A Winter in Arabia

by Freya Stark

  In the Castle of the Sons of Muhsin south of us lives Sayyid ’Aluwi’s beduin bride, whom he married for love. He is the friend from Woking of my former journey, and I was just able to call on his bride before taking to my bed, and found her shy and pretty, a daughter of a headman of the Ja’da. ’Aluwi is away, but his brother Husain was there, though he had to retreat hastily from the room because his recently divorced wife appeared on a visit. He comes almost daily to see me, speaking Arabic slowly, for his native language is Malayan and he has only recently come from Singapore. He likes Singapore better, but the religion of the Hadhramaut is purer, he says. He is a good-natured, wide-eyed, curly-headed creature, with a taste for rather frequent marriages which his family deplores. In our talk yesterday we fell upon the subject of courage and he told me that a man once asked the Prophet what it was; the Prophet answered thus: “Courage is Patience.” It is, at any rate, what with one thing and another, a virtue much in demand here; and it is very exhausting.

  * * *

  In the afternoon the Mansab of Meshed’s son, the same who drove with me from Qatn, came to say goodbye. I bought his silver knife from him, for we are all collecting them; they are made in a delicate pattern of flutings and balls. He turned it round in his hands, dubious whether to part with it or not, while Mubarak the Slave who was standing by, murmured at intervals: “Make it easy for her. She is a guest.” The slave cannot take his wife to an Aden doctor, but he can give advice to his masters.

  Having obtained the little object I presented the young man with a pocket-knife made for the Coronation, with a picture of King George upon it, sitting on his throne, and sent him away happy, for none of the presents I have brought are as successful as this one.

  Januury 2.

  “Clientum longa negotia.” …

  (HORACE.)

  Out of bed, with a fluttering heart, I sat on my terrace to-day, small and mud-walled, and looked over the wadi, its sand-coloured villages and warm cliffs, and the palm trees burnished in the sun; and drank at the loveliness and fragility of life, as one does in the first days of convalescence, when the body lies lazy, as a snake that has shed its skin. From the stony slope below, the children playing with their native dust caught sight of me, and their voices, small but persistent, have been calling: “Freya, Freya, let me in,” ever since. One has to pay for popularity!

  I have ended the day as usual with a talk with ’Ali, who comes after work (a euphemism as far as he is concerned), to sit with his mug of tea at my bedside, and spit melon seeds over my carpet, and give me the valley’s news. He has had a secret letter from the village where the man was murdered in his sleep. It is signed by some of the Elders and designates the three whom they suspect to be the guilty men—a curious insight into methods of justice. This affair is causing uneasiness, for the tribes are no longer supposed to be in authority and there is no government visibly able to take their place: and the family of the murdered man are clamouring.

  * * *

  The Mansab came this morning, and brought a very precious possession, a manuscript copied by his grandfather from earlier histories, a sort of commonplace book of all that was thought worth preserving at that time. It has the fascination of old and treasured things, gathered for someone’s private joy. Among a great deal of religion, there is a medieval chronicle, which as far as I can tell is more or less unknown: so I have been sitting on my terrace, copying it out, after the Mansab’s departure.

  He came to tell me that he had been in person to the old sayyid who thought to turn us out of this house, and that the matter is quietly settled. And then he sat, drinking tea and clicking his amber rosary, and talked of history and battles long remembered. We discussed the route which the Rasulid Sultan Muzaffar took to Dhufar. This is not specified in Khazraji, the only local history of the fourteenth century known to us, but the Mansab seemed to have no doubt about it, and assured me it was by Redet ed-Deyyin (from Bir ’Ali therefore), by Ghaidun down the ’Aqaba Ghar Sudan, by Hajarein, Haura (at the opening of this valley) to Hedye near Qatn (which is older than Shibam), and thence by the usual road to Seihut and the coast. The Mansab’s ancestors went to Sultan Muzaffar in Haura on this occasion and offered fealty, and were given the sovereignty of their lands. He spoke of his fourteenth-century gossip with the same interest as if it had been a matter of yesterday; like a Persian miniature, there is no perspective in the historical mind of Asia.

  After this, little Salim appeared, slinking through the door between one visitor and another. He sat in a corner and looked at Country Life and recognized the Adam fireplace in the great drawing-room of Corsham as “the place where they cook the dinners.” He was very happy and came to ask in a whisper if I would give him a notebook and write his name inside, which was done, both in Arabic and English. The asking for a gift is always done in a whisper in one’s ear!

  Then the Mansab’s servant came. He had brought me yesterday a present from his master, a necklace of variegated stones, agate, cornelian and many others, a beautiful coloured thing from Yemen, and now he came gently to remind me that the customary present to the bearer of gifts had been forgotten. He did this in a delicate way, by saying that he had a small son, three years old.

  Then my old friend Jamila called, loving, dark and capable as ever, after a nine days’ journey from Mukalla on a camel. When I asked after her mother, who is her love and care in this world, she smiled and put her five fingers close together and her head on one side in a tender little gesture, as if to show the smallness, and sweetness, and helplessness of age.

  After Jamila came Husain, with an old sayyid who has an antique carved incense-burner to sell, cut in black stone. He was a charming old man with a fringe of hennaed whisker and a fine green cashmere shawl, and placid, beautiful manners produced by the consciousness of religious superiority. At the beginning he did not wish to drink tea or sit in this unbelieving house, but went away friendly after a time, though I did not buy his relic.

  Then came the man whose head had been cut open, then the carpenter to make a cover for the W.C., another man with a wounded hand; the washerman; five affectionate children; and Sayyid ’Ali to end up with. By this time the morning had gone.

  In the afternoon came Salim again, asking with concern as ever how I was. He felt my hands, and said:

  “Hot, hot, the sun is in them.”

  He is the only one of the children who comes to talk to me first and only afterwards looks into the waste-paper basket, which is the children’s permitted hunting-ground, full of treasure such as empty film cases.

  To-day he turned his attention to my electric torch, and asked if it had a heart. He meant the bulb inside.

  “Yes, it has a heart,” I said.

  “Everything has a heart,” he observed after a moment’s reflection. “Men, women, lamps, everything—and if it stops they die, may God be praised.”

  He has a busy, quick way of talking, and tosses out his hands as he does so.

  “Have you ever been away from Hureidha, Salim?” I asked.

  “No.” He said it with a moment’s wistfulness, but added stoutly: “It is the best place in the world, and later on I shall travel and go to Meshed like everyone else.”

  “Oh,” I said, “you will go further than that; you will go to Mekka: that is half-way to me. You will come to see me.”

  Salim gave me one of his smiles, very sad and sweet.

  When the sun had set and I was in bed again, the Mansab’s brother, the Qadhi, came to help with explanatory notes for the names of places in the manuscript. We discussed Maqrizi, who says that the Se’ar tribe can change themselves into wolves. The Se’ar have stolen forty-two camels and are probably going to be bombed by the R.A.F., so that it might be a useful accomplishment just now.

  “It is not true, however,” said the Qadhi seriously. “It is a pure fairy tale of Maqrizi’s. But it is quite true of the Beni Shabib near Qatn.”

  January 3.

  “We stroll to our box and look
down on the pit,

  And if it weren’t low should be tempted to spit.”

  (CLOUGH. Dipsychus.)

  I have in my room an old yellow-and-pink carpet full of holes.

  I was horrified when first I reached Hureidha to find that nearly every woman I talked to spat on it when she mentioned my companions. Alinur’s kindliness is now winning its way; she has made friends by coming down when the mother of Ahmed called, and the word goes round. But the Archæologist does not talk to anyone and continues at present to be unpopular and my carpet to suffer, though all they find to say is that the corners of her mouth turn down. It has made me notice that corners of mouths in the Hadhramaut do, as a matter of fact, hardly ever turn down. The expression of their faces is amiable; hatred is common, but bad temper is scarcely known. The faces of the men are often spoiled by theology, or by being puckered for years in the sun; but the women keep into old age an expression of calmness and sweetness, and the lines that are common in Europe are hardly to be found in these harims. This comes, I think, because, living always together and under a rigid code of courtesy, the feelings which create these lines are never allowed free play. Better than self-control, they have that true serenity which begins at the very source, eliminating those feelings for which self-control is required. I think it is because of this inner quietude that the faces of nuns, of Quakers, and of Arab women have, as they settle into age, the same look of peaceful acceptance and repose.

  This nun-like appearance does not, however, interfere with the habit of spitting, which develops at the earliest age and at present seems to concentrate on the Archæologist and my carpet. The small Ahmed this morning sat quietly in his corner, turning the pages of Punch with a running commentary—for these are the first images of human beings the children have ever seen on paper, and to them they are living people. “That man is smiling, God be merciful to him” (an advertisement for cigarettes): “That surely is not one of the children of Adam, I take refuge with God, it is a Jinn” (a lady in corsets): “And that is the Madame who digs”—he put his small finger on the image of a man and began to spit, hitting the page two feet or so away with remarkable accuracy, and inspired, I begin to hope, only by a dislike for trousers.

  I dislike them too, and so does Doreen, foreseeing the day when the ladies of the country in their turn will adopt this peculiar Western ugliness; we have suggested in vain to the Archæologist a loose, light coat to cover them. The question of dress is indeed very difficult. But I think one should avoid what to the Arab himself appears indecent and also what, when copied, as it inevitably will be, will look discordant against the background of these towns. For we cannot very well complain of the ugliness of the East when we ourselves have introduced it. Trousers are, I think, generally ugly on the female figure, where everything is round that the tailor intended to be straight; they do not, however, appear indecent to the Hadhramaut Arab, because they are not as yet particularly masculine. The comfortable sarong of the country is worn both by Harold and by the oil expedition, who have made themselves extremely popular by this adoption. If their precedent is continued, trousers in the Hadhramaut will soon come to be considered as exclusively intended for female wear!

  January 4.

  “It is naught, it is naught, saith the buyer; but when he is gone his way, then he boasteth.”

  (Prov. 20. v. 14.)

  Husain brought his old friend to-day, for a second round in the affair of the incense burner, which it is obviously intended that we shall buy. We approached it in the classic manner of diplomacy, beginning with the life of Husain’s grandfather, who ran away as a boy to Australia. There he spent all his fortune, and returned in contented poverty to his Java home. He had a passion for music, so that he would rise from bed in his last illness to hear a celebrated singer; he must have had something of Husain’s own easy-going nature. By the time we had done with him, and discussed a little philosophy by the way, and heard how the old sayyid was the builder of the new mosque in Hureidha, in whose floor the two pre-Islamic inscriptions are uncompromisingly buried—by the time all this was said, the sayyid’s price had descended to forty dollars and my offer had risen to fifteen. We left it at that and took friendly farewells: but Husain soon came hurrying back alone and suggested a compromise of twenty-five as a favour to himself. Reasons for buying here are not mere commercial ones of supply and demand, they are weighted by the social standing of the seller: it is scarcely nice to refuse to buy something you do not want from a sherif of noble birth. So we compromised on twenty-five dollars.

  I had barely settled to my manuscript again, when an elderly bedu woman came with a bag of melon seeds, an offering, in her hand. She had a tattooed chin, and her kind face, full of lines, was dyed yellow with turmeric, together with her arms. Her eyebrows were plucked in a thin straight line as if she came from Bond Street. She is the wife of the Nahdi tribesman who lives in a cave in the hillside and guards our excavations at night, and came with a message to say that he would like to see me.

  “Why does he want to see me?” said I, in our clumsy utilitarian way.

  “He would like to talk Arabic,” she explained. “And then,” she said, “one day we would like you all to eat with us, if you do not mind our cave.”

  This I promised to do, and, having talked a little about the pleasure of being a grandmother, which is the same in Arabia as elsewhere, had again settled to my manuscript when the Mansab came, extraordinarily handsome in white skirt with green edge, white coat, green turban, and his amber beads.

  He came to tell of a plot arranged against us by the Sultan of Qatn and some sayyids of Meshed in the hope of extracting large sums if we dig there; he has been asked to join, but has written his disapproval, and as we do not mean to dig in Meshed the matter has no importance, except in so far as it shows the pitfalls that lie about one. It is unkind of the Sultan, who is supposed to be a friend, but a political tangle is now threatening to ruin all his British relations. Sitting here, we can watch these things arise, lifting their modern heads out of unsuspected avenues of time. There is a feud, generations old, between the Qu’aitis of Qatn and the Kathiris of Seiyun, nominally bridged over by the recent peace. But the feeling remains, and the fact that British headquarters have come to be Seiyun is sufficient to identify us with the enemies of Qatn, whose ear is hence inclined to foreign voices: nor will the matter, when it comes to its inevitable head, ever be thought of as what it is, a reincarnation of the undying medieval feud, but will figure in the enthusiastic Press of various countries with whatever label of rebellion or crusade may happen to be in fashion at the time. So we live in our cave, watching the shadows of things distorted between us and the sun.

  * * *

  The Archæologist came back last night with fever and is in bed to-day, but it is apparently dwindling quickly. It is a strange endemic sort of disease, and lies in wait for any moment of weakness, nor do I suppose we shall recover from it completely till we go. The people here are nearly all affected in a lesser manner, and in many women it seems to bring almost a paralysis of their lower bodies so that they can hardly drag themselves about, probably due to sitting, when the illness is upon them, with only one garment in the draught of their low windows. Salim has been coughing badly, and I rub his chest with camphor.

  * * *

  Meanwhile we are marooned from Europe … we have no news and no letters; the aeroplane that brought me has never come again; of Harold and the R.A.F. in Seiyun we have no word; and the oil people have vanished into air or possibly gas. Alinur is out all day, and I, well or ill, have my work to do indoors, so that it does not matter, but it is hard on the Archæologist, immured upstairs in sickness and seclusion.

  January 5.

  “Thou should’st see the merchants of Alexandria: three tablecloths, forty dishes, to each soul seven plates of all sorts, seven knives and seven forks and seven spoons, large and small, and seven different glasses for wine and beer and water”

  “It is the will of G
od,” replied the Effendi; “but it must be a dreadful fatigue to them to eat their dinner.”

  (LUCIE DUFF GORDON.)

  The Mansab sent a message this morning to invite himself to dinner. Qasim brought it, together with a white kid, frisking in ignorance, which he got from our neighbours as part of the menu. I am still in bed after sunset, and the other invalid secluded upstairs, but it did not matter, for we arranged rugs on the floor by my bedside, where I could reach the food, and Alinur, with the Mansab and Qadhi like Van Dyck pictures come to life, sat round, while Qasim and Sayyid ’Ali squatted, offering conversation from the doorway. They have gradually learnt of themselves that they can talk in the presence of Alinur.