by Freya Stark
I thought I would toil up, though it is hot now in the afternoons: our mornings are eighty in the shade at 8 a.m. The Archæologist has lamented the absence of rock inscriptions in Hureidha, and wishes to find another cave to dig: and this one is close to the town and nearly all day in shade. It is there, apparently untouched, where the steep cliff meets the scree, with pre-Islamic words scratched on the rock around it, far better than the graffites of Shibam and Seiyun, and the only ones, as far as we know, round Hureidha.
February 21.
“For charitable prayers,
Shards, flints, and pebbles …”
(Hamlet, v. sc. i.).
As we rode home yesterday we saw a hoopoe and a butterfly, peacock blue with yellow markings at its outer edge of wings. There is a pretty little bird called qara, with a black flattish head white splashed, white tail with black mark, white underbody and black wings; a wheatear perhaps? The ba-ramadi is a small grey bird with a black head. The triz is a wagtail with black bib and neck and white on the back and underbody. And there is a bigger bird called makhala, with black head and tail and yellow under its body. But the bee-eating phoenix has not yet appeared.
* * *
When I reached home I found a man with a qasida in praise of Harold in his hand. “He has broken the horns of the wicked,” it says. I wonder if this has any relationship with the Bible phrase: “His horn shall be exalted”? It was the breaking of the horns of the wa’l that brought the punishment of ’Ali in the children’s song.
Harold and I are the subject of song in Hureidha at present. Old Abdulla the watch-mender came some evenings ago to present me with an ode in my honour. He had it on a piece of grubby paper and his wife and daughter came too, to hear. I had gone to bed, but it would have hurt the old man’s feelings to be turned back; so they all sat by my bedside; and it was charming to see him playing with his song, singing every verse over with modulations and variations, making us observe every delicacy of rhythm, while his daughter looked at him with all the admiration of her heart, and the wife, a plain elderly woman with a quiet, sweet expression sat listening, sure that he would be admired. One felt that it was a happy little household, all blossoming from the charming nature of Abdulla, who is one of the many really good old Moslems that I know. Qasim crouched out of sight in the passage, so that the women might remain unveiled, and presently Ne’ma joined us, and understood no word of the classic Arabic, but approved the sentiments when they were explained.
“Is your son a poet too?” I asked. He is an intelligent man very like his father, who has been telling me about a ruined fortress in the jl above Hajarein.
“He writes half a verse now and then, but he does not know the difficult words.” The father and daughter are the real companions in this craft, and presently they began to sing together, recalling one qasida after another. She knew all his poems, and reminded him of them; and at the close of each verse the two voices sank in unison into that low bell-like note on which the Arab music ends.
* * *
News has come through to-day that the Humumi have surrendered, handed in their robbers, agreed to pay the fine, and that the Tarim road is open; so we are once more in contact with the world. We have arranged to leave on the 5th of March, and I have sent for a lorry; I go overland, if I am strong enough, and meet the Archæologist on the coast to examine the probable site of Cana before sailing for Aden. Alinur hopes to come, but may have to hurry back to Palestine direct. It is getting hot; a south wind blows in the late afternoon, and it is irritating and dry; it is ninety in the shade at 5 p.m.
* * *
The Archæologist was feverless in the morning and packed our collected pots, and now alas! is in bed again with a temperature. The pots are so depressingly ugly that a prolonged contemplation of them would make anyone ill. Perhaps if one spent one’s life in close communion with such hideous efforts of the past the sweetest nature might become embittered and grow to hate the human race merely because of the things it is now preparing for excavations of the future. No other animal, when one comes to think of it, has littered the face of the earth with fragments except the creature Man.
* * *
I have been out with Alinur, looking for flints in the gravel which lies like a thick slice along the wadi bed, sandwiched in loess-like ground beneath it and above. The flints look almost as white as the limestone pebbles. They are fastened there as in cement, and Alinur hammers them out, striding along with a clumsy walk that is pleasantly restful; it seems to have taken something from the steadiness of the rocks with which she deals.
We lunched under the shade of an ’ilb tree with huge roots twisted in the stream bed, the favourite shade of an elderly thin white goat with hennaed forehead, who retired after an irritated look, stared at us from another tree to see if we would take the hint and go, ate a piece of our orange peel with an interested air as if it were a scandal, and refused to have anything more to say to us. Our slave and his friend had both forgotten to bring their food; they lay and slept while the donkeys licked their toes; “qui dort, dîne”; and in the late heat of the afternoon we returned, keeping up a trot by the simple but fatiguing expedient of swinging alternate legs against the donkey’s tummy.
* * *
I have been enjoying myself rather wickedly with the people of Meshed, the same who wrote to say that they did not wish us there to dig. Having been taken at their word they are sorry and have paid two visits, during which we fence politely. They ask what my plans are. “To stay here,” I tell them. “The ruins are important and the people’s kindness makes us feel at home.” The delegation leaves with a disgruntled air, but still hopes with persistence to retrieve the ground lost by that unfortunate manœuvre.
February 22.
“He that blesseth his friend with a loud voice, rising early in the morning, it shall be counted a curse to him.”
(Proverbs).
I am one of those fortunate people who can sleep through almost any noise, but my companions, with nights already devastated by pye-dogs, are now awakened in the first glimmer of dawn by the voices of the Children of Muhsin practising the call to prayer from the minaret below. Our Mansab and Qadhi have started a sort of crusade to make the people of Hureidha more attentive to their prayers, and every mosque is now filled five times a day. A road too is being built for cars: it is to sweep from the R.A.F. landing-ground to Hureidha and then on to the temple of the Moongod; the road is made simply by hoeing up hummocks into their original sand and clearing away boulders. All these novelties bring a restless atmosphere of civilization into our little town. The committee of Elders—five sayyids, one from each big house and two to represent the poor and the peasants—are afraid to lose their powers, and difficulties are piling up for our Mansab and his ardour of reform. Reform, here as elsewhere, is expensive; the proceeds from the seizure of the goats have vanished already in the making of the road, and a new tax has been invented for litigants, who are now expected to pay a dollar each for the settlement of their disputes, which the Qadhi used to do for nothing.
I went down one day to the Diwan when the Council of Elders was sitting and watched the application of the Law. It is a patriarchal affair. Round the walls of a pillared room pierced by seven carved windows, the committee of five leaned on cushions, clicking rosaries. Our Mansab, in one corner, sat cross-legged with a pillow on his knees to write on, an ash-bowl and litter of papers before him, and a large pair of scissors to play with. He has beautiful hands with narrow fingers, slender and square at the tips, nails pink with my varnish, and a gold signet ring. Opposite him, against one of the pillars, sat the Qadhi, explaining the cases to his brother as they came. Three secretaries squatted writing. Between them and the Elders the wall-space is filled with anyone who likes to come, chiefly beduin, and as I entered a litigant was hurling invective at his opponent, an old peasant whose every wrinkle was wrinkled twice over, as he crouched at the foot of a pillar and spoke with both hands held out. When they were dismissed two beduin stepped int
o their place. One was a fine man, in a striped futah with belt and vest and turban, the other poor and naked, with only a dirty cloth to tie his old grey hair; when his opponent laid a new gun before the Mansab (each litigant deposes something of value while the case is tried) he could only take an inferior dagger, much handled, from its shabby sheath.
He had not come prepared for the new rule about the dollar, and when he was asked, and saw the other pulling out a fat leather bag, a look of such misery came upon his face that I was just about to go bail for him when the case was postponed and both told to return to-morrow.
It is not a bad system. The Mansab’s decisions are final and personal, but the Qadhi is there to see that they accord with the Law. As everything is done in public there is a strong control of opinion, and the listening Elders do not hesitate to say what they think. The feeling was pleasant, democratic and friendly. The news of the district came in rolls and wisps of paper tied with very grey bits of calico: news that the young American in his journey had reached Sur and spent two days there: that a Qadhi has been nominated for ’Amd: that the Archæolo’gist must call for a registered packet in Mukalla, arrived nearly a month ago. (She has been expecting it for weeks; it is rather hard now to be asked to fetch it in person 200 miles away.)
While we were in the middle of it all, a banging of drums and a chorus were heard in the street below and all the Elders bent their portly forms to the ground-level of the windows and looked out. It was the workmen coming home after finishing the new bit of the road. They were headed by the fat cook, who came up to report with a new green turban on, and the Comic, his assistant, beside him. The road was described, the Elders asked questions, the Mansab gave the workmen the blessing of Allah; with mutual congratulations the employers parted from their employees, and the drum and its chorus were heard receding. The morning’s diwan was at an end.
February 23.
“To turne and winde a fierie Pegasus.”
(Henry IV.)
Sayyid ’Aluwi and I have been on pilgrimage to the tomb of a saint in the hills; it is on the way to Rakhiya and is known as the Wali Rukheime. No one can tell his origin; they say he belongs to pre-Islamic times, the times of “the first ones,” and that, when the saint died, “the earth opened and he buried himself with no one’s help, his sword and his servant beside him.”
The Mansab of Meshed lent his two horses for the expedition, and I set off thoughtlessly at a trot at 7.45 a.m. ’Aluwi following with cries. When he caught up he informed me that he had never ridden before, and I watched with some concern while he wrestled with the difficulties of his horse, his loincloth—an inadequate garment—and the flimsiness of a calico skull-cap on the hottest day we have had. If he were not the most amiable and placid of men, his temper must have given out. As it was, the irritation was confined to his horse, the grey with henna spots, who foamed and zigzagged at a gallop while ’Aluwi did things with the bridle one could hardly bear to look at. He was luckily hemmed in by the landscape, hills on one side and sand-dunes on the other, and went like a shuttle between them. The sand-dunes have a steep western pitch on whose brow ’Aluwi would hesitate, faintly and reluctantly reminiscent of Olympia, with the same unhappy but amiable expression of surprise repeated every time before he trotted hopefully up the easy eastern slope of the next. He is an optimist.
We came to a charming Arcadian sort of country, plantations of ’ilb trees in sunk fields, and then turned north into the wadi, with Ruweidat village on our left. A fort with four round ruined towers stands at the gate of the valley and beyond it one enters on a wide and stony amphitheatre inlaid with gravels; ravines, like stairs descending, open to it from the jl. In this shadowless place, scattered with flints, marked by a few pale samr trees meagre and grey, and camels browsing between their vicious thorns, the tomb of the saint lies beside a lime-washed building and rough siqaya, and shines white in the solitary meeting-place of wadis. It is shaped like a mummy-case with a lump for a head, and about fifteen feet long. These gigantic tombs are scattered over the Hadhramaut and are said by the people, probably truly, to date from times before. Islam. This one is on an ancient route that crosses to Wadi Rakhiya and the main Hadhramaut track by Shabwa to Yemen; traces of a built causeway are said still to exist along it: it is a short cut which avoids the Kasr detour for travellers making northward from ’Amd.
The one-roomed building that stands beside the tomb and the siqaya has two doorways opening south and north. Its rough stick ceiling is supported on tree-trunk pillars, and small thick shuttered windows open near the ground. A strip of black matting, a coffee hearth with coffee pot and cups in a basket, an incense burner carved in stone: and on the walls drawings of horned ibex very like those found by Sir Aurel Stein on Chalcolithic pots: such is the furniture of the shrine. It is a humble place, with an air of cheerful and secure sanctity about it: for none would steal its poor possessions, which are guarded by the saint himself: and the beduin will deposit their treasures here when they go on a journey and find them safe on their return. A friendly bedu had brought us a goatskin of water from the village and hung it on a peg for our use: he held our horses in the sun while ’Aluwi and I ate eggs and raisins inside. It was his duty, he said, to keep the saint’s siqaya filled for the use of travellers.
When we left the valley of stones, we made at a canter through the hot sandy air, across the flatness of our wadi for home; we had ridden for nearly five hours altogether, scarcely ever at a walk, and my little Java pony had not a fleck of lather on him; he can go, at his half-canter, the whole day long. When one dismounts and throws the bridle on his neck, there is no need to hold him: he turns his head in a friendly way at the sound of one’s voice. I have now sent Qasim to buy two measures of millet in the village, to give the horses a feed; their usual meal is only millet stalks, and it is because of the difficulty of feeding them that so few are kept in this country. As for ’Aluwi’s grey, it came home white with lather from exasperation rather than fatigue: and it was not nearly so tired as its rider.
* * *
The news that the road to the coast is open was premature. Three only of the four Humumi tribes have surrendered, and the runner whom the young American sent for letters spent three hours in a hole on the jl on the Du’an track, trying to escape the fate of his predecessors, whose mail-bag the tribesmen burned. He is an old man, with a small white wedge of a beard and a knitted sports cap, and came last night with a lantern in his hand through the uneven streets, hoping for a tip. But he brought us no letters, owing to some mistake of the people in Mukalla, and as we have been waiting a week for him, we parted in mutual disappointment.
February 25.
“Illae continuo saltus sivasque peragrant
Purpureosque metunt flores et flumina libant.”
(Georgic IV.)
In a village among the palm groves lives the keeper of bees, in a square mud house of many stories pitted with loop-holes for defence (mishwaf, look-outs, they call them) by which the bees fly in and out. By dark low stairs one climbs to the roof where they have their tunnels built of mud, and shallow water trays conveniently fitted with studs of iron for their tiny quivering feet: they see their pasture lands, the samr, palm and ’ilb trees, spread in the wadi below, and flit over the parapet in the sunlight. The bee-keeper’s grandchildren run naked in and out among them: it is a happy little aerial world.
I passed there on my way as I went to dig tufa fossils for Alinur by the pool in the ravine. I took Sa’id to hammer them out, a dark meskin or peasant, immensely strong, with little cheerful eyes, and a crowbar and great hammer on his shoulder. In the village below, our beduin greeted us as friends and joined us; a woman there was beating henna leaves to powder in a stone mortar beside the well in the shade. The boy Hasan led Daqiq, the donkey that answers to its name. As we climbed the scree he told me his family affairs and how his father has now remarried his mother, long ago divorced. Forty-four other wives, which is the traditional number of a centipede’s
legs, have diversified the interval. He is an old, old man to look at, and wears a yellow gown, and is a poet with a reputation for holiness, and I see him now and then walking with a meditative air heightened, no doubt, by all the female complications he has known.
“Your mother must be glad to come back to you?” I said to Hasan.
“Yes,” said he casually. And then added with a note of real warmth: “She is clean: she has cleaned the house.”
He then told me about the other forty-four: “But now,” he concluded, “my father does not trouble about their looks. He only likes them if they can keep the house clean.” There is a touch of the patient Griselda in this story.
In the shadow of the ravine, we spent the day smashing tufa boulders, trying to do as little damage as possible to the delicate leaves and stems that lie embedded in their heart. The beduin are quick—they understood in no time what was required; but it took longer to persuade Sa’id the peasant to go gently with his clumsy tool. He lifted his iron with both hands and, as he dropped it, growled to let the breath out of his body; the two sounds rang back from the high buttress cliffs around. Camels grazed in the ravine, stretching their long necks to the boughs of trees, their bodies the exact colour of the rock, both in sun and shade; they looked like primitive drawings against that ancient background. When our boulders were split, and a number of manageable pieces collected, I sent for one of these camels to carry them home, saw them packed in flat saddle-bags woven with palm leaves, and watched them down the steep scree slopes, borne with that look of aloofness which camels seem to acquire without any education at all.
As we ambled home through the evening, friendly way-farers came up to say there were letters from Mukalla: “A letter from your Mother, if God wills.” From the tops of the female palms, which men fertilize with spathes, greetings were called. A golden light was spread in the evening air. A bedu overtook us with a bough from the incense tree, (Boswellia Carteri or Bhuadajiana) sent for from the jl for my companions to see; its crinkled leaves, rather like ash with frilled edges, were drooping, its bark flaking off, but the milky frankincense dripped from its veins.
