A Winter in Arabia

by Freya Stark

  The two tracks join and together follow a dreary defile stifled in sand and yellow ironstone; and at the head of this in a naked dell we rested, finding such shade as we could, A delicate black-and-white wheatear hopped about here, which they called Rukheime of the Hills.

  We had ridden for four and a half hours, and the afternoon sun was slanting steeply when we started again.

  “He who has not many men, the Sun comes and eats him at night,” Salih sang over and over as he saddled the camels. The beduin use of language is a perpetual delight; if they wish to tell me that something is for me to decide: “It is nearer your heart than ours,” they say. They set off now, still sulky with ’Ali, led by Salih’s friend, a figure so girlish in his barefoot grace, his curls tied away from his ears in a bunch at the nape of the neck, his face and hands so delicate and small that the tuft of beard on his chin seemed a monstrosity of nature.

  He led out of the defile over the last swellings of Merkham through a land of barren hummocks black as slag-heaps from coal. All was volcanic here.

  They were sulky with Ahmed too now, and so was I, for I had to ride a camel. Robin had given out altogether, his master having spent all the extra wages I had given him on stores sent back to his home. Poor Robin, with nothing but a few millet stalks inside him for the last two days, drooped along, his master brooding behind him, head sunk on breast, appalled at the cruelty of a desert you would think he might have known, or at least have enquired about, considering how he has lived all his life beside it. Down a long corridor we went, shady and dark, for two hours: volcanic cliffs shot up in perpendicular strata like flames on either hand, pitted with holes like honeycomb, where the deformed white stems find root of Adenum Obesum. Of that dead rock the outer skyline edges only catch a polish, like dark shoe-leather in the sun.

  I went stumbling far below, reduced to walking by the fatigue of the camel and the debility of Robin.

  “Your face is blackened, Ahmed,” I said. But Ahmed is one of those people who think it is the Universe and not he who are wrong when they happen to differ, and disconcerted me by saying that God would judge between us. This is always a disquieting thought, and—though angry—I did remember that the bag of rice to which Ahmed had misapplied his wages, was intended to nourish those eight female relatives of one sort and another; when next I drank from the goatskin, I offered him a share; he promptly finished all.

  “He can go home,” I told Sayyid ’Ali. “But not alone, or he will die. Let him join the first caravan we meet.”

  “I have written already to the headman at Yeb’eth,” said ’Ali, “to seize him as he goes by and take the six dollars away that you gave him in advance.”

  “You can tear that letter up,” I said. “And we will look upon the dollars as alms given to the feeble-minded.” But I almost regretted this decision next morning, when Ahmed came to ask for a second edition of his wages. He needed them, he said. He had an almost Teutonic incapacity for seeing other points of view.

  A late shaft of light struck us as we emerged at last from our long corridor into samr glades that lined a sheltered valley. It came down from the left to meet us, from Jebel Nahr on the ridge of Aswad, and was called al-Aisser, or the Left-hand valley. It joined our Lijlij track, and we turned west together, into a sunset country of varied and sudden hills. Violet shadows already lurked among them; and in the twilight we turned from our track and found a sandy place and traces of camp-fires, by the well of Lijlij that lies in its hollow alone; here the men of the Ba Qutmi come walking by with unechoing tread on the sand, leading their camels, and rest their guns against a tree to talk beside the travellers’ fires.

  “May one sit near her?” they ask when they see me. And then: “Where did you pick her up?” They turn to Salih. “And who brought her?” meaning from which tribe did they take me over.

  And when these matters have been settled, while they sit cleaning out cartridge-cases to fill with lotion for their eyes, they ask for news in their beduin way, saying: “What is the war in your wadi?”

  They live scattered about in huts or caverns of these hills, and tell of rock drawings everywhere in remote ravines too far to visit now. Their illnesses, collected through doctor-less years, are laid before me—a snake in the stomach, wind in the elbows—an expert would find it hard to diagnose. The well nearby, protected by a few dry walls and sheltered with faggots, is busy with the men of the place watering their goats for the night, who join us presently, when the full moon is out over flat-topped trees and pointed hills.

  Two young married people come, with the straight hair and beautiful small features of these very ancient tribes. The bride is unveiled, hung and braceleted with silver, one smooth plait showing under the shabby cloth they wear here in folds on the top of their heads. Her anklets are broad bands of brass, with bosses. Her face is beautiful as that of a Madonna. With a charming gesture of affectionate confidence she lays her hand on her husband’s bare knee as he squats beside her, and in her other hand holds a bowl of milk to exchange for the medicine. Presently a small cousin joins them to find something for his grandfather’s cough, hitherto “helped by Allah alone,” and to ask for medicine against wolves which eat the goats they take to pasture. He is so full of affection and concern that I have to part with some of the most precious camphor oil that I use for myself. It is hard to keep anything in this land; at every turn one meets with people whose need is so disproportionately greater than one’s own. The beauties and charities of their code, the hardness which a life among the perpetual poverty of others must engender, become clear as one travels among them.

  In the dawn we too watered our camels and travelled in early sunlight into those little hills, making due west, over a low red pass called Naid, where many small cairns lie scattered, resting-places where the beduin dead are prayed over on their last journey, as they pass from their houseless wilderness to where, round habitations, they build a city of their graves.

  Two hills flank the pass, and in the dip below lay the small oasis of Aroma with a fort and well and the mountain called Horhor behind it; and a long train of laden camels were zigzagging up the boulders towards us. The bearded beduin shook hands as they reached and passed us; they shake with a clasp, sidewards. One asked if I was a sayyid, and looked surprised when ’Ali said “A sayyida.” There has been in this region a female Mansab of the Junaidi sayyids; she inherited the position from her father, and was much respected and did not, in fact was not allowed to, marry; and my beduin were delighted when I told them that I was to be thought of as a Mansab also, and forthwith called me so. They told me that there had been three of these ladies; the last one died a year or two ago, and the tribes are now divided as to whether to have another woman or no, so they put papers with the names of various candidates into her tomb to see what she felt about it, and in the morning found the masculine names torn to shreds.

  It took us only an hour to reach Aroma. There before us lay a great sandy basin, blown up by the sea-winds and lapping to the edge of the hills. These sand-drifts are common here and they call them “kaut,” and I was anxious to cross while the morning was still cool. But the master of the fort of Aroma stood by the wayside to meet us and seized my bridle and looked threatening when we asked to hurry on.

  “What does she mean?” he said, turning to ’Ali. “Is it to insult me?”

  ’Ali carries over his shoulder my leather-fringed bag filled with coffee berries, which are produced in the houses one rests at, according to the custom of this land: the host is put to no expense, and his prestige suffers if one passes him by. I could-not help feeling rather relieved at the thought that we were travelling in such uninhabited country; in a populous region one would never get on at all. As it was, we sat under his ’ilb trees for an hour, while the pretty wife who ruled him and his fort beat out the coffee berries on a stone; and, in the heat of the day, continued down the valley, barely scratched for cultivation here and there. There were drawings on the hillside above Aroma, too
high to be reached without the sacrifice of another day; and there were some under a rock on the wayside, almost effaced and rough; as we crawled in to look, we saw a snake coiled there with puffed cheeks, about eighteen inches long, coloured white and buff and faint red like the ochres of the drawings—the only animal seen on this journey, except for some conies among the rocks of Rahbe. With no further incident we turned north to skirt the edge of sand and reached the third and last well on our road, where the small square forts of Mesfala, the capital of the Ba Qutmi, stand on little hills.

  Chapter XII

  ARRIVAL IN ’AZZAN

  “La soledad seguiendo,

  Rendido a mi fortuna

  Me voy por los caminos que se ofrecen.”

  (GARCILASSO DE LA VEGA.)

  THE CHIEF OF THE BA QUTMI WAS ABSENT, AND HIS TWO sons sat in their tower and did not come to see me, so that I took this opportunity to uphold the prestige of my sex and nation, refusing to visit their mother in the harim. All they had to do, I said, if they wished for my company, was to come and call on me first. The social deadlock was very welcome, for it allowed us to rest in peace under the shade of a tamarisk and enjoy the open spaces of Mesfala.

  This is the beginning of the great Meifa’a basin where four wadis flow into the open. A huge amphitheatre holds them, intersected only by the Dhila’ range which lay, half blanketed in sand, across the Kaut before us. The long snouts we had looked upon from Hajr now showed their other side and formed our eastern barrier. They shone diaphanous behind us in the noonday light. In the foreground the resting flocks, and men drawing water in the sun, looked sharp and vivid as the Book of Genesis to a child.

  This was the home of Salih and his friends, so that our departure was even more dilatory than usual, and it was four o’clock and cool before we started on the crossing of the sand. The Wadi Muhit comes down here from the Fughà pass, and, having circumvented the Dhila’ range flows into Meifa’a below it; here also the Yeb’eth track from Gulgul comes into our track from the north; and the whole landscape, framed in the steep strata of its range, its sands ribbed by south-east winds, slide gently south-eastward to low hills and the invisible sea. New plants appear here, different both from the limestone flora of the jl and the volcanic fragile flowers we had left behind us: shersher (Tribulus mollis Ehr. Caltrops), ribla (Heliottopium undulatum Vahl), mrikh (Leptadenia pyrotechnica (Forsk) Dacne) and grasses—sherh (maerua crassifolia Forsk) and thumam—that make hillocks beneath them as they clutch the wandering sand. The camels eat all these.

  As we rode I watched the camel before me, admiring the perfection of its desert ways. Its ugliness is the ugliness of the east, that has some strange attraction; its colour is the colour of desert dust, with the same innumerable, imperceptible variations; its tail, which looks like a dead palm frond, is merely ridiculous. But its feet are so strong that I have seen a camel, fully laden, raise itself up on a foot that was twisted beneath it, apparently without noticing, and so delicately made, with concertina-like springs at the heel, that they give themselves without shock to every inequality of ground. I can see why the beduin love their camels: it is the only beast of burden whose constant wish is truly to oblige. Like one of those unselfish people who are always gently moaning, the camel does all that is asked of it with a constantly negative mind: but it does try to do it, and when the bedu shouts “tariq” from behind, will leave the morsel of green leaves hanging on a branch in mid-air and find obediently the track from which it strayed. Only sometimes, when another caravan comes by, you will hear a vague, individual rumble from a male as he passes, while the lady whom he will never meet again turns to look distantly at him, as if through invisible lorgnettes.

  To my ignorance there are only two sorts of camel, those with comfortable saddles and those without. Ours were without. But now, in the middle of the kaut, we saw a creature advancing in tassels, sent with a letter of welcome from ’Azzan, and a sayyid and two donkeys beside it. The ’Azzani boy had run ahead through the night with news of us and now came with the three newcomers—which made ten instead of seven for supper. I am sorry for anyone who organizes commissariats in Arabia.

  All together we reached the western edge of the kaut and entered by a long winding defile the range of the pointed hills. Dinshale was on our left, Surba’ straight above us; the round moon hung in a violet sky between their dusky walls; and far behind us the hills we had come from showed like a coronet of amethysts washed up to by the sand. In a windless corner of this unwatered range we pitched our camp at seven and watched our fire burning. My new donkey, with hennaed legs, came in a friendly way and sat beside me, like a dog, rubbing its head in the sand. The prejudice engendered by Robin began to evaporate. I offered rye vita biscuits, but it got up, spitting, only when Qasim, passing by, put chocolate in its mouth.

  I had promised a present if we reached ’Azzan before ten the morning after, and the result was that Salih’s small brother tried to rouse us at four. This we resisted passively, and set off in earliest daylight, pale as a sea-shell, and rounded the bastions of Surba’, and followed a small wadi called Thire down from the watershed, till we came to a main highway, where the Wadi Salmn flows with perennial water, from the town of Hauta to ’Azzan. Here, between broad beds of gravel, the village of Lahdzan stands screened in palms: seven towers are on the hill-tops about it, all within shooting distance and at enmity one with another till the coming of the “English peace” a few months ago. The river thence flows shallow and brown with fish in it, between villages, shadowed here and there with trees; the months of peace have already brought fields of lucerne and millet to its banks. No sight can be more restful than to come from the wilderness to see men and women knee-deep in their crops: unless perhaps it is to leave men and women and return again to the wilderness. But at this time, with a week of empty jl behind us, the sight of man was pleasant in his labours. They are done here almost entirely by slaves, for the land belongs to the beduin who scorn to work with their hands and treat their people roughly, with scanty food and beating, and grudge them even the decent gift of clothes, so that the Arabs of the towns are loud in blame. The general rumour that the R.A.F. were coming to liberate these poor people brought them in droves across the field to greet me, welcoming me as they stooped in their rags to kiss my knees and garments as I passed.

  I was now again riding a donkey, and the sayyid, its master, a big rough man, rode on a white female ass before me, which he made to go by pulling at a rope under its demure and shrinking tail. When this happened, it would give an irritated twist, and set off, very knock-kneed, small, and feminine, at an incompetent gallop over any boulder that happened to lie before it, while my donkey rushed amorously after. The sayyid, three sizes too large for his mount, sat loose and light-hearted; but I had a pack-saddle that went round and no stirrups, and—what is far worse—no initiative; villagers too were now crowding upon us, seizing my bridle right and left to lead me to their homes.

  Slowly we made our way, in and out of reeds and shallow water, down the river, while the crowd gathered from the fields behind us: until we left the garden lands (called Ghail) and came to where, on either hand, low cliffs enclose the stream. Here on the left, a long ledge is inscribed with words and pictures notched into the gritty sandstone—a varied collection of Arabic1. and pre-Islamic, jumbled together—a saddled horse, a man and lion fighting, and men shooting with bows standing on the necks of camels. Greetings and words are scratched there, and the feeling of the place is in its lesser way like that of the Dog River in Syria where the armies of antiquity passed and left, inscribed in stone, words more permanent than themselves.

  This, too, through many centuries, must have been a passageway for the great frankincense route up into the hills. No one can travel, as I did, from the enclosed eastern lands into this open basin and not realize that Geography herself has made of the Wadi Meifa’a a highway to the sea. The great wadis of the north come down here and open the rich uplands of Nisab and Yeshbum
and Habban; and lead without obstacle to the coast and the port of Cana. Even now the caravans from the coast go to Shabwa by this road through the Wadi Jardan, and the fortress of ’Azzan commands them as once the fortress of Naqb al-Hajr close below it commanded the caravans of their ancesters; only the riches and the volume have diminished—the skeleton of the great highroad remains.

  And the place called Wd in the Quran, which was the home of the sons of Thamud, is still the name given to Meifa’a beneath the walls of Naqb and ’Azzan. (See page 200.)

  In spite of worried looks from ’Ali and my beduin, I stopped to photograph the drawings of the ledge, while the fortunate arrival of the uncle of the headman of Ghail brought a certain quiet among the crowd. He was a handsome man with dark eyes and short grey curls tied round him with a band, and carried on the wooden butt of his gun a tuft of ibex caught by himself in the hills; and he had served in the Levies in Aden. He sat down on the rocks to watch me at my work, while the men around, divided into parts like a Greek chorus, spoke for me and against in low voices: at every halt, unless one happens to have a friend already there, this chorus takes place—and the traveller’s most important business is to see that the party for him remains in the ascendant. Now, however, a woman, standing in the wadi bed below, began to shout angry reproaches to the men on the ledge who let the Unbeliever take pictures in their land. Uneasiness began to be felt; the headman’s uncle looked angrily down; I had to take some notice.

  “One thing,” I remarked, “is ever the same in your land and in mine.”

  “And what is that?” said they.

  “The excessive talk of women.” The delighted audience rushed to the edge of the ledge to shout this remark down with embellishments, and with a last vindictive snap the female voice was silent. But I lingered as little as I could; demands for money began to be heard; ’Ali, mounting me on my donkey, asked me to hurry. The sayyid on the white ass had disappeared, and my animal seemed to respond to no stimulus except that of love alone, until a bedu soldier appeared and whacked it with a rifle from behind. We got away slowly, shedding the crowd over hot white distances of stones. Near ten of the morning we reached the point where the cliffs die down, and the six or seven high towers of ’Azzan with battlements whitewashed in the sun stand grouped on the open hill-ringed space of Meifa’a. The Sultan’s new landing-ground, marked with white cairns, lies just below their walls.