A Winter in Arabia

by Freya Stark

  The whole bay, in a great wing-like curve, rises on every side to a semi-circle of dead volcanoes, twelve or twenty of them, that look down like spectators, observant from their thrones. Down their easy ridges caravans can journey by a dozen different ways. There, on the road to Hajr, is Obne,1 or Libne, seen by Von Wrede, and another ruin of which they told me, called Mubna al-Kafiri, a day’s distance from Bal Haf; the very geography of the wide amphitheatre shows how it must once have been a meeting-place of caravans.

  Captain Miles, in 1870, found the ruins of the town and its houses in the flat ground between the crater and Bir Ali, and Count Landberg saw them, nearly buried and with no important buildings among them when he landed here in 1896. Built in the black lava stone that lies about, they are not visible to the casual eye; the fortified important places were on the rock above.

  One can still climb there by the easy remains of a causeway, above the open shaft of what looks like a grave in the north of the hill. Great black blocks, roughly cut, show the seawall protecting the citadel’s approach; and on a ledge east of the causeway the two inscriptions in the rock are clear as on the day that they were cut. Count Landberg photographed only the smaller of them, and I could see why, for the larger is difficult to get into the lens; but he copied them both, as I did again, not knowing for certain that he had done so. As through a rift in clouds, they show for a moment the history of Cana in the past. The citadel itself was called Mawiya, and the Governor of Cana here, in the shorter inscription, recorded his presence. The longer one is dated and tells how the tribes of Himyar, having made an expedition into Abyssinia, were harassed by the Abyssinians in their turn; with their lands invaded, their king killed, they shut themselves up in this fortress, and restored its single gateway, its cisterns and walls in the year A.D. 625 or thereabout, many centuries after the Periplus speaks of the ancient harbour. Of its later history under Islam, little news can be gleaned. Such as there is is taken from Ibn al Mujawir and Maqrizi and seems apocryphal. The old Wolf told me there had been a king here called Samana ibn adh-Dhubian and a village on the flat low-lying island of Hallani just below, but could not tell me where he got this news. With the decay of the trade-route, the strength that had kept the roads open and secure no doubt also decayed, and the natural advantages of the harbour and its wide approaches were counteracted as they are now by the wildness of the tribes. Nothing is left but the records of old labours, cut in volcanic rock. Four great cisterns, arranged with shallow slopes around them, to catch all rain that falls upon the crater; the ruins of buildings with glazed medieval potsherds and more ancient walls, and on the very summit the scattered traces of a serai or keep. From the height and wide area of the crater, several acres in extent, one looks out to a sea-horizon and to the semi-circle of the watching volcanoes: it is all desert now and wind-blown sand, but once there must have been oases and gardens, and Ptolemy’s map shows various little harbours, where dhows would choose their anchorage according as the monsoon blew east or west. Count Landberg thinks that Mijdaha was the actual site of Cana, but my own opinion is that the town that gave its name to the harbour would lie beneath the walls of the fortress where the custom-houses and store-houses of frankincense and other merchandise would naturally stand: nor—having paced those cindery wastes by camel—do I think that caravans from the Meifa’a highway would go for anchorage and water one mile farther out of their way than they needed. Bir Ali is the first place they would come to where these two essentials are combined; and at Bir Ali any sensible caravan would stay.

  These things I turned idly over while copying out the inscriptions through the quiet solitary hours of the afternoon, happy in the thought of ample time before us; for Sayyid ’Ali was to go east to Mukalla and as he passed through Bir Ali would send a boat to race us with the north-east wind behind it to Bal Haf.

  So we proposed, and, towards four o’clock, sent Sayyid ’Ali walking round the little bay. I had finished my inscriptions and was resting, longing for water, which we had run out of, and drearning of the harbour, my head against the roughened lava-blocks of the ruined sea-wall; and I listened in a pleasant vacuum to the small gay chatter of the sea. A noise and commotion seemed to be greeting ’Ali at the gate across the water. I paid no attention and time passed, until Nasir, squatting suddenly beside me with two strangers, remarked in a pleasant way that the townsmen wished to shoot.

  I was very tired. I thought he meant that they were disappointed because we had not gone near them to enjoy a formal reception: I sat up and told the two envoys that I should be delighted on another occasion but had no time to-day. No answer could have been more fortunate. The envoys gazed blankly at their first experience of a female European enigma and Nasir looked delighted. I felt that I had adopted the correct attitude, but that something was wrong.

  “They meant to shoot us” Nasir explained.

  “And why didn’t they?”

  “The Elders persuaded them not to.”

  I was beyond anything else thirsty. “Are they sending the boat and the water?” I asked.

  “They are sending the water, but no boat.” Their methods of warfare, I could not help feeling, compared favourably with those of Europe.

  It was time to attend to the bewildered envoys. Diplomatically speaking, we had the situation in hand. “Welcome and ease,” I said. “When are you coming to shoot us?”

  Outraged to see the matter treated with this levity, one of the ambassadors explained that they were not natives at all of the regrettable little town yonder, but inhabitants of ’Azzan who happened to be living there and had volunteered to come to their countrymen with a message. The message was that we should be attacked unless we went off instandy by the way that we had come. It was just upon sunset.

  Sayyid ’Ali now re-appeared very twittery, and a little white-veded huri with two waterskins behind him in the bay. ’Ali, because of his holiness, could enter the enemy walls. I counted out his money on the ground in the ebbing light and half expected trouble, for he had, I noticed, in an unobtrusive moment helped himself to what he considered a suitable amount, so that I gave less than I had intended; but all he did was to burst into tears and kiss my hands, unable to speak, and walked off sobbing with the envoys beside him, a small forlorn figure with flapping skirts against the vast arena of the darkening bay.

  The shore of Cana grew forbidding in the twilight.

  Our little band collected itself together, two camels, two waterskins, a few packets of sticky sweets thoughtfully brought by ’Ali, and a plank which one of the soldiers had apparently (very ungratefully) looted from the huri. The men, in a nonchalant way, took out their cartridges and cleaned their rifles.

  “They may cut us off at the pass,” Nasir remarked, looking over his small forces—six in all. “Now,” he said suddenly, “let us dance a zamil.”

  “Why?” asked the dejected soldiers.

  “Why?” said Nasir with eyes so dancing with gaiety that I shall ever comfort myself with the remembrance of them when a fight is on hand. “Why? To annoy the town!”

  Fatigue vanished in a moment: the six were off in a line made uneven by the buried ruins, green flames from their rifles scattering towards the hostile unresponsive walls, while Rupee led my frightened camel after. There seemed to be no path, and from a cloudy sky the dark was falling among the sharp teeth of the lava: everyone spread out of sight. I resisted a western passion for giving advice and waited, and just as the night really fell the path was found. The squat crater, the ghost of Cana, loomed behind us, a shadow pursuing far into the night. We climbed, slowly and steadily, into a blackness of lava unlit by any stars; the path, for some strange reason, showed vaguely in a blind world; nothing else was visible, except the dim silhouettes of volcanoes.

  We rode and walked for hour after hour in a blank of time. I had no proper saddle and every limb was aching, but Nasir, in his useless sandals, walked cheerfully, leaving the other camel for his men. “A little fatiguing,” he would say when pres
sed; and when asked how his feet were on the sharp invisible cinders: “They are all blood,” he answered truly, in the same even tone. The camel too grew weary, and stumbled over the rough unseen way: “Wogar,” Rupee would call, or “tariq” if it strayed from the path, or “leil,” that is “the night is coming,” to make it hurry, though it was an inapposite remark. In very bad places he sang “oh-ho, oh-oh-oh-ho,” and I held on, for he was too tired to warn me of bad bits ahead, and I, for greater ease, was riding with one leg up in the insecure Arab way.

  At some moment in the darkness we dismounted and saw by the light of a flare of thorns that it was only nine-fifteen—so strange and long are the hours of the night. We ate our sweet stuff and rested for ten minutes, and Nasir, who became in this adventure the gentlest and most thoughtful of companions, held the waterskin and showed me how to use it with one hand, pressing it against the ground, so that the water rises like a spring. He was never impatient. What is the use of being impatient in Arabia? People whose tempers break can never stand the strain. But when two of his men with nerves on edge quarrelled over a box of matches, he instantly leaped and seized the aggressor’s rifle, wrestling with him for it in the light of the fire, and, as the two settled like growling dogs each on an opposite side, said unperturbed: “They will be friends to-morrow.” The soldiers of his small garrison look up to him and take his hand and call him affectionately and intimately by his name. In readiness of wit, in cheerfulness and quickness of decision, in the unselfish bearing of hardship, he was a leader of his men.

  After this we settled down again to one dark trudge of hours. The Southern Cross moved above our heads, the clouds had cleared away, but nothing could give beauty to our night, and whenever we passed from one shallow dip to another, new shapes of volcanoes, similar to the last ones, stood blacker than death on either hand. There must come a time, I reflected, when one can bear no more, and then I suppose one dies. Till then the spirit carries, strange and undefeatable, the unknown sustainer of men. But we were at last descending, a steep and long descent; there were no more craters before us; we stepped off the lava on to sand. Without a word Rupee hitched off the camel that followed and dropped asleep in the path as he lay, leaving me in the hands of the soldiers. We soon reached the sea: it was 2 a.m.; a moon, old and green, appeared over the ridges we had left, now shining, black and dead. We had been out for eighteen hours, thirteen and a half on a camel and two and a half on our feet, and there had been an average of nine hours a day on camel for a week before. When we reached the sleeping harbour I found that Qasim had packed my bed on the dhow; but the Mansab’s quilt was there in a corner and I can remember the blankness of sleep falling like dew as I touched it with my cheek.

  Chapter XVII

  A DHOW TO ADEN

  “ What spell, what enchantment allures thee

  Over the rim of the world

  With the sails of the sea-going ships?”

  (SAPPHO BLISS CARMAN.)

  THE NEXT DAY BEING FRIDAY, THE DHOW WAITED FOR THE midday prayer and I was able to sleep. Nasir came in, cheerful with bandaged feet, and all the Sultans gathered to try to turn the day before into an Incident wherewith to bother the Sultan of Bir Ali. There was a last attempt to extract money; I did not grudge it, for it is a hard load to carry on a little kingdom with the beduin all around; the harbour, with its twenty-five soldiers, is all the source of income that there is. But it makes one feel rather like a sheep among wolves. I said to Nasir that I had meant to send a present from Aden.

  “Presents are nice,” said he, “but money is more useful.” One has perhaps found that out oneself. I therefore sent an offering to the Old Wolf, and Nasir came back with a brightly coloured dilapidated basket and a goat cooked inside it to sustain us on our way. The old man was reluctant to be seen by the merchants of Hauta in public farewells to a woman, and was for staying in his tower. This, however, I would not have, and waited till he came. There was a shaking of hands on the sand and a packing into huris, a climbing by rope ladders up the side of the dhow. Farewell to Nasir in his boat, farewell to the beach and its towers, the freedom, lightheartedness and hardness, the courage, the fierce merciless gaiety of Arabia.

  The crew of eighteen, all from Dis in Oman and all related, amid a welter of ropes, hoist up the double sail. How lucky I was, everyone said, to get so big a boat; I wondered what the size of a small one would have been. She was 120 feet long and cost 8,000 rupees all complete. She had a tall tree from Malabar as mast and a deck at the stern above the hollow thwarts; here was the steering-wheel, and the compass in a brass pagoda with a lantern inside it: and here the skipper and I had sofas one on either side. The skipper, the old Nakhuda, with hennaed beard cut short with scissors, makes tea and tells of his yearly traffic between Calicut, Bombay, Basra, Jedda and Zanzibar—over this wide range he roves wherever his merchandise takes him. When the monsoon blows too hard, between July and September, he shelters with other dhows behind Ras Burum. He and his crew there leave their craft with a single watchman, and go overland for the date harvest in their homes of Oman, and stay till mid-September, when they sail to buy dates in Basra. He is related to the Sultan of Zanzibar, and has a brother, a judge, in Oman, and has been since childhood the friend of his employer, a rich merchant of Aden, where his dhow was built thirty-two years ago.

  As we left the harbour we nearly ran into the headland of Bal Haf, for the chain broke that joins the steering-wheel and rudder; three men came running to save it and tie the broken ends with knotted oddments of cord.

  The sails flap, their cordage makes a pattern against them. The edges are bound with thick rope that twists like a snake in the breeze. The hoisting is done to a chant, melodious and gentle like the voice of waves, ages of simple sea-faring are in it; when the hoisting is done the crew stand and admire, clapping their hands, with any able-bodied passenger who has helped because he happened to be there.

  We have little cargo but thirty-two passengers, who pay three rupees each to be taken a hundred miles to Shuqra. They are mostly beduin and are sick decently over the side. The Sultans have sent eighteen people gratis, to the skipper’s annoyance. Nearly all have done the journey by land, which takes ten days; and lying on the deck and thwarts, a thick carpet of bodies wrapped in futahs with naked shoulders, they make a running commentary on the landmarks of the shore where, far away in the haze, the familiar and for the moment unattractive shapes of volcanoes appear. The hours go peacefully. The crew sit about, plaiting ropes of palm leaf to sell in Aden for the making of seats. The skipper is pounding henna to dye his beard. At intervals they catch fish on a hook baited with wuzifs, trailed at the end of a long line. They are pulled, swishing like silver firework, through the water, and cooked on a primus stove among the cordage, and divided fairly between us all. The skipper feeds his passengers altogether on rice. There is a cheerful gong sound too on the deck, of ginger beaten in a mortar, to flavour the coffee which at intervals goes round. For me he has brought out his only tin of figs preserved in syrup, given him, he says, by the Italians, and pours out glasses of tea with a sailor’s neatness stirring with the handle of the teaspoon, so as to keep the other end dry for sugar, a thing no land Arab would bother to do.

  It must be indelicate to eat in public. When the moment comes, a sail is brought and arranged like a curtain around me. But there are other moments for which no provision is made. The only sanitation are two small wooden cages, tied with rope to the outside of the dhow; here at intervals travellers stay meditating, their lower halves decently hidden, but the rest all exposed to the general view. This publicity I could not face and at last put the problem to the Nakhuda, who looked as if he had been a family man many times over. He saw my point and sent for three oars and a sail; these were draped like a tent, and there I could retire precariously over an ocean that rushed with great speed below, and with some reluctance, since, as I could not monopolize one-half of the sanitation altogether, the tent had to be erected afresh every time. There are
inherent difficulties in the situation of a solitary female on a boat.

  In the afternoon of the second day we anchored off Shuqra, a little town with mosque and palace against a pointed background of high hills. Here we dropped most of our crowd and continued for Aden with a few only, a soldier and a beduin or two from ’Azzan, servants of merchants in Hauta, who take bales of tobacco to sell for their masters and return after a week or two with different merchandise. These, in the sunset, lined themselves up for prayer with the crew in two long rows, swaying with the monsoon swell. There is ever a heartfelt accent in prayers at sea, but more so here, for we are very small, we creak in all sorts of places differently from a big boat, as if we were jointed and alive, and are alone too and have seen no craft on this ocean except a dhow far off whose high uplifted sail above the mast-top proclaims it from Sur in Oman.

  When the night has fallen and I can see only the cordage and sail against the stars, I listen to the steersman behind me singing softly over and over the ninety names of God to keep awake.

  At three in the morning the lighthouse of Aden first appeared, a dim shaft on the hungry ridges, blossoming like civilization in recurrent intervals, with darkness large between. Only from the outer ocean and the night can you know how small a light it is, how vast the currents through which it beckons, how indomitable in his perpetual ventures the spirit of man.

  As I lay there, drawing nearer, I thought of this civilization and of the beduin who is so happy without it. Perhaps it is because he need never choose the second best. Poor as his best may be, he can follow it when he sees it, and that is freedom. We, too often compelled to see two roads and take the worse one, are by that fact enslaved. Our lesser road may in itself be better than the wild man’s best one; but that is neither here nor there, it is our choice of the second that makes us second-rate. The second-best for security in finance, the second-best for stability in marriage, the second-best for conformity in thought—it is our civilization, though not that of Hellas nor of the City of God; and every time we consciously accept it our stature is diminished. It would be pleasant, I reflected, to look back on a life that has never given its soul for money, its time to a purpose not believed in, its body to anything but love. The Arab can still say this, unconscious of alternatives. He will take a bribe gladly but will then do what he likes notwithstanding; his servitude does not penetrate far. Even ’Ali, regardless of the rules of property to an inconvenient degree, keeps his inner self free of them in an original way, which the materialist will never understand. The materialist too often is civilized man. Perhaps it is to get away from him, that so many quiet people like to travel in Arabia.