A Winter in Arabia

by Freya Stark

  * * *

  The son of the Mansab of Meshed has come again, with a sack full of pre-Islamic rubbish to sell: I would not buy in any case, for it is a fatal thing to encourage promiscuous scratching up of ancient sites. But I took from him a little handful of incense, found in an antique fragment of a jar, and smelled it as it burned, still faintly fragrant.

  * * *

  My stream of daily tribesmen now flows again and Sayyid ’Aluwi brought his brother-in-law to-day, who is a minor headman of the Ja’da. The Ja’da used to emigrate a great deal to Hyderabad, and their type is very mixed. The question of blackmail has been a good deal discussed in the wadi and the headman and his two friends looked at me with cold reserve till I happened to ask after the rather remote village they came from. When they told me the name, I said:

  “Oh, you are the people who are always killing each other?” for there has been another murder among cousins there; whereupon they smiled delightedly as a man does when accused of being bad and gay. It must be difficult for moralists to explain why one is more pleased with one’s vices than one’s virtues. The fact is that one loves the Good, but the Virtuous are rather a bore. Another Ja’da came asking to be released from a sickness imposed, he thought, by the witchcraft of some woman in Java; and he too looked as pleased as possible when I suggested that his own unkindness was probably the beginning of the trouble.

  “Will your wali not give you a counter-charm?” I asked.

  “Ferangi medicines are better for that sort of thing,” said he.

  A more difficult problem has arisen over a bronze axe I bought for the Archæologist a day or two ago. The seller had, it seems, merely borrowed it from a friend to do a day’s chopping, and brought it to me: the rightful owner appears now, incidentally with a scalded hand which he has smeared with honey. The axe is precious, being the only object of the kind we have seen, so I have refused to relinquish it, and told the owner to summon his enemy before the Mansab, to extract the price I paid. One will become as ready as Solomon with constant practice here.

  February 7.

  “Each in his narrow cell for ever laid.”

  (GRAY’S Elegy.)

  The tombs of the Saints of Hureidha, with their sons and their grandsons around them, lie under egg-shaped domes in the cemetery outside the town. They lie in wooden arks, heavily carved, and their size, pressed together in the small square space, gives them a jostling air unsuitable to the “vasty halls of death.”

  The oldest is that of Habib ’Omar al ’Attas, who died in the year of the Hejra 1182 (1768 A.D.); that of Habib Ahmed, the most venerated, dates from A.H. 1335 (1916 A.D.); but their elaborate carving and dusty neglect might belong to a much earlier time. The little buildings are naked, decorated only with scroll-work round the windows, a niche or two for lamps, and an old cotton sheet, printed in colours, tied by the four corners to prevent the mud roof from falling in crumbs on the coffins of these venerated dead. Habib Ahmed, the author of my MS., was the grandfather of the present Mansab; it was he who instituted the rule called Taraf in this valley, which made it sinful to destroy women, cattle, waterways or trees. It must be pleasant to know that, when your worldly labours are over, you will abide in the love of your city, visited on holidays with banners and still consulted in the daily problems of all: resting there with your ancestors around you, while your descendants carry on the works that your arms have relinquished in the weariness of time: no wonder that with this before him, the Mansab of Hureidha walks with so quiet a dignity among his people.

  They, gathering round, watched with dubious looks while I took my shoes off in the sun-drenched porch and prepared to photograph the tombs. A bedu assured me that the saint would object.

  “That may be so,” said I. “But do you think that your wall cannot look after himself? If he dislikes being photographed, all he has to do is to spoil the picture.”

  “That is so. That is indeed so. That is what happened to Doreen.” The crowd was reassured, for Doreen’s effort in the dim light had been under-exposed. They opened the windows, and I was allowed to photograph in silence, with only a murmur from the bedu now and then, saying: “It will not come out.”

  It was my first day abroad. A small bodyguard of children kept the crowd back with sticks, a proceeding which began to be resented and required another oration to explain that not pride or the desire to avoid conversation inspired it, but the existence of worms bad for illness which their bare shuffling feet are apt to stir about them in the dust. But it is an exhausting thing to take a convalescent walk through Hureidha, though to-day the town is half empty; all who can have gone on pilgrimage to Meshed, to return across the jl in time for their to-morrow’s feast.

  February 9.

  “When a bad Muslim dies the angels take him out of his tomb and put in one of the good from among the Christians in his place.”

  (LUCIE DUFF GORDON.)

  A small feminine sensation has been caused in Hureidha by the fact that my hands have been painted with henna for the feast: the news has rushed round the town and enthusiastic women come to snatch and admire the works of art as I pass. The truth is that I have long wanted to see how this operation is performed.

  So I arranged to go to the Mansab’s sister and her daughter “Rapunzel” of the long plaits next door, and found there the best beauty specialist of the town, ’Ayesha, with pretty little pointed face and thin fingers, sitting cross-legged making green puree like spinach out of powdered henna leaves and water in a basin. She asked me to wash my hands with the powdered Khoteqa to get the grease off, rubbed my wet fingers in turmeric which I spread over hands and arms to make them yellow; and then, having arranged cushions to support me on every side, took my hands over, beginning with the right one “for a blessing.”

  With her forefinger she scoops up the paste, which hangs in a thin drip, and with this traces out rings and stars and trees and anything she fancies. It was a formidable performance. I went at 1 p.m. and emerged at five. The ladies pressed glasses of tea into my free hand, looked at the growing work of art with criticism and advice, and told the gossip of the town. Fatima, the elder sister, came in a festal dress of embroidered silk, her eyes heavily kohled, a pair of white-and-black check socks “for best” loose about her ankles. The event of the day was a woman who had cut her throat but is still alive: I had been sent for, but Qasim refused to give the message, to my relief I must admit, and I shocked the ladies by surmising that perhaps the Sikin had got into her; they were pained to think I should have learned of this unorthodox spirit. A feeling of infinite leisure hung over our harim. When the news was interesting, ’Ayesha stopped work with her finger and the drip of henna suspended in air and everything came to a standstill. She kept a little stick in her mouth to wipe away irregularities in the pattern and stray drops, which she apparently swallowed. It could not be bad for her because henna is one of the trees of Paradise. When my hands were done, I was arranged on cushions on the floor and told to sleep while one of the ladies did my feet: the others had coffee in a far corner. I lay with closed eyes, feeling the little cold drops as they fell; henna is cooling, they take baths of it in summer. I dozed, and woke to find the work finished, on each instep a sun with shining rays, taken, the lady said, “from a printed book.” My hands had three palm branches on the back and one upon the middle finger, besides other small patterns and circles: the first joint and the inside of the palm were solid henna. This elaboration is only for brides; matrons or unmarried girls have a much simpler affair: it was the height of impropriety for me to walk about so highly decorated. But though I pleaded in a modest way, the ladies could not bear to lose the opportunity: they lavished every bridal ornament upon me. While I lay drying, they gathered round, fed me with bread and coffee, and brought half a petrol tin to beat on while they sang: the day passed, pleasant, restful and timeless: but I had to keep the stuff on, caked like mud, all night, and go again this morning to have the pattern worked over to make it strong. It then lasts
with no further attention for three weeks.

  This morning a real drum had been provided to amuse me, and a woman expert in singing and trilling her tongue, while the little girls came and tossed their hair about in the dance called Rishi, or, very rigid, two by two and hand in hand, stamped their feet in the Safina to jingle the bells of their anklets and the little bells that hang from rings on the great toe. “Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes” is an accurate description of dance dress in the Harim.

  To-day all are in their best, and the girls’ hair is rubbed stickily with dates to make it fluff out at the bottom of their plaits. The women visitors sit in their medieval dresses; the veil tight about the chin frames their face, the black mask thrown back makes as it were a crown; in the shafts of light from the lattices, with the carved dark columns behind them, they move like the pictures of some fourteenth-century psalter come to life. I lay dozing at intervals, listening to the talk with closed eyes as the hours went by. I had a merciful heart, they said, and it is not true that Christians throw their dead into the sea.

  A young woman came in with a timid manner to see me as one might a lion in its den: she teaches the little girls to read. She laid her fears aside gradually and, when I seemed to sleep, told the assembled company the story of Maiuk the Christian.

  Maiuk, she said, lived near a mosque, and one day a widow and her daughter, travellers, came to this mosque, and being quite destitute, asked alms of the mulla. But he sent them empty away, and they wept. And Maiuk heard them, and sent his servant to enquire and was told that it was a widow and her daughter, and that they were travellers, and he sent them one hundred dollars. And in time the mulla died, and came to the gates of Paradise, and saw the rivers and the trees and the huris: and the angels said to him: “This, oh Mulla, was the place prepared for you, but it has been given away to Maiuk the Christian.”

  February 10.

  “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”

  (Psalm 137.)

  The first ceremony of the feast began yesterday on the slope of our wadi, under the cliffs of the western side, where it is shady in the afternoon.

  Here the men and children of Hureidha assemble on this day for the evening meal, which they cook in the lee of boulders that have rolled and settled on that stony slope. Small parties were going already with carpets and cooking-pots when the youngest of the Children of Muhsin came for me with his donkey and spread my white sheepskin upon it. Alinur came too, but the Archæologist is in bed with fever. We threaded our way among the reddish sandstones till we came to where boulders were spattered with the blood of goats and kids, and circular hearths were built, the same that I had seen and wondered at three years ago on the jl; they call them maq’ad, or sitting-places, and build them with a ring of big stones a yard or so across, and charcoal and a kindling of dry palm leaves in the centre, and a layer of thin flat stones above, on which the gobbets of meat are laid to cook. These sacrificial feasts take place all over the country in the high clefts where the water pools are found; they belong no doubt to some rite whose origin is lost, and the places are still called ma’bad or “homes of worship”; but the people of Hureidha removed their ma’bad a hundred years ago and brought it down to the hillside near the town; and there on the day when the army of tents has issued from Mekka and the animals are slaughtered in Wadi Mina, the people of Hureidha, too, celebrate the Pilgrimage. Most of the men are away, 1,300 of them are said to be in Java, and no women appear, so the crowd among the boulders big as houses was thinly scattered, and from the mounds of the ma’bad the smoke rose only here and there, straight as the sacrifice of Abel.

  From groups far and near greetings and invitations were called, and we paused by this friend or that, till, under the leaning wall of a boulder with carpets spread, we climbed to where the Mansab and his party were arriving. There we settled in a circle and leaned on cushions, rising at intervals to greet some Elder as he joined us. The land fell away to the flat wadi whose sparse houses and palm groves shone in the sinking sun. At a little distance sat the cook cutting chunks of meat into small pieces, a basket before him and a knife in his hand; he was swathed in a yellow fringed futah, with a wooden key tucked in at his apex in front; his portly back, enclosed in a machine-knitted sweater, rested against the mountainside behind it, two solidities meeting back to back. His assistant, half naked, with grey beard and woollen tam-o’-shanter, fanned the fire of our ma’bad with a shallow basket, and fed it with lumps of fat, while a man in a red tarbush sprinkled salt.

  In the course of time the fuel consumed to hot embers, the roof of heated stones sank down, the pieces of meat were laid to roast upon it.

  In our circle of Elders rosaries clicked; the conversation, tranquil and deliberate, pursued its way, imbued with the peace of the evening; the mind went wandering in Time through the feasts of mankind. Now and then the Qadhi asked all to join in a Takbir, the declaration that God is Great.

  Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar;

  La Allah illa Allahi

  Allahu akbar wa lillahi al-hamdu

  Allahu akbar kabirihi wa al-hamdu lillahi kathirihi

  wa subhana Allahu bukratan wa asilan.

  La Allahu illa Allahi

  La na’bud ilia aiahu mukhlasina lahu ad-din

  wa lau kariha al kafiruna

  La Allahu illa Allahi wahduhu

  sadaqa wa’duhu wa nasara ’abduhu wa ’azza junduhu wa

  hazama al-ahdzab wahduhu

  La Allahu illa Allahi wa Allahu akbar wa lillahi al-hamdu.

  God is Great, God is Great, God is Great:

  There is no God but God.

  God is Great and to God the Praise.

  God in His immensity is Great and to God much praise.

  Glorify Him in the dawn and at the fall of night.

  There is no God but God.

  Him alone we serve, purifying our worship to Him,

  Though the unbelievers hate.

  There is no God but God alone.

  His word is truth, He gives victory to His servant;

  He gives glory to His army and puts the sectaries to flight.

  There is no God but God and God is Great

  To God the praise.

  The voices sounded noble and manly among the frail columns of smoke ascending in the desert place of stones.

  After every Takbir our neighbours turned thoughtfully and said: “There is no difference between us. We all believe in God.”

  A pleasant smell of roasting meat floated about. And presently cooked rice was brought in baskets, a tablecloth was laid, dates, bread, and honey were spread upon it, and the goat came up in relays, sizzling from the fire. In a small circle of their own nearby, eight of the children sat eating too, their little tummies visibly distending. When it was over the Mansab gave them fireworks to play with, while we again reclined. We perfumed ourselves with incense in small burners; we listened to the poets among us; and went home while the last brightness faded from the cliffs, red as the bands of henna with which old Sindbad the Sailor has streaked his donkey in honour of the feast.

  When the dark fell we too had fireworks. I had a few with me, and some crackers, and the children let them off to sparkle over the edge of my terrace for the neighbours to see. Nothing, I believe, could have pleased people more, for many have come to-day saying: “You too took a part in our feast.” We are more or less adopted as citizens of Hureidha.

  February 11.

  “And as rest from labour is kept inviolate by the just man, so let the works of pious mortals endure.”

  (MACEDONIUS, Greek Anthology.)

  We had hardly done with the excitement of our sacrificial meal, when the young American oil-man from Mukalla walked in. He was gaily dressed in a long green futah, an Iraq sidara like a forage cap on his head, and had walked all the seven days with seven camels for his luggage behind him. He was so young, healthy and cheerful, so pleased with a universe unlike his own, so gay when he laughed, and so
grateful for friendliness which comes when “you sit about and talk,” that no one indeed could be his enemy. The perpetual charm of Arabia is that the traveller finds his level there simply as a human being: the people’s directness, deadly to the sentimental or pedantic, likes the less complicated virtues; and the pleasantness of being liked for oneself might, I think, be added to the five reasons for travel given me by Sayyid Abdulla, the watch-maker: “to leave one’s troubles behind one; to earn a living; to acquire learning; to practise good manners; and to meet honourable men.”

  * * *

  Yesterday was the chief day of the feast, called Zina, and we dressed to a beating of drums, and made our way about 7 a.m. through our uneven streets till we came upon a little group of four rehearsing by themselves with banners unfurled. In the open space in front of the Mansab’s house, another group was beating. The trident brass of the banner poles shines against the blue of the sky; on crude satins the name of the wali is embroidered; the crowd, collecting slowly, had put on all brightness it could find in the way of tablecloths, loin-cloths or shawls. The Mansab comes out from his carved doorway in a green turban and cloak, green jacket gold-buttoned beneath it, the men of his family behind him; he is so holy, people do not kiss his hand, they bend over and sniff at it audibly, so as to breathe up a whiff of sanctity as if it were snuff. The procession formed itself, some hundreds of men, the Mansab and the banners at its head; Alinur and I followed, snatching photographs as the colours wound round the brown corners of the town, across the dry ravine, up the slope in the sun to the mosque where the cliff of the jl hangs like a ship’s prow above. There they prayed, and then poured in a varied stream to where the egg-shaped qubbas of the saints shine vivid among dusty graves, past the shed where biers are kept that hurry corpses to their shallow beds.