A Winter in Arabia

by Freya Stark

  When I reached home, I found eight people to see me, among them an old man who came for medicine for himself, his wife and his son of ten (remarkable at his age). It took Qasim’s and my united efforts to make him distinguish which was which, and he will probably wash himself with Epsom salts and feed his wife on permanganate.

  And when we had done with him, Sayyid ’Aluwi was waiting to say farewell: he goes back to Mukalla by Du’an, the only open way across the jl. His brother Husain, who married a fortnight ago, is now divorcing and going back to the wife he left, to the joy of all except the latest bride. It is his third wife and fourth wedding.

  February 26.

  “At all events my name will remain.”

  “Inscribe it on a stone and it will remain just as well.”

  (EPICTETUS.)

  My cave is not to be dug. The Archæologist went up to it and finds it too big and the inscriptions, not worth photographing.1 She has now started another cave and we shall have had seven weeks of excavation if we leave, as we still hope to do, on the 5th of March. She has had to lose five weeks altogether through illness and even now is not well enough to face happily the insidious microbes of this dust, but there is a heroism about her, which carries her successfully where softer natures fail. Even Sayyid ’Ali, elastic under snubs, whose virtues, such as they are, have nothing of rigidity about them, recognizes this harder metal when he sees it.

  “Her learning is great,” he told me: “and learning must be honoured.”

  * * *

  Alinur and I lunched with our Mansab to-day in a carpeted room which seemed luxurious after our draughty bareness. He was waiting at the bottom of his long whitewashed staircase to lead us by the hand, scented and immaculate as ever, but dressed in Italian colonial khaki with a blouse effect at the back. His colleague from Meshed in a clean white gown, various sayyids and a Nahdi bedu from Henin were sitting there, and we heard the news of the young American who, also laid low with fever, has had to return to the civilized comforts of Seiyun. When our lunch, cooked by Qasim, was over, I climbed the many stairs to the harim next door and saw my patient’s foot, its sores now red and fairly healthy with freshly-flowing blood. For the first time in two years the old lady has been able to stand on it, and I came away happy, not only because of the misery eliminated by a little permanganate of potash, but also because the credit of Ferangi medicines stands or fails in Hureidha with the Mansab’s mother’s foot.

  The only other excitement of the day is Ne’ma, who has, it appears, been divorced yesterday morning, and has taken it to heart in a surprising degree considering how she carries on with Qasim. I had in fact thought her divorced long ago, but it seems that that was only partial.

  “Now,” she says, “it is finished, and I grieved all yesterday; but to-day it is over.”

  “I hope it will be a good husband next time,” said I.

  “Inshallah,” said Ne’ma.

  * * *

  Alinur has found four berries among her fossil leaves and hopes they may identify the tree. Great palm fronds petrified appear in the heart of her split boulders; she chips them delicately out with a chisel.

  February 27.

  “For there was shed

  On spirits that had long been dead,

  Spirits dried up and closely furled,

  The freshness of the early world.”

  (MATTHEW ARNOLD.)

  The beduin of Bahr, who turn out to be related to those Murshidi of Kor Saiban who call my friends the Ba Surra their “Father,” said that there is an inscription and another pool in a valley to the south. I showed them some pre-Islamic letters from the temple and asked if the inscription were like that; they looked dubious, glanced about till their eyes fell on a packing-case marked Shell, and told me eagerly, that that was the writing on the rock. But it isn’t. It is pre-Islamic, rough letters smeared with red ochre on the shelving overhang of a great boulder which has rolled to the valley bottom from the cliffs: opposite, a track leads up the ’aqaba through rocky gateways to the jl, and that is a short way by Redet ed-Deyyin to Bir ’Ali. Many of these inscriptions appear to be at the branching off of tracks.

  The valley runs a long way back, in a southerly direction, empty of villages beyond Shujjeira where the beduin live. It is open and feathered pleasantly with trees, and camels graze there, and the deep seil-bed carries its gravels to meet the seil-bed of Wadi Nissim and flow towards Hureidha together. We turned up a side valley to the left, towards the pool Samu’a. Sa’d, the bedu, led us, walking with lovely freedom, his black rag like a cloak over his shoulders, a kid for lunch bleating confidingly on top, the thermos in his hand. He has a most engaging smile and light-green eyes, and all these beduin are plump, not fat but well covered: their muscles ripple as they move.

  On flat ground a little beyond our inscription, we left Daqiq, the donkey, and began to climb under the huge overhang of cliff. The waters, when they flow, drop here from ledge to ledge into cathedral shadows; they have worn round pits in the limestone, where trees find coolness and grow among huge fossil shells one foot or two feet long that lie about clumsily convoluted, petrified remnants of the forgotten sea.

  The ledges recede in tiers and the second holds in its recess a dark pool full of fish, cool in the shadow of the wind-hollowed cliff above. But the tufa rocks are beyond, on the highest step below the jl; to reach them one must climb barefoot by smooth-lipped little hollows that scale the limestone wall. The four beduin gambolled here like goats, carrying my camera, carrying my shoes, seizing my hand in difficult places, until we reached the third ledge and saw there, enclosed and warm, a small mirror of water, peopled at its shallow end with rushes in the sun. Two trees with leaves like those of the fossil trees drooped over it, and at its far end, like a barrier, built in the slowness of time by the waters of spring, was a block of tufa, green with maidenhair. In this cloistered place, seen only by the beduin and the sun, wild palms, and twelve various sorts of shrubs and trees were growing; small limpets lived on the rocks, and the surface of the water was scattered with tiny things, cuirassed like polished steel, who pushed themselves about in a world so remote that man himself, one felt, was but a new intruder.

  He looked at home however. Sa’d was already squatting, grinding the salt for our kid between two stones, while another bedu used the white smooth limectone floor to paste our flour for bread. Under the tree, in the shade, on a boulder, two beduin and a boy roasted a scaly-tailed lizard (dhabb) which the boy had caught below. They roasted it in its skin, and brought me the tiny liver and sweetbreads and a bit of tail, which tasted as good as chicken: the rest they divided and gave the boy who had caught it the head as his rightful spoil. “We are friends now,” they said, as we finished this hors d’œuvre.

  On the same boulder, with wood from a misht tree, they built a fire, set in a circle of stones. The kid, carried inside a poor little bundle made up of its own skin, was stitched into suitable pieces with shivers of palm, The wood burned, the blackening stones fell flat upon it and made a floor for the sizzling meat to rest on, while the bread cooked round the edge. When it was done, and the pieces evenly divided in heaps, the guests handed their daggers to Sa’d; he, with the bunch over his head and without seeing, laid them at random on the divided portions and each man took the meat that fell to his lot.

  “On a feast day,” said Sa’d, “we build these hearths on our house-tops so that the smoke goes up into the sky.” And such, no doubt, were the hearths of Cain and Abel. We, in our easy lives, have forgotten how natural it is to combine religion with food. Here at any rate, in our meal, there was nothing that could not have been just as easily prepared with the flint knives of prehistoric men.

  And when we had eaten, and climbed down the buttresses of the jl to the middle pool below the upper ledge, the beduin fished in the afternoon sun. They held a shawl with crumbs outspread under the surface till the curious fish came floating above it and were slowly, very slowly, lifted out. The green, paint-like water r
ippled behind the men’s shoulders; they glowed warm and brown through the indigo skin; they worked like the world’s first inhabitants at their light-hearted toil.

  When we left the pool they dropped me from the ledge by my wrists, with a bedu to secure my feet below, inspiring no great security considering their small foothold and the drop. On the lower ledge a circle had already gathered for medicine and talk; a bundle of grass and misht boughs, collected for their camels and Daqiq, were given me as a pillow. Shepherdesses of the black-and-white flocks came to join us with small axes in their hands and fish in their high hat-crowns, and sat to build their fire. One of them was prettier than the rest. “We brought her from the Samuh of Kor Saiban,” the beduin said, as if she had been some sort of communal possession.

  These beduin are socialists without knowing it; in their small communities, losses and gains affect them all. They were pleasant to talk to; their art of conversation has been elaborated through many summer afternoons spent in the shadows of rocks. It had the charm which comes to people who observe and do not merely copy; their similes spring vivid and racy from their lives. “The eye of a cock,” they said of a small shiny stone; and the boy, when he held up his lizard in a languishing attitude in his hand, said: “See how it sits like a bride.” The great ledge arched over us like the tier of a theatre; only a vertical strip of sky, narrow as a meander of spilt milk, was visible between the ravine’s high walls: we discussed the place in a detached way as a refuge from bombs, and decided that we should be safe where we sat.

  In the hot sun, at 2 p.m., we descended, found Daqiq on the lower level, and rested in the shadow of another boulder while he ate his grass: stopped in the village a moment to talk to Sa’d’s mother, adorned with blue tattoo and saffron-coloured with turmeric from head to toe as far as one could see: and are home now with the Rip van Winkle feeling of one who has stepped from an earlier into a later Time.

  March 1.

  “Stone walls do not a prison make,

  Nor iron bars a cage.”

  (LOVELACE.)

  The last of the Humumi rendered themselves up on Friday and the road is to be opened to-day. Our strange remote confinement is at an end. No difference is made in our visible lives, but the feeling of prison is gone, and with it also the feeling of safe separation; a pause and a stillness of time. I can imagine how one might throw a lingering glance of regretful affection as one leaves the quiet of a cell.

  ’Ali brought this excellent news last night, together with an immense bag of mail, the accumulation of weeks, and all the gossip of the valley, including that of the visit of Lord Dufferin and Sir Bernard Reilly to Seiyun. These excitements have come and gone and no ripple has reached Hureidha.

  We, on the other hand, have just escaped being involved in a new little war in our district, because Sultan ’Ali’s governor in Haura, a few hours’ ride away, was roughly spoken to by a Nahdi tribesman in court. He sent five of his men to follow and kill him, but they were luckily intercepted by the son of the Mansab of Meshed, who happened to be in the street. The Nahdi was able to escape, and the trouble of a blood feud is avoided.

  The other news is that our lorry will come on the 5th to carry all away, and I shall start a day earlier, so as not to be late for the rendezvous at Cana, for there is little enough time as it is for an overland journey.

  * * *

  I took Alinur for another good day at Samu’a, to what she too thought the loveliest of hidden sanctuaries, climbing in her stockinged feet. She aroused respectful affection in the heart of the beduin, who had doubted her being able to reach the upper pool; but we did not sling her back down the ledge. The pool, she says, was once a lake whose lower fringe finally broke with the weight of water and let the torrents through. But how the fish got there not even she, with all the resources of geology at her disposal, can explain.

  * * *

  I have spent a meandering day taking last pictures in the town with the Qadhi, who read out the carved inscriptions of the tombs, and standing with upturned palms while he chanted his prayer for the dead, smiled in his gentle way as I said “Amen.”

  We examined the door of his house, which is the oldest in Hureidha, about 300 years old. It is two inches thick, made of ’ilb wood, eaten by the sun, and further strengthened by horizontal bars; a wooden bolt lets down into the floor, another one of iron drops from above, and beside the usual wooden lock there is a huge bolt held by a carved latch and a small, particular bolt to lock the hole made for the hand to pass through from outside. “My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door,” says the Song of Solomon.

  We then inveigled the Mansab into his green coat, with yellow ribbon like an order over his shoulder, a blue turban and yellow shawl on his head, and so photographed him on the threshold of his house. There we lingered and discussed antiquities, and particularly the Cufic inscription said to have been found in the old mosque, dating it to the days of Husain Salama, the great Yemeni, in A.H. 315 (A.D. 927). This relic has unfortunately disappeared. The Mansab went on to tell me of the pre-Islamic words still used, especially by the women, in Hureidha: shatata for moon, qaqa for dates, dada for bread; whether they are Himyaritic or not, they sound peculiar. Having exhausted the wonders of the past, we reverted to our own modern coils, and discussed Sultan ’Ali of Qatn, whose agitations, the Mansab now admits, are all of Italian origin.

  “I dislike the Italians,” said he, “though they are always ready to do anything I ask. But one knows the reason for that.” And we left them and their distasteful politics to discuss the more congenial topic of the ancient habitations of the Children of ’Ad.

  “There is a place,” said the Mansab, “called Wd, mentioned in the Quran in the chapter of Daybreak as the home of the Beni Thamud. It is somewhere in Hajr, I do not know where, and they say there are ruins beside it.”

  “I will look for it,” I said, “when I go.”

  The Wadi Hajr is a legendary place altogether. Old Abdulla, the watch-mender, has ridden to Bir ’Ali by that way in ten days and tells me that the Wadi Hajr once belonged to a king called Be’be’, who sent for one thousand virgins from Somailland across the sea; they were all shipped in a sambuq, but when they reached the Arabian coast it was discovered that every one of them was pregnant. So they were sent up into Wadi Hajr, to do the best they could, and the population there, said old Abdulla, is still quite peculiar, neither African nor Arab, and their hair stands straight up.

  March 4.

  “Welcome ever smiles

  And farewell goes out sighing.”

  (Troilus and Cressida.)

  To-morrow I start over-land west and down to the sea through what was once the old Incense Route. To-day the Archæologist has decided that she cannot meet me at Cana after all; so now there is no certainty of a boat at the far end of the journey. Had I known I would probably not have arranged to go, for the low-lying roadsteads of Arabia are unhealthy places to arrive at.

  * * *

  There has been one last little flutter over Sayyid ’Ali and the workmen’s luncheons. The shopman appeared with an unpaid bill long overdue, but begged me not to make the matter public or else, said he: “Sayyid ’Ali will not pay me the other debts he owes.”

  This was a little difficult. “How can I get him to pay you, without telling him that I know that he owes you something?”

  The shopkeeper pondered and admitted reason on my side. “We will leave it,” he said: “and I will manage.”

  He was an ugly man with a squint, and I asked the Son of Muhsin, who tells me about these things, whether the defect was ever taken to coincide with the evil eye.

  “Oh no,” said he. “And anyway there are plenty of remedies for the evil eye. You can either spit, or say Mashallah, or—if you can get hold of a piece of the dress or hair of him who has the eye—you can smoke it and pass it three times round in a circle, over an incense burner, for instance. It is quite easy to tackle.”

  Having dealt with this small matter and d
one some packing, I spent the rest of the day in farewell visits to the harims of the town, climbing first of all up the many steps that led to the Mansab’s mother. Her foot improves day by day, and would have been well by now, but for the cousin who told her that Christian medicines break one’s leg, and so caused a month’s delay in the beginning.

  From the pleasant quiet of her room, I went to the harims of the sisters, all sadly busy snipping the stars and spangles off their gowns. Dressmakers are not allowed to put new ones on, on pain of punishment, and, as we rode along some days ago, our men called out to a gay little bedu girl, walking in festal glitter, and warned her of prison if she went to town. What with the men who have to pray so assiduously, and the women who are allowed no spangles, and the shepherds whose straying flocks are seized, a resentful feeling is stewing in the town.

  The melancholy of the harims was enhanced by the sadness of the occasion, the genuine sadness of good-bye after a whole winter spent together. A small snapshot of my mother came in the last mail and the women kissed it when I showed it and rejoiced because three letters at once had come from my home: they stop to congratulate me in the street as I pass and say how sorry they are to see us go. And now Fatima, sitting and talking of our journey, bursts suddenly into tears; and what words can one find, when one says good-bye for ever? The kohl, as she wept, came streaming down her cheeks, and I too left the room with eyelids wet.

  In the house of Muhsin they are too busy for regrets; for they are celebrating Husain’s return to his second wife from his third. She looks about sixteen years old, and is dancing with a nervous air of endurance to an assembly of ladies, her pretty silly little face ornamented with orange eyebrows.