by Freya Stark
In the afternoon, full of doubts, on a donkey and with three new camel-men behind me, I set out for ’Amd, only an hour’s ride away.
But we were not to reach it that night. As we passed under the battlements of a fortress on a mound, called Hedbet Shamlan, the headman or Muqaddam of the Ja’da himself came out to meet us and, seizing my donkey’s head, led me inside. My protests, addressed to him and ’Ali alternately, went merely unheeded. Prestige was in question. In pursuit of it my sufferings, like those of the nations of Europe, did not count.
The headman of the Ja’da was a fine old man. His bare torso tufted with white hairs had the marks of six bullet wounds, shot into it two years ago from the houses across the wadi. Sitting against the dark wall of his guest-room, a red and brown turban on his head, in the dim light of small shot-holes from above, his long face and the venerable tuft of his chin-beard made him look like some Rembrandt patriarch half lost in the shadows of his background. He alone is the real ruler of the Ja’da through all the length and breadth of ’Amd. Elders and chiefs of sub-tribes, as they dropped in, greeted him and settled along the walls beside us. They talked of the slave who is their governor from Mukalla, whom they hate.
“He does not know our customs,” they repeated at intervals, “and he takes twice two dollars for every case he tries.”
I believe that it is a mistake to send slaves to govern tribesmen.
“You know your own people,” said an old man, turning to me. “You know what they like. Are we to send a deputation about this governor to Ingrm, or shall we murder him first?”
Out of general principles I advised a deputation.
“And how is it,” they asked, “that in all this time Ingrm has not come to see us?”
“Merely,” said I, “because you have no motor road. His time is important, and to come here and back means four days even from Hureidha. It is only we of the Harim, whose time as you know is of no value, who can give ourselves this pleasure. But if he had not liked the thought of seeing you, would he have sent his wife to you last year?”
A murmur of approval greeted this explanation, and the entrance of supper brought the conclave to an end. The Muqaddam’s wife stayed. She, with tribal freedom, had been sitting alone among the men, veiling only if some stranger came in, who was not a kinsman, as most of the Ja’da are among themselves. But now, when our meal was finished, a horde came pushing from the narrow stair. All who were sick, or curious, crushed their way through, fierce and good-tempered, unused to denial, unsuitable visitors for a convalescent. After they had gone I lay sick through the night, feebly resentful of ’Ali, who had promised to spare me. When one collapses in Arabia, it is the moral strength that sinks under pressure of too many human beings. In the morning, having dressed with difficulty, I lay fainting at intervals on some sacks in a corner of the room while Qasim packed the bedding. ’Ali, shocked by the sight of me into a passing spasm of repentance, rushed out to find the donkey which the Headman had promised: forgot till he saw me descending, hopeful of departure; and was only roused from the last embraces of his creditors when, outraged beyond the power of words, I led him by the arm and placed him face to face with my donkey, which had at last appeared … without a saddle. The two, I felt, could best talk out the matter by themselves.
This was the culminating point of misery. From now onward the gods of travel, perhaps touched by the trust I had shown them, grew kinder. Every evening I noticed, at first with almost unbelieving wonder, that there was no fever to pay for the exertions of the day; until in a week’s time, that short and painful nightmare was forgotten.
The donkey—eventually saddled—and my donkey-man and I, having left the camels to their packing, moved through the morning fields, with the high-built houses of ’Amd carefully on our left. We followed the white gravels of the seil-bed, till we came to places bare of gardens, where palms and tillage end beyond a right-hand village called Damhan. Here we soon turned south, passing beside the well-built stones of some pre-Islamic irrigation, possibly a sluice. Beyond it the valley forks, the western branch leads to Jardan, the southern by Wajr into Shi’be, which was to take us to the jl. Somewhere near here there is the cave of Kank, the father of Nebi Salih, in a ravine called Bilghirban. The Van der Meulens had followed a slightly more easterly track, so that I was presumably the first traveller in Shi’be, a pleasant thought in its Arcadian peace.
It is a narrow valley, less than a mile across, but scattered with villages, threaded in their season by ribbons of water, where old canals are dug into the slope. The force of these waters in spring is shown by the great height of the dry-built dams of Shi’be, chief of the little towns. On top of them the causeway runs that leads below the houses. All around is tillage, or palm trees whose tops give a feathery luxuriance to the cliffs behind them. The ’adhab (Poinciana Elata) stands tall here, with white and yellow flowers; ’ilb and misht hang park-like over the canals or spill their shadows on the ribbed ploughed earth that waits for rain. Last year for the first time in memory no seil came to feed the fields in spring, and the folk of the wadi had to do with what little was left from before. So all are living now with hungry anxious hope, and if you say to them as you pass, “May your seil be good this year,” they cry: “If it please God,” with voices that come from their hearts. There is something infinitely touching in these fields, so carefully terraced for rain which may never come, on which their life depends. To believe in a God, who deals in miracles, and to watch him refuse the simple gift of rain, would, one would think, put a strain even on the endless forgiveness of mankind.
The population of Shi’be trailed across their wadi to watch me asleep after lunch in a field, and, when I awoke in a circle of over fifty strangers, introduced me to the son of their Mansab, a gnome-like man on little spindly legs. He had thick black hair fluffed out from a tight head-band, and his face was dyed blue with indigo, which made it pinched and hungry; he looked pathetic and bad from being so small and miserable in himself. He was too timid to invite us, but this was done by a friend, a man with hair parted smooth from the middle in long ringlets and a knot at the nape of the neck, an astonishing Victorian vision to see with one’s opening eyes. He had travelled in India and Malay, and answered sharply when someone asked Sayyid ’Ali why he brought Christians to the land.
Nothing, I had felt, should make me enter those dark little towns again till I was well. But the people of Shi’be possessed a library, and with this inducement led me triumphant up their narrow streets, over the seil-walls that are twelve feet high and under a fortress that hangs above the houses.
The houses are brown and strong; they have a good room with lattices and perhaps a little one for the harim above—all windows else are small for defence, and it is dramatic to see a head come out of one of these openings, just big enough to let it through. Many heads were out to-day, and the roofs, decorated with ibex horns, crowded with women: in the shadow below we moved in the dust of feet, suffocated and weary. And the library was not worth a visit after all; a whitewashed room, it had three little cupboards in the middle carved 140 years ago and very shabby: and they were locked, and the absent Mansab, the father of our small Misery, had the key.
So we left Shi’be, after coffee and a visit to the Harim, and went on to where the valley divides and becomes uninhahabited, beyond the village of Radhhain, a four hours’ ride from ’Amd. A westerly track there goes off towards Jardan, vanishing into an apparently perpendicular wall of cliff, while the main Wadi Sobale continues south-eastward to the jl we should visit to-morrow.
In the dry bed of the canal, close to where it takes off from an ancient “damir” or dam, we pitched our camp. A lithab tree (ficus salicifolia) hung above with long and pointed leaves; from its boughs my mosquito-net and the guns of the beduin were suspended. The men of Radhhain came after supper—a sophisticated little crowd that talked of cinemas and had learned to read maps in Java. They sat some yards off round the fire while the camels browsed at my fee
t and the donkey at my head. As I lay in bed I could hear Sayyid ’Ali entertaining, and the entranced laughter of the company: he was imitating the sayyids of Meshed, and the voices murmured on into my sleep; till a shock-headed man, creeping round my bed for his gun, woke me—the last inhabitant of Radhhain going home. I lay then, enjoying the warm delicious night. A sickle moon was shining; the pointed leaves of the lithab hung black before it, in Chinese loveliness; a small wind woke suddenly from nowhere, flapped the leaves against each other and died as it had come. The moon sank. Voices of foxes echoed in the cliffs—echoed and re-echoed, like some lost chorus high above the world. When I woke again it was to the singing of birds. The branches, so lovely against the moon, were the everyday branches of the lithab. Only their enchanted memory remained.
Chapter VIII
ROBIN
“Balaam said unto the ass: because thou hast mocked me …”
(Numbers: 22.)
MY DONKEY HAD NO NAME, HIS MASTER AHMED TOLD ME, so I called him Robin. I had been charmed to see that Ahmed fed him on dates, sharing his own lunch in equal portions. Now, as I began to know the pair more intimately, Ahmed’s attachment to this soulless animal began to show itself for what it was—an obstacle to the whole progress of our caravan.
Everyone knows that a donkey should go faster than a camel; the seven days from Mukalla to Du’an are five days only to an active ass. But this unspeakable Robin knew that he had but to droop his ears and look pathetic, to pause knock-kneed before a boulder perfectly easy to circumvent—his master’s heart went out to him, thoughts even of gain were forgotten—if the hillside happened to be moderately steep, I would be asked to walk.
This happened at the very beginning of the ’aqaba of Khurje, by which we climbed from Radhhain in the morning. I had already fallen off once beside the ancient dam, and been held by Ahmed in his agitation firmly pinned among the donkey’s hoofs. I had been roused in the earliest dawn by braying when the millet stalks which Robin looked upon as breakfast were accidently rustled by a passing foot. And his lethargy was mere pretence: the sight of a female donkey, even on the far horizon, would set him off with cries, Ahmed hanging to the halter for his life, nearly pulling me off under the obviously inaccurate impression that a donkey and its rider are inseparable.
So I refused to dismount, and we crawled slower and more slowly up the hill with a feeling of coldness between us. Ahmed was a tall angular peasant with high cheek-bones and narrow eyes, and a mild expression due largely to the fact that he had none of those small wrinkles produced by thought. He walked with his head down, asleep to the landscape about him, considering small financial problems in his soul. The peasant and the beduin are two different species. But when I had spent a day wearying of his dullness, I would see him go with his ungainly walk to say his prayers apart, or watch him spreading the millet stalks with an air of tenderness before the indolent Robin, and would feel ashamed when I considered how these endless small sums of his were devoted to the support of three orphan relatives besides his wife and daughters and two sisters—burdens accepted without murmur or repining. I would feel ashamed but I would also observe how the accumulated efforts of Christianity have failed to make us enjoy the sight of mere virtue unadorned, for the fact is that Ahmed was quite unattractive.
Far different was Awwad of the Deyyin who was leading us to his castle on the jl. Black-bearded with a large, lascivious mouth and always cheerful, he had come as far as ’Amd partly to meet us, partly to arrange for a third wife, since the second one says the work is too hard and wants to leave him. Apart from the difficulty of providing funds for this transition, which was still rather problematical, Awwad’s head was not troubled by finance: freer than a millionaire from its problems, he was able to concentrate on pleasant things when they came—the cooking of a sheep for dinner, or the brewing of tea in the shade. Now, at 6.40 a.m., with the sun pouring in to the Wadi Sobale as if it were a cup, he led the way up a zigzag track where smooth milky stones laid neatly still show an antique causeway to the pass.
They have remained intact in a protected place, sheltered from winds and landslides by the cliff: and where the cliff breaks away in a perpendicular tower, the causeway creeps behind it, through a tunnel in whose semi-darkness lies a smooth block of limestone, with pre-Islamic letters scratched upon it, sign of an ancient roadway to the sea. It was the first certain pre-Islamic object since Hureidha. The cleft was made, said ’Ali, by the sword of a saint of Islam.
“Do you imagine he wrote the Himyaritic letters?” I asked.
’Ali looked at me nonplussed for a moment. Then he laughed with his usual generosity, admitting defeat. “Nothing escapes the English,” said he.
Our camels lumbered by, their quarters gigantic in the shadows: a few hundred yards on, an hour from the bottom, we broke by a chasm into the white sunlight of the jl.
Into the thin and clean reviving air. Over the edge, far down, Wadi Sobale pursued uninhabited windings between gnarled cliffs. But over the plain a silver mistiness made every distance gentle in the sun: our journey lay flat and far and visible before us, flanked, like an avenue, by brown truncated mounds. Flints of palæolithic man lay strewn here, glistening on the ground; and I thought of the Archæologist with a gleam of warmth; grateful for the pleasure of now recognizing these small and intimate vestiges of time.
Awwad the bedu rejoiced at being out of the lowlands and encouraged us with fallacious distances. Three hours, he said, would bring us home. We therefore rode gently through the morning, leaving on our left hand the track to Du’an. I had decided to push on for the south.
The jl was dry as a bone: the water-holes we passed were waterless; two years had gone by without rain. At eleven-twenty-five we dipped into a valley, the head of Wadi Zerub.
The charm of all the western jl lies in these shallow valley heads where, just below the upper rocky rim, rain-water collects and trees are sheltered from the wind. A few solitary towers, or small fortified villages stand there, surrounded by thinly scratched fields. In the distance, on our left, we could see several of them as we rode—Berawere and Berire, fair-sized clusters, belonging to sayyids. Through them ran the Van der Meulen’s track to Dhula’a, a tiny market town. That was the main way for caravans to Hajr; but we, led by Awwad, kept to the west among the Deyyin beduin, and rested till three-thirty at Zarub, under the shadow of their ’ilb trees. Three little forts stood up and down the pastoral low valley, and the few inhabitants, friendly and wild and shy, stood in a fringe around. The men talked and accepted us as guests of the Deyyin—but a young woman, advancing carelessly and seeing me of a sudden, stood petrified with fear. The whole party, hers and our own, urged her on, saying that I would not bite, or words to that effect, and she finally came gingerly, touched my hand with frightened fingers, and fled to safety. She had five wild little children about her, and a brass-bound girdle at her waist. It is strange to feel that one is a monster. The children looked at me with solemn interest, then turned their heads, weeping, to their mother. Only the smallest accepted me, not having reached the age of understanding; it lay in a leather cradle, with leather fringes and a leather top to cover it, head and all: its mother carries it, slung like a basket on her arm; and when she has to labour in the fields, erects a tripod of three sticks from which it swings. These women are unveiled, small and sturdy like their men; they look as if their families went back to the beginnings of time. Their tiny, solitary villages must be very old, with careful pebble-lined half-empty ponds.
At three-thirty, rested and happy, I noticed that Awwad’s perpetual optimism seemed ruffled: he was chafing to be off.
“But,” said I, “we must be quite near. You said three hours this morning and here we have been riding for three and a half already on the jl.”
“Ah, well,” said Awwad, “it is not very far.”
“Shall we get there by sunset?” I asked. When it is impossible to get exactitude even for the present, it is simply waste of time to wrangle f
or it in the past.
“If we hurry, we may,” said Awwad doubtfully.
We still had, I found, two valley ravines to dip into—Mlah, and Sobale, our wadi of the morning. They were delightful places, with the charm of things which live for their own pleasure, serving no utilitarian end of man, like the loveliness of childhood, free of conscious purpose. These cradles of valleys had the same innocent happiness about them. The waters had scooped them with a rush and left visible traces as one scrambled from ledge to ledge, undercut by the violence of the past. Little tufts of wild palm grow there and a great variety of shrubby trees, that keep their branches low, not to emerge into the wild currents that sweep the jl above. You go steeply down and steeply up the other side, and the slow-footed camels take their time; and, in a blank space of the map, the existence of these ravines makes it impossible to guess even roughly how long a journey will take across the jl. I was finding it just double what I had been told.
