A Winter in Arabia

by Freya Stark

  As we rode back, the three children carolled with strident voices:

  “We caught the red Ibex and broke his horns

  And ’Ali the Servant of God within the year

  will take from us the sight of our eyes.”

  There is still a flavour of magic about the ibex or wa’l; a red one is supposed to be particularly strong. These short songs, two verses with pauses in the middle, are called ’amal, and sung with any labour, such as the drawing of water from the well.

  Down the valley we rode in the crisp sun, a little wind blowing through it. Hureidha appeared far off in sight, its white mosque and minaret before it. It is a charming town, so clean, clear-cut and brown, and not a tree to break its straight and delicate lines. It is a dear city. I shall think of it always as something complete and independent, a little oasis that lives its life in its own way. And of how few places can one say that in the world?

  February 17.

  “From the old deep-dusted annals

  The years erase their tale

  And round them race the channels

  That take no second sail.”

  (A. E. HOUSMAN.)

  Things are very gloomy. The Archæologist continues with a small but irregular temperature, Alinur is in bed with a cold; our American has left us to walk up the wadi to ’Amd, after receiving a message to say the the “deep wadis are unadvisable”; wadis ’Ain, Masila and all S.W. of Henin are forbidden: the road is still cut; and there is a wavering ripple here among our tribes owing to the fact that the Humumi are not yet dealt with; the British reluctance to bomb is very difficult to explain to the Arab. I am wondering whether, even if I am strong enough to attempt it, I shall be able in a few weeks’ time to travel by camel to the coast.

  On the credit side of this depressing balance is the fact that I have bought the fifteenth-century MS. from the Qadhi. Our Mansab, hearing of the difficulty about the orphans, decided that as the benefit will go to them one can sell, though one cannot lend their property. So the Qadhi appeared this morning early with an air of mystery, and drew the precious object, wrapped in a case made of mattress ticking, out of the folds of his cashmere shawl. I told him that I had no idea of its value, but would risk 100 dollars: he said he had thought of eighty, but the extra twenty would be a help to the orphans. He is the straightest, most honest of men, and goes out of his way to tell me which of the manuscripts exist as printed books so that I need not buy them. I have now got three partially copied, and have taken details and copied specimen pages of six others.

  * * *

  I have ridden out in the wadi, photographing irrigation channels for Alinur. Our slave took me. He is as huge and black and clumsy as a Labrador, and he has the smallest of donkeys, which he adores. He calls it McLean.

  “Why McLean?” I asked, very much astonished.

  “It was a steamship,” said he. “It used to visit along the coast, from place to place—and that is why I gave the name to this donkey. He is like a steamship on land.”

  Anything more unlike would be hard to imagine. McLean has a wooden pack-saddle with a shelf on either side; one can balance one’s feet there in a precarious way.

  The sun and day were beautiful; a little film of cloud made one hope for rain, and the fields are being hoed with pointed hoes and the canals cleaned out in expectation. Yellow scented balls of blossom, soft as kittens, are out on the samr trees along their banks of boulders. The slave was so happy, he stretched his huge arm and slapped me on the shoulder at intervals, out of pure affection, regardless of the disturbing effect, like an earthquake, on McLean.

  Hasan the boy came too, in a green futah, and walked ahead, cajoling the donkey onward with his skull-cap which he took off and offered as if it were a dish of carrots. “Walk ahead,” I heard the slave whisper. “McLean likes to see someone in front of him.” McLean was not taken in, even when Hasan filled the skull-cap with pebbles.

  Hasan, smoking wisps of paper filled with green tobacco, walked on reciting poems composed by his father about Harold and the R.A.F. and chucked his long brown fingers to explain the verses to us and to the donkey behind him.

  “When the flyers met them with their hum,

  The tribes fell a height of four stories.

  In wadi ’Alwa Ingrams will overcome;

  Who disobeyed his order, he will bomb.

  He commanded abruptly and there was no discussion,”

  “Oh, Hasan, how can you say that?” I interrupted.

  “They will throw down their guns

  And their hearts will settle.

  He says: ‘Woe to you if you cause trouble,

  On camels we will seize the guilty, with blows.’

  Now everyone crows on the day of the month,

  (the last day, when a truce ends: all being peace now, there is nothing to fear)

  Now all who sin, ask pardon of Allah.”

  “Ingram is very great,” said Hasan. “Since he has been in the Hadhramaut, every year the seil-flood comes.”

  I can see Harold and Doreen rapidly turning into legendary, tutelary deities.

  We rode along the north side of the wadi, to a burial cave, now used for storage of fodder, dug in the hillside; its niches were filled with drying stalks of millet. Below it the dead oasis stretched across the plain, sandy waves dotted with stones like foam. A train of four camels ploughed slowly across that dusty floor, on whose immense peace the imperceptible, immemorial movement of Time alone was visible.

  The irrigation seems to have come down unaltered; a series of stone-built wedges cut the main stream and divided its waters: they are called sadd, a misleading word, as it makes one expect a barrage where none exists. From these sadds secondary canals, small streams called saqiyas, are taken off, irrigate fields enclosed in high mud banks, often topped with a breastwork of thorns, and flow over a walled outlet into parallel saqiyas that run on a lower level. Little holes in the banks, called harra, let the water into smaller patches or plantations. In the main canals, here and there, great blocks of stone called ras are built to deflect the course of floods, and the waters are sometimes run through a narrow piece, walled on either side, where they can be measured: one such ancient measuring-place is yet visible, emerging from the sand.

  As we rode there, a bent old man, his shoulders clothed only in his beard, came up and told me he was the head of a sub-tribe of Ja’da and lives in a small fortress on a rock beside the way. Alinur has been, and there is a cave below the rock.

  “My sons will let you see it,” said the old man.

  But when we got there only a handsome, sullen grandson was at home, afraid to bring the key. “You might carry things away,” he said to the slave.

  It is annoying to be treated like a pickpocket, though the suspicion was mentioned with no malice. Our little party left in state and dudgeon, relieved only by the sprightliness of McLean who stops of his own accord at every water-dome, in case his rider may be thirsty. The slave then contemplates him fondly, like a mother her precocious child, but Alinur tells me that she secretly uses a packing-needle, gently to prod these pauses.

  When we reached home I found the Qadhi and a host of people waiting, a new poet with a Qasida, and the Mansab of Meshed—delighted to eat marmalade and biscuits—surrounded by a train of men and boys carrying a small grey monkey with sad wrinkled nose and red behind: it sat on the middle of my terrace playing with old reels of photographs and eating melon seeds. They say there are numbers of them in the hills about. They are unbelievers, the Mansab says, transformed by God. It seems strange to think of God as so much more unpleasant than one’s fellow creatures. Who would change his worst enemy into a monkey, with that sad look in its eyes?

  February 18.

  “There is a pool whose waters clear

  Reflect not what is standing near.”

  (WALTER DE LA MARE.)

  Our Mansab has issued an order that spangles, sequins, cowrie shells and all such ornaments are to be abolished from the wardrobes
of Hureidha. Consternation fills every harim. The ladies with sighs are snipping from their new dresses, just finished for the feast, the stars they wear so gracefully in the middle of their backs, swaying as they walk. And the sadness is that we are responsible for the tragedy. It is the sight of our dowdy clothes that inspires dress reform in the heart of the Mansab. He himself is a dandy, always immaculate, scented with sandal-wood, his nails now pink with my varnish, which he asked for. It seems unfair that he should be able to condemn the whole womankind of his city to plainness. I have been to the majliss to see what I can do, but the unanimous male vote was inexorable. “Sequins,” says the Qadhi, speaking for all, “cost a great deal of money and are no use.” Social distinctions will be preserved by other means. Sherifas can wear long black wraps to the ankles and throw the fringed ends both over one shoulder: slaves and the lowly born have to throw each end over its own shoulder and wear them short; this rule is now to be enforced with strictness, so that a lady may be known for a lady as she trails her shapeless garments through the dust. But the pretty spangles must go. “They cannot wash like your clothes,” says the Mansab. It almost makes one wish to dress like the Archæologist in trousers, which no one would copy.

  * * *

  We have had a mail from Seiyun—the Humumi still fighting, the road still cut, trouble spreading; Harold must wish us away, though we are having a steadying effect in this corner. Mr. Philby’s article has come, and when Ja’far destroys my afternoon sleep by murmuring “Freya” for an hour on end outside my door, I like to think that we are a spearhead of oppression.

  * * *

  I am now the poulticer of Alinur, while the Archæologist, having consented to take quinine, has dropped her temperature. The young American is back from ’Amd, cheerful but exhausted with social life and realizing to the full the price one has to pay for a friendly footing in Arabia. He tells me that he calculates the wear and tear of life here to be exactly double that of home.

  We took him yesterday to hunt for tufa fossils. For an hour we rode south along the Wadi Nissim gravel, amid dams and sluices and watch-towers here and there, until we turned to the cliffs and lost the path under steep limestone boulders. Alinur rode McLean and I had a still smaller engaging creature called Daqiq who knows his name, lifts his head, and brays if you call him. Hasan came and the slave, and a strange bedu appeared with long smooth hair over his shoulders, and walked with the young American hand in hand. When the sheer walls narrowed we came to a ledge like a grand circle in a theatre, over an empty stream below: and saw at its hillside end in shadow a naked pool, rock-ringed and lonely, about forty-five feet across and its depth unknown—my thirty-foot tape could not plumb it. It lies dark there, reflecting nothing, beside a little beach of rock, where the limestone silt turns to tufa for the benefit of geologists to come, and is visited only by the violence of waters in their season, which foam down a scooped channel in those scarce shelving walls. In the ravine another group of beduin and five shepherdesses, children, were playing with browsing goats, and came to look. The lads wound their head-cloths round their loins and leaped into the water; or climbed the overhang, and, clinging like goats, sprang fifteen feet or more into the middle of the pool. It is a mystery how, with only a pond of this size in the whole district, they all can swim; they learn, they say, during the floods of spring. It was charming to see their dark bodies with curls loose on their shoulders, the cliff and the shimmer of green water around them. There are fish in the pond; if you catch and eat them you can see in the dark, the beduin say. The little shepherdesses sit shyly at a distance and eat dates out of the crowns of their hats.

  The young American gave us an excellent lunch. The beduin lads came shivering, wringing their loin-cloths out of the cold water to the sun. Red dragon-flies flitted, a frog put out its head. I slept with the splashing and laughter in my ears, and in a dim dream followed the voices as they must have echoed century before century round the water-hole, since the days when first the leaves were fossilized around it, exactly, to look at, as the leaves that grow there now.

  February 20.

  “And the great argument for long living is that you win lands of dreams and find them real too.”

  (Letter from W. P. KER.)

  The Mansab of Meshed, still here on a visit, said that he wished to see our ruins and lent me his brown pony to go there; he himself rode the grey with henna spots. We set off in the morning from a heap of bricks just outside the town, with a sort of John Gilpin ceremonial and a chorus of admiration when I started to trot. A woman on a horse has never even been imagined here. The little Javanese pony called Nasib (Fate) is a charming beast. They train them to a quick pace between trot and canter, perfectly smooth as if impelled horizontally, with no ups and downs, and most pleasant. He pricked his ears and looked about with the friendly liveliness that makes Arab ponies so attractive. Hasan, running at remarkable speed, followed with camera and sunshade.

  The Mansab was not really dressed for riding. He had a long white gown over a purple loincloth, with no trousers, and bedroom slippers on his feet; his velvet sash and the Sultan of Hyderabad’s decoration pinned on to it kept him more or less together. He came thundering along like a voluminous Charon, beard, gown, turban and slippers floating about him, and enjoyed it hugely till his star fell off amid the ruins of the pre-Islamic irrigation, and Hasan had to run back to find it; but the bit with the name in the middle had gone.

  We climbed to the temple of the Moongod, dilapidated already but peaceful in the sun; and then, crossing the main waterway of the vanished gardens, marked faintly by a double line of stones, saw the Nahdi and his boy labouring in their fields on the farther side. He had hired a plough and two oxen for one and a half dollars for the day, and his patches of turned-up earth looked very small. The little boy was going over them with a camel and his wooden board, drawing the earth washed down during the winter up again on to the slope of dykes that hem the cultivated patches. The water, when it comes, escapes by a gap built with stones at one corner, like the lip of a jug, and descends to irrigate another field below. But as yet it is still desert, for every drop has to be carried three miles across the wadi except in the season of floods.

  The Nahdi ran to meet us and kissed the Mansab’s garment, now decorously perpendicular as he stopped to dismount. Hand in hand they went over the scree to see the excavated cave, a large round place with niches and fragments of pottery and skulls; and thence to the dwelling cave, in whose twilight, on goat-hair strips of matting, the Mansab settled cross-legged with his sash wrapped round him to support his knees. He was hot, and took off his turban, and beamed. He was pleased at my regret over his star, but himself does not mind, he says, losing his possessions; and this is evidently true, for he thought no more about it. He had a bag of tiny coins in the folds of his gown for the children, delighted and shy beside him; and presently in the middle of a sentence his eyes shut; he stroked his beard, said he was an old man, lay down at full length with his plump toes sticking upward, and was asleep.

  The family had rushed to slaughter a kid, so that we had time on our hands. The twilight was pleasant and cool, filled only with a small buzzing of domestic flies. After a while when coffee had come, I too felt sleepy and lay down, and was touched presently to see the old man creeping quietly towards me, to cover me, head and all, with his green shawl. By the time I woke, the kid was there, carried like the head of St. John in a basket, and a mound of yellow rice beside it.

  The Mansab washed with only a few drops of water, remembering how far it has to come; he is one of those happy natures who think spontaneously and cheerfully of others. His host, squatting in a dark corner, looked on while we ate, more pleased to see his food consumed than if we had brought him a present: and when we left soon after, the Mansab took Hasan to ride pillion behind him, my camera in his hand.

  On the way back we stopped at the small fort of the Ja’da to see the owner whose grandson had received us so badly. I had seen to it that a com
plaint reached him by ’Ali, and we were now welcomed in a cave below the castle, where, under double rows of ancient funeral niches, the family lives in winter for warmth. There was another unexcavated cave, they said, in the hillside above, with ancient writings cut in the rock beside it.