A Winter in Arabia

by Freya Stark

“plaisirs d’une race pauvre, économe, eternellement jeune … trouvant son bien en elle-même et dans les dons que les Dieux lui ont faits. …”

  (E. RENAN.)

  Fatima, the Mansab’s sister, has called to-day, and sat on the floor turning over the leaves of Vogue. It had just come, and I had not had the time to tear out two naked ladies advertising bath salts: I hastened to say that it is a paper exclusively circulated in harims.

  “Are they real?” said she.

  “Oh no,” I said with relative truth: they had the improbable silhouette invented by advertisers. “They are just Jinn.”

  “Do they see them,” she asked, much intrigued.

  “No, but they think that is what they look like.”

  Fatima was overcome by the female beauty of Europe. The specimens of it provided by ourselves in Hureidha had evidently not made a particular impression. She kissed her forefinger and pressed it on the prettiest of the mannequins and said: “May Allah shower good upon them.”

  * * *

  Husain too has looked in for a little, and asked if I would like to buy a bee-hive. “Then,” said he, “the honey could be sent to you in Europe every year.”

  A father bee-hive costs sixty or seventy dollars, a son twenty-five: they are kept in a village among the palm gardens, and the guardian, who looks after about a hundred of them, takes a quarter of the honey, but the owner keeps the increase of the bees.

  Abdulla the watchmaker came too, with a pocketful of stones like agates, which they thread here on necklaces and think efficacious against various ills; he was disappointed because I could tell him of no medicine in them. He sat turning them over, his head swathed in a purple turban with a yellow shawl above. “Is it true,” he asked, “that you are going to Beihan?”

  Beihan lies in the north-west, and will eventually be found to have been an important place in pre-Islamic times.1 We had planned to examine it at the end of the season, but it is useless to think of our archæology among beduin, and now that the only civil aeroplane is out of action it will be impossible to go even for a flying visit. “But why do you ask?” I said to the old man.

  “I would have liked to go with you.”

  “Have you friends there that you wish to see?”

  “No,” said he, “I have no reason to go, except that I have never been, and knowledge is better than ignorance.” What better reason could there be for travelling?

  January 31.

  “In squandering wealth was his peculiar art:

  Nothing went unrewarded but desert.”

  (DRYDEN.)

  This is my birthday. I woke up in the dawn, and looked out from my terrace with a feeling of gratitude for a universe one might so easily not be alive in to enjoy. It was another of those strange misty days, nothing but white softness visible, and in it the shaving of a moon, white also, tilted like a boat in waves of foam. Behind that curtain the sun came up unseen, the cliffs were lost and reappeared, intangible and blurred: it is the influence of the star Neth’a, they say.

  Out of this dim world a hooting car produced Sayyid ’Aluwi, my friend from Woking with the beduin bride, who now attends to electricity in Mukalla. He appeared, placid as ever and a little thinner, and remarked that he had been shot at on the road, the same road we followed over the jl, a little south of the place we camped in. Three ambushes lay in wait for them, they raced by the first two but had to stop for the third, which got them in an enfilading fire, and fifteen Humumi tribesmen came up and relieved them of 1,300 dollars. The camel trade of the Humumi is being damaged by the existence of a motor road—what can be more reasonable than to make the motor road unpleasant? It is merely done, said Sayyid ’Aluwi, so as to draw the government’s attention to their troubles. The affairs of Palestine have impressed on the Arab world that arson and murder alone can open London ears to a good cause, and the Humumi have adopted the same tactics, forgetful of the laws of relativity. They have not as good a cause as the Palestine Arab, either, for no one can deny the right of a motor road to the inland cities of the wadi. Harold has long been doing what he can by taxing the motor traffic: but the camelmen are doomed eventually, as those elder Titans who strove against younger gods. For who are they, in their poor nakedness, to stand alone against the mechanical world?

  Meanwhile the Mansab has returned. He walked in, handsome as ever, in a brown check greatcoat of the time of Lord Byron. A cashmere shawl, yellow and red, was thrown over one shoulder under a white turban, and his red-tasselled amber beads were in his hand. And he came to my bed and kissed me on the forehead, a greeting reserved to Sherifas, which caused another murmuring approval from the attending crowd.

  His mother, he says, is better and everyone full of regret that she did not begin to use the fomentations when first I sent them, but allowed herself to be dissuaded by an old cousin who told her that Christian remedies are poisons.

  “But now,” said the Mansab, “if God wills, she will be cured and you need fear no one who may speak against you”; and he told me of an old woman who had come to ask if it would be allowable for her to pray for us, since—owing to the fact that her son is working—she had been able to eat meat for the first time in a year.

  The news from the great world, which as far as we are concerned is the Wadi Hadhramaut and Mukalla, is none too good. Doreen is ill, with the same epidemic that we suffer here: and the Humumi have raided another lorry on the Tarim road and stolen 2,000 dollars intended for Ba Obaid and therefore probably for us. It will be most inconvenient if we are stranded without money.

  Having told me all this the Mansab asked to see the findings of the tomb, and sat with a skull in his hand, now varnished by the Archæologist with shalaq. I told him about Alinur’s mapping of the ancient irrigation, a labour which makes her popular since everyone thinks it is meant to restore the original water supply. And we then discussed the affairs of the Mansab of Meshed, to whose letter I have written a friendly reply: the matter of the attempted blackmail has been raising a question never hitherto asked, as to who actually owns the waste areas of this country—the tribes or government?

  No sooner had the Mansab gone than Sayyid ’Ali appeared. He has easily cajoled our slave into handing the workmen’s luncheons back to his keeping, and now came to ask that, as he had provided a particularly good meal, he might be given a little more money.

  There are limits to all things. “You wicked sinner,” I said. “You want to be paid because for once your immoral profits are reduced?”

  ’Ali went into fits of laughter, and walked on to the terrace to laugh himself out—delighted to be discovered! If ever there is a Parliament in this country, he will be the first M.P.; he has all the demagogic arts. In spite of all, however, the luncheons will have to be taken from him, and I shall follow the Qadhi’s advice and arrange with the owner of the Hureidha shop direct. Sayyid ’Ali heard of the resolution with equanimity; he merely remarked that we pay half a dollar for a donkey which he gets for a quarter; he omitted to mention where the other quarter went to.

  “The people here,” he said, “have light blood: they talk too much.”

  “Indeed they do,” I said, reflecting that it is something to dislike one’s own defects, even if one sees them only in other people.

  February 2.

  “Where thieves break through and steal.”

  (Matthew vi, 19.)

  Of all problems of travel in countries without a post office, that of money is one of the worst. Large notes, even if they exist, are little use, since only fair-sized towns will change them, and the small currencies are nearly always unmanageable. One cannot carry their weight on one’s person, a strong box arouses more interest than is safe, and ordinary luggage is easily accessible to any Arab with time on his hands; the best way is to deal with the matter as the Arabs deal with it themselves, and to hand one’s money-bag and all responsibility to one’s servant, who has a free mind to attend to it. I have now done this many times, nor ever had to regret it, for nine people
out of ten respond to a trust that is placed in them, and the tenth … one should have judgement to avoid. So Qasim has our cash, and keeps it locked in a tin box, and writes the sums on the wall as he hands them to me, a proceeding which the Archæaologist, far from considering my financial method as the fruit of experience, looks upon with disapproval as the product of a flibbertigibbety mind. Since our arrival in Hureidha, however, where we possess large sums of several thousand dollars at a time, I have handed over the reserve to be kept in her bedroom, merely so as to avoid sleeping with it alone downstairs, for Qasim lodges in another house and anyone can walk into me through the non-existent terrace door. Her bedroom is locked with—she declares with innocent and surprisingly unscientific confidence—a European key. Now anyone might know that European keys and locks are bought all over the East by the dozen at a time, and one that opens one door will open another with equal ease; the only safe way of locking anything up here is to use one of the clumsy Arab contraptions made of wood. Our pretty little Ne’ma has long since looked into every secret corner of the Bluebeard room, one may be sure. I might have thought of this myself, but my own methods of guarding against theft are different, and, as I always lose keys, I would have given this one to Ne’ma to look after, and been sure then that no one except herself would rummage among my things. As it is, the danger never entered my mind, and fifty-five of our dollars have gone. I can remember hearing female steps and a chink of silver down our stairs, and noticing vaguely that the sound seemed different from the usual click of anklets, but who did it, or when, or how, we shall never know for certain. I hope it was Ne’ma; she can then buy herself another girdle to go with the dress we have given her for the coming feast. As for our bags of silver, they have been brought down again and handed to Qasim, who has locked them in our neighbour’s carved cupboard, and now goes about with a large and very non-European key securely tied in his girdle.

  * * *

  He too has had to have a new futah for the feast and a white turban with yellow flowers. For days it seemed as if Hureidha could not provide these things, but at last our slave appeared with them unexpectedly—conjured to all appearances from nowhere—and Qasim has been smoothing them out on the dining-table, saying “Praise be to God” at intervals. His wages, however, I do not give him, and I have been talking to him like a mother on the subject of female wiles: he looked self-conscious and blushed, and will probably pay as much attention to my words as young men usually do when talked to by their mothers.

  Meanwhile, unless we can get something soon from Shibam, we shall have no money to pay our workmen when this last bag has gone.

  February 3.

  “He wished him to be a model of constancy and fancied the best means of affecting it would be by not trying him too long.”

  (Mansfield Park.)

  The air is hot already, seventy to eighty in the shade, with sudden changes in it, and I have been sitting on the terrace for the first time wrapped in a quilt. Salih, the youngest of the Children of Muhsin, came and helped me to diagnose a woman who complained of a Sikin in her head. The Sikin is invisible except to a few exceptional people like Salih’s father; it has a human form, though much taller, and can live in any substance—a stone, a wall, a door-post—and if you laugh at it, it creeps into you and hurts; if, on the other hand, it—or rather she—likes you, she will come and shake your clothes when you are ill, and bring one or other of the Prophets to cure you. Some Sikins pray and some do not. If she dislikes you, she spits as you pass (spitting is terribly popular) and you come out in a rash. It is very difficult to know her, because she goes about veiled like any other woman, even when she is visible. I thought Epsom salts might discourage her as much as anything; if they did not, I told the woman, Allah would do the rest, and Salih and I continued to discuss the matter after she left. He did not think it was a Sikin, but rather a Barkin, who—or which—is altogether milder and enters like a little cool wind by the great toe of the right foot; it then settles in the chest, swelling in lumps either in front or on one side, and it eats your food, so that you eat and eat and are always hungry. The Wall in the tomb down below can drive it away, out by the big toe as it came.

  “Is it true, Salih, that the Wali has four ’Afrits in the shape of dogs who go to his tomb every night and keep him informed of everything we do?”

  “Yes,” said Salih. “Anyone can see them going in and out. No one can enter when they are there.”

  “The ’Afrits,” he went on, “are men, and they creep into women by the ear” (how very true); “and the Jinn are women, and visit men. But the worst of all,” said Salih, “is the Makhfi (the Hidden One): when He creeps in, you swell and swell and go black and die, may Allah preserve us.”

  “Amen,” said I, for indeed our European morale is slightly shaken with all these diseases about us, and the Archæologist is now drifting towards sickness in her turn. Alinur says that this country “gives her the willies”; I must tell her it is only the Barkin.

  * * *

  Sayyid ’Aluwi, Salih’s cousin, strolled in upon this conversation and turned it towards matrimonial complications, equally incalculable but far easier to cure. He tells me that his whole family are bringing pressure to bear on his brother Husain, whose divorce and remarriage are strongly disapproved of. “It may be,” said ’Aluwi hopefully, “that in a week or two he will divorce again, and then he can remarry his former wife.”

  “That will make two divorces and two weddings in a month. Do you have a big feast for every wedding?”

  “Not when it is the same wife for the second time,” said ’Aluwi.

  “But surely,” I said, “he can’t marry the same wife again till someone else has married and divorced her?”

  Sayyid ’Aluwi looked troubled. “We do not follow that rule here,” he said. “The fact is that the sayyids have made special arrangements among themselves so that they can marry cheaply and often—for there is very little else to do here. So they have a rule by which no one can pay more than fourteen dollars (21s.) for a wife, and a virgin at that; one can spend sixty dollars or so on a wedding feast, but that is all. This makes it possible for them to marry as often as they like. But the tribes are very much more expensive, and here in Wadi ’Amd one is supposed to woo one’s bride for six months or a year, and one can see her as one does in Europe.” A look of gentleness came over Sayyid ’Aluwi’s kind and open face: “You went to visit my little beduin wife,” said he. “She cost me three hundred dollars; and when I had been accepted, I had to give a present to her mother, who uncovered her face before me for the first time when she received it. It is called a ‘coffee present,’ and she gives half of it back as a wedding gift. And then I had to give presents to all the slaves. But the money for the bride is not actually handed over—not until there is a divorce.”

  “That will not be necessary in your case,” I said. “She is a darling.”

  Sayyid ’Aluwi beamed. “We married for love,” he said. “It is the best way.”

  February 6.

  “For so above thine altars will Philippus offer vapour of frankincense.”

  (Greek Anthology.)

  The great feast of the year, the feast of the pilgrimage, begins in three days’ time when the Elders of the Cities of the East see the new moon of Dhu’l Hajja in their sky. Then everywhere, from Samarkand to Morocco, is rejoicing and the slaying and eating of goats and sheep and lambs and the steam of sacrifice goes up in unison from the pilgrim fires of Mekka and from the pilgrims’ homes. These are the greatest days of all the year, and already a fervour of preparation runs through our little town, and I am more harrowed than usual by the constant stream of women who come with the last of their treasures to sell. They never end their poor unhappy stories except by saying, “Allah will feed us,” nor do they withhold their blessings and polite gentle words if, as it happens, one cannot buy: so that one is ashamed for one’s easy virtues, compared to these whose goodness lives in the constant companionship of hunger
. The trouble is that we have no money left to buy with, and Ba Obaid is sending nothing—he too, no doubt, cut off by the Humumi war. Our slave, poor as a rat himself, has just brought in a woman with children to feed whose husband has vanished in Java: it is a story I hear every day, but the slave has been doing what he can for it with his huge and clumsy eloquence, forgetting himself and his own needs in the anxiety to befriend. He has a great many friends; a moment will come when I shall have to ask him to bring in no more; but I hate to do so!

  Little Ahmed, too, came asking for things—tea and sugar for his mother. I thought he was making it up and paid no attention: he turned at the door and said in a pathetic voice: “You did not believe me when I spoke,” and in the evening the Mansab’s sister herself came to fetch the things away for sudden visitors and told me that Ahmed had gone home cut to the quick by my lack of confidence. He is only nine years old.

  Their great-grandmother, she told me, was a Ferangi Christian, brought from Batavia to Hureidha, where she settled and became a Moslem: a strange history.

  * * *

  Our wadi meanwhile is filled with troubles and rumours: the Archæologist is in bed with a temperature, and her cave has been disappointing, as it turns out to have been looted already by the pre-Islamics themselves. Our mails, slow as they were before, are now cut off altogether by the Humumi; and as for money, we are nearly down to our last dollar—and the time of the feast is not a time to borrow!

  A chauffeur has been shot dead on the Tarim road, and Sayyid ’Aluwi will have to circumvent the troubled zone and return to Mukalla across the jl by Du’an. Our only vision of the outer world was the sight of three aeroplanes flying from the Se’ar in the north towards Mukalla. Swift and infinitely remote they flew, unattainable as the sunbeams and clouds through which they travel, and if one lay sick indeed, one would see them as the shipwrecked see the distant passing ships beyond their call.