A Winter in Arabia

by Freya Stark

  “What of the Government?” the beduin would ask as they met us. “Does it mean to let us live or will it kill us?” They asked it without irony, convinced that governments can do without question what they please. But the villagers of the oasis were anxious for help with their orchards, their roads and canals. “Why does Ingram not visit us?” they asked, ignoring the cameldays that cut them off. Any government would do, they said, provided it were strong, for the prosperity of these inland places depends upon safe access to the sea. According to the distance and the danger, the price of commodities varies, so that a load of rice costs three and a half dollars less at Yeb’eth than in ’Amd. The price of weapons too varies, according to the temporary security of the land, and rifles on the jl have dwindled from five to three hundred or even to two hundred dollars.

  The port of Yeb’eth is Bal Haf rather than Bir Ali, and they reach it by a newly opened three days’ route across the hills; but before this they would go round to ’Azzan, they told me, rather than by Hajr, because of the safer road, while their traffic eastward was less with ’Amd than with Du’an. Their wells are easy at a depth of fifteen to thirty qma; and the oasis and the land around belong almost entirely to the Mushajir, with a few ’Amudi Shaikhs scattered here and there.

  Their villages are fine medieval groups of towers, barely furnished and poor. When I had sat there among them for an hour, I took refuge in the comparative seclusion of the harim, where the women welcomed and petted me, piling cushions and looking at all I had brought. The smallest boy of the house came and sat close in the circle; a tin lion, machine-made in Europe, hung about his neck, because Asad or Lion was his name. The wife was plain. She wore a necklace over the top of her head in a fashion I had not seen, and her mother sat beside her, a woman still beautiful, from Du’an.

  “Do you see any good in me?” she asked. “An old woman, far from my people?”

  “The old are nearest to Allah,” I answered and pleased her. Nothing, to the Arab, appears to be so sad as the living among strangers. Her eyes were still lovely and dark.

  The husband and master of the tower had been to Massawa, and told me how hard the Italians make it for Arabs who come with British passes. Some, however, they use for propaganda, and three brothers who had long served in the Eritrean army were busy now spreading rumours against us all over the lands of Yeb’eth, not, as far as I could see, with very much effect.

  A mosquito was humming in this lowland and I meant to be off before the afternoon was out. But the chorus of Sayyid ’Ali’s accusers had to be dealt with first. Everyone was annoyed with him and everyone said so. Even Awwad, the Deyyin, having bestowed my present in his cartridge-belt, complained that ’Ali owed him five dollars.

  “Why do you lend him money?” I asked. “You knew, when you did so, that you were throwing it into a well? He has promised new dresses to all the camel-men because they are his friends? Can I do anything about it? You ought to know him? He is an Arab, not an Ingliz.”

  A hasty chorus assured me that no one would dream of confounding ’Ali with the English, and I then turned to deal with Ahmed, who had become a merchant in Yeb’eth where things are cheaper, had spent all he had, and now had nothing left to pay for Robin’s fodder. In an evil moment, reluctant to see that unsympathetic animal starve, I paid five days’ wages in advance.

  Now all was ready, except for the buying of food. The new beduin had been strenuously told to provide their own, and dates and rice were soon got together; also two goatskins of water which ’Ali had forgotten in ’Amd. In a final chaos, complicated by hosts of callers, by farewells to the Ja’da now completely friendly, and by the close-packed presence of half the oasis children, we got off. It was four o’clock in the afternoon. At the top of a gentle scree the jl received us, its tawny landscape dotted with round qaras (hillocks), empty and silent, an arid but ineffable peace.

  The evening too was peace in a small wadi recessed into the flatness of the jl. It was called Shi’b al-Gin. The huge qara of Kalab is east of it; and in its pastoral heart wooded with ’ilb trees it had a pond and a fort, and a few families of beduin beside their goats, penned for the night with thorns. Here we too camped at six-thirty in a sandy hollow on moonlit ground strewn with berries of the ’ilb trees. ’Ali, after so much tossing, settled into the respectability and ease of holiness, and the beduin came running to kiss his hand. He takes it well, without undue elation, and is ever anxious to push me also into a creditable limelight; he is indeed a magnanimous little soul, in spite of all.

  Two other sayyids joined us here, young boys home from school in Tarim. They were making for Nisab in the northwest, and asked if they could add themselves to our party as far as our roads go together. One feeds them, it goes without saying; it is the custom of the land. But the fact that no one can ever know how many there will be for dinner over a two or three days’ foodless desert, does make housekeeping difficult. The elder of the two lads had devoted himself to grammar and religion for four years already.

  “For how much longer will you study?” I asked him.

  “I do not know. Perhaps always,” he said. “Learning is like water to the earth. There is never enough.”

  Salih the Badiyan was unloading the camels, helped by a friend and a small brother. The goatskin of water and the gun, the two necessities of life, were deposited in safety beside us in shelter of a tree. These are good beduin, resourceful, cheerful and quiet: of me and of ’Ali they think little, but they care for their camels and know their road; and it is pleasant to watch their deft accustomed movements and to sit eating the yellow berries that lie strewn about in profusion and to smell the bitter smell of the evening fire.

  * * *

  Next morning at six-thirty we left the small dip of our valley by its western side and saw the grandeur of the unknown jl about us, ruined and desolate. The waters and the wind have worked, and the flat surface is eaten into and threatened on every side. The great ravines roll themselves down to Hajr, over an immense fan of eroded tortured lands. Here is no water, except what lies in pools of the limestone below in shady places, or rushes in the channels of the rain. The little forts, invisible and single, are separated by days of rough journey; Ganamnam in Shi’b Jereb in the north, Ghiutek in the south, were all I could learn of in the wide broken landscape that lay in sight, naked in the morning; to right and left as we rode on a narrow shelf of gravel, the uninhabited valleys fell away.

  The houseless beduin live here and know the water-holes. The ravines themselves hold in their sheltered hearts pleasant oases of high-growing trees. Long before the days of Islam, the forebears of these tribesmen must have known them, for their rough red ochre letters are painted with increasing frequency as one travels westward, on many a flat or overhanging surface of stone.

  Two such we stopped to visit in Wadi Rahbe, where the track zigzags down into a valley and the two great water-bitten desolations of Saiq and Rahbe meet. Not far from a pool like a well in the limestone, words and drawings are painted on the northern overhanging cliff. The words are strange, perhaps magic formulas, with the same letters often repeated, and a name here and there; but the pictures are plain enough and drawn with spirit—ibex and camels with rudimentary riders, men—a man with bound hair or a turban—and three oxen without humps unlike the modern cattle in this land. In the bas reliefs of Deir al Bahri, that show the bringers of frankincense in the fifteenth century B.C., the oxen too are smooth-backed like these, and the fact has been taken to strengthen the claim that Arabia, rather than Africa, was the frankincense land once known as the Land of Punt1 If this is so, the oxen of Rahbe strengthen the claim; and show also that there was probably tillage in this lonely valley at that time. The drawings are rough enough, but observant, the shambling camel-legs, done with wavy lines, are distinguished from the straight strength of the oxen. They are far better than anything of the kind we had come upon so far.

  In the body of the valley, arching over the seil-bed, is a stretch of thick trees
and wild palms. The trees are of the kind they called Tzaraf at Samu’a, brilliant as if a thin coat of varnish were spread over their leaves and with trunks two feet across; the palm trees behind them grow tall and push their spiky fans into the sky, and the beduin distil a drink from them (which is, I am sure, forbidden) and call them nos. Under their pleasant shadow ’Ali was thinking to rest through the heat of the day, and looked apprehensive when more drawings were mentioned down the valley.

  “Only two hours to go and come,” the beduin said.

  “You do not know beduin,” said ’Ali; “you do not know what they mean when they say two hours.”

  What I did know was that no one can inspire a caravan with antiquarian enthusiasm after lunch. We would set off before our rest—it was only ten in the morning—and come back when we could, and we took pity on Sayyid ’Ali and left him reluctant under the trees.

  Down Rahbe with the heat increasing we rode through the morning, by park-like sweeps of tamarisk and flame-flowered shrubs and pools of water left from the winter-flowing of the stream; till we came after two hours to Ghiutek, a fort with huts around it, and were made welcome because our beduin were related to the beduin of the valley. There we drank from a goatskin of muddy water, took a handful of ’ilb berries that lay drying in heaps in the sun, and asked why no one tilled the earth in this lonely little paradise where trees would grow.

  “We tried,” said the men of Ghiutek, “to blow a canal with dynamite out of the hillside. But it did not come and perhaps we will try again, and then we can cultivate and use irrigation, but otherwise we will live on these berries that you see.”

  “And when you go to a town, where do you go to?”

  “To the tower of Joba, one day’s journey down this wadi.”

  “And from Joba, where does one go?”

  “Another day, to Hajr.”

  They live, shut up in their cliffs in a world of their own, unless they depart altogether for places like Singapore.

  Twenty minutes beyond Ghiutek, down the valley, we came upon the other drawings on the under tilted face of a boulder the size of a house, close to the track. These also had rough letters, and two pictures of husns with towers—the same husn probably whose descendent stands at Ghiutek to-day.1 We returned, riding briskly. In the furnace heat of the valley, Robin, encouraged by the beduin behind him, behaved like a proper animal, while his master, crumpled up with fatigue, trailed too slowly in the distance to protest.

  We rested, and it was almost sunset when, after long zigzags up the terrific ’aqaba of Saiq, we reached again the windy spaces of the jl, and made camp in the deepening dusk in a cup of the limestone, with the ruins of the world as it seemed at our feet. Among the rocks, still and warm in the moonlight, our camels scattered and settled, immovable and ancient in outline as the rocks themselves. No animal looks as permanent as the camel in its own landscape. And as we sat round our fire, a bedu appeared out of the darkness, with straight hair and a straight small nose, of the tribe of the Ba Qutmi of the Beni Nu’man.

  “Are you one of the Ferangi,” said he, “who are coming to make us free our slaves, and pay taxes, and to make our women do as they please?”

  “I do not know,” said I, “about the first two, but I know that your women do as they please already, because I am a woman myself.”

  He laughed and squatted down in the glow of the fire.

  “All the jl is talking,” said he, “about your aeroplanes. The Sultan of ’Azzan told us they were coming, and none of us believed him; and they did come; and now you have come just after. What is it all about? Are you coming to spoil our country?”

  “Indeed I hope not,” said I.

  “We have given up all our guns because of your English peace, and now the Sons of Himyar who live in the hills have stolen two of our camels a fortnight ago, and we Ba Qutmis have given up our guns.” (A whole circle of German rifles was gleaming with smooth barrels round the fire.) “We have had enough of the peace, and soon we shall go into the lands of the Himyar and pour petrol over the roots of their palms. We do not like you.” He smiled at me in a good-natured way as he spoke.

  “We are going to have a kid for dinner,” said I, “and you will like me better after that. In our country we think that a man never likes people till he is fed. But as for your country, we have no wish to take it from you.” I looked over the vast lands tumbled in the moonlight and thought of English woods with blue-bells just coming. “We have a better land,” said I. “And if we are here it is not to do you any harm, but because your sultans invite us, to keep out other people, whom you and we both dislike.”

  “If that is so,” said the Ba Qutmi, “why all is well. But if you make a peace, you should keep it, and not let the Sons of Himyar steal our camels.”

  Chapter XI

  ACROSS THE WATERSHED

  “ Their arms the rust hath eaten,

  Their statutes none regard:

  Arabia shall not sweeten

  Their dust, with all her nard.”

  (A. E. HOUSMAN.)

  THERE ARE, I SOMETIMES THINK, ONLY TWO SORTS OF PEOPLE in this world—the settled and the nomad—and there is a natural antipathy between them, whatever the land to which they may belong. Perhaps it is because we are comparatively recently barbarians, because the stone age lingered longer among us than on the Mediterranean coasts that the English have remained so frequently nomadic at heart. It is the more imaginative attitude in a transitory world, where a man who tries to feel settled must appear to the eyes of eternity very like someone pretending to sit in comfort on an ant-hill. And the nomads are without doubt the more amusing. With a mind receptive to the unexpected they acquire a Social Sense. The roughest bedu has it, and it is this that so happily distinguishes him from a peasant like Ahmed or even from a Banker, people who walk through landscapes with their heads down, thinking out sums. The nomad, moving from place to place in mind as well as body, is ready to take an interest in any odd thing that meets him; this makes him pleasant and I am inclined—especially after last winter—to think it is better to be pleasant than to be virtuous, if the two must be looked upon as mutually exclusive.

  ’Ali however, with nothing much to show for it in the way of stability, is developing the attitude of a Settled Man, and has fallen out with the Sons of Nu’man. They, poor things, were happy in the thought that this journey to ’Azzan could be made to last days and days: already it has stretched out to three instead of the promised two, and it seems doubtful if even the fourth will see us there. Apart from the fact that the Aden Government has no notion of where I am and is probably getting restless, I am delighted to go slowly; the calm nights of the jl pour strength into one day by day. But ’Ali has Reason on his side. He spoke roughly to make the camel-men go on; a moment of uncertainty followed, and I had to intervene with tactful words; Salih explained with black brows as we continued that—if ’Ali had been alone —they would have taken their camels and left him in the desert—a grim unpleasant thought.

  “But,” said I in a shocked voice, “isn’t he a Sayyid? You couldn’t do that.”

  “We are beduin,” said Salih. “We like people, or we don’t like them. We like you,” he added with a disarming smile, and henceforward showed his affection by leading my camel round the branches of the samr trees that might happen to scratch my face, instead of through them as he did before.

  We had been riding all the morning along a tongue of jl between two ravines—Mudha’a with a track running towards us on our left, and on our right the hollow depth of Rahm in whose far sunlight we could see moving the tiny figure of Salih’s friend looking for water to fill our skins. Presently a depressing small range of rubble limestone blocked our north-western view, though the jl before us was still lovely in morning, flecked with pits of shadow. The road wound in decorative unnecessary loops made by the feet of camels in the past; the bedu behind me sang as he swayed on his saddle, in a high meaningless voice, shrill as the wind. And then, climbing the foot-
hills of Jebel Aswad to the Dzera’ Pass, we reached the ridge that had been our horizon on the jl of Mothab, four days ago; and saw before us, red and black and fading in misty air like the Celestial City, bounded on its far side by crests of Jebel Himyar, the huge bowl of the hills of ’Azzan.

  Dark indeed must the heart be that does not lift at the sight of the journey’s goal set out before it; and I have often thought that, if one lived well, such perhaps may be the hour of death. Even the beduin to whom it was so familiar felt the strange joy that fills well-regulated minds when they step across a watershed, and paused in the morning breeze beside me, to point out the hills of their land.

  We were now between two systems, white and black, where long ridges of limestone break and meet volcanic peaks of Aswad, home of the Beni Nu’man. Wa’l, the Peak of the Ibex, is the highest, standing about half-way along this range; but the most northerly and last peak is Merkham, under whose dark shaft our pathway led. On our other side and far higher above us were the crumbling buttresses of the last of the limestone ridges, whose long and even headlands break down and end here in three isolated, flat-topped derelicts called Qadas, Qishé and Himar. Beyond the former, where it joins the headland of Jebel Ali, is the Fughà Pass, fit for lightly-laden camels only, where the Gulgul track from Yeb’eth comes down, travelling through uninhabited lands. Another track, from Husn Ganamnam, comes in from the north and met us as we descended from the pass; a long string of camels, like some Egyptian carving, was threaded along it round the pyramid edge of Himar.