A Winter in Arabia

by Freya Stark

  And now, when I reach home, the camels are here already on the hillside with the camelmen from Samu’a, and Sayyid ’Ali all prepared to come and protect with the holiness of his presence, and Qasim, lovelorn, with a boil under his arm, quite useless under these two disabilities. We hope to get away early to-morrow morning.

  The lorry is to come by then, the packing-cases are all prepared, the tins of food left over—apart from small stores for ourselves—are already stacked in heaps for division among friends.

  All this goes on in chaos.

  My room, now furnished only with boxes of skulls and its carpet full of holes, looks derelict like a ruin; when everything but my bed is packed and I am resting, a child creeps in, one of the many who slip their hands into ours when we go out for walks. She pulls a saucer out of her blouse and asks for one last gift of Epsom salts for her mother, and when I have given them, suddenly buries her face in my arm and cries out: “Oh, we love you so much, we love you,” and flits into the darkness. It is the night’s last farewell in Hureidha.

  THE JOURNEY

  Chapter V

  THE JOURNEY BEGINS1

  “ Society is all but rude

  To this delicious solitude.”

  (MARVELL.)

  WITH OUR STAY IN HUREIDHA THIS DIARY ENDS. THE OPEN road begins again and the single-threaded story of travel.

  Ever since the Moongod’s temple had been disentangled from the sands, I had grown more and more convinced that Hureidha never was on the main trade-route of the ancients. The littleness of the temple, the poverty of all objects we ever saw or found, compared to other more westerly sites, showed it to have been a small oasis, living on its gardens much as it does to-day. The main road probably lay in the west, through Beihan, and that we could not visit. At the same time I felt sure that there must have been some sort of ancient traffic through ’Amd to the coast, just as there is to-day; and it was in the hope of verifying the vestiges left there, and judging, as far as I could, of their relative importance, that I decided to travel by camel to Bir ’Ali. This was not meant to be an exploration: Van der Meulen and Von Wissmann had already travelled down Hajr, and not only they, but Doreen Ingrams a year ago, and the young American the other day, had visited ’Amd itself: it was only by accidents and happy chances that my steps were deflected to new country in the west.

  At about ten in the morning, in the sunlight, Alinur and I walked down to meet the camels in the town. Everyone was about. The Mansab had called, scented with sandal-wood, pressing both hands in farewell, his eyes full of tears; the Mansab of Meshed had come, affectionate and cheerful; and the Qadhi sat through the last moments, cross-legged on the camp-stool, copying poems in my book. The children came, but little Salim, proud and sorrowful, kept away. Around the camels, struggling since 5 a.m. to get themselves packed, a little crowd had gathered.

  Alinur was anxious because of my health, still precarious, and the new vagueness of my prospects on the coast. She would give up Palestine and come to me, she said, if I sent her a runner in Mukalla. Kindness and friendship could go no farther. The three camels drew up, with the Mansab’s orange quilt spread as a saddle, and the paraffin lamps brightening the luggage as they swung; and now a new excitement appeared at the opposite end of the street—Abdulillah in the car, and a red lorry behind him all ready for the Scientists to-morrow.

  A last delivery of letters, a last crowd of good-byes—I was in the car with Sayyid ’Ali and Qasim, and Hureidha small and brown in the distance behind us. A fat repulsive man, owner of the lorry, had climbed in too. They drove us for a stretch along the loess-like wadi flats, through the tangle of the old irrigation, past the scenes of the winter’s labours, till in the silent noonday of the wadi they set us down, waited a little to let me deal with the lorry-driver’s efforts at blackmail, and finally departed.

  Qasim had forgotten lunch. He had been too busy pouring armfuls of dingy cooking vessels into the receptive arms of Ne’ma. He now sat with tears rolling slowly down his cheeks, his shirt bloodstained from his boil, a distasteful object which it would have been cruelty to scold. I wandered off and left him.

  I was alone. The first time for months, so it seemed. An immense and silent peace lapped me round. By a little isolated samr tree, its thin lattice of shade a cobweb in the blaze of the wadi, with my head on its warm wrinkled roots, I slept.

  Chapter VI

  WADI ’AMD

  “And it affords some ease

  To see, at eve, the smoking villages.”

  (HERRICK.)

  I OPENED MY EYES ON A YOUNG SE’ARI LAD SQUATTING BESIDE me, a bracelet on his arm and his knife in his hand, the same whose tribe the R.A.F. has been bombing. He had come, as many of them do, by the Wadi Rukheime, whose opening lay just opposite, dusty in the sun; and had been sitting watching my sleep, his curls loose on his shoulders. He looked like a small, solitary brown animal with soft eyes, and asked me if Harold belonged to my tribe. In the peaceful heat of the wadi the samr tree above my head was thrusting out new leaves between thorns that shone white like daggers in the sky. There was no sound except faint, far-off puffs of wind and the hum of a few small flies. A mud-coloured saqiya stood in the foreground with goats around it; the world scarce breathed in the noonday heat.

  Our camels appeared presently, breasting in their ageless stride the equally ancient dunes that cover the wadi floor and its dead gardens. We mounted and rode reclining, the orange quilt arranged like an armchair round me. The camel is an ugly animal, seen from above. Its shoulders slope formless like a sack, its silly little ears and fluff of bleached curls behind them have a respectable, boarding-house look, like some faded neatness that dresses for propriety but never dressed for love. My camel was called Ibn Mafrush, and wore three spots of henna on its neck: the other two, Qibli and Sa’ada, followed, tied head to tail. You would think that in all these centuries they might have learned to walk of their own accord behind their beduin, but the wretched men still have to lead them by a rope, as they did, no doubt, when they departed down the dusty way that led from the Garden of Eden; and the rope must be held so high that it is tiring. They change at frequent intervals, one coming to take it from the hands of the other with that silent helpfulness of theirs. The wadi stretched around, sand-coloured and unbroken; to our swaying motion the landscape seemed endlessly the same, till, at two-thirty, we turned a sudden corner to the south; a big wadi called Tabra’a opened on the right; and Qarn, two feudal clusters on a hill, showed that we were entering the fortified village landscape of upper ’Amd.

  It was still desolate enough, a land of rocks and sun, and we rested to eat in a little husn (fort) called Sinhaj, with not a blade of grass in its mud-walled court, nor any vegetation but a few stunted ’ilb trees in the land around it. The people who sit in this poverty, beating their friendly coffee berries on their hearth, are contented enough, and tell ominous tales of fertile Hajr, where the water is sweet as sugar but poisonous, and the people go about with short loincloths (which I do not mind) and large tummies (which I do, because it means malaria).

  Qasim was still weeping over Ne’ma, so copiously that I began to wonder whether the human body contains more water in the tropics than elsewhere. It was time to talk to him for his good and I explained that separations are the will of Allah; and one woman very like another; and when he married a Yemeni girl in Aden he should have our paraffin lamp that he desired. “And now,” I concluded, “say your prayers for which you are very late already, and in the name of the Merciful stop weeping into my cup.” Whether it was this homily or the natural adaptability of youth I do not know: but he came from his prayers with Ne’ma apparently forgotten and became a gay and excellent servant for the rest of the journey.

  In the waning afternoon we rode by beds of gravel in the sun. Great grey banks of them lie here, capped with loess, dividing wadis Hebde and Kebir. The cliffs run in a noble sweep above. And in the dusk we came to fields ploughed and brown, like corduroy velvet, and gardens dyke
d with walls; and saw Zahir, our little town, growing towards us, a ridge of houses against the sky. The cliffs in straight lines beyond it shone like a stair on whose last step the sunlight lingered. In the dust of the valley amethyst evening tufts of smoke were rising. Shepherdesses trailed home with the patter of their flocks behind them. This is perhaps the best joy of the journey, to come at evening to your unknown resting-place. However many the disillusions you have left behind you, no habit blunts the thrill of this unknown. The little village, swathed in its own life as in a veil, lies waiting there like a bride before you: and one cannot but feel that it is a passion for mystery chiefly which explains the optimism of human beings towards both polygamy and travel.

  The whole male population of Zahir was out to receive us, for we had sent our Mansab’s letter on ahead. They led us to a dark house on the hill and sat down, about forty of them, round the mud walls of their room, for conversation. This social exertion at the end of the day is, I think, the chief hardship of travel: I bore it for an hour, and then crept dead-tired to sleep, till a straw mat with rice and a kid appeared in my bedroom with ’Ali and Qasim and the headman to share it. Another hour of talk in the guest-room below, a visit to the harim, the luxury of a wash, the last effort to write one’s diary, and then the boon of sleep.

  * * *

  It was eight-thirty before we started next morning, already exhausted by one and a half hours of medicines and talk. Even so, I was cross before the packing was done with, and to be cross in Arabia wastes more energy with less result than any other form of self-indulgence. But after this the day was pleasant, a leisurely progress through almost continuous stretches of gardens of ’ilb or palm.

  The Ja’da tribe own the whole valley of ’Amd and live here in feudal unity; and attend in peace to their irrigation, which is infinitely more careful than that of Hureidha, though their water is sometimes 75 Qmas down instead of 45. (The Qma is the distance between a man’s outstretched finger-tips.) At the upper end of their wadis, where the seil torrent rushes in spring, they build their dams, and lead the water off in canals cut for miles along the edge of the slopes. From there it is terraced gently in relays, four or five levels or less according to the width of the valley, till—having watered the gardens and ploughlands—it again reaches the bed of its own stream that runs through the middle of the wadi at its lowest point.

  Long dry-walled dykes protect the terraces. In some of the towns, such as Nafhiun and Nu’air, water runs into deep rectangular cisterns with rounded corners, lined with mortar, medieval or ancient as the case may be. Von Wissmann has written about these cisterns in the Yemen, where they are still in use from pre-Islamic times:1 those of Wadi ’Amd, from the quality of the mortar, are most probably medieval. The biggest of them, at Nu’air, which is the best-watered place of the wadi, was 30 metres by 16.6. Its water, like that of several other places in the valley, was brought not by the floods, but in conduits from a “gelt” or pool in the ravines: “A pool,” said ’Ali at Nu’air, “twice as big as the one at Samu’a.” The pre-Islamic people may have used conduits far more than is done now, for there are bits of wooden troughs, scooped out of tree trunks a foot or so across, still stuck into inaccessible faces of the cliffs. The men of ’Amd say they are bee-hives, and brought one to show me from a high ravine: I think they are more probably conduits for water, of which the more easily reached portions have naturally vanished. But I have not seen them in their proper places, and cannot therefore speak with assurance.

  There was a feeling of seclusion about us as we rode. Not in the landscape itself, for that was lively with men ploughing, or shepherdesses under the ’ilb trees with their goats; but in the pastoral quiet life of the valley, remote and self-sufficing, where stray travellers alone bring news of the world outside. Even murder here is dealt with in a family way; as we rode we passed the house where the girl now lives who shot her father, happily settled with a brother in a decent quiet like half-mourning, and anxious only about the possible activities of Harold and the methods of the West. The towns are strong and poor, their walls all brown without whitewash, their windows built small for defence; as we passed one of them a voice called “Faraya” from its unseen darkness, for many of the people of ’Amd have seen me in Hureidha; they come running with welcome, very different from the watchful looks of those who do not know us, for I am only the fourth European here. Doreen took the eastern bank by ’Aneq, but we kept to the west, through Rahm, ditched on its northern side, by Qudha’a, a watch-tower on a hill, through Nafhiun of the cisterns, to Sarawa and Rihib, whose pile of houses is crowned by a castle with four towers. Here in the open cultivated land we rested at noon for an hour, with a pleasant temperature, eighty-seven in the shade. ’Ali, thinking to bully me into lunching in a village, brought nothing for the company to eat; passive resistance on my part and the remarks of the camel men made him go back to Sarawa in the sun in search of dates and fodder. The passers-by stopped on the road beside us, their curly heads tied with cloths like garlands; they are Se’ari mostly, who come down here to get food, and use the Persian form kheir to ask you how you are. They are among the ugliest beduin I know, with huge mouths and bony faces and eyes rather near together. One of them brought his hookah and passed it round, and made a pleasant bubbling noise of leisure in the shade.

  In the afternoon the land grew more barren, the water and the cultivated stretches lay mostly on the eastern side, where the town of ’Aneq, the largest between ’Amd and Hureidha, lies basking in the sun. As the level shafts slant towards us from the west, I notice more clearly strange tumuli that line the scree-slopes of this wadi, more numerous near ’Aneq than elsewhere. They are cairns built, either at the top or bottom of long lines of heaped stones, one cairn, hollow in the centre, at the end of every line. Sometimes there is only the line of stones, without the cairn. They are not necessarily parallel, but they always run down and never across the slope, five or six of them sometimes, radiating like spokes. Perhaps they are tombs? Beyond saying that they belong to the Ancients, and that they were probably meant for shooting from, the beduin have no theories about them. They give to this valley the same sort of feeling one has on Dartmoor, riding between forgotten Druid avenues of stones.

  Chapter VII

  SICKNESS IN ’AMD

  “Dolce color d’oriental zaffiro

  Che s’accogliea nel sereno aspetto

  Dell ’aer puro, infino al primo giro,

  Agli occhi miei ricomincio diletto,

  Tosto ch’io usci’ fuor dell ’aura morta

  Che m’avea contristato gli occhi e’l petto.”

  (Dante’s Purgatorio.)

  SAYYID ’ALI IS GENEROUS; HIS ONLY TROUBLE IS A GUILELESS indifference as to what he is generous with; and the virtues that come out of someone else’s pocket are apt to irritate our Anglo-Saxon ethics based on property. I share this prejudice, but with the uneasy feeling that perhaps, when final sums are drawn, the man who hands his neighbour’s pennies to the poor may find an advocate: one cannot deny that civilization has ever been based on the vicarious use of other people’s lives. Nevertheless it is irritating to be used in the mere capacity of brick for the building of the edifice of our neighbour’s soul, and all the winter we have suffered. But now, riding at six o’clock of the evening to the little town of Nu’air where Sayyid ’Ali belongs, I—as a recipient—was to see his other side. Already in the majliss1 of Zahir he had come into his own, holding the village entranced with comic dialogues. He had omitted lunch both for our camel-men and our camels: but he was obviously used to that, and it sat light as a feather upon him. Now, as he saw the whole town gathered to meet us by the five great cisterns and the unknown giant’s grave beside the little mosque, he gathered himself together with all the dignity of a small but public man. I watched his cotton skirt and grey jacket and the drab ends of shawl fluttering before me surrounded by compatriots in the dusk. The best house in the town was borrowed for my reception. Tower-like and forbidding, the h
ouses of Nu’air rise from the flat ground of the wadi; by fifty-seven steps, up stairs lighted dimly with shot-holes, I climbed to my room, where ’Ali’s wife and his children were waiting in a row.

  After supper the whole town sat cross-legged round three sides of a court under the stars, while Sayyid ’Ali, the lapels of his jacket gathered neatly under folded hands, addressed me in a speech of welcome whose adjectives, delicately chosen, brought credit not only to me but to those whom I visited. “The Beloved of Government,” said ’Ali, “is with us here to-night.” I thought of Harold, who must just now have heard of my unauthorized departure here into the west, and smiled. But as a climax to the great evening, I failed. My poor little speech of thanks wavered unadorned after those florid sentences, and, exhausted beyond the demands of politeness—I soon asked to retire. The harim still had to be visited, a seething mass of ladies. Coffee was there being pounded on a raised hearth like a dais by an old slave-woman who at intervals paused in her labours to intone a prayer. There was then a moment of silence, like a pause between waves. When I left I was so tired that I thought I could have lain down to die: I was running a fever, I took quinine and discovered that my heart was unable to stand it; the prospect of a malarial journey into Hajr seemed madness to attempt. With infinite sorrow, when ’Ali came in the early morning, I told him I could not go; he must send the camels back and a runner to fetch a car as far as Zahir, the nearest point to which, it was said, a car could come. I lay quite still in misery, waiting for the beating of the heart to steady itself, thinking how once already I had been frustrated by illness in this land. ’Ali was good, he kept people away, and as the day went on the fever dropped, and I looked at the map. The track to Hajr runs almost due south, over a jl that has Wadi Du’an on its eastern edge—only a day’s ride from our route, so ’Ali said. This was incorrect, but it served its purpose. If I got on to the jl out of the villages and their endless talk, I might, I thought, recover: and at the worst, I could make shift with a day’s ride to Du’an and there find a litter to carry me to the new motor road now building from Mukalla: by this time it must have reached a point not more than two or three days’ journey from Du’an. And if I turn back I shall never, I thought, feel mistress of my body again. To be twice defeated was too much. I called ’Ali and Qasim; they both thought it a reasonable plan: a second runner was sent to countermand the car. I spent a day of quiet in bed with only one visit from the headman of the Ja’da, and next morning crawled out to see the sights of the town. It has round wells enclosed in little walls with locked gates belonging to private owners. In seil-time the floods wash right up to the houses, the ’ilb trees have their roots in the air as they have on the banks of streams. The giant’s grave is like that of Wadi Rukheime, a long rough heap of stones: but the pre-Islamic slabs around it which they told me of have all disappeared.