A Reed Shaken by the Wind (17 page)

It was a dragging afternoon. I sat next to an English-speaking schoolboy, who asked me, “Are you a very brave man? How far is it from London to Liverpool? How many pigs can you kill?”, and, finally, written down for a written reply, “Are you very like us? I ask you.” I did not know the answer to any of his questions.

In the evening Daoud danced again. One of his dances was the tale of a man who had seduced another’s wife in the reeds and was hauled before the government authorities; they got all the names mixed up and ended by punishing the wrong man. Here, I saw, was the common denominator of the dances that made fun of holy men and of the attitude of prayer; it was a simple mockery of authority.

Another was a dance of fish-spearing; a stranger came on the scene, ate the fish as it was cooking, and was murdered by the spearer. A third man, a policeman, arrived and accused the killer, who brushed the whole matter aside, saying, “He
must have been dead for days; and anyway why bother about trivial rubbish of that sort?”

After all the dancing was over Sheikh Abdullah looked frustrated, as though he wished he had lost another buffalo calf, or perhaps several. He consoled himself by talking of a neighbour who, he said, had four wives and forty-six concubines, and satisfied six of them every night.

I
WOKE
the next morning giddy and with a slight fever. It was the only sickness that I suffered throughout all the journey; for three days I felt unsteady and stupid in the daytime, and at night my dreams were of things unhappy and far off. Thesiger, too, was unwell, and lost his voice; our symptoms were perhaps related to Amara’s collapse the day before. We had moved a mile or two to another stone fort, and here I was saddled for nearly three hours with the headmaster of the local school. It would have been a difficult enough time had I had my wits about me; in the dull state to which the fever had flattened me it was little less than torture. Thesiger introduced him to me as a gesture of kindness, thinking that it would be a relief for me to be able to speak English to somebody. After the first few minutes of deadlock, he sent a boy to fetch from his house
The Oxford
University Top Book.
This proved to be an English Primer, complete with pictures of cats, mats, and other monosyllabic riff-raff dear to the nursery. For a solid hour he read aloud from this volume, infinitely slowly, and “putting in the expression”.

“Is the cat on the table?” he read slowly and probingly. “No!”—archly—“the cat is
under
the table!” “Is the boy work-ing?
No!
He is play-ing with his elder sister’s dug!” At this point I interjected: “Doing
what
?” and he passed me the book with an aggrieved air; there was a picture of a child in shorts playing with an Aberdeen terrier. The primer had not been prepared for use in a Muslim country. At last he closed the book and said sententiously, “Of all the c’s that werbi this c that. Yes?” Seeing me look blank he repeated it, and then wrote it down. I took his English—Arabic dictionary and found the word for “quotation”. “Is it a
quotation?” I asked. He nodded enthusiastically. “I think,” I said painfully, “that there must be something missing.”

He turned to me with a sudden brightness. “My father is underground,” he remarked with an air of surprise, by way of changing the conversation. It was clear that we should always be at cross purposes.

Two days later we drove by car to the town of Amara. Thesiger had sent a messenger to order a taxi, and it appeared magically on the opposite bank of the stream to the
mudhif
at which we were staying. There was no sign of a road anywhere; for a mile or so we bumped and zigzagged across dry uncultivated land traversed by waterless irrigation ditches, and when the road began it was at first a barely perceptible track on the hard mud. Gradually the track grew higher and became a straight mud road running parallel to the bank of the watercourse from which we had set out. On our right, as we drove north, a vast marsh with lagoons of open water stretched away for many miles; then this gave place to green patches of half-grown barley and wheat, and limitless acres of mud desert dotted with isolated palm groves. We passed many of the Beni Lam nomads, either encamped in black tents with their great sheep flocks spread over seemingly pastureless ground, or on the move with almost as many little laden donkeys as there were sheep.

The town of Amara, at the end of the ten-mile drive, did not live up to the beauty of its name. Yellowish brick and corrugated iron; perpetual peeling enamel advertisements for popular western products; dirt and refuse; everything, after the wide clean skies and astringent life of the marshes, seemed to me shoddy, mean and ugly. We paid courtesy visits to the
muttaserrif,
or provincial governor, and to the Chief of Police, and we visited the American Mission where I was impressed by Dr. Nyekirk, a craggy, rock-jawed young American with a handshake like a gorilla; it was to him that
Thesiger sent from the marshlands patients whom he was unable to treat himself. We lunched, at a building something between a fort, house, and palace, with one of Mehsin’s grandsons, the son of that Dakhil whom Aboud had killed in a shooting accident. Our host was doing his national service as a private soldier; according to custom, however, a payment of
£
50 had reduced the obligatory period to three months.

Very few of the marsh tribesmen do national service at all. They have their own ingenious way of dodging conscription; they will pay a neighbour to borrow a child who is obviously below the requisite age, and this child impersonates the boy who is to be called up. This, though absolutely safe for the recruiting official’s first visit, breeds some confusion when he returns, say two years later. Another child is borrowed; sometimes he is even younger than the previous one. The official expresses wonder and amazement at the ingenuous Peter Pan, and a dispute begins. It ends as such arguments are best settled; a little money changes hands, and the incident is closed.

We returned from Amara to another village, to which Hassan and Kathia had transported the
tarada
in our absence, and from there we began to work back, by a different route, to Dibin. The weather was like April in England, with a fresh gusty breeze and the sun shining whitely between glinting showers. The waterways led at first through pastoral country, where encamped nomads tended great herds of cattle and sheep. This was the one moment of the year when the land has a strangely vivid freshness, a tenderness of green that transforms the flat grey wastes into brilliant acres of young grass growing in watery soil. Upon it grazed sheep of all colours, but colours of a peculiar richness, piebald, skewbald, black, brown, and white, and with them were great numbers of Jersey-coloured cattle; as it began to rain the attendant cow-herds, instead of adding more clothing,
took off their
dish-dashas
and were naked, with their garments folded into bundles on their heads. A cantering colt splashed at the water’s edge, bucking and throwing up his heels in the same exuberance of spirit as the herd-boys who danced in the light gleaming rain; above them the air was rustling with the passage of migrating birds, straggling mile-long flights of little red hawks, green-and-bronze bee-eaters, and the winking black and white of avocets and stilts. Away to the south of us a great flock of wild geese were spiralling down to alight, the golden bugles of their voices drifting thin and clear across the intervening miles of marsh. As we went farther the waterways became choked by a floating carpet of white and gold water buttercups, so thick that in places whole lagoons were completely covered, without an inch of visible water. “There are two pronounced seasons,” Thesiger had written in the article that had led me here, “summer and winter, for spring and autumn last only about a month.” This was the spring, and it was more glorious than I had seen in any other land.

Here we were in the country of the Sudan; once a great tribe, but now dwindling and scattered, for the building of the Kut barrage had affected the fortunes of all these people dependent upon the distributaries of the great river. We stopped for the night at the fort of Sheikh Hatim ibn Saihut, in a palm grove where salmon-pink hoopoes flitted among the branches. It was a building of a type new to me, a vast low structure of mud and brick with walls four feet thick. The reception room was pillared at the centre with three smooth palm trunks, each carrying a square pediment at the summit, where they supported a ceiling of palm beams with reed matting showing between them. In place of the abominable European arm-chairs of most sheikhs’ reception rooms there were long seats of dark wood with arms at their ends, and on the floor were scattered a profusion of rich rugs and carpets.

Here we heard news of the controversy between Nasr and
Salman. It was rumoured that Nasr would lose his case in Baghdad, and that the Government would restore his property to his father. Sheikh Hatim told us that Nasr had appealed to him and to many other sheikhs for help, but they had all given him the same reply. They had told him that if he would throw himself on his father’s mercy they would go with him and intercede for him, for that was the only course that could retrieve anything of his lost honour. Hatim said again and again that it was outside anyone’s experience that a son should defy his father to the unthinkable point of seeking Government aid against him.

After we lay down to sleep the room in the fort was noisy with the courting of swallows, whose mud nests plastered the palm beams and pillars; all through the night they sang and made love, the clear silver bubbling of their voices loud in the darkness. The beam of an electric torch would silence them for a moment; they would draw guiltily apart like lovers in Hyde Park caught in the beam of a car’s headlights, but as soon as the light left them they were at it again, vocal and irrepressible.

If I had accepted Thesiger’s statement that an unwounded wild boar would charge a man unprovoked I had accepted it as a child believes the existence of death; it was not a thing that could have any personal significance for me. I had seen the terrible wounds inflicted by pig, a long scar puckering a brown thigh from knee to groin, a back cross-furrowed by hideous laceration, the calf of a leg that must once have hung in tatters from the bone. I knew indeed that nearly half of all the Ma’dan men carried such scars in some degree.

The stories, however, were all either of wounded pig or of a sleeping beast surprised suddenly by a reed cutter or a fish spearer as he waded, often waist-deep, through the reeds; or of a small canoe coming unaware upon one of the little soggy reed islands which the pig build to sleep on. The
picture was always one of a startled animal surprised from sleep by an enemy already on top of him, or of a wounded animal in whom the dull embers of pain smouldered into explosive flame at the approach of its inflictor. To reinforce my euphoric security there was the fact that I had by now killed quite a few pig myself; none had charged me nor displayed anything but fear, and further the marshmen had shown little caution in following into thick reed-beds pigs that we did not know to be dead. On only one point was I not deluded, the ubiquity of pigs. They were as common as rabbits in England before myxomatosis was introduced, and in my secret view I thought, perhaps, that they were little more dangerous. I needed a lesson, and I got one.

We left the fort of Sheikh Hatim that morning to return to Malaya. There were heavy blue-grey clouds all round the horizon, with a mutter of distant thunder and the threat of rain, and my temper matched the sky. It is not easy for two men to travel alone, as did Thesiger and I, unless they know each other very well, and that morning my mind was filled with fancied grievances against him, with the marshalling of trivialities into an orderly assault force. Thesiger was among friends and I was among strangers, and I felt isolated and frustrated. The mood was perhaps not dignifiable by any other name than sulks, but it had not lifted when later in the morning the skies cleared and the sun came out and lit the pale sheets of water and the vivid greens of new growth. We left the dry land behind us and the nomads with their black tents and great sheep herds, and at length there was once more water on both sides of the low canal. It had not been there long, for the reed growth was short and scattered, no more than a foot or two high and thin like lace, so that the extending water showed always through it and beyond it to where the hills of Khuzistan hunched low and curiously pale on the horizon. A group of two or three smuggling boats passed us, the towers on the bank bent and straining as they hauled the heavy boat-loads of contraband
grain from over the Persian frontier. There was an ostentatious display of firearms throughout the party. It crossed my mind vaguely that this was the first day for a long time that our rifles were not carried loaded and ready to hand, but I was feeling too flat and sullen to comment upon it.

Not far off to our left an enormous concourse of duck were on the wing and wheeling. They wanted to return to the point from which they had risen, a few hundred yards away, and as I watched they began to pour in again, moving the water with a liquid roar as they alighted in drove after drove. The air above them was a wild weaving throng of wings as the racing packs checked to alight, hurtled downwards, then shot up again. A party would alight, rest tense and motionless with upstretched necks, then take off again in panic, but their places on the water were instantly filled by others. Round the restless throng of pintail, shoveller and wigeon long clouds of teal described dazzling arcs of speed a few feet above the water; one moment they were dark as driven smoke, the next as they wheeled in unison their undersides showed silver as a shoal of darting herring.

Thesiger saw me watching them. “There won’t be much to eat where we’re going,” he said. “Do you think you could do anything with those? Probably bread and some milk otherwise.”

I looked at the place where the duck were alighting. They seemed to want to stay there, but there didn’t seem enough cover to hide a mouse, let alone a man. Still, I would be out of the canoe, I would be able to straighten my aching knees, and I would be quite alone for the first time for many weeks. It would feel like freedom. I could think without being overheard. I said, “I might. I’ll try. But once I put them up they won’t come back while the
tarada’
s anywhere around. You’d have to take her at least half a mile farther on, give me half an hour and then come back.”

“All right—here’s six cartridges. What are you going to do for cover?”

“I’ll find something,” I said enigmatically. I had been a wildfowler in my youth, and I fancied myself to get duck where the next man could not. As I stepped from the canoe to the mudbank of the canal Thesiger said, “Don’t waste all those cartridges firing wild shots.”

As the canoe pushed off into the channel again I sat down on the mudbank and began to roll up my trousers. It was hopeless, I knew; one could roll them tight and high as a pair of bathing drawers, but in five minutes they would come cascading down again, and the next time one rolled them one would be finding mixed clay and water clammy against the inside of the thigh. With a
dish-dasha
one had only to hitch it up and tie it round the waist. I finished and stood up; the trousers might be good for a hundred yards. The duck were mostly gone now; only an odd bird circled far out of range, and a pelican sailed by on stiff wings, stately as a battleship.