A Winter in Arabia

by Freya Stark

  Awwad was anxious now, and tried to urge Robin and the unresponsive Ahmed with unavailing words: lengthening blue shadows began to lie to the east of every mound, In the emptiness a curly-headed lad from ’Azzan had appeared, flapping in sandals made of a ragbag of leathers stitched anyhow. I have read somewhere that the people of ’Azzan wear these to brush away scorpions from their path. However this may be, the young lad adopted us and took matters in hand. He trotted singing behind Robin, with a sharp stick in his hand: Robin understood. Awwad and a black cousin of his, with guns upon their shoulders, joined the chorus. Robin trotted, while his master sloped behind us begging the company in vain “to have a heart.” I laughed; even Robin enjoyed it; the jl now was flat as a landing-ground with limestone snouts pushed here and there along it. The sun dipped and blackish clouds sailed from the east with spots of rain. At this moment we came to an edge and saw Romance in the varied light of evening—a little castle, walled and towered, in an island of ’ilb trees gilded by slanting shafts of sun. The long barrow of Awwad’s Himyaritic ruins was there beside it; two more towers among trees on the left; and on the southern horizon, improbable as some medieval background, a cluster of five towers, the fortress of Hajlein.

  As we climbed down the blocks of limestone Awwad’s baby son toddled in the path to meet us: his father picked him up on to the shoulder that had no gun. The little family of the castle were at the gate. The place looked poor and bare when we drew near, but strong, built of small jl stones laid flat and stuck with mud, the central keep with battlements crowned with brush wood, and brushwood also round the outer wall: inside it were pens built with low roofs for cattle.

  The only two women of the place, the precarious bride and a sister, took me by the hand up shallow slabs of steps to the guest room in the keep—a good room, old and black and low. Its door was carved, its small windows one foot by eight inches shuttered with thick blocks, the ceiling sustained by a tree-trunk column. The men hung their guns and cartridge belts on pegs about the walls. Two palm mats and two black strips of goatwool were all the furnishing, except a hearth for coffee dug in the earthen floor. Here a bedu soon sat down with husks in a mortar, and beat with an alabaster pestle picked from the ruins nearby. His hair, with a fillet bound around his brow, flared out above his shoulders, his big nose and thin mouth made him look like some medieval page. The smoke from the fire curled through a hole in the ceiling. The restless wind, pushing against the tower, as the darkness fell showed the wisdom of small windows. When the camels were tethered and my bed made in one corner, our parry gathered here—’Ali and Qasim, three camel-men, Ahmed and the lad from ’Azzan with the men and women of the fort in a circle. They talked, and spat at intervals on to the middle of the floor. On the outer edge Awwad’s small son rolled about playing with a toy—a tin bucket with Charlie Chaplin stamped in gaudy colours. Awwad did not know where it came from. “Is it a man or a woman?” he asked, “or what is it?” Apart from my bed, it was the only touch of Europe in our sight.

  Chapter IX

  THE HIGH JOL

  “The myriad hues that lies between

  Darkness and darkness.”

  (RUPERT BROOKE.)

  LIGHT, LOVELY AND GAY, SHONE ON THE WORLD WHEN I OPENED my shutters next morning. The south wind, so hot in the wadis, blew with a freshness of spaces about it, and a nip. The goats were out—all black, the white kind seem not to inhabit the jl. The small tilled fields, and the limestone threshing floor, lay flat and shining in the sun.

  The two sisters-in-law came to see me as I finished dressing, and brought Awwad’s first wife. She had walked over from Zarub, a sad-faced but pleasant woman who might have been his mother, with a ring with silver beads threaded through one of her orange nostrils. Their made-up eyebrows give these beduin a curiously sophisticated look. They wear dark clothes woven at Hauta in Hajr or at Gheil Ba Wazir on the coast. They had never seen a European, and sat enraptured, looking at all my things, until I gave the younger wife my mirror, which she hovered over, torn between her longing and the reluctance to take something from a guest. She accepted at last, and came at intervals through the day with offerings, first her poor little silver nose-ring and then with an egg in her hand.

  It was pleasant to feel that the day and its leisure were ours to play about with, for we had not far to go, and the whole morning could be devoted to the ruins. The long mound, flat as a table, lies opposite the fort.

  On top of it stands what was once, I believe, a pre-Islamic mausoleum1: it is a small square building of stone slabs, neatly cut, and roofed also with flat slabs of stone. The lowness of the ceiling, and the small size, show that it was no human dwelling place; it is divided into three by two partitions, and the whole thing is less than nineteen feet square. Three cairns of rough stones are piled at the far end of the mound, about five feet high and hollow like those of ’Amd, but with no stones leading towards them; and, in the western slope below, two graves had been washed bare by rains and ruined by the beduin. They were different from the graves near Hureidha, and indeed from any found in the Hadhramaut hitherto, for they were single chambers built square with roughly dressed stones into the hill, and closed by slabs that ran in grooves of stone. Trinkets—two bronze rings, comelian beads and a potsherd or two, had been found inside them and the mutilated remains of an inscribed slab lay buried in debris close by. The slab is written in the Hadhrami dialect and commemorates the renovation of the tomb for someone who was to be buried inside it; this, of course, I did not know at the time, but I thought that the place was probably a general burial ground and that more might be discovered if one dug. The beduin had done so much damage already that I was careful to let out no word of these surmises, but confined myself to expatiating on the advantages they might have got out of their site if only they had left it untouched. It was a gloomy theme and after scrabbling over half the hillside in search of more inscriptions we turned mournfully back to our tower. When we had lunched there, Awwad took me up to the battlements where, under the brushwood, I saw a poor orphan girl whom he keeps in charity. “She is subject to fits on Fridays,” he said, and asked if I could send some medicine; “even if it costs money,” he added touchingly—and who can say more than that?

  Near four of the afternoon we left the tower of Suwaidat, and rode for an easy hour to that of Madhun, which stands on the same lowland basin draining to Sobale north-west. Awwad came too; he would bring us, he said, to Yeb’eth, beyond the Deyyin boundary. With his gun on his shoulder he trotted beside me. Hajlein on our right hand shone in the light; its five battlemented towers had turrets on their tops.

  “One tenth of the biggest tower is mine,” said Awwad; and went on to tell the story of his grandfather’s sister, who was being carried off from it against her will when the ravisher was overtaken and killed.

  “Did you make sure that it was against her will?” I asked.

  “It didn’t matter,” said Awwad.

  Around us as we rode, pre-historic flints glittered like small mirrors—only those worked by man shine when they are caught by the sun.

  The chief lord of the fortress, with a few relatives beside him, was squatting on his hams where our track crossed that to Dhula’a from Hajlein.

  “Come and spend a night with us,” he said.

  But Awwad pushed on to where Madhun stood in sight in a bay of the jl, two towers and a cluster of huts, with goats and peasants drawing towards them in the evening. Here, in a windowless room, I slept well under the cold and windswept stars.

  Qasim is now an excellent servant. I got up in the dark and found him busy with breakfast, and rode off on Robin at 6.40 A.M., before the surprised camel-men had finished with their dates. It gave us a morning of unhurried peace on the highest upland of the jl, the watershed of Hajr. As we reached and topped it, a new lowland basin rolled out below us, filled with sea-clouds and steam, even to where Wadi Minter ends in shallows at our feet. This is inhabited country: Lingaf was in sight on our right, and th
ere were four castles in Minter; the middle one, under whose triangular shot-holes we passed, belongs to a solitary marooned tribesman of the Ja’da. And when we had crossed this oasis, rich with the singing of birds and the vague sweetness of grass underfoot, we came, after an expanse of jl and stones, to the tower of Ba Taraiq, and the valley-head of Luqna, and Ra’un with its mound before us on the left; and in our sight, whenever we stood on rising ground, faint as clouds, volcanic pointed hills of ’Azzan.

  Thither would we travel, I decided, and avoid the cloud-steaming lowlands of Hajr, where, the camel-men said with one accord, all who go when the dates are in flower, fall ill of a fever and die. We would but dip down and out again at Yeb’eth and new camel-men would take us across the unvisited jl. We had the new men already; for as we had skirted Hajlein, a young bedu of surprising beauty ran out and took our ’Azzani by the hand, and the bargain had been made then and there.

  Our Ja’da camel-men were not heroic stuff. Friendship rather than efficiency ever guided Sayyid ’Ali in his choice, and he had picked these cronies of his from peaceful fields to travel through what they considered a hard and bitter world. They were not real beduin at all. They had the “Arab” type with long regular faces, very different from the square-set little aborigines of Deyyin or Saiban. I myself would never have looked at them twice, but I had been far too ill to bother about such things when they were chosen. And now whenever we reached some denuded spot to rest in, they sat despondent, lamenting the fact that they had forgotten both food for their camels and water for themselves.

  Abdulla their leader had evidently been told by ’Ali that his presence rather than his work was required. He was, said ’Ali, who has a passion for grandeur, a gentleman of the Ja’da. He had a cross and twisted face like that of the dwarf in the Nibelungen, and suffered from indigestion. Whenever we dismounted, he would gather all he could in the way of rugs and sacking, pile them into a heap to recline on, and prepare to watch Qasim and the beduin do his work.

  “Do you never do anything yourself?” I asked at last.

  “No,” said he. “The women cook.”

  “And when you are alone, I suppose you die of hunger.”

  “No, then I work.”

  “Praise be to God.”

  Qasim, gathering firewood, looked amused.

  But now, on the bare jl, the camels have had nothing but samr leaves to eat for the last three days, and as for the men’s lunch, ’Ali admits that it has vanished. Abdulla reclines and wails—no food, no feed, no warmth—as if most of these troubles were not of his own making; the donkey and I are the only well-fed members of the party. But no one is very bad-tempered about it; they cook a thin disgusting gruel and laugh at the suggestion that it be treated as a day in Ramadhan. They rest in the clear hungry air among the thorns and boulders, with the basin of Hajr breaking to shallow far cliffs below, and play with their guns to distract their minds and chew a mixture of tobacco and ashes, which, they say, improve it with a salty taste. What happened to the food ’Ali alone will ever know. He, universally blamed, sits contented, smoking a pipe with a stem made of an old cartridge-case. Cartridge-cases are used for all sorts of things. The beduin who come for medicines empty them out to use as bottles, make holes to stand them in the roots of trees, and give them a berry of the ’ilb tree for a stopper.

  At this place called the ’Aqaba of Mothab the rest of our day’s route lay all in light before us, winding towards Ye’beth in Hajr between the ravines of Mothab and Injit.

  Their devious twists, eating into the jl below, looked irresponsible like the paths of worms in wood. We rode there delicately through the afternoon between the heads of wadis that drop as if a trap-door had fallen, till sunset made the gravel silver, like wavelets on a stream; then we camped on the Van der Meulen track, 1,255 metres above the sea, at a dry waterhole called Nuqba of the ’Ilb Tree.

  The sun went, its gold ribands trailed and died quick as snuffed candles; from the Injit ravine at our feet shadows rose with the climbing night. Through the ocean green of the sky an icy wind came blowing; the food problem grew acute.

  The camel-men shivered and gathered by a fire: “We will be patient,” was all they said. There is a disarming, and also invincible quality, in patience and stupidity combined. But Awwad, gay as ever, trotted about almost naked with his operatic smile, while Qasim, in tennis shoes, dealt with the tea. There were said to be beduin of the Mushajir somewhere in the darkness below; Sayyid ’Ali must get meat from them; he was the villain; it was he who had economized our supper. He sat talking, unconquerably cheerful, while snubs, reprimands and accusations hung about him—and having looked in vain round an unresponsive circle for some victim to send in his stead, girt up his petticoats and went. After a long interval a woman appeared on the shore of the shadows with a bleating kid in her arms. The kid was for me, but there was nothing for the men.

  There was an outcry. Gladly would I give my little scapegoat, but it was a mouthful among so many; it trotted downhill again, happy and despised. I now handed the woman two dollars for a bigger dinner, and again we sat and waited, saying things about ’Ali, warm and well-fed, we supposed, with the beduin harim. Next time, I decided, I myself would take over the financial management of the camel-men, who would not have, like these, the privilege of being Sayyid ’Ali’s particular friends.

  I now went to bed to the chant of Ahmed’s prayer, his gaunt peasant neck and shoulder statuesque against a sky that held a yellow planet; and when I woke again the moon was high, though not yet high above us, tangled in a samr tree, flooding it in light, shining in a cluster of stars; and there was business going on round the fire. A sheep was cooking. ’Ali thought it pregnant and said it might be bad for me. I decided to risk this, and Qasim soon came along to reassure me and to say that it was merely fat, and reappeared in due time with the liver on a plate, an exquisite meal. I handed out such coats as I could spare in the thin cold air, and fell asleep again not far from the crackling fire, wondering with a pleasant gratitude at the general courage and gaiety of men in a hard and beautiful world. In the dawn we woke under a red sky to find everything wet with dew as if it had been raining: I usually sleep on all my clothes to keep them dry, but had forgotten about these heavy dews; my sheep-skin and my quilt were sodden; and even at eight-thirty, when already we had been riding for two hours, the fat little scrubby plants in the shade of boulders were still heavy and luminous with dew.

  The company had not slept; they had sat all night heaping logs on the embers. Ahmed and Robin and I left them and went on with the young ’Azzani lad, dressed in somebody’s discarded Norfolk jacket with the collar turned up and his curly head above. ’Ali came behind, riding slowly, because his camel was so hungry. And as we made south, a three hours to the ’Aqaba, by dry water-holes and cairns—sites possibly of pre-Islamic burial—we met a runner from ’Azzan, walking lightly with the morning shadows behind him to Du’an. Harold, he told us, had landed on his Sultan’s new landing-ground and he was rushing across country with the news. I might still find him there, said the young man, leaning like Tobit on his staff. It would be amusing to coincide unexpectedly with Harold in a place unvisited by Europeans for the last twenty years.

  When the news had been given and taken, we parted and continued, till we came to the untidy spur of ’Aqaba that falls to Yeb’eth, and saw the oasis below us, spread out in groups of forts and houses by their seil bed, with ’ilb trees and small dusty gardens of palms. The place lies like an island embraced by high moraines of loess, carried down by Sufra and Injit.

  From our height we could see small dark towers where the unmapped caravan routes wind north and west to the tableland upon whose farther edge stood yesterday’s blue hills. Perhaps it is some echo of the days when we too, unburdened with possessions, wandered lightly on the surface of the world, that gives the unexpressible delight to the sight of a road that vanishes, a road that winds into a distance, the landscape of to-morrow melting into the landscape o
f to-day. Some books, like the Pilgrim’s Progress, give this feeling and, recognizing it, we know that the charm of the horizon is the charm of pilgrimage, the eternal invitation to the spirit of man. To travel from fortress to fortress, over the high jl where men still walk with guns upon their shoulders, and at the end of days to see before you land that is yet unknown—what enchantment in this world, I should like to know, is comparable to this?

  Chapter X

  THE DRAWINGS OF RAHBE

  “ Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

  The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.”

  (SHELLEY.)

  AS WE CAME OFF THE ’AQABA, THE YOUTH WHO HAD PROMISED camels at Hajlein was squatting there before us. His name was Salih, of the Badiyan, who are a portion of the Beni Nu’man, who live in those volcanic hills to which our face was set. He was graceful as a panther, with features perfectly regular and eyes brilliant under long lashes, and his blue torso was naked to the waist; he had wound a dark turban round his head and his futah was gathered full like a ballet-skirt about him in the manner of his province. Hand in hand with the ’Azzani under the ’ilb trees of Yeb’eth, his indigo wildness and the other’s Norfolk jacket green with age walked together under my sunshade.

  We had been travelling four hours and it was still morning when we reached Shuruj, the village where the caravan route from ’Azzan comes down. The news had already spread and a roomful of visitors was waiting, for—apart from the Dutchmen six years ago who hurried through—no European has been seen here. The head of the Mushajir was there, to whom Yeb’eth belongs—old and deaf and friendly with white hair over his naked shoulders—and a sayyid, old too and holy, who looked more dubious. The holy are ever more chary of their welcome, and politics here, untouched by Harold’s truces, moved in suspicious grooves.