A Reed Shaken by the Wind (3 page)

Three out of Thesiger’s four canoe boys had arrived to meet us in Basra. In those days when I did not know them I found their presence acutely embarrassing. At the Consulate-General Thesiger and I shared a huge bedroom. After my excursion to the
suq
Thesiger was nowhere about, and I sat down in an arm-chair to look at a map. After a few moments the door opened silently and the three canoe boys entered. I said good afternoon, which was about all I could say. They returned my greeting and sat down cross-legged on the floor, in a semicircle round my feet. All three stared at me without the least expression. Each dangled from his fingers a string of beads, one red, one yellow, and one white. The beads clicked slowly and rhythmically, my watch
ticked, and if I looked up those six eyes still looked unwaveringly into my face. If I met any of their eyes individually they would glance away, but as I looked down again at the map they would come back to my face. I tried smiling at them, and they smiled back, but with anticipation, as though I were now about to say something, which I could not. I had already found out that my few words of North African Arabic were unintelligible.

Amara, Hassan, and Sabeti; Kathia, the fourth, was to join us a day or two later when we began our journey. Both in feature and in character they were as unlike as they could be; they had little in common but the colour of skins. Amara was a handsome self-possessed youth of eighteen, fine boned, disdainful as an Arab stallion, often moody and withdrawn. He alone of them seemed always at ease in the surroundings of civilisation; there could never be anything gauche or awkward in his movements or in his response to an unfamiliar situation. At this time his natural vanity preoccupied much of his attention on his newly growing moustache and beard, at whose infinitesimal length he would snip, absorbed, with a pair of nail scissors. He liked mirrors.

Hassan was a year or two older, a bouncing but volatile extravert with peculiarly heavy eyebrows and just-noticeably underhung jaw. He and Sabeti, both of whom were married, were the most habitually good-humoured of the four, but Sabeti’s good humour was of a different quality, something almost pathological; he was the type of the Family Slave. If there was any odd job to be done it was naturally Sabeti who did it; his desire to serve and to please seemed as if it must have been developed in compensation for a total absence of looks or charm. Sabeti looked like an apologetic crow, and the wide eyebrow-moustache that he wore did not succeed in any way in altering the essentially placatory character of his face.

The map at which I looked while the three looked at me
was so blank as to be scarcely worthy of the name. There were rivers, tributaries and distributaries, and great areas covered with a small tufted symbol to represent marsh. To a few place-names, very widely scattered, someone had added a question mark in red ink, and in some cases drawn a red line clean through them. This was the area of permanent marshland to which we were going, and the bulk of it lay some forty miles north and west of Basra. Some two-thirds of the way across it the Tigris ran from north to south, vertically, so to speak, while the Euphrates ran horizontally from the west to form the southern boundary.

As recently as Biblical times the Persian Gulf stretched far up the country that is now known as Iraq. The two great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, flowed separately into the sea; not, as they do now, through the common conduit of the Shatt al Arab on whose banks Basra stands. As the sea receded it left in its wake a country of marshes, creeks and lagoons, which was settled in earliest times by immigrants from the Persian and Turkish Highlands. The living conditions of these earliest settlers differed very little from those of the marshmen of today; their reed houses and their few possessions have been excavated at the level just above the virgin silt.

As the centuries went by, the great area of marshland exposed by the sea became divided into areas of seasonal flooding, semi-permanent marshlands; and, fed by the many distributaries of the two great rivers, a central area of permanent marsh which exists to this day. These permanent marshes lie low between the courses of the two great rivers, and extend east of the Tigris over the Persian frontier. The farther the sea has receded the farther south has become the area which is at all times of the year without solid ground, and until Thesiger came there in 1950 it has remained one of the unexplored territories nearest to civilisation. Whereas the areas of seasonal flooding, the great rivers themselves, and the fringes of the permanent marsh, have all been visited
both by travellers and by armies in wars of European origin, the heart of the marshes and its people have remained unknown.

It was, I had learned from Thesiger’s article, a tribal area inhabited by some half dozen tribes whose frontiers extended arbitrarily outside the marshes. Some of them claimed to be not of Arab descent, while others contained a liberal sprinkling of
Sayids,
or linear descendants of the Prophet. The generic name for the marshmen is Ma’dan, a term used to define not a tribe but a way of life; the people who have for many centuries been proficient in extracting their livelihood from a waste land of water and of reeds, and who have had little or no contact with the world outside.

Because the physical geography of the country has been in such constant change it is difficult to trace the origins of the Ma’dan with any certainty. The marshes were very much farther north when the first immigrants came from the east to settle there, and that was more than five thousand years ago; during the Dark Ages there were other happenings besides the successive conquests of the Medes, Persians, Greeks, Romans, and finally the Arabs, that may well have added stranger blood to that of the marshmen. In the early part of the ninth century
A.D
. bands of robber gipsies settled in the marshes. After a while, their numbers increased by malcontents and refugees from justice, these became proclaimed rebels against the Caliph, who found this petty insurrection so difficult to quell that he was taunted with being unable to catch a few hundred frogs within arm’s reach of him. They capitulated at last, but it seems that those who could remain among the reeds did so, mistrusting the promise of amnesty should they emerge.

Some fifty years after this, in 869, there began a rebellion which for nearly fourteen years shook all Southern Iraq, and which seemed, indeed, as if it would throw out the Arabs and lead to a negro empire in the east.

The confusion that had succeeded the death of the
Prophet in
A.D.
633, and the strife over the dubious succession, was still at that time fruitful ground for exploitation by any unscrupulous claimant. More difficult was the amassing of a following strong enough to enforce the claim.

In the two hundred and fifty years since Mahommed’s death his
soi disant
linear descendants had become legion, and there was, therefore, nothing original in the fact of a certain Ali ibn Mahommed, a man from near the modern city of Teheran, giving himself out to be of the blood of the Prophet; nor in his early unsuccessful attempts to gain influence in various communities where existing schism offered a foothold for opportunism. He failed in Basra—a town standing farther to the west than the present city of the same name—and was forced to flee to Baghdad, but not long afterward he returned to the south with quite a different plan in mind. He had chosen for his raw material of rebellion the mass of African slaves who were called Zenj, men of the country now known as Zanzibar.

Huge numbers of these slaves were occupied on the waste land that lay to the east of Basra, engaged in digging away the surface stratum of soil, rich in profitable saltpetre, and at the same time exposing the cultivable layer beneath it. Their work was of the hardest, and their living of the meanest, for here was none of the affection and tolerance that can grow between the master and the slave who is attached to one family or household. In these men who hated all but their own kind, Ali—“the Abominable One”, as he came to be called—saw the strength and ferocity that should sweep him to power.

His approach to the slaves reveals a cynical acumen, a deep psychological insight, worthy of any later propagandist. He spoke to them with the tongues of God and of Mammon, so that the two images became for them inextricably confused. The religious sect to which he proclaimed allegiance—inconsistently with his alleged descent from the Prophet’s daughter—would appear to have been
chosen solely for one of its slogans: that the ruler should be the best man “even though he were an Ethiopian slave”. To that sect, the Kharijites, the deadliest of all sins was failure to acknowledge themselves as the true representatives of Islam. All other Muslims, therefore, they might dutifully destroy as infidels.

That was clearly the doctrine most likely to appeal to the slaves in their bitterness, and on the worldly side he preached not the right of equality with their overlords but their right to own slaves themselves.

The revolt of the slaves under the leadership of Ali the Abominable began in September 869, and almost immediately their headquarters came to be the marshlands surrounding the Tigris. Their tactics were night attack and ambush of their suppressors’ boats from the screening reed-beds. There were at first some fifty thousand men, but their army was swelled by Bedouin and malcontents of every description, and when the rebellion showed early promise of success many black soldiers of the Caliph deserted and went over to Ali. Within a year they had built a city on the west bank of the Tigris, from which they raided and plundered towns far afield, even invading Khuzistan to the east of the Persian frontier. After capture or partial destruction of any city Ali would parade before the survivors the heads of the dead; when in 871 he finally captured Basra itself the lowest estimate of these was 300,000, and the slaves waded in the blood of the free men whom they had butchered. By 879 the power of the Zenj was at its greatest; they had by now captured many of the cities of Babylonia, and even part of Kurdistan had surrendered to them. But they garrisoned and held little if any of their conquests, returning always to the marshlands in which lay their permanent safety.

In 881, twelve years after the insurrection, the war entered upon its final phase, the siege of the city that the rebel slaves had built. Mokhtara, “the city of the elect”, they called it, but their enemies spoke of it as The Abominable
City. At the beginning of the siege it was said to have contained 300,000 fighting men, and a negro king who ruled over them.

The city withstood two years’ siege, and when at last it fell in 883 the King of the Zenj had fled from it, and it was the head of Ali the Abominable himself that was laid at the feet of the Caliph’s besieging general. It has been suggested that he died by his own hand, in the ruins of his city, for no man came forward to claim the fabulous reward.

Many of the Zenj who escaped from the city fought on from the reedy thickets of the marshes. In the end those who were organised into larger bands capitulated to the forces of the Caliph, but others dispersed into the wilderness of reeds and water and were heard of no more. Those who surrendered were described as pure barbarians, speaking no Arabic, and eating both carrion and human flesh.

It would be strange if so great a body of men had left no descendants in the marshlands.

A
FTER
four days in Basra we left, unromantically, by taxi; the five of us huddled into one car with a mountain of luggage that was composed almost entirely of medicine chests.

Of that hour’s journey, because it was succeeded by so much that was new to me, I have small recollection. A flat, dusty road that led at times through palm groves; a desert of still dry seasonal marsh; flat mud-coloured land under an open blue sky on which, endlessly, the black kites soared and swooped; by the roadside an eagle, heraldic and defiant, upon the carcase of a yellow pi-dog.

At length we left the road and began to drive away from it over hard, dry mud, cut by shallow irrigation ditches over which the taxi lurched perilously in the direction of a distant palm grove, and within a stone’s throw of the Euphrates beyond was a village of date-cultivators to which Thesiger’s crew had brought his canoe.

After the glare of light outside it seemed very dark under the palms, and our surroundings very unfamiliar. We were among the scattered reed houses of a village, the ground between them intersected by deep water-filled ditches, each spanned by a felled palm log, worn and slippery from the passage of many feet. Across these precarious bridges we threaded our way towards a reed building many times larger than any other in sight, the
mudhif,
or guest-house, of a sheikh.

These
mudhifs
are a feature of all the country surrounding the marshlands. They are used solely for the entertaining of guests, who may eat and sleep there—customarily for not more than one night—even though they be casual strangers. The
mudhifs
consist, as do other reed houses, of a row of
arches made from the giant twenty-foot reed
Phragmites
communis,
over which reed matting is laid to form a structure not unlike a nissen hut, but often of nobler proportions. The number of arches is always uneven, nine, eleven, thirteen or fifteen, and the entrance faces towards Mecca. This entrance is low at one of the two flat ends, and in the great majority of
mudhifs
it is also the only entrance for light, though some of the more ornate buildings have intricate and ornate reed lattice work at the opposite end. In either case the light is dim, and the atmosphere beneath the high smoke-darkened arches reminiscent of a cathedral. A
mudhif
customarily contains no furniture; when guests arrive servants spread rugs on the reed matting floor, and place bolster-shaped cushions of green or crimson plush along the walls. As everywhere else outside the towns the habitual seated position is cross-legged upon the floor. The coffee hearth, about a third of the way from the entrance, is a small strip where the mud floor is bare of covering, and beside it stands a row of brass and copper coffee pots of varying sizes. Among these is a King coffee pot with an ornamented symbol sprouting from the lid; these seem vessels of ritual significance in keeping with the solemnity of the building.

The sheikh himself was away, and we were greeted by his brother, a man of whom I chiefly remember his chin—or his absence of it, for he had less than any human being I have ever seen. A short fringe of grey beard marked the position it should have occupied; but for it a line drawn from his lower lip to his Adam’s apple would have encountered no obstacle.

At this stage, the outset of our journey, I was entirely ignorant of the manners and customs that constitute good behaviour; the majority of these are common to a great part of the Arab world, and in no way peculiar to the marshlands, but most were new to me. Some I acquired by example, but in the most important Thesiger had instructed
me before we left Basra. I knew the simplest forms of greeting, and that one should place one’s hand over one’s heart after shaking hands; that one should be barefoot when entering a house (but should be careful to wear shoes outside, for fear of hookworm); that the left hand is unclean and should be used only for unclean tasks.

This last is the most difficult for the inexperienced European to remember, for few realise the comparatively high degree of ambidexterity they have attained. While right-handed people do not use the left hand for the direct performance of any skilled task, it is constantly and unconsciously in use as an adjunct or supplement, and very soon I found that a conscious effort of will was required to keep it unoccupied.

We are, by Arab standards, a very insanitary people. The idea of using lavatory paper is disgusting to them; nothing can cleanse except water, or, in the case of the desert Arabs, sand. For this they use the left hand, and there is nothing perfunctory about the washing; a man will continue until he is satisfied, which may be several minutes. In theory—but not always, it must be admitted, in practice—a man will also wash himself after urinating, which is always done in a squatting position.

Because it is the left hand that performs these and other unclean tasks it becomes a thing unclean in itself; and is never, as is the right hand, ornamented with rings. It should not, however scrupulously it has been washed, touch the face or head, or be used to hold a cigarette; or be put to any one of the numberless and often aimless uses (such as meditative pinching of the lip or stroking of the chin) which pass unnoticed among Europeans.

The idea of cleanliness, however far practice may fall short of theory, is very strong among even primitive Arabs. That it is a shameful thing to allow pubic hair to grow, probably has its origin in the same idea. It is very rare to see dirty nails, either of hands or of feet, and immediately before
eating, after the party is seated, a host or his servant will always carry round a small ewer and bowl for rinsing the fingers. It is customary, too, to rinse the mouth after eating.

Eating in the Arab manner requires to be learnt, and at the beginning I found it humiliatingly impossible. The
pièce
de résistance
of all meals is the same, a conical mountain of rice which is often two feet across and a foot high, and its manipulation is not easily mastered. The guests sit cross-legged on the floor before one or more of these mountains, round which, in a sheikh’s
mudhif,
are usually ranged bowls of gravy, mutton, whole small chickens, and plates of a thin greyish gelatinous substance tasting like the smell of scented soap. All this is to be eaten with the hand, and the right hand only, though the left may be used to hold a chicken while the right pulls the carcase apart. Any Arab host worthy of the name will kill chickens—worth about four shillings each—for his guests, and a hospitable sheikh will sometimes kill a sheep, whose boiled and nauseous head is placed among the other dishes to announce the fact. Pieces of flesh from the ears, the hair still attached, are esteemed as a delicacy, and hospitable fingers explore for a guest the gums and palate, producing strips and morsels which would be appetising if the head were not staring at the eater with those dreadful boiled eyes.

I have found in Desmond Stewart’s
New Babylon
an Arab proverb which I did not know when I was in Iraq, and which would have explained a great deal to me if I had: “Eat like a camel and be the first to finish.” Every meal is, indeed, a sort of eating race, and each man crams himself feverishly, in a silence unbroken but for champing jaws and an occasional belch. Whatever the embellishments, the rice is the main meal. One pours a little gravy over the claim one has staked on the mountain slope, and digs in a fist. This should be done with the back of the hand uppermost and the thumb on the palm; the fingers enclose the rice, and
when the hand reaches the mouth the thumb pushes the rice up into it—if, that is to say, there is any rice left to push.

That first evening, I found, there rarely was. The mere fact of being cross-legged made the rice a disconcertingly long way off, and no matter how large a handful I set out with, so to speak, it had dwindled to a few grains by the time the hand reached the mouth. Such of the intervening space as was not occupied by my lap was covered by a section of the gigantic waterproof floor-cloth that the servants had spread before laying the meal; on to this resonant surface the rice from my hand pattered and plopped like a hail shower. I began to cheat wildly, pouring on more gravy and squeezing the rice into adhesive balls in my palm; for the first week this, though an acknowledgement of defeat, was the only method I found possible.

When the eating race was over—and Thesiger, who had introduced among his own men the Bedouin custom of rising simultaneously, was an easy winner—it became clear that, however efficient were the other contestants, there were many messy feeders among them, for on the great cloth lay several pounds of scattered rice among the bones and other discarded litter.

Eventually I became able to eat rice quickly and efficiently, without spilling a grain; but to the end, though I could detect no difference between my handling of it and theirs, the Arabs insisted that I was somehow doing it wrong.

When one has eaten, one’s right hand is necessarily covered in rice and dripping oily gravy, and it is quite in order to clean the hand by licking it. If, however, a chicken has been part of the menu, the left hand, which has been allowed to hold while the right hand mauls, is equally covered with gravy and fragments; and to me it proved practically impossible to remember that if one is licking one food-covered hand one may not lick the other. After my first
gaucheries
of this kind my left hand seemed to be
preternaturally large and ugly; I seemed to perceive all at once the grotesqueness of the human hand, even its pathos; those five defiantly mobile fingers that might work only hidden and in shame.

There were rules to be learnt, too, about the drinking of coffee, which, though few of the common people can afford it, any man of importance customarily offers to his guests. The beans are ground, by pestle and mortar, and then roasted over the fire; the
mores
require that both operations should be done in the presence of the guest, and no host would dream of offering previously prepared coffee. When it has been poured from pot to pot among the rank at the coffee hearth, in a sequence that I never properly understood, a servant approaches the seated guest carrying in one hand the coffee pot and in the other a doll-sized cup. Into the cup he pours about a dessertspoonful, and this the guest drinks—if he can, for it is almost boiling—at a gulp. If he wants no more he shakes the cup quickly as he returns it; it is, in any case, bad manners to drink more than three cups before giving this sign.

Though belching is entirely socially acceptable, there is the strongest possible taboo against breaking wind; it is among the deadliest of all social sins. Most of the Arabs have done so at one time or another during their lives, but it is so memorable an event that by it other more momentous happenings are dated; it remains evergreen in their memories. When asked for the date of a murder or a family disaster a man may muse and then reply, “I don’t know; I think it was the year that Jassim farted.”

In illustration of this there is a story much like another of Elizabethan England, and which has, no doubt, many parallels in other cultures holding the same taboos.

Abarachdan was a youth, the son of a sheikh, who had recently been admitted to the
medres,
or council of sheikhs, at
Baghdad. There, in public he committed the unpardonable crime. It echoed through the
medres,
it echoed through all Baghdad. He was driven from the
medres
by his outraged elders, hounded out of Baghdad, and finally from all Iraq. He spent his life in Egypt, and when he was an old man he returned to spend the last years of his life in the country of his birth. He came back on foot, frail and weary. Before he reached the frontier of Iraq, while he was still in Syria, he paused to rest and drink at a well. There he saw a boy drawing water, and fell into conversation with him. After a time Abarachdan asked the boy his age. “I do not know,” the child replied (for few Arabs know the year of their birth), “but I know that my father was born in the year that one Abarachdan farted in the
medres
in Baghdad.”

Abarachdan returned sorrowing into exile, for his lifetime had not been enough to expiate his crime.

In one of the narrow scum-covered ditches that threaded the village lay Thesiger’s canoe, left here by Amara, Sabeti, and Hassan before they had come out to meet us in Basra. Canoe is a mean word for so beautiful a craft. The canoes of Southern Iraq are of many shapes and sizes, often squat and primitive-looking, but this was a
tarada
, or war canoe, thirty-six feet long and less than three and a half feet at its widest beam, with a high slender prow rising five feet from the water in a curve like an eagle’s claw. This is the aristocrat of all craft of the marshes, ornamented throughout the interior with round iron bosses like those of a medieval castle door. The high prow enables them to force their way through reed-beds where a conventionally shaped boat would stick, and their shallow draught of a few inches gives them free passage over water no more than ankle deep.

Few men other than sheikhs own a
tarada,
for whereas canoes of other types may cost as little as £3 or £4, a
tarada
costs £75, and its possession, among people who are in the main poor, is a hall-mark of status, as certain makes of car used once to be in England.

At dusk we walked through the palm grove, past the waiting
tarada
and down to the bank of the Euphrates. There were no craft upon the river, and beyond it the horizon was flat and bare; on the ultimate distance lay a dim darker strip, the great reeds of the permanent marsh.

When we lay down to sleep in the
mudhif
that night it was of the marshes that I dreamt. All through the darkness the dogs of the village barked and growled, and by the fire at the coffee hearth sat three armed negroes whose faces coloured my dreams, dreams of reeds as tall as forest trees between whose stems skulked the centuries-dead cannibal army of the Zenj. Between dreams I remember the low chatter of the negroes’ voices, and I remember fleas, fleas, fleas. In the dawn there came a rustle of rain on the reed roof, and the far-away crying of wild geese.