by Freya Stark
That was the last rest we had. We were now a large concourse of people, twenty-seven camels in all, and with our promiscuous parcels, paraffin lamps swinging, and the cooking-pot that always clattered from the Sultan’s saddle, looked rather like a collection of tinkers than an expedition prepared for war. My old Uncle was there, striding gallantly through the morning, with a lizard (dhabb) about a foot long with a scaly tail, tied in his loincloth as a present for me. I came to love this little creature later on and called it Himyar, after the tribe and the hills from which it came.
Talk now grew lively through the early hours, a crackle of laughter and repartee running up and down. Beduin, falling into step below me, told me they meant to keep the motors that kill their camel traffic from ’Azzan. “One of them tried to come,” they said, “last year, and followed the coast from Shuqra and would have run up the stretches of Meifa’a which are easy, but we threatened it, and the travellers refused the risk, though the chauffeur would have come. But we will kill whoever does so,”1 they said unanimously. And I replied with the story of King Canute, who, like them, tried to keep out the waves of the sea.
In spite of our slow unvarying pace, we covered much more ground than when we rode alone. Now and then I would put out my feet and rest them in the teddy-bear thickness of the foal’s back as it trotted alongside, with soft eyes and pretty lashes, rubbing affectionately against its mother. Sometimes it strayed and the two would call to each other with deep mooing voices, as if, amid the fussiness of our human chatter, they lived aloof in their remote primeval world.
The morning grew hot. We plodded across rivers of gravel among small limestone knolls, seeing no human being, though the Al Dhiyaib might be expected in these wastes:1 only on the far right, across the invisible Meifa’a the oasis of Radhun could be seen in the distance, dark green and dim in the blaze of the sun.
The men on foot now began to come with water for the thirsty; a continual business of such little services ran up and down the line. If they wanted to walk, people slipped down the camels’ legs and only clumsy ones like me had to make it kneel to climb up again. At intervals the Old Wolf, jolting beneath his black umbrella, gave presents of oil; from the goatskin that swayed at his saddle, men poured it over their heads and naked shoulders in the sun.
The slate-coloured plains of gravel shone satiny like the backs of well-groomed horses. Behind them ridges of “kaut” began to show against the range of Jebel Aswad on our left, and stole in front of it and hid it slowly with a pale, smooth wall. As we went south the sand increased in great two-coloured dunes, tawny and pale yellow; at noon we got a far glimpse of the sea. But we turned east, away from the estuary of Meifa’a, among even taller dunes, pure yellow now like islands on the limestone floor. The hills that look so white from the sea are “kaut”; they run in a long ridge about ten miles inland and mask harder mountains whose invisible presence is shown only by flints and pebbles that lie in a gay incredible variety of qualities and colours, brought down by torrent across our path.
The camels here had difficulties; the caravan floundered and stumbled and broke into straggling ends. Anyone, you would have thought, could have attacked it, and the men pointed to a hollow close beneath us where nine on each side had been killed twenty years ago. The familiar wadi plants we knew had disappeared now, harmal and tzafar (Tephrosia apollinea link) and samr; new things—reedy grass and small white flowers, duweila (Pulicaria glutinosa Jaub) and sharh (Odyssea mucronata Forsk) and a sticky-leaved herb I had not seen, clung on to the hummocks of the sand, with rak and tamarisk in the hollows. On our right the dunes hid from us the sight of the sea, and looked in the heat like a line of immovable breakers.
You would have supposed, from the comforting words of the caravan, that we were just turning to our oasis at noon; but it took us four and a half hours to reach it, a smudge on the stubble-coloured slopes of sand. Nasir, who had walked these twelve hours with his gun upon his shoulder, was still ready to organize a dance as we approached, but first turned aside amiably to look at what seemed in the distance an artificial breakwater towards the sea. It was nothing but a natural outcrop, and there is, I think, no vestige of human labour on the flat stretch that lies eastward between Meifa’a and the volcanic hills. Having ascertained this in spite of weariness, we made for our oasis, beating tunes on my saucepan for the men, who danced their zamil divided in two wings. My old Uncle, with the lizard at his waist, joined in, apparently as fresh as when he started. Even at the end of such a day these men walk with their springy freedom, often hand in hand, and I noticed, looking down upon them, that their hair is not usually black, but has brown streaks in its slight curls that catch the light.
This art of theirs of the caravan is the one thing the Arab has learned by endless repetition to do supremely well. One after one all my modern gadgets failed me; the thermos broke, the lunch basket was far too complicated, only the Mansab’s quilt stood me in good stead. But the bedu’s waterskin, with one hand used as a cup and a funnel, is economical and light; his coffee-pot, brass and unbreakable, hangs under the saddle over the camel’s tail; his cotton shawl can be used for everything in the world that cloth is ever used for. He has all that is necessary and nothing superfluous; and if his rope were of the kind that did not break whenever you pull at it, one might say that his equipment was perfect of its kind.
At four-thirty we came to the oasis where palms grow rich and sudden round hot springs on the slope. The azure water runs in pools in their shade, delicious to bathe in if modesty allowed; but I could not rely on the villagers of ’Ain ba Ma’bad as I could on my beduin behind their rock. The people here were indeed mostly slaves who work for beduin owners and long for freedom and the Royal Air Force; while the thought of British interference is correspondingly unpopular with their masters. An old slave who crept up for medicine after dark, was tortured and twisted with beatings.
There are but a tiny mosque and a few low rooms, and pens of thorns for goats at ’Ain ba Ma’bad, and in the biggest of the rooms we sat and were received. When the chief Elder came briskly along with handshakes and, reaching me, saw that I was a woman, he started backwards and fled.
I was their first European female, and the British were anyway unpopular, because Harold was pressing for payment for some theft or murder. Chiefly however they were annoyed with their own Sultans who had taken away from them the guardianship of the track: “And now you see how the Al Dhiyaib come and levy blackmail on camels. Two of our men were made to pay a dollar each, only the day before yesterday, at the place where you turned to the east.”
“Perhaps you did not keep the ways safe enough. Are you the people who let Colonel Lake be shot at along this road?”
“Colonel Lake?” said they in genuine surprise. “He is not a Moslem. It does not matter if he is shot at.” And though I argued the point, with quotations from the Quran and the support of my companions, the atmosphere of ’Ain ba Ma’bad remained unfriendly, and I was too tired to sit and try to alter it with talk after food.
Qasim found a secluded goat-pen with a low door by which one could creep in; and I had just settled for a long night when Nasir appeared and said, regretfully, that we were starting at 2 a.m. again next morning. The camel-men, he explained, having heard that a dhow had just called at Bal Haf were anxious to pick up a load and return the selfsame day. The comfort of twenty-seven camel-men was obviously more important than mine, though it seemed hard to realize it at the moment, but nothing, I told Nasir, short of the Day of Judgement would make me move before four in the morning, and he departed, obviously relieved to get off so easily. The affairs of every single man in the caravan devolved on Nasir’s shoulders, from the mending of a lamp to the milking of a goat; he alone saw to it all, and was as cheerful and competent at the end as at the beginning of the long string of crises that the travelling Arab calls a day. He was good-looking too, and sturdy as an oak tree, and had a smile that lifted the corners of his eyes.
In the morning,
under a sky painted with high moonlit clouds like some baroque church ceiling, we once more padded darkling on the sand, and came, as the light broke, to the springs of Juwairi, that run hot through turf-green runnels into palm groves. Here the camels drank, stooping snake necks in decorative patterns, while mountains opened in the eastern distance under the wakening sky. Nasir dragged my quilt to a quiet place and I slept for two and a half hours, and we then rode inland again among sand-dunes, with only rak and shahr and the grass qalila and ’andam, the reed-like grass eaten by cattle, about us, and on the sands a glitter in sheltered places, shining “like eyes of locusts” the beduin said. This glittering powder comes from the sea, and lies in patterns where the waves end on black volcanic sand and even the fluted scallop shells are black. Far in the east, when one comes out on to the shore an hour from ’Ain Juwairi, one sees the long snout headland of Bal Haf.
It took us four more hours to go there, but no one minded in the delight of the waves and the fresh sea-wind. The breakers came rolling in in four long rows towards the shrinking camels; armies of crabs scuttled under their feet —like beduin, I thought, so numerous and active, round the hermit crabs, peaceful citizens, hampered by their shells. There were gulls, but not many; and shells pink and yellow lying among the black; and no cultivation in all this distance, and only one house, at Qal’a, where soldiers guard the water on which Bal Hal depends. Every two days they take it over by boat in goatskins.
As we drew near we saw how Bal Hal is built on a stream of solidified craters that must have rolled once, liquid and convulsed, towards the sea. They are black, duller than night, and the sea shines strangely brilliant below them, and three white towers and a few palm huts are all the buildings that encircle a little harbour lined with dazzling sand. In the middle of it, a dhow rode at anchor, and bales of merchandise were lying on the shore. Indigo, sugar, rice, and chief of all, sesame, called dijil, both for eating and for oil—they lay there as the bales of Phoenician traders must have lain on the earliest Greek or Cornish beaches; and our camel-men hastily untied our own bales of tobacco and began to load, so as to return with the daylight to the oasis from which we came.
The Old Wolf stopped outside Bal Haf to say his prayers. My camel was stopped too, so that I should not enter before him, and by the time we proceeded, dismounted, towards the middle tower, the little garrison and all stray inhabitants were gathered in two rows to shake hands. Here too there were signs of reluctance at the sight of me; there were strangers, chiefly merchants from Hauta, who had already sent messages to say they had no wish to see me in their town; and while the Old Wolf and his retinue went up to sit in their tower, Nasir hurried me unobtrusively to a small and sunny room above the sea.
The last inhabitants had left smudges of indigo and other more animated traces which Nasir recognized, but—seeing my distress—pretended to be mistaken, till I produced two bodies. We thereupon gave up the tactful fiction with a smile. They were the first I had ever seen in the Hadhramaut, and a little thing like that was quite insufficient to damp the pleasures of washing in a room to oneself. I had done this and was sitting alone at my window watching the loading of bales, when a tall man with his shawl like a toga about him entered un-announced behind me and wished me peace.
“And upon you be peace,” said I.
“Have you no mercy,” said he, “you and your people?”
I looked at him in surprise.
“There,” said he, pointing to the last of the small white towers, square on the tongue of rocks, “there lies the Sultan’s brother, bound in that room three years, and dying.”
I looked at him with a sort of horror. The tower stands alone, one room to each story and three tiny windows on each side; it looks out over a blankness of lava and sea. And I thought of the prisoner’s little son in ’Azzan, and his cry.
“I have waited long by your door,” the stranger continued, “so that no one should see me come in.”
“I will do what I can,” said I.
Without a word, with a sort of dignified and manly haste, he turned and left me. And I was able to speak for the prisoner so that he was freed from Aden.
In the late afternoon our camel-men departed leading their camels like a frieze below my window, against the shining background of the sea. My own man was ill and lay groaning for an hour or so under a rug in my room, and I could not think what to do for him. He was a friendly youth, unhappy because the beduin girl he loved had jilted him, and I prevailed on the reluctant ’Ali, who does not believe in superstition and is honest in these matters, to write him a charm; and now he had to go off writhing with pain, through the lonely Hadhina, under Jebel Aswad a four-days’ journey, to avoid the danger of the road by which we came, for they had no escort of soldiers. With the departure of the caravan, our little harbour sank back into its sun-baked quiet; the Sultans and the garrison shut themselves in their tower; and only the passengers of the dhow, let loose on this unfortunate shore and unable to get any water, raised a small dust of chatter under my window till far into the night.
Chapter XVI
THE SITE OF CANA
“Sed nox atra caput tristi circumvolat umbra.”
(Aeneid.)
IN THE DAWN I WAS AWAKENED BY VOICES AT PRAYER. IT WAS the garrison, led by Ahmed, the Sultan’s brother, at the edge of the waves below. In the clear light, turning to Mekka, his charming and handsome face looked tranquil as the sea. His turban showed against the tower across the little bay in whose lonely whiteness his brother lay dying. Strangely, I thought, must that familiar voice of prayer rise to the prisoner’s ears.
Nasir had told me that they would hold up the dhow for a day while he took me to visit the harbour of Bir Ali, the site of Cana, and that a boat in ease and comfort would replace the six-hours’ camel ride along the coast. No boat however came. Except for the dhow, there was no boat in all the landscape, and by the time that the one sambuk of Bal Haf appeared in the distance bringing water, the wind had turned against us. I felt I could not cope with two things as capricious as the wind and the Arabs together and gave up the thought of going by sea. The dawn had turned into daylight, and it was eight o’clock when Nasir finally produced two camels, and said that we would get a boat from the men of Bir Ali to bring us back safely in the arms of the monsoon.
Apart from the endless indispensable condition of keeping one’s temper, success on an expedition in Arabia depends, I think, chiefly on the amount of local information one has been able to collect. In Hureidha, where our excavations depended on it, I had been careful before I went to find out the ins and outs of all the chief affairs, and the winter had gone without a hitch. But here I was, so to say, on holiday; I had ’Ali as my only precaution, and he had made things easy everywhere except among the beduin—but otherwise I took no trouble and did not know the elementary fact that the two little harbours of Bal Haf and Bir Ali are chronically at war. Peace at this very moment was being laboriously engineered by Harold in Mukalla; this did not alter the fact that Bir Ali was a hereditary enemy; and if its inhabitants would make themselves sufficiently unpleasant to me, there was the chance that the R.A.F. might bomb them, or so my Sultans hoped. Nasir, with one camel-driver called Rupee and five soldiers, took me happily eastward on what I looked upon as an archæological expedition, while he looked upon it as something of a raid.
“There is a little difficulty sometimes between us and our cousins,” he said in his understating way, and led me unsuspecting over the slag-heap coast of dead volcanoes, pitted with craters, whose only beauty is when their dusty blackness dips into the jewel-green of the sea.
Of all the visitors to Cana, Von Wrede alone, I think, has approached by land; and he took the inland road. So that it was a good thing to follow the coast and look there for any possible alternative sites where ruins might be found. Bal Haf I had carefully examined the night before, and had eliminated it from among the possible harbours because of its want of water now and in the past. The present trade is due c
hiefly to the fact that customs there are about two-thirds per cent compared to ten per cent at Mukalla. As we rode eastward, one only harbour looked promising, formed by the crater of Kaidi or Rotl, that stands out in the sea; but here too there is no water—only a rain-hole in the rocks long since dry—and there was no sign of building about it, either on its flanks, whose natural steepness looks like walls hung over by stalactites of the limestone, or on top, where a hollow cone is sunk in the circle of the crater. All these rocks have a flat sort of coral gallery, running round them at the water’s edge; heaps of oyster-shells left by the beduin remind one of the Fish-Eaters’ Bay.
Here, says the Periplus, just “beyond the cape projecting from this bay lies Cana of the Frankincense Country.” As you round the black precipitous shoulder of Rotl you see it, Husn al Ghurab, a crater flattened and solitary, far off, beyond a sweep of sand. The sand of the intervening shore is here so white and shining that the foam of waves looks grey as it breaks. Crocodile black snouts of lava, half submerged, push through it everywhere. Beyond, in a sea misty with sunlight, are the islands as the Periplus describes them, white with the droppings of birds, and one on either hand. They lie, like pebbles, in the luminous lap of water and of sky. So graphically had the old mariner written that for a moment the centuries vanished, I heard him speaking, I saw the landmarks as he saw them, hugging in his small vessel that inhospitable shore.
Behind the crater is a bay, white-green with sand that shines through the deep water, and across it the small town of Bir Ali with walls, a single palm beside it. Eastward the land rounds to the black snout of Mijdaha, the only other possible site for Cana.
