A Winter in Arabia

by Freya Stark

  Towards sunset I left them, and found the young boys of Shibam outside the walls preparing to play football, beside the well where the goatskins are filled.

  * * *

  The Archæologist is ill, with what looks like sandfly fever, and our departure in two days’ time must be put off.

  December 5.

  “Thy cheeks are comely with rows of jewels, thy neck with chains of gold.”

  (Song of Songs.)

  The feast is a fatiguing time, for while it lasts it would be very impolite not to visit every harim of one’s acquaintance and they are all crowded and buzzing with conversation and finery. I have been doing my round, and have amused myself by counting the trinkets and adornments on one small bride of twelve years old in the house of Ba Obaid, beginning at her head, where she wore gold acorns and an amulet on either side of her parting, and ending at her feet, festooned with a lacework of henna, painted to look like a sandal an inch up from the ground, with a gold anklet aslant over her instep. On her neck she has three rows of small gold beads above a sort of collar called a m’labba. Below this came a necklace of perforated gold beads alternate with old Greek coins and a British pound among them: a necklace of big round gold beads below; a necklace of amber, a gold necklace rather like an order, with cases for charms and big coins alternate, the coins specially minted by a philanthropic society for the unemployed in Egypt; another necklace to hold up the great square amulet in front and a longer one for the large crescent moon in gold. European earrings and rings in quantity: lion-bracelets made by Chinese jewellers in Singapore, and a golden girdle. Her hands were done delicately in an intricate wheel pattern of blue henna, a wheel in the middle and a small one on the two finger joints, a palm branch, a red star and red crescent in the inside of her palm. Her eyebrows were painted dark so as to join each other. She sat incommoded but pleased with all this weight upon her, twisting her side curls which, being almost the only thing about her not made of solid metal, could not be trusted to keep their perfect symmetry. She was almost too stiff with decoration to smile.

  December 6.

  “Sunt quos curriculo pulverem Olympicum collegisse iuvat.”

  (HORACE. Ode.)

  I meant to spend this day in bed, for I, too, am now sickening for a fever of some sort; but Husain had taken trouble to prepare for us a house belonging to an uncle of his at the village of Hauta where to-day all the district goes in pilgrimage to the tomb of an early sayyid, Ahmed bin Zaid.

  “You will like it,” said Husain. “There will be horse-racing. It is a pity you were not here last year, for then there were three horses, but now two have died.”

  “Then who does the racing?” said I.

  “The one that is left,” said Husain, evidently surprised at so obvious a question.

  I felt I could not miss this spectacle, and Alinur said she would go in the afternoon if Husain would fetch her in his car. He and his brother Ahmed and Iuslim came for me in the morning and took me to a little house full on the pilgrims’ way. From it I could see the road and all that went on upon it; the sunlight fell pleasantly on its whitewashed walls through the lattice of the windows and palm trees outside; cushions and a rug were spread, a samovar was brought for tea, I spent the morning happily watching the road and its traffic, careful not to show myself, for this instantly gathered an animated crowd, until the procession, rolling by with banners in its centre and a few camels like islands about it here and there, gathered and carried along with it all stray thoughts and people of the little town.

  Husain who, like any Englishman, disliked being too conspicuous, had dumped me in this unobtrusive spot with the evident hope that I should stay there. But I had no idea of missing the rites of the pilgrimage and the visit to the tomb. It was only a few minutes down the road, the egg-coloured domes were visible in their bare waste of graves. The cliffs of a side wadi embrace them with shallow open arms. Iuslim and I joined the women, whose bright blue now trailed in that limestone whiteness. I have been noticing all these days what great increase of dignity is given to any public function when people dress more or less alike; some quality of the sculptured frieze falls upon them; the mere fact of repetition gives them a reticent and sober splendour.

  This crowd, save for the women’s blue, was dark in colour, for the beduin of all the neighbouring country had gathered to the shrine. About seven thousand must have been there assembled, an immense concourse whose long line repeated the line of the cliffs behind it. The sun shone upon them, their four banners, like the ark of the Israelites, rocked in their midst; the tomb under its dome was dimly visible in shadow against an open door behind it. For a minute or two I saw it all, small, detailed and hard like a miniature; then the crowd noticed and engulfed us.

  Iuslim vanished, though we kept fairly near each other and made for home. A stranger took my hand and led me. Wave after wave of beduin surged towards us and above, struggling for a glimpse of the stranger. They were friendly but terrifying by sheer numbers. Volunteers appeared to beat at them with sticks; like the air in the Ancient Mariner, the human mass “opens from before and closes from behind”; a strange wild head with hair parted down the middle in long locks like Charles I appeared and reappeared persistent as a dream before me, tossed on the living waves. When we reached the doors of the little house, the wooden key, of course, would do nothing in a hurry. Three men held the crowd while a knife with a crooked blade was tried. Iuslim now emerged worried and dishevelled. When the key turned we made a rush; our three assistants held the onslaught for a second with their arms, and the door was closed behind us. I showed myself like royalty from the terrace, and was greeted with cheers or their Arabian equivalent by the mass of people which now stretched almost out of sight below.

  After this it was scarcely surprising that Husain should not appear in the afternoon to take me to the “races.” I did not expect it for I know by long experience what a nuisance I am. But Iuslim came and explained that his master had a slight temperature which prevented him from fetching Alinur as he had intended, or coming for me in his car. Iuslim and I would walk; the mosque round which the people gather is only a short distance west of the town.

  It is, as a matter of fact, about three-quarters of a mile, and long before we got there we reached the crowd, all going that way. Iuslim strode on with a dogged look, quite useless as far as I was concerned. But I saw a donkey with two small friendly boys upon it; they gave it me; I thanked God for my divided skirt, leaped on by the one and only stirrup to accompanying cheers, took some friendly stranger’s proffered stick and, escorted by about five hundred people, turned the affair into a sort of progress. Iuslim with very dusty eyelashes walked beside me, his pale blue turban slightly disarrayed, his manner glum.

  When we reached the wide bay of the races, a lovely but anxious landscape appeared, for it too was filled with people, the concourse of the morning. The solitary mosque, mud-walled and yellow-brown, was crowded on every balustrade with the blue draperies of women. I thought we were going into some room there, but Iuslim seemed surprised.

  “Where is Husain?” I asked.

  “Here,” said he, looking round at the five thousand human beings now making for us as fast as they could from every point of the compass.

  Round the base of the mosque was a shallow platform about a yard wide and equally high, and crowded with women. I made straight and quickly for it, averted a female panic by speaking Arabic just in time, and scrambled as it were on to an island among them. Iuslim sat at my feet. Two volunteers threw people off as fast as they mounted on either side. Men below kept a small free space with sticks: one drew his sword, but put it back again in answer to my signal. Those who got a foothold, I dealt with: I found that by seizing their arm, looking them in the eyes, and saying firmly “Get down,” I could make myself obeyed.

  As I was the sight of the afternoon, a sort of whirlpool went on below. Small boys lost their feet and flew about like footballs. They were all in holiday mood and cheerfu
l, and when I looked up from my photography and smiled, the phenomenon was greeted with shouts of joy. The horse-race was practically forgotten: I could see the solitary racer, a tiny Java pony, careering in a circle far away. Aloof and above the turmoil, five or six camels stood out of range of trouble, and I wished I were on one. Beyond them were the four banners: their gilt crescents glittered in the sun against the cliffs behind them, their pink and red silk rounded itself like rose-leaves in the sky. In the half-naked beduin crowd, I was suddenly surprised to see a camera bracketed upon me; it belonged to the portly Aulaki commandant of police in Seiyun. He struggled to within shouting distance and called out in English: “Is everything O.K.?” and left me to my fate.

  But now the banners began to move away, and the crowd with them. When they had broken into groups and thinned, Husain was discovered and asked in no dilatory way to bring his car. We drove back through the young palm plantations in a golden twilight, overtaking home-going parties, the beduin on camels with their women pillion behind them, the sayyids sideways on donkeys or walking, the edges of their long white coats flapping from them at every step. Iuslim was almost speechless, white even to his moustache with the dust of battle; he began gradually to laugh.

  “This year,” he said, “you and not the blessed Ahmed bin Zaid have been the centre of the pilgrimage.”

  HUREIDHA.

  December 26.

  “Ah, to touch in the track

  Where the pine learnt to roam

  Cold girdles and crowns of the sea-gods, cool blossoms of water and foam.”

  (SWINBURNE. Atlanta in Calydon.)

  The people of the Hadhramaut all say that, in spite of the great heat, the summer is their healthy time. In winter they suffer from a cough which settles with fever on their lungs and is as widespread as influenza in London. We all have suffered, and continue to suffer from it. When I returned from my pilgrimage I, too, went down, and as the aeroplane was leaving, decided to hasten matters as I hoped by a week in Aden hospital. Alinur was now well again, and the Archæologist better; they preferred to convalesce in Seiyun, where Harold and the R.A.F. were temporarily installed, negotiating with the Se’ar in the north. It would be a little while before the Archæologist was fit to begin her work: I hoped to be with them, or very soon after them, in Hureidha.

  But who can predict the course of events, even with the help of mechanics? The hospital refused to relinquish me when the week was up: the aeroplane left alone, and-crashed while joy-riding in Tarim, luckily with no damage except to its own machinery and the nerves of the pilot: the Hadhramaut was suddenly removed as it were from the Home Counties to the Antipodes. The kind and pleasant hospital still wished to keep me, but I was naturally anxious to rejoin the marooned expedition, from which of course no news was coming through. So I left in a 4,000-ton pilgrim boat touching at Mukalla.

  All day we ploughed along the Arabian coast, watching the changing colour of the sea. From the morning’s sapphire to the afternoon, shot silk like a kingfisher’s wing and barred with luminous shafts, it grew white in the sunset, its underlying darkness showing only in smooth and oily shadows. The tossing flecks of foam in mid-ocean, like tritons suddenly diving, all subsided. The detail of the coast grew clear of haze, the west a stair of gold. Inland ranges with sharpening tops showed thin as paper above their misty flanks. The seagulls’ crescent wings against the west were unfathomably dark. The ocean, too, darkened like old black cloth gone green with age.

  In the morning at seven we wakened off Mukalla, grey and dove-like in the dawn, to a sea alive with fishing porpoises: their sharp perpendicular fins make the small sudden splashes of foam. Gulls flying low above their heads were fishing too; and so were the men in huris, paddling their round oars. Man here is happy; he joins in the activities of his universe: he lives in a pleasant companionship with the porpoises and gulls. The sailor in his ship is happy too among the gulfs and islands of his round world, whose weathers and vicissitudes he shares; his inventions have not outstripped his mind. But we are now companionless in a universe in which we are unique; our pressing need is to find some harmony which once more may include us with forces equal to our own, greater than those our science has outrun.

  There seemed to be no chance of finding a motor car from Mukalla for at least a week. It was Christmas. I had accepted with happy resignation a necessity which obliged me to eat a holiday dinner with my friends, when a small aeroplane appeared making for the landing-ground of Fuwa: the postmaster, the mail-bags and I packed ourselves into a car and found the still nerve-shattered pilot and a small spare plane ready to take us on. The rest of Christmas morning I spent with the surface of the jl below me, intricate and gnawed by water like a sponge. I lunched at Seiyun, and dined at Qatn, talked about Arab history with Sultan ’Ali, met there my old patriarchal friend, the Mansab of Meshed, and continued the day after for Hureidha.

  In this part of the wadi, the stretches of corn are almost continuous on the south, because of the nearness of water in the ground. The sunshine lay upon the green like a yellow garment; the houses stood solitary, peaceful and far apart. The land belongs to the tribes.

  We came to the openness of Wadi Kasr, which I remembered. It is an ancient name, descended from pre-Islamic times, for it exists in an inscription. In the spring, said Abdulillah, the driver, the whole space from cliff to cliff is a wide green sea: now there was nothing but dry grass which showed on the reddish sand like tow-coloured hair on a fair complexion.

  Our company grew gradually. We started with only one man with meeting eyebrows who said he came from Shabwa and was helping with the car. The new Seiyun postmaster, from Zanzibar, then climbed in with an immense and charming smile and a book of the Sunna in his hand. The Mansab of Meshed’s son added himself at Qatn, and then the Hureidha postman whom we overtook riding with gun and turban on a donkey almost invisible below him. He tied his gun to our door and the Shabwa man made room for him by sitting on the bonnet. When we broke down, which we did three times that morning, Abdulillah peered into the interior of the bonnet. “Nothing,” he would say, in a detached manner. “It is only dirt.” He polished various small objects with a duster, and the car went on. In the fullness of time and in the heat of noon we reached Hureidha.

  HUREIDHA.

  December 27.

  “J’avouerai que j’ai eu l’hardiesse de laisser aux personnages les aspérités de leur caractères.”

  (LA CHARTREUSE DE PARME.)

  The first news I had of my party was from a Nahdi tribesman, a nearly naked man with, on his head, one of the knitted sports caps which the Italians across the sea have made unhappily popular. He strode up during the breakdown of our car and, having barely greeted us in a truculent way, said: “These two women, what do they want? They shut themselves up and see no one. I have been twice to call and have not seen them. Do they dig up gold?”

  Qasim came running to meet me down the hill where houses are piled one above the other. Our own, a small brown one, granted by the Mansab or Religious Head of Hureidha, is near the top, in the last row on the southern edge, and looks south over a wadi about a mile wide. A mosque and a well stand in the stony flat below. The ladies were out: they had arrived some days before, and found a site and begun to excavate. I had hardly settled my things about me before a message came from the Mansab Hasan asking me to lunch.

  He is the religious ruler of this place, a descendant of the Converter of the Hadhramaut, of the tribe of Qureish. When he walks abroad, people kiss his hand as he passes. He has a manner of authority, and looks handsome, his green turban wrapped round a grey skull-cap that matches his grey gown. He leaves behind him a scent of sandal-wood. His feet and finger-nails are dyed with henna, and he winds an amber rosary six times round his wrist. When he lifts his turban, which he does absent-mindedly in conversation, the top of his head shows bald with a fringe of black curls round it, like that of a medieval monk. His mild eyes, darkened on the lower lid with kohl, his mouth sensitive and rather
full, his beautiful hands with long fingers, give him an almost feminine elegance.

  When I was here before I met two brothers, ’Ali and Muhammad, but the Mansab was away, for he travels in India, Somaliland, and Egypt. He was here now, he said, only because of the message sent through Sultan ’Ali of our coming, and because his brothers had spoken of me; and he watched, pleased, as I dipped my fingers in his rice and enjoyed the “asit,” a pudding made of pounded dates, sesame oil and sugar. His brother ’Ali the Qadhi sat on one side and did not eat with us, for the respect paid to the Mansab is very great. The Italians entertain him when he travels in their lands, and, as I happened to know one of them, we talked of mutual friends.

  “I have been waiting till you came,” the Mansab said presently, “to decide whether to allow you to dig here, and meanwhile I have given those ladies four men. They asked for eight. I thought four was enough.”

  Amused by this attitude towards female emancipation, I agreed with the Mansab’s prudence, but suggested that the ratio might now be raised. The giving of labour would increase his prestige with the tribes around. The tribes are the perpetual thorn in the flesh of the Mansabs of Hureidha.

  Female emancipation as a means of propaganda became comprehensible in his eyes and we parted friends. The Mansab, like any ordinary Englishman, appears to be afraid of the Strong-Minded Woman (whose mind, I sometimes think, is apt to be her weakest point). He had obviously imagined alarming things about us.

  “I am glad,” he said, “to find that you are Arabs like myself.”

  * * *

  Many people came to call in the afternoon, and at sunset the experts returned, pleased with their day’s work on the mound of a castle or temple on the north side of the wadi, an hour’s ride from here. The whole valley floor over an area of miles is strewn with undistinguished mounds, and to have discovered an important one so soon shows the excellence of our Archæologist.