A Reed Shaken by the Wind (16 page)

Kathia leapt from the
tarada
and ran splashing through the ankle-deep water to collect the ibis. When he reached it he drew his curved knife, took his direction from the sun, and, pointing the bird’s head to the general quarter where he believed Mecca to be, he began to slit its throat. A cry of
dismay came from Hassan—Mecca, he called to Kathia, was much farther to the south. Kathia reorientated himself and began again. This time he was stopped by a yell from Amara, who judged Mecca to be somewhere between the two points so far chosen. Kathia became hopelessly confused, and began to spin like a top, the gashed throat of the dead ibis dripping blood east, west, south and north. Amid cries of derision he returned sulkily to the
tarada,
to be greeted by the flat statement that no one could possibly eat that ibis now. Kathia threw the bird angrily to the bottom of the canoe, and the argument about it was still active in the form of desultory repartee when some half an hour later we passed an old man herding buffaloes on the bank of a waterway. Someone suggested giving the ibis to him, as he would not know that its head had been aimed many degrees off-course when the throat was slit. Kathia tossed it to him with a lordly gesture of largess, but as he did so Hassan began a malicious explanation of why this particular ibis was not lawful food. The old man did not trouble himself with the dispute, merely remarking that in his opinion ibis were quite inedible in any case.

So scrupulous a following of religious custom with so complete an absence of religious observance—for very few of the Ma’dan know more of prayer than is necessary for their buffoonery of it—must be rare in any religion. It is in the matter of food that this aspect is most striking among the marshmen, for they are hedged about with taboos that make no concession to convenience. I never learned, during my short stay among them, the full list of appetising birds, beasts, and fishes that were unlawful meat, but I knew enough to puzzle how these restrictions had begun. The various species of plover that offered a constantly easy target when we were short of food were all unclean; and I had imagined the taboo to extend to all the family of wading birds, until Sabeti chided me one day for not shooting at the bird they call
gus-gus,
the bar-tailed godwit. The fishy-
tasting pigmy cormorants, no larger than a pigeon, and the great African darter, are both clean; pelicans, which I am told taste little different, are unlawful.

Among fish, catfish are unclean, and all that are shaped like eels, and all shellfish. A pig is of course impossible to any Muslim, but all grazing beasts are lawful. Thesiger told me that beliefs as complex and seemingly without reason are held by the Bedouin of Arabia, among whom it is permissible to eat the Desert Fox but not the Steppe Fox.

The following day I learnt just how difficult it can be to kill a wild boar. We had come to the village of Sijla just before the light began to fade, and took the
tarada
at once to look for pig, accompanied by a young Suwaid in a flat hunting canoe so small as to resemble a water-ski. The country here was all shallow water and bulrushes, with an occasional open lagoon. The rushes were nowhere very thick, and one could see through them to a distance of perhaps a gunshot away. Every now and again we flushed a purple gallinule, the great gaudy blue and purple fowl, as big as the biggest of domestic hens, that takes the place of water-hens in the marshes. The Suwaid found a pig but moved it; we could hear the splosh of its galloping, and we gave chase, the crew paddling with a frenzy of effort. We could not catch up with him while he was in his depth, but should he reach water deep enough to have to swim we should overhaul him easily. We came to a lagoon and he was swimming in front of us; as he reached the shallow water at the far side and his body became visible he was no more than twenty yards from me, and broadside on. I fired one cartridge of LG at his heart and the second at his neck, but he seemed to feel neither. He crossed a belt of foot-deep water among bulrushes, and then he was swimming again and the
tarada
came up on him fast. When we were no more
than five yards from him I took the .45 Colt and fired at the back of his neck. I used the whole magazine of thirteen cartridges, and there was no question of a miss, for the impact would have shown in the water. The first seven shots made no impression on him whatsoever; at the eighth he submerged, but after a moment he came to the surface again, still swimming strongly. He showed no signs of feeling the next four of those massive bullets, though I could see each one thud into the matted hair; the thirteenth, and last, chanced to break the spinal column, and then he died instantly. Little hope, I thought, one would have against a charging boar who clung to life like that one.

The half hour’s return to Sijla is one of the images that, together with the clamour of the frogs and the black
chevaux de frise
of reeds on sunset skies, I shall carry longest in my memory of the marshes. The sun went down now in a muslin of clouded yellow and dove-grey etched with strings of homing ibis, and against it glided the silhouette of the young Suwaid poling his hunting canoe with a fishing spear. So narrow was his tiny craft that he stood with one foot in front of the other, as much a part of it as a horse’s body was part of a centaur. The figure moved with a classic grace, the
dish-dasha
tied around his loins accentuating the slimness of the torso; he leaned backward as the haft end of the spear entered the water, then bent from the waist as he drove down on it with the swift, smooth urgency of the long thrust, a movement as controlled and fluid as that of a ballet dancer. Each time as he straightened again for the next thrust on the other side of the canoe the five points of the spear were black against the sky; the taut silhouette and the slim, dark sliver of the canoe carving in utter silence through the shining liquid sky and sunset-coloured water. Above him a single star began to glitter bright as the moon.

In a few years’ time that young tribesman whose urgent silhouette I shall carry in my mind’s eye as a symbol of the
marshlands will be driving a lorry if he is lucky, pimping in the back streets of Basra for white employees of a western Petroleum Company if he is not.

The frog chatter that night was the loudest that I had heard. The ground was mainly dry round the house, but there were a few pools of water close to the walls, and from these came a babel so loud that it was necessary to raise one’s voice to talk in the house. Some of the louder and more cynical frog voices were of such volume that it was difficult to imagine them produced by creatures less than the size of a football. When someone passed by the pools outside there was a sudden quiet in the foreground, in which one could hear the steady roar from the distant reed-beds.

After midnight there was unceasing thunder all through the dark hours, the peals continuing for minutes at a time all round the horizon, and heavy rain streamed through the roof of the house. It began to clear in the morning, and there were windy gleams of sunshine on the scattered water. In the afternoon, when the skies were bare above a rainwashed landscape, we went out again to look for pig, this time in company with five other canoes. Here, between Sijla and Jerait, the country varied from dry desert, where there were traces of recent nomad shepherd encampments, to open water with high reed islands. I travelled in a canoe paddled by two Suwaid, and the fleet soon scattered, so that I knew the directions of the others only by the sound of shooting.

Before that day I had had no conception of the numbers of wild pig that lay concealed in the reed-beds. Like hunting spaniels the five canoes harried them from the thickets until all around us they were galloping over hard ground, swimming in droves through the wide blue lagoons, or standing as dark hulks at the edges of the ochre reed islands. At one moment I could count forty-seven within rifle shot
of me. After half an hour I was almost in tears of frustration. Thesiger had lent me his rifle, but I had no means whatever of communicating with the two Suwaid, who, wild with excitement, seemed to think it as easy for me to shoot while the canoe rocked and plunged under the urging of their paddles as if it were motionless on terra firma. Again and again, exactly as I pressed the trigger, the canoe would lurch over to the deep thrust of a paddle and the bullet slam into the water a few yards from us. Then the two Suwaid would steady the canoe for just long enough to give me a deeply reproachful look. When I did at length remember their word for “stop” the results were still more disastrous, for they interpreted the word not as “stop paddling” but as “stop the canoe”, and they would begin at once to backwater with a frenzy of strokes that almost tipped me over the side. Standing in the lurching canoe with field-glasses, camera, and revolver all hung round me, clutching the rifle at the ready, I felt like a wobbly Christmas tree, and when the rifle fired it was as if a cracker had gone off unexpectedly. Had it not been for my last three shots of the afternoon my reputation for total inefficiency would have spread quickly through all the surrounding villages. From the direction of Thesiger’s canoe, hidden from us by the reed-beds, four half-grown pigs swam in line ahead, crossing our bows a hundred and fifty yards away. As the two Suwaid spotted them and were about to give chase, I saw beside us a little island of mud a few inches above the water. I leapt to it from the canoe, and, starting with the leader, I managed to pick off all four pigs as they swam. To a more sophisticated audience the effect of this display would have been marred by the fact that I fired only three shots, the last killing two pigs simultaneously as their heads came abreast, but to these people, imbued with traditions of economy, this accident was an enormous enhancement. They became wild with excitement, and, leaping ashore to the island, they began to war dance round me, yelling out a chant that, had I been
able to understand it, would no doubt have done much to restore my self-respect.

Altogether I had killed eleven pigs with no fewer than thirty-two cartridges, while Amara had shot the same number with fourteen, and Thesiger had killed one with a shot-gun.

A duck-hunter had arrived home a little before us; he squatted by the coffee hearth with his bag lying before him, the feathers singeing in the fire. There were two purple gallinule, two garganey, four pintail, and some coots. Two of the pintail were alive, half in the fire, their heads resting on the headless neck-stumps of the dead.

After that day we were once more among the sheikhs of the outland waterways bordering on desert and cultivating land. The first of these was a young man no less than six feet three inches tall; tall Arabs are so very rare that he seemed a giant. One eye was entirely closed, giving to the face an habitually inscrutable expression. I had by now calculated that, apart, perhaps, from the nomads, one man in every fourteen or fifteen had either lost an eye or suffered from advanced eye disease.

Here, in the crowd outside the
mudhif,
an old man in a red turban and an ancient khaki coat reaching to his knees carried in his arms a child of about eighteen months. Its face was barely distinguishable as human, the whole skull, down to a point across the cheek-bones, so deeply crusted as to resemble the dried skin of a toad. The eyes were slits in this crust, defined by crimson streaks of the colour that is left by a red Biro pen, continuing across the bridge of the nose in a deep fistula; the cheeks, swollen to the size of a football, were covered with thick scales. The mouth, though quite inhuman, was red as though with rouge. Once I thought I saw a movement within the eye slits; otherwise there was no apparent trace of life. The old man took this terrible creature
away after Thesiger had reiterated that he could do nothing for it, and presently he returned alone. The children edged away from him; then, trying to persuade a ten-year-old to dance, the man laid a hand upon his wrist and tried to pull him from his comrades. The child screamed and struggled, and bit the wrist that held him; then suddenly choked and spat.

The next sheikh, Abdullah, was fat and benign, and occupied our horizon for the best part of three days. Unlike most
mudhifs,
his had an atmosphere of cheerful informality, and was dominated, numerically and otherwise, by children. One of these, a fifteen-year-old boy called Daoud, was a superbly accomplished dancer, of a grace, speed, and contortion that the Performing Flea might perhaps emulate in five years’ time. He had a far greater repertoire than any other dancer I had seen, and by now we had seen many, yet despite this the only eroticism that appeared in his dances was in those that were anecdotal. He danced for an hour, and when he sat down Abdullah, who had clearly appreciated the performance to the full, muttered something about going to look for a lost buffalo calf. Summoning Daoud to help him, he disappeared into the pitch-black night outside. Twenty minutes later they returned, the sheikh a little breathless and perspiring, but looking pleased and contented. The boy Daoud was smirking; the buffalo calf was not mentioned.

The evening ended with a war dance whose chorus was in praise of Thesiger,

We moved no more than two hundred yards the next day, to the
mudhif
of Abdullah’s brother. Here a holy man in a white turban extended finger-tips in greeting and disdain, and left immediately, presumably to wash his hands; an
elderly Sayid took his cue, and I could almost feel him shrink from the touch of the unbeliever. Immediately after a lavish lunch, agonising pains seized Amara’s belly; he was in such distress that he could not speak, and he writhed and groaned while Sabeti, to my surprise, began to cry. After a time the pain began to wear off a little, and, doped with opium and belladonna, Amara fell asleep. Sheikh Abdullah, who had come with us to his brother’s
mudhif,
seemed to identify himself deeply with Amara, and was soon curled up and snoring heavily opposite to him. He was still asleep when Amara recovered enough for a journey of another few hundred yards to a magnificent
mudhif
of fifteen arches on the opposite bank of the stream, but here Amara collapsed again. Abdullah arrived after us, newly awoken from a
couvarde
not unlike that of North American Indians who go through a simulated confinement when their wives are in labour; he chirruped at Amara, and getting no response he settled down to disconsolate chatter among the rich pillows.