A Winter in Arabia

by Freya Stark

  * * *

  We are in a rather destitute condition here just now, for Ba Obaid has not sent us our money from Shibam. Sayyid ’Ali found a man so old and toothless to go for it with a camel, that Ba Obaid evidently thought it unsafe and wrote to say he himself would send it by a messenger of his own. It comes sewn up in sacks of Maria Theresa dollars,1 with some small change of the local currency minted by the Al Kafs of Tarim; and one man can hardly carry two of these little sacks, for each dollar (worth IS. 6d.), is about the size and weight of a 5s. piece. It shows how safe the country now is, that this can travel unguarded—a thing impossible three years ago.

  January 10.

  “No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace

  As I have seen in one autumnal face.”

  (DONNE.)

  The Archæologist has a pleasant taste in beautiful things. Some time ago she suggested that we should buy a collection of jewelery and clothes worn by the women here. I am doing this, and the word has gone round, and rows of women come rustling whenever Qasim opens the door, with small round covered baskets in their hand, and their trinkets to sell inside them. They sit with anxious eyes behind their silver-bound eyelet holes while first I and then Qasim weigh the objects in our hand, and it is impossible to drive a bargain merely business-like for these vanities round which the female heart is curled.

  “All the things we women love—scents and ornaments and wars—are taken from me,” one said to me a day or two ago, whose husband has left her without money.

  So many of them come that Qasim weeds them by a process of selection I suspect not to be strictly impartial: one can see the power of the Doorkeeper, and the growth of Favouritism in the East, born of the mere physical inelasticity of Time. It is to mitigate this danger that every Arab ruler sits at stated times in open places, accessible to all.

  Yesterday one small boy, called Muhammad, used his power of access to bring his mother, and in her hand a necklace set with silver suns. Muhammad is a plain little boy with so enormous a smile that it seems to have a separate existence of its own like that of the Cheshire Cat. But his mother has the most beautiful mouth of any that I have ever seen, and kohl-rimmed eyes like black water. Such beauty in an old tired face comes from some loveliness behind it: in her dark shawl, her forehead bound in black, she might have been Motherhood itself as she looked down at her son and saw in his common-place features only the infinite extent of her love. Her husband has travelled to Java and has not written for three years. I asked if the boy would go too: and it was then that she looked at him with that unfathomable tenderness, and said: “No. Not till he has a child that I can keep, and then he will go to get money.” Not out of books, but out of the very sorrows of womanhood, these have to learn their strange serenity.

  It must be admitted that when they come to describe their illnesses, they take about three times as long over it as any average man. When the Mansab calls, Qasim shoos them away in a hen-like chaos, and they melt through the door with flutterings of face-veils and shawls.

  The Mansab has been twice to-day, for to-morrow he travels to Seiyun to ask for a soldier or two, and to tell Harold of the turmoil of our wadi, where the government, as our old Triton prophesied, has now gone up in smoke. Or rather it would have done so, but the Slave-Governor of ’Amd, seeing himself in the role of the victim, and having neither salary nor soldiers to help him, thought it better to escape in time and has fled for refuge down our wadi to Qatn—much to our relief, for he alone is the object of the beduin’s dislike. They, meanwhile, are busy pouring paraffin over the roots of each other’s palm trees in an effort to imitate civilized war—and all because of one man murdered in his sleep and a little stirring by Italians from outside. It is monstrous how money is spent to stir distant troubles in unknown lands, to bring, for some petty and dubious advantage, chaos and death into the lives of men.

  As for the Mansab himself, he is no longer against us after many long talks over politics and the future of Islam. And meanwhile he is taking with him his manuscript, of which I have only copied the first section.

  He sat for a time, talking of various troubles that surround him, his long locks and the cap on his high forehead making him look like a Raphael portrait, with that rather girlish, delicate expression of Renaissance youth. Husain came, too, bringing finally our elusive landlord with him—an ancient Sufi nearly blind, with a tuft of beard like a soft white cloudlet under his chin, and a white turban wrapped round a skull-cap of sequins and tinsel of almost startling levity in one so old. He was very friendly, considering that, without consulting him, we have ousted him from his house. “If you had been others I would have thrown you out,” he remarked with unexpected vigour, tossing frail ghost-like hands. But he has got his rent, for the Mansab’s verdict went in his favour. He told me there is a quick way to Du’an over the jl that takes off from this southern bay on which we look and comes out either at Ghaidun or Khureiba. There are indeed infinite interlacings of routes across the plateau, apart from the main tracks that follow the course of the greater wadis down below.

  * * *

  When they had all gone, and the evening was over, I stepped on to my terrace before sleeping and looked at the southern sky and its stars, thick as foam-flakes on the rising darkness of a wave. They are brilliant but soft, unlike the diamond glitter of Alpine skies. Orion is early now, and the Pleiades late, and an unknown star shines through many hours of the night at my window. In caves on the hillside opposite, where they keep their millet stalks cool and shut up their goats, live the Se’ar tribesmen who provide our milk. The young man is marrying to-night, and they are dancing round a fire in the cave; only a blur is visible as the figures pass before it, but the sound goes on for hours—three beats and a pause, and a rifle-shot now and again. The Se’ar are free people, and can court their brides face to face a year before they marry.

  Above the cave and the dancing figures are the cliffs where the valley divides, one mild already in the hidden radiance of the moon. Illuminated precipices hang about it; its summit is whiter than the night. The other stands black, hiding the climbing horns, and throws across the wadi floor a giant cone of shadow; in its darkness, as in a harbour, the hillside and caves and we and the sleeping houses of the town are hid.

  As one watches the shadow creep across the valley, waxing and waning monthly with the moon, the mind wanders back through the eternal recurrent monotony of seasons, till the Se’ar beduin, leaping at the mouth of their cave; turn to the men of the Stone Age, who dance wild nuptials under the same dark and ragged skyline of the jl.

  January 12.

  “For verily the excellence of man

  Is in two smallest parts, the heart and tongue.”

  (Arab saying.)

  Qasim likes holy men, but he has just been telling me that he thinks little of the sayyids here. “We in Yemen,” he says, “know a good one at once from a sham, because the real one cures you by a mere touch, or even a look at the place of the disease: and even when they are dead—there is one I know of who has an ’ilb tree over his grave, and your sheep die if you take a branch for fun or to make a walking-stick, or else you wound yourself as you try to cut it: but if you take the leaves to use as medicine, they will cure you.”

  “As a matter of fact,” I said to Qasim, “the really holy people are nearly always stronger dead than alive. Look at the Prophets. Even here they tell me that the Saint who is buried in the tomb below has pye-dogs who slink in to him at night and keep him informed of all that goes on in the wadi. I wish one could persuade the dog who barks below our window to go and join them.”

  * * *

  We are having a quiet time, for the Mansab is away and Sayyid ’Ali has been sent reluctant to Shibam, ostensibly to escort our money back, but really to enable me to hand over the workmen’s food to the household slave who draws our water, a clumsy, ugly, huge and good-natured creature, so remarkably strong that I have seen him with my own eyes lift a petrol tin full of water with h
is teeth. He is happy with no obvious reason for being so except that he has a nice hardworking wife: she draws the water-skins from the sixty-foot well when he is away. He has now spent our money honestly on rice and dates, 4s. 6d. for eighteen men and boys, and there has been general repletion and a holding of ’Ali’s name to scorn, but that is as far as it will go, for not one of these men, who are peasants and not beduin, will stand up to him when he returns.

  January 13.

  “Qu’est-ce qu’une femme auprès

  d’un papyrus Alexandrin?”

  (La Reine Pédocque.)

  I have been out for the first time, and have climbed to what three years ago was the old mosque, with one of the few square-based minarets left in this land. It is now all restored and renewed, the interior filled with columns like a forest—thirty-six pillars in six rows and a small square of light in the middle—the minaret rebuilt with round holes like railway-station architecture, and the two pre-Islamic slabs buried under the modern pavement. All this is the misguided beneficence of the old man who sold us the incense burner. The town climbs up to the mosque, on spurs of the cliff-side, and was lost to-day in pale unusual weather shimmery as a sea mist but not damp—since there is nothing to be damp with. With it a N.E. wind blows, sudden and cool. The people say that the mist comes “with this star,” a pretty way of mentioning a month. It gave a strange look to the cliffs of the wadi, like headlands out at sea. Through it I walked to call on the Mansab’s sisters, who live in various houses scattered in the town and welcomed me on my first venture abroad. They all live in pleasantly empty rooms lifted on carved pillars, and strewn with carpets, where, through low windows, the sunlight can make patterns on the floor. Even poor houses with ceilings of sticks laid on rafters, contrive to lay them in diagonal patterns, to give the effect of decoration.

  All the sisters are pretty, especially when the veil frames the oval of their faces, for their heads are flattish at the back and the plaits do little to hide the shape. In the house of the Mansab’s grandfather, who was the saint, his mother still lives, ill these three years with a gangrened foot which, for some small ailment, she cut about with a penknife. It should have killed her with blood-poisoning long ago, and is a swollen mass of sores. I took permanganate and explained the making of fomentations—without much hope: the mother must have been a lovely creature, and still has pretty ways, with little gracious petulant movements of her hands. She breaks off the talk of her three dutiful sons to say: “He loves me, you know,” as if it were a wonderful and constant surprise.

  Two women from Ajlania were sitting there and sang their native songs, in which we all took parts like strophe and anti-strophe in a Greek chorus, while little hands with hennaed nails beat time on an empty tea-box, used as a drum. Every town has its own dances and songs, and Ajlania is one of the most celebrated. The Greek chorus, with the household servants in groups discussing the affairs of their masters, and the masters asking for and listening to advice, is indeed a picture of ordinary Arabic life, very similar, I imagine, in all small towns that lived or live on robbery and flocks.

  As we sat there, the Qadhi appeared, kissed his mother’s forehead, and walked back with me to finish the notes for the manuscript, now complete. He stayed for a long time—indeed he always stays till I explain that I must go to bed—and told me of the troubles of the valley. The Ja’da have gathered about nine hours away on the jl—a sort of tribal pow-wow such as von Wrede witnessed nearly a century ago. They have sent a deputation to Sultan ’Ali of Qatn, who is playing an uncertain game, misled partly by propaganda, partly by his ancient Kathiri hate into hoping that he can, by stirring trouble, remove Harold and the Seiyun influence altogether. “He thinks,” I was told, “that if there is enough disturbance in the country, Mr. Ingrams will be recalled by the people in London who do not like to hear of agitation.” How shrewd this estimate is, the reader may determine; the idea of playing off public opinion at home against the man on the spot has at all events entered the Arab mind. I have a liking for the Sultan of Qatn, and both the Mansab and Sayyid ’Ali are going to try to warn him of the ruin of his ways, of which the Mansab is now fully persuaded. Two R.A.F. machines, merely flying over this wadi, would keep the district quiet: it is distance and absence that allows foreign weeds to grow: and as soon as Harold appears, all will melt away before him. Meanwhile our presence does something to keep the place quiet; every day I get people from the wadi who ask advice, which I give, unofficially and reluctantly, for their own peace.

  Their governor has fled; and the tribe have seized the daughter of the murdered man. It seems that she opened the door to his enemies or—according to the latest version—herself shot him in his sleep. He was bad and violent, all the tribesmen say, and had taken her jewels and shut her in his fort, suspecting her to be unlawfully pregnant: if a child was born, she would die. So she killed him in his sleep, and someone’s blood is wanted to avenge him. But as there has apparently never been a murderess in this country before, the Ja’da do not know what to do about it, and have sent to ask Harold to set the precedent.

  Having discussed this matter at great length, the Qadhi passed on to another subject and asked me if it would be possible to get a book with the whole of English Law inside it. He looked at me in silent wonder when I told him that it would take six houses the size of his own to accommodate it.

  January 14.

  “Nec pietas moram

  rugis et instantae senectae

  adferet indomitaeque morti.”

  (HORACE.)

  We have been to lunch, Alinur and I, with the oldest man in Hureidha. I found him sitting in the dust of our kitchen floor, left there by Qasim, who is in love just now and quite unreliable, and he asked us to lunch with him to-day. His shoulders stoop under a greasy coat of silk striped red and yellow; his cheeks are sucked in with age; his eyes, still embellished with kohl, are flecked green and blue like the sea on a windy day, and his beard is dyed with henna. There is nothing left of him but a sort of ghost-like shell of antique gaiety, the flicker of a candle almost dead. He has been a traveller in his day, and knows South Africa and India and Malaya, and is rich and respected, and has had, it is said, fifty-five wives. He is a friend of all the British who come his way. On the doorstep of his great square house he was waiting to receive us, and deposited us with his wife, a middle-aged woman and plain, who quickly poured her troubles in my ears.

  “I hate him, and I have pains all over.”

  “That comes from sitting in draughts,” I said, separating the propositions which she seemed to consider as one.

  She brushed this aside. “Who would not feel ill with a husband of ninety-five?” said she.

  “You have a beautiful house,” I tried to distract her.

  “Pah, and he keeps all the keys and never lets them out of his grasp”; and just at that moment the old man returned, with a plate of ginger in one ancient hand and in the other, a ruby ring on its little finger, the bunch of keys.

  The wife retired, we sat on the floor round an excellent meal, and friends and servants who had come to help with the ceremony entertained us with stories of our host. His age is the pride of the town. But he himself sat silent, his light eyes in some dream long past, and presently began to talk quietly of Nairobi and Cape Town and the far-away travels of his youth.

  We had been rather surprised to hear that he was building a house at the other end of Hureidha. I asked him about it.

  “It is my tomb,” said he. “It will soon be finished.” His old eyes closed in the middle of our conversation and he was asleep.

  “He is old,” said the guests for the twentieth time: “the oldest man in Hureidha.”

  With his servants about him, and the wife who hates him, with his keys and his silk coat and the dreams of his journeys, he seemed like some old Balzac figure perpetuating the vanities of mankind, till death

  “When he has wandered all his ways

  Shuts up the story of his days,”

/>   in the tomb whose building he watches with tired eyes, among the tombs of his fathers.

  January 15.

  “Glory be to that God who slays our children, and takes away our wealth, and whom withal we love.”

  (’ATTAR: Tadhkirtu ’l-Awliy.)

  Mansur the postman walked in this morning, the same to whom I gave a lift on the way out here, and told me that Harold is in Seiyun with six R.A.F. machines, ready to bomb the Se’ar unless the forty-two stolen camels are restored. Sayyid ’Ali, who has returned, staggering under two sacks of new dollars, also confirms the news.

  Mansur sat, with his profile, straight as a Greek head, framed against the background of the wadi, twirling his silver cane in his hands: it is only the ghost of a cane, for all except the metal core and the silver handle have melted off it, but such as it is it is an object of elegance and I have never seen him without it.

  “The Government is merciful,” said Mansur. “Ingrams is going to meet the Se’ar once more—and then if nothing comes of it they will bomb them. Those flyers bring a great peace into this land.

  “Shortly before you first came to Hureidha,” he went on, “my brother was shot dead from the house opposite ours in the palm grove, and we had the blood feud to carry on, and it was inconvenient because the door of each house could be shot at from the windows of the other. Then two years ago Sayyid Abu Bekr, may Allah widen his breast (with happiness), made a truce of four years between us and, from his own purse, gave me a hundred dollars bakhshish for my brother’s death. And now the English peace has come, and the blood feud has ceased with no disgrace to me, and it is pleasant, for I and my next-door neighbour can walk together side by side and neither need shoot the other. Thanks be to God.”