night before, and appointed the inconvenient hour of sunrise for a call. Abdulillah the chauffeur, who brought his message, was so concerned to find me in bed that he rushed up to seize my two hands, and touched me by this unexpected kindness: but in the night the sciatica got better and I was able to go with Qasim across the pink morning sands of the wadi, cold to sandalled feet. It is convenient to wear sandals when visiting, for one can slip in and out of them easily on the threshold of carpeted rooms.

  The governor’s palace rises in white and brown tiers above the space within the gateway of Shibam. It has archaic carvings on its doors, and long bare passages, and parapets that overlook the square; and is an old-fashioned place. At its gate the drummers and the banners were preparing, for the Sultan and all notables visit the mosque in state on this day of Zina, the first day of the feast.

  Nothing was yet happening, however. I found Sultan ’Ali alone with a few retainers, a hennaed beggar woman pouring blessings upon him from where she squatted in a corner of the room. He was browner and better than when I saw him last, dressed in a long brown surplice coat. We drank tea and presently left him to prepare for prayers, and I asked for a chair on the shelf that runs from the palace doorway so that I might spend the morning there and photograph the town.

  This was a pleasant, idle, festal morning. The drummers sat on their heels by the door and drummed incessantly from sunrise onward till the Sultan came: they had two little drums called mirwas; a big tambourine-shape beaten with small sticks, and called marfa’; two shallow wooden tasa drums, like bowls with skins drawn over the top, and a big pale-blue barrel called hajir or tabla. The drummers relieved each other; their chief, an old man, sat by trying on his own hands the fine flexible strips of palm with which he beats his tunes, reserved for the important moment. The mercenaries began to arrive in ones and twos with their rifles on their shoulders, and smiled at me as they went in, for they all know me by now; so do the children—who are worse than the drains of Shibam, since they stir up microbes and dust around one in a perpetual whirlwind. Now, however, they promise to keep the rest of the crowd from the centre of my lens; they try their little best to remember, but creep slowly nearer like meeting waves till my camera and I are submerged and a soldier removes them with a switch on their bare toes. Two banners are brought, green and red, one on each side of the door: and now there is a stir, the Sultan emerges, walking swiftly with eyes downcast, and dignified: the banners are seized and move behind him; elders follow, in white with Mekka skull-caps, multi-coloured; the soldiers come in a bunch, shooting their rifles in a promiscuous way; the drums and the crowd all move across the square till the narrow street opposite swallows them in shadow, and the infant population and I remain to await their return.

  Few pleasures give as much constant satisfaction as the inactive one of sitting quietly while the shows of life go by; it adds to the delight of contemplation the subtle satisfaction that others are fussing about things that leave us personally calm—the feeling that one has after poking an anthill with a stick. This morning even the ants were absent: all of us who were left in the square shared the contemplative life. Hadhramaut has a theory that if two people are late together they cease to be late at all: it seems to bear out the mathematical rule that two negatives make a positive. Women, hurrying for prayers, trailing gowns white or blue against the round windowless buttress where the dark street ends, met other women equally late: it would have been inhuman not to linger and talk it over. The little girls came out now, in tiny trousers under their silks—orange or magenta, trimmed with lace green or blue, and necklaces from waist to neck and patterns on cheeks and foreheads, green arabesques done with rang—a Persian word; they came like butterflies, their silver anklets frilled with bells, or golden circlets askew over their insteps. The women began to group themselves on the rising bank of a well, like a shadow-splashed bed of delphiniums against the buff and whitewashed houses in the sun. A dazzling minaret shot into the sky above them. A flower-bed of children sat at their feet. The crowd began to return: the Sultan passed with drums and banners through his door. Below his palace the soldiers danced; the square filled with the returning crowd. It wedged itself so close that the soldiers with difficulty kept their circle clear; above the heads of the people their triangular daggers flashed and caught the light. They were all in bri
ght colours to-day like ruffling birds, their turbans high at the back and low over the forehead, clean futahs tucked into belts full of cartridges, and zip-fastened vests above. They danced their highland dance in groups of three, advancing to the centre of the circle or following each other at a jog-trot round the edge, bare feet and neat ankles active on the stones, their arms and crooked knives uplifted. They have danced all through the afternoon, and look pale with fatigue, the black kohl heavy round their eyes, their long strange profiles rather like those one sees on Etruscan tombs.