What Am I Doing Here?

by Bruce Chatwin

  But Toynbee’s scheme is too simple. Shortage of grazing and population pressures certainly contributed towards the great exoduses. Livy tells of a Celtic king who resorted to predatory expansion, ‘anxious to relieve his realm from the burden of overpopulation’. Furthermore, once pastureland is overgrazed, the grass becomes sour and less nourishing. Overgrazing also bares the topsoil which is then carried away in the wind. Dustbowl conditions ensue and the rains do not come any more. But such shifts in climate as there were do not coincide with the invasions. No climatic change took place in Arabia to account for the outpouring of Bedouin warriors in the service of Islam.

  Moreover, it does not require a major shift in climate to ruin a stock-breeder. Few climates lack a lean season, a time of mental and physical anguish, which the religions ritualised as Lent or Ramadan. In the desert this coincides with the hot dry phase (Ramadan comes from the Arabic ramz ‘to burn’), in the north with the last months of winter. At this time the people are weak, the animals weaker. And if the lean season lasts too long, a rich man may face total ruin. (Sheep farmers in New South Wales used to calculate that a thirty per cent drop in rainfall would carry off eighty per cent of the livestock.) But the lean season is also, in Bedouin terminology, ‘the time of the beasts’. The story of David and the Lion reminds us of the danger shepherds faced from carnivorous animals, and wolves will increase their numbers in direct ratio to the availability of edible sheep.

  The instability of his profession encourages the nomad to increase and guard his flocks with fanatical obsession. He prefers to eat meat at others’ expense and to rustle his neighbour’s animals whenever he can. Then he looks about for other alternatives – raids, long-distance trade, and protection rackets as an insurance against disaster. ‘The soul of them’, Doughty wrote of the Arabian Bedouin, ‘is greedy first of the proper subsistence, then of their proper increase. Though Israel is scattered among the most polite nations, who has not noticed this humour in them?’ Owen Lattimore, whose knowledge of steppe pastoralism is unrivalled, once said, ‘The pure nomad is the poor nomad,’ in that he is unburdened by the luxuries of settlement. But in a society where livestock is wealth, the pure nomad is the relatively rich nomad. His obsession with increase is dictated by the fact that, once his flocks decline below a certain level, nomadism loses its viability. He and his family are compelled to find employment as agricultural serfs. As Ellsworth Huntington wrote in The Pulse of Asia, ‘all the nomads I have ever met seemed to be comfortable. When their flocks diminish, they are obliged to seek new homes and to betake themselves to agriculture, leaving only the rich to continue the nomadic life.’ Live beasts are the standard medium of exchange, and a man rich in animals has purchasing power to ‘buy’ wives for himself or his sons, to buy grazing concessions, and to buy his way out of a blood-feud.

  Nomads are unstable within their tribal lands as a direct result of their ‘growth ideology’. And it can be seen that the maximum amount of activity on the steppe will coincide with a climate favouring the growth of herds. With more animals to defend, there will be more herdsmen needed, and in turn more disputes over grazing rights and more raids. The cattlemen of Abraham quarrelled with the cattlemen of Lot. Knowing neither could control the wayward temper of their cowboys, Abraham suggested a parting of the ways. ‘Is not the whole land before thee? Separate thyself I pray thee, before me: if thou wilt take the left hand, then I will go to the right; or if thou depart to the right hand, then I will go to the left’ (Genesis 13:9). But once a split-away group trespasses on the pastures of others because of overstocking, old boundaries and agreements are destroyed.

  ‘Sons are the source of wealth’ goes a Turkoman proverb. And as we know from the Gospel of St John, a good shepherd owns his own sheep, unlike the hireling who runs away at the first sight of a wolf. The increase of healthy animals demands the increase of healthy sons to look after them. Hence the nomad’s exhibitionistic attitude to male potency and his preoccupation with the genealogy of the male line. All stockraisers have this obsession for ‘fine blood’, and human studbooks litter the Old Testament. As economic principle, nomads make no effort to limit births, and a plentiful supply of milk from domesticated animals enables a nomad mother to conceive again immediately after birth. Her first child is weaned early and to some extent this rupture weakens the bond of attachment between her and her infant. The latter deflects its attachment onto animal ‘substitutes’ and is encouraged to fondle baby animals, remaining ‘animal-fixed’ for life. Boys are taught to ride as soon as they can walk, if not before. Pere Huc describes this in Travels in China, Tartary and Thibet. ‘When a mere infant the Mongol is weaned and as soon as he is strong enough he is stuck upon a horse’s back behind a man, the animal is put to a gallop, and the juvenile rider, in order not to fall off, has to cling with both hands to his leader’s jacket. The Tartars thus become accustomed, from a very early age, to the movements of the horse and by degrees and the force of habit, to identify themselves, as it were, with the animal.’

  Warfare – or, at least, violent competition – is endemic to nomadism. The tribe is a military machine, and from the age of four boys are trained in the art of war and defence. They are deputed to tend a few animals on pain of punishment for letting them stray. As a result, they are brainwashed into believing that the care of livestock constitutes one of the main purposes in life. This devotion to animals is invariably accompanied by a weakened regard for the value of human life. The Grand Historian of China, Ssu-Ma Ch‘ien, describes the process in his account of the Hsiung-Nu or Eastern Huns. ‘The little boys start out by learning to ride sheep and shoot birds and rats with a bow and arrow, and when they get older they shoot foxes and hares which are used for food. Thus all the young men are able to use a bow and act as armed cavalry in times of war.’ Furthermore, equitation engenders a sort of Olympian grandeur. As the Russian explorer Colonel Przwalsky quaintly remarked of the Kalmuck nomad, ‘His contempt for pedestrianism is so great that he considers it beneath his dignity to walk even as far as the next yurta.’ The Huns, we are told, bought, sold, slept, ate, drank, gave judgment, even defecated without dismounting.

  The territorial instability of the nomad may be contrasted unfavourably with the greater security enjoyed by the ‘primitive’ hunter and gatherer. The former sees territory in terms of good or bad grazing, the latter exploits his territory gratefully for his basic needs, and refuses on principle to store food for more than a few days. This he can afford to do, since hunters take active steps to keep their numbers constant. Without milk from domesticated animals and without beasts of burden, the mothers must suckle and carry their children on long journeys till the age of three or more. Meanwhile, they cannot bear any more children. The hunters have been accused of ’merry squandering’ and certainly enjoy a far lower standard of living. But by budgeting for the minimum they lack all incentive to overstretch their frontiers unless forced out by others. ‘There has never been the least attempt’, wrote Spencer and Gillen of the Central Australia Aborigines, ‘made by one tribe to encroach on the territory of another. Now and again they may have inter-tribal quarrels or fights, but there is no such thing as the acquisition of fresh territory.’ The hunter’s sole motive for travel outside his hunting ground is to ‘marry far’ in accordance with the incest taboo. For this reason, isolated groups of hunters are interlinked in a network of reciprocal trading agreements and marriage alliances with their neighbours. Fights flare up when – and only when – the parity of these exchanges is broken. Thus ‘primitive’ war and nomadic insurgency cannot meaningfully be compared to one another.

  In their own feuds nomads preserve something of this ‘archaic’ notion of equivalence. The nomad world is racked with vendettas, but justice is personal, brisk and effective. All parties to a quarrel try to prevent it getting out of hand. The instability in their nomad society lacks the cohesion needed for conquest on a mass scale. The nomad armies were military machines co-ordinated by powerful autocrats. Th
eir cohesion can only be explained in terms of the nomad’s interaction with settled civilisation.

  It used to suit evolution-minded social scientists to believe that pastoralism preceded agriculture. The hunter learned to tame wild animals. The nomad settled down to grow crops, and the farmer made the inventions on which the first cities depended. Yet nomadism was not a step towards civilisation, but a step away from it. Abraham left the city of Ur to become a nomad. The Central Asian Steppe, like the Great Plains of America, had been under cultivation till the horsemen swept the planters aside.

  The great transformation from food-gathering to food-producing, known as the Neolithic Revolution in the Old World, first took place on the flanks of the Fertile Crescent, that great arc of mountains from Palestine to South Persia, where, after the recession of the ice-sheets, the wild ancestors of our sheep and goats browsed over stands of wild wheat and barley. The process by which grains and animals became domesticated was gradual and is not yet fully revealed. The important point to remember is this: at first, stock-breeding and agriculture were practised by the people of the same settlement.

  The farmers eventually developed irrigation, and agriculture came down the mountainsides into the rich alluvial valleys with startling increases in yield. Meanwhile, the herdsmen withdrew to the wild places and developed a new order of their own. There they later domesticated the horse to give them greater range. Thus, nomad and farmer are linked to a common past and, to some extent, share common aspirations. If the nomad recovered the mobility of former times, he was also committed to an ideology of growth. The cleavage deprived the farmer of rich sources of animal protein and the nomad of essential grain. Nomad and farmer might hate each other, yet they needed each other. A nomad independent of settled agriculture has probably never existed. Ammianus Marcellinus, it is true, heard that the Hunnish cavalry survived on the blood of their horses and foraged roots alone, just as the Masai suck the blood of their cattle. Such were the iron rations of the campaign; but normally settler and nomad exchange grains and vegetables for hides, meat and dairy produce. An Iranian nomad cannot get through the winter without grain. The Sahara camel man cannot live without dates. In an ideal situation the two cultures live symbiotically side by side.

  But the nomadic insurgent has tactical mobility and is expert in guerilla warfare, the art of ‘attack and withdrawal’ which, according to Ibn Khaldūn, was the practice of the Bedouin nations. ‘Raids are our agriculture’, goes a Bedouin proverb. The nomad does not take kindly to being ordered about. He looks down on farmers as sub-human rabble and does not feel obliged to treat them as equals. To quote Lattimore, ‘when nomad chiefs patronize agriculture it is a subject agriculture that they prefer, exploited under their military protection and practised by imported peasants, between whom and the dominant nomads there is an emphatic social difference.’ A character in the History of Priscus said this of the Huns: ‘being themselves contemptuous of agriculture, they descended on the Gothic food supply and snatched it away like wolves. Eventually the Goths occupied the position of slaves and toiled for the sustenance of the Huns.’

  A barbarous taste for ‘fire-bright gold’ infected the pastoral world. Its incorruptible brilliance relieved the leaden monotony of waste places. ‘They had golden earrings because they were Ishmaelites’, goes a line from the Book of Judges. The Huns ‘burned with an insatiable lust for gold’ and their Scythian and Sarmatian predecessors had their goldsmiths perfect ornaments in the celebrated ‘Animal Style’, an art of seething, snapping monsters where man is a stranger. From the frozen tombs of Pazyryk in the Altai Mountains or that of the Hunnish ruler from Noin-Ula in Mongolia, archaeologists have unearthed precious silks and embroideries, pile carpets and lacquers. Byzantine ambassadors to the camp of Attila noticed that the Hunnish dictator himself ate from a wooden trencher. But his followers wore extravagant silks, garlanded themselves with pearls, and drank from golden bowls encrusted with garnets. Such were the effects of contact with the luxuries of settlement.

  The nomad ruler could only attract followers if he rewarded them well. An ungenerous lord was a dead lord. Once the supply of luxuries dwindled, he had a clear choice, blackmail or war. Ssu-Ma Ch‘ien records that the Hsiung-Nu appointed a Chinese renegade to handle their diplomatic exchanges with the Imperial authorities; he advised the ambassadors to make sure that their tribute of grain and silks was of fine quality and the right quantity; if not, ‘when the autumn harvest comes we will take our horses and trample your crops’. Once the settlers hardened their hearts and the subsidies dried up, the nomad ruler had no alternative but to risk deploying his ‘natura’ military machine against the glittering metropolises of the plains.

  1972

  7

  PEOPLE

  SHAMDEV: THE WOLF-BOY

  Last Easter Saturday, Father Joseph de Souza put on a freshly-laundered soutane and took the bus from Sultanpur to Lucknow, to celebrate Mass in the Cathedral. With him went an eight- or nine-year-old boy whom he was taking to Mother Teresa’s Mission of Charity. The boy was unable to speak. Instead, he would clench his fists against his neck, depressing his vocal chords to make a low muted noise halfway between a growl and a howl.

  Along the road the bus passed through the forest of Musafirkhana, where, about four years earlier, the boy had been found at play with his foster-brothers – who, it was said, were wolf-cubs.

  From Romulus and Remus to Mowgli in Kipling’s Jungle Book, there have been stories of man-cubs being saved and suckled by wolves: as well as by pigs, sheep, leopards, bears and, recently in the Sahara, by gazelles. No single case has been proved beyond doubt. It is conceivable that Pascal – the name bestowed on the new arrival by the mission Sisters – will turn out to be the exception.

  Pascal immediately befriended the orphanage dog – although, one day, he took its ear in his mouth and bit hard. During the first week, he would rip off his clothes, chuck away his food, and when he got hold of a pair of glasses, he clashed them together like cymbals. During the second week, he began to settle down. He learned to greet people with the Hindi salutation ‘Namaste!’ He liked to travel round the garden sitting upright in the back of a bicycle rickshaw. The Sisters did have to watch him with other children: for sometimes, without warning, he would flick his fingers into their eyes.

  One morning, a troupe of Rajasthani entertainers came down the street with monkeys jingling their bells, and a bear on a chain. Someone held up Pascal so he could get a better look – and he, as if suddenly seized with a fit, struggled and tried to throw himself into the bear’s arms. A mission-worker, having watched this behaviour, decided to rename Pascal ‘Baloo’ – like Baloo the Bear in The Jungle Book — and wrote a short article about him for one of the Lucknow papers.

  The article was syndicated in the foreign press. I was in Benares when I heard of it: I took the train to Sultanpur and looked up Father Joseph, who teaches at a school run by the Sisters of the Little Flowers of Bethlehem. He is a small, wrinkled, optimistic South Indian who has spent forty of his sixty-nine years in the Hindi north. In the hot weather he sleeps alone on the roof of a barrack-like building, at the far end of the compound from the nuns. In the yard below there grew some leggy papayas. A kennel housed a ferocious Alsatian that yanked at its chain, howled, and bared its teeth as I passed. Father Joseph’s colleague, Sister Clarice, then gave a tea-party in my honour at which she and two other nuns told their version of Pascal’s story:

  Early in Easter week a Muslim woman came to the school with news that an ‘animal-child’ was roaming the western part of the town, scavenging for scraps. The Sisters found him on Good Friday, filthy and abandoned, crouching in a niche in the wall of a mudbrick house. The owners of the house said that a laundrywoman had come to claim him a few days earlier.

  ‘But she didn’t want him back,’ Father Joseph interrupted, ‘seeing he’s come from the jungle and all. That’s what it is. Once a baby’s been touched by an animal, they abandon him and all.’
<
br />   Father Joseph said that, in the course of his ministry, he had often heard stories of ‘wolf-children’, but had never set eyes on one. He knew of one case where a mother had lost her child at nightfall, and returned to find a female wolf guarding it.

  The Sisters succeeded in tying up the boy and taking him back to the school. When they bathed him, he bit them. He spat out some Cadbury’s chocolate. They gave him dal and chapaties, but ‘he threw the plate and all’; and when he heard the Alsatian barking, he rushed towards the kennel and tried to get inside. The Alsatian suddenly went quiet. They then put the boy to bed and locked the room.

  ‘I heard him growling in the night and all,’ said the old priest – and the morning had found him hunched against the door.