A Winter in Arabia

by Freya Stark

  But all her charms in my eyes are momentarily destroyed by the fact that she has established Qasim’s kitchen in the W.C. just by my bedroom. It is quite a pleasant little apartment in itself and the sun and air have rendered it outwardly innocuous since the last inhabitants were there, but still … it has never even been whitewashed since. Qasim showed me over it in an embarrassed way and finally asked if I thought it nice to cook meals in a W.C.? I did not tell him what I thought, but said that he had better take himself and his traps to the shed below. Apart from other things it would shock Hureidha if I slept like Cinderella among the servants.

  But for one night there was no help for it, the shed could not be prepared in time; my bedroom, which opens on to the terrace without a door, was the only way for Qasim to go in and out. Tired and vexed, I sat waiting for him to finish while the last saucepan was being polished with what seemed unnecessary care; and next morning in the uncharitable hour before dawn, dressing so that Qasim could get in to cook the breakfast, wondered at the curious vagaries of people’s attitude to hygiene. Qasim and the scientists are equally shocked by each other. One is always coming upon these mutual and identical criticisms from East and West. Meanwhile, being still weak from hospital and the nights and dawns extremely cold, I am ill again, and so annoyed that I can scarcely indulge the harmless pleasure of picturing to myself the surprise to European feeling if Qasim’s uncivilized opinions on Western sanitation were disclosed.

  December 28.

  “Verily fire is kindled by two sticks, and verily words are the beginning of warfare.”

  (NASR IBN SAYYAR.)

  I had one day’s interval to visit the “dig” before this catastrophe of my relapse became complete. It is on a mound, an hour’s ride or so away, above a hollow which must once have been an artificial basin, still called Karif ath-Thabit, or The Steadfast Pond.

  The flat and yellow wadi lies around it, threaded by the canal and by the seil bed, a dazzle of white stones. Ancient debris lie there, hummocks surmounted by grey boulders, wavelets in the sea of sand and time. In this bare and pleasant space, where the horizon cliffs melt into the western distance like an avenue of sphinxes tawny in the sun, a little crowd was gathered, of workers, sightseers and volunteers, and Sayyid ’Ali, an old friend, in their midst. He is, as it were, our liaison officer. His turban floats unwound in the heat of argument; his mind is far too busy with all his small corruptions to let him be of any use as a director of labour. He is a little man and when he walks uses his arms like flippers through the air to push himself along. Politics are the passion of his life. In his breast-pocket (when he wears one) he keeps a dingy much-folded piece of newspaper with the portrait of Mr. Anthony Eden. He scrambles through life avoiding or haranguing creditors, and seizes any money that lies handy, to distribute “for the honour of his name”: his honesty is peculiar to himself; but he is an idealist in his way, caring more for the shapes of his fancy than for material things; a born comedian and a mimic, delighted with a joke; an avoider of work and lover of words; fond enough of adventure to join in it without a thought of gain; and ready always in the magnanimity of his small soul to appreciate those virtues which he himself does not possess.

  The Archæologist calls him “that little cur,” and has difficulties with him over the men’s pay, which ’Ali, in the innocence of his heart, thought of as a small gold-mine of his own. He has a plan, too, to find new workmen every day, “so that all the countryside may benefit.” What would not benefit, I have been pointing out at some length, is the work of excavation. The matter of the pay I have taken over since ’Ali knows me and I can do it without unpleasantness. He is a native of the Ja’da country, and an indispensable man, and is our only go-between with the tribes, who pay very little attention to what the sayyids of Hureidha may say. The daily feeding of the men has started in his hands and will lead to difficulties, but there is nothing to be done about it till trouble actually arises.

  December 29.

  “If this born body of my bones

  The beggared soul so barely owns,

  What money passed from hand to hand,

  What creeping custom of the land,

  What deed of author or assign

  Can make a house a thing of mine?”

  (R. L. STEVENSON.)

  A serious problem lay waiting for me in the matter of our house. It is a small brown house on the edge of the town, and slants at a steep angle down the hillside below the cliff. It looks past the solitary castle of the Children of Muhsin to a palm-fringed wadi below. We can settle here very happily. But our landlord has received letters, asking him how he can bring himself to allow Christians inside it? Whatever happens, it would not do to be ousted on a point of religion. The landlord is an old man, and absent; he lives in Du’an: personal influence cannot reach him. All that can be done is to start a rumour on its way to say that we think of paying rent, an unusual proceeding here for visitors, and I have asked his nephew, who lives next door and manages his affairs, to come and see me.

  It is fortunate that it is possible to attend to these matters in bed. I lie under a mosquito net in comfort: three of the twelve openings in my room have been boarded up and the Archæologist has compensated for the unfortunate episode of the W.C. by kindly draping her rug over my door. The two come here to breakfast and to sup on a packing-case table, and I spend their hours of absence dealing with the endless negotiations that Arab life requires, with Qasim to help when medicines or money are wanted from the chest. One has to know a lot of religion to be a doctor. A man came in with a poisoned foot which I bound up with Antiphlogistine. He was a handsome creature, slim-waisted, with the small regular nose and well-shaped chin of many of these western tribesmen, and he had just shaved and had his hair cut and bound it with a coloured scarf. He was going back to his wadi, worried by the thought of the bandage which would keep him from washing for prayers.

  “You can wash all round the place—your five toes and your heel and your instep. Won’t that do?”

  “No,” he said, “it isn’t enough.”

  “But don’t you know that you are dispensed when you are ill from washing altogether? If you are very ill, you are allowed to pray by just flickering your eyelids as you lie.”

  The Ja’da man looked unconvinced. Qasim had to be called to corroborate. He hobbled off dubiously, and I am sure took off the bandage. Perhaps it may be counted him for merit and his foot may cure itself.

  A more difficult matter has been that of Mubarak the Slave who is one of our workmen, and to whose wife I have given medicine. She has been ill for a year, and he came to-day for a new dose. He is fond of her, and would take her to Aden, or even to the doctor in Mukalla, but the sayyids tell him he is a slave belonging to this earth and cannot move.

  “I know,” he said, “that I am free by law, but what is the good of that?”

  I have advised him to wait for Harold’s next visit, who has only too many of these matters on his hands. It appears that there are a number of such slaves in Hureidha, and their freedom only becomes effective when some British official is near enough to be applied to in cases such as these.

  * * *

  My pleasantest visitors are the children, who remember me with favour from last time, when I told the chauffeur to give them a ride in the car—an event still unforgotten. They rushed down in a little cluster even before I reached the house and have never left me since. They are most delightful children, friendly and unselfconscious and affectionate, and sit, half a dozen or so at a time, round the bed, looking at my oddments, a fairyland for them. I have a mechanical donkey, which puts its ears back and wags its tail and is so popular that I lend it to be kept for a day and a night. It is brought back honestly in the morning, carried with loving care, a little grubbier each time, and it is amusing to watch the older boys pretend to take no interest, and gradually fall and ask for it just as they are leaving. Qasim too cannot resist playing with it, and is going to ruin the machinery.

 
I had four crackers too, with whistles and paper caps inside them. Salim, my particular friend, pulled the last one; he stood in a sort of ecstasy, smoothing the red-and-gold paper in his dirty blunt little hands, smiling to himself. His cousin Ahmed, who came late, could only be accommodated with a paper cap in which he stood in stricken silence, with dusty eyelashes sucking up tears like blotting-paper, till Qasim lifted him to see in my mirror the vision of himself crowned with green tissue-paper and sent him away happy too.

  Salim is a darling, minute for his eleven years. His features are beautiful, rather pointed and very fine, and he has that rare thing in this country, a well-shaped head. He has the most charming feelings. When I offered a biscuit he refused.

  “Oh, now why not?” I asked, surprised.

  “One must not covet things,” he said.

  When I am tired and ask to sleep, they leave at once. “We exhaust you with our chitter-chatter,” they say politely, and file downstairs to Qasim’s shed which is always full of a small babbling crowd.

  The poem of welcome that ’Ali the Qadhi wrote for me in their school three years ago is now sung all over the country, the children say. But alas, the school itself is closed for want of funds. The scattered sayyids who kept it going have ceased their contributions, and the house in Java whose rent was its mainstay is empty because of the slump.

  December 30.

  “Il ne s’emporte jamais, ne prononce pas de paroles injurieuses, est incapable de lâcheté ou d’ avarice, ne frappe aucun subordonné, ne repousse aucun quémandeur, et ne s’est pas une seule fois révolté contre Allah.”

  (Praise of his uncle by ’Umara the Yemeni—12th century.)

  The ruin on the mound appears to be a temple with two flights of steps, and inscriptions taken from older temples are inserted promiscuously about its walls and pavements. Yesterday a hideous little idol with head roughly chopped out of the end of a brick was found in an annexe, with three incense burners and two broken pots before it. Ugliness never seems to have hindered the worshipping instincts of men. It is strange to think of the smoke curling up from those three burners in that place so long ago; the smoke that still arose the other day from the sea-front of Mukalla, when they lit fires of incense in honour of King George’s coronation. The idol looks exactly like the rag dolls the little girls here make and play with, except that these are dressed in coloured bridal garments, provided with strips of black rag for hair, decorated with necklaces and green festive patches on their faces, and loved tenderly. I asked for one and a quite repulsive collection appeared, carried secretly by the little girls in the big blouse sleeves of their gowns. This playing with dolls is a pagan affair, not approved of by their brothers.

  * * *

  There has been a fearful shindy at the dig. The Archæologist, whose Arabic is scanty, is apt in moments of excitement to push the uncomprehending worker silently aside. This is understandable, for they can misplace things in the twinkling of an eye, but there are ways and ways of pushing. There is your sociable push of comradely eagerness, which no one minds, and there is your gesture of aloofness with its unconscious racial innuendo which the Arab visibly dislikes. I noticed a push or two myself, and, like Cassandra, foresaw trouble coming; but, unlike her, said nothing about it, having learnt that much wisdom out of three thousand years. It has come now over the finding of the idol, which meant a little bakhshish to the two lads who discovered it. One of them had been the recipient of one of these pushes of which the perpetrator was quite unconscious, unaware probably that the hands of women are anyway degrading. The victim, pleased with his find, did not mind in the least: “She can hit me if she likes,” he said, misjudging our Anglo-Saxon pleasures: “it is only the remarks that I mind.”

  A man who had seen the idol and found nothing himself shouted out: “Ha, you who let a woman beat you!” The boy said: “She is a better woman than your mother!”

  The angry man heaved a stone and cut the lad’s head open: he then brandished his dagger and foamed at the mouth: whereupon the Archæologist put herself in the line of fire, which is a dangerous thing to do, and ’Ali, by his own account, which I am sure is not true, clasped the wild man to his breast and prevented murder. They all eventually arrived at my bedside, the Archæologist still blissfully unconscious of being the unwitting cause of violence.

  All three men are dismissed, which is the way of the world. The injured one proposes to go to the Mansab for a trial; in Yemen, Qasim tells me, they have a schedule assessed for wounds in every part of the body, but I do not know how it is done here. The Mansab has sent me a little note to ask if we would mind not hitting our workmen, and ’Ali has begged me to prevail on the ladies to be moderate—one would think they were Bacchantes liable to frenzies by the fuss it has caused.

  * * *

  There is violence of a more serious kind in Wadi ’Amd, where a man asleep in his house has been shot. Rumour has it that it was done by his daughter, so that we do not appear to be the only energetic women in the district. There are no soldiers and no police in this Arcadia, and Sultan ’Ali of Qatn has been written to, being the nearest man with an army. He will have to send to Harold, and in course of time the wheel of justice may revolvé, but there is some fear that the tribesmen may do something in their own quicker way first.

  December 31, 1937.

  “She went out but little and then always veiled, either to excite and then disappoint curiosity, or because she knew it suited her.”

  (TACITUS.)

  The Mansab visited us yesterday.

  He came with the sayyid who acts as our landlord, a bitter-faced old man who tried to slip away without drinking tea. This is a slur I had no intention of putting up with, and had him forcibly recalled by Qasim, for it is a mistake to overlook any social carelessness; and the old man returned full of amiability, while the Mansab, smiling, clicked his rosary slowly.

  Alinur came down and sat with us, spreading biscuits with cherry jam and explaining the temple, altar and inscriptions; while he, equally anxious to tell the “real” history of antiquities about here, interrupted with the news of three temples, two Zoroastrian and one Burmese! and a treasure of lead beneath one of them. (It is curious that a legend about a treasure of lead wanders throughout this region.) The Mansab won, and held the field, partly because Alinur was busy with the biscuits.

  * * *

  The Mansab’s two handsome sisters, Rahiya and Fatima, have also called.

  These sayyid ladies come in the evening, when the streets are dark and empty so that—even veiled as they are and covered in sheet-like white—they may not be seen. Qasim lets them in, and then clears the kitchen and even the street for them when they leave. “In the day-time,” says Fatima, “there are men about,” in a voice in which one might talk of a plague of locusts.

  “How happy you are unmarried,” she told me. “Allah alone is above you.”

  She is a handsome matronly creature with great eyes, pleasant to talk to, for she has a lively wit and speaks in images. When she describes a fat man she pats herself all over and says: “Such a lot of meat to carry.” When I first came here three years ago and European women were unknown, she had been afraid, she said, to meet me. She beat her breast with little taps to show the fluttering of her heart. “And then,” she said, “I saw that you were smiling, and I felt that anyone who smiles must be like us.”

  She is the mother of the little boy Ahmed, the one of the paper cap, and it was his favourable report which brought her down to see us. With that small boy and his sister she lives alone in a house on our opposite ridge, and gets small sums at long intervals from a husband in Batavia, and asked me rather sadly if I had any medicine to make a man love his wife. But she is devoted to the Mansab, her brother, who consults her in many matters, for she is clever and strong, with an affectionate heart.

  Her sister Rahiya is the wife of the long-faced sayyid next door, and we have now made friends, so that I hope the house problem may settle itself without a hitch;
the harim is usually the quickest way for diplomacy.

  The women here all use expressive but inaccurate gestures to explain their feelings, and it is very difficult to diagnose a pain described, for instance, by the slow closing and opening of all five fingers. “It does that,” they say, fixing me with anxious eyes and waiting for a cure.

  They come in clusters with little presents of dates or salted melon seeds and keep their veils on, for Qasim is in attendance, and all one can see of their heads, tight-bound in black, are brown soft eyes in the silver-threaded eyelet holes, and a little bit of varnished yellow cheek. It would be the greatest blessing in the world if a doctor could tour these valleys even once in a year. There is a perpetual sickness in winter, of the kind that I am suffering from, coughing and aching in every limb: and as at least a dozen sick people cough in my face every day, I suppose I shall never get well. Little Salim has an attack of it and I have taught him to turn away during the paroxysms, and have given him a breast-plate of cotton wool to wear; but his family have taken it away from him because they think it is a Christian amulet and not safe. He always refers to us as Unbelievers and is abashed when I correct him.

  January 1, 1938.

  “Il lui était reconnaissant d’être aimable et de laisser traîner après elle un parfum d’ amour.”

  (Le Mannequin d’ Osier.)

  Qasim is falling in love.

  The sayyids next door lend us their maidservant, a pretty round creature from Rakhiya in the next valley. Her name is Ne’ma (the same name as Naomi) and her face is like a very cheerful diminutive moon. Her voice has a lilt in it, a petulant little note of song, and she has small quick gestures and something funnily French about her. She is quite wealthy, chiefly in the ownership of girdles, of which she has gradually collected two, all studded with silver and coral beads, with amulet cases round the lower edge. The buckles are brass and come from Hajarein, and they are taken off when a woman is bearing a child, for every stage of life here has its appropriate clothes. Ne’ma has a husband somewhere or other, but I think he is going to divorce her, and anyway he does not count; and her pretty sing-song voice goes on in the shed with Qasim long after the rooms are swept. She is not allowed in the Archæologist’s room, which is locked with a European key, but she tidies Alinur upstairs, and Qasim usually helps her, and the whole proceeding takes a very long time. She is a great authority on everything that has to do with clothes or cosmetics. The fashion for painting the face green, she tells me, is going out. She can explain the uses of herbs, of the white-flowered harmal that grows everywhere and is squeezed into kohl as a strengthener of eyes, or its leaves ground fine and mixed with cardamom and oil and a cowrie shell for luck, and smeared daily for forty days on the faces of new-born babies and their mothers. It is called murr, or Bitterness, and must be a horrid introduction to life for the baby. She tells me also that the birth of a girl here is welcomed in a household just as much as that of a boy—a great difference from North Arabian lands. Indeed, the people are charming with all their children, whose noisy little congregation is the swiftest way through the hearts of the harim to the friendship of its masters.