A Reed Shaken by the Wind (5 page)

Immediately after breakfast Thesiger’s surgery began, and since the gale was still roaring out of an empty blue sky outside, tearing up dust-storms from the dry mud of the island and filling the whole air with fluttering golden fragments of reed, it took place in the house. My admiration for Thesiger’s assurance grew with every moment; there was surely no practitioner in England who would have attempted to treat the variety of complaints with which he was confronted. He had won his reputation among the marsh people by years of this work; rapid hit or miss diagnosis that grew gradually more accurate with prolonged experience, followed by the profligate use of the latest costly anti-biotic drugs that rendered the diagnosis of secondary importance.

The marshmen are riddled with diseases, many of them appalling to look at, and it is probably to their high mortality that they owe their continued existence, for this watery waste could never have supported an expanding population. Many of these diseases are acutely infectious, and when I left the marshes I left marvelling that I had contracted none, but marvelling much more that Thesiger had survived four years of intimate contact.

Dysentery is one of many diseases that are endemic; and in a marsh village, where the water comes right to the walls of the houses on every side, that drawn for drinking often contains recognisable fragments of human excrement besides a multiplicity of animal organisms so dense as to give the whole the appearance of a thick greenish soup. Yaws, a non-venereal relation of syphilis producing skin conditions of peculiar horror and high contagion, afflicts a great part of the population; ringworm or some allied skin affection may be expected in the heads of the greater number of children; hookworm spreads rapidly through the barefoot habit; and
bilharzia is inescapable to the marshmen, who of necessity spend much of their time naked in the water. It is this last, perhaps, that might properly be described as the disease
par
excellence
of the marshes, for no cure can prevent immediate reinfection. The bilharzia of the marshes is the parasite whose true name is
Schistosoma haematobium,
an organism about a centimetre long and a millimetre broad which ravages the pelvic region of its human hosts. In common with many other internal parasites it has an intermediate host, in this case the water snail, without whose total destruction the disease cannot be eliminated. At the stage of emergence from the snail the parasites are active burrowing organisms which penetrate the skin of a man and begin the next stage of their existence. An enormous number reach no fertile ground, as it were, and die, leaving weals and blotches where they do so, but the operation partakes of the stupendous profligacy of all generation; and, teeming like spermatozoa, a number pass through the lung capillaries to the heart and are thence distributed all over the body. The first symptom is the passing of blood in the urine, and this continues until at its height some thirty thousand eggs are being passed every day. These, in the marshes, return to the water, where they at once hatch into another active embryo stage which enters the water snail. It follows that the stagnant water surrounding a marsh village is densely teeming with the organisms of the post-snail stage, and it is impossible for any member of the community to avoid infection.

The disease is very slow in progress, and one may play host to breeding bilharzia for years without more than mild discomfort if the infection is slight, but sooner or later all the pelvic organs may become affected and suffer severe pain and malfunction, besides secondary effects such as stones that form round the eggs in the bladder.

That list is but a tiny fraction of the diseases to which the marshmen are subject, and it is small wonder that Thesiger,
who for four years had performed seeming miracles among them, was besieged by an importunate multitude in every village that we visited. The number of patients would grow gradually from a nucleus of two or three in the household with which we were staying; word would go round that the medicine chest was open, and they would come in from every quarter of the village to press round him, sometimes in hundreds. To treat them all would have been impossible; no medicine chest that could be transported in a
tarada
would have lasted more than two or three villages; and many, especially milder cases or those whom Thesiger suspected of malingering in order to be in the swim, were turned away. From the first day these decided that I was a suitable intermediary; of less formidable aspect, perhaps, than Thesiger, and one whose heart could be softened to plead for them. I was soon surrounded with a crowd little less than that which milled round him, and no amount of repetition that I did not understand Arabic made any noticeable impression upon either their numbers or verbosity. Each displayed his suffering with a formal and unvarying ritual of pathos; my view became a kaleidoscope of cataracted eyes, suppurating boil-craters, patches of angry rash on brown skins, wounds, and swollen genitals.

For nearly three hours Thesiger worked indefatigably in the midst of this bedlam; his hypodermic stabbed with piston-like regularity at brown bottoms; oceans of ointment were spread on leagues of lint; he stitched away like a tailor at dog bites and pig-gores, and counted out hundreds of white pills into hundreds of horny brown hands; while all space and light were effectively closed off by waiting patients and relations.

Last of all came the circumcisions. During Thesiger’s first year among these people he had been in much demand to repair the often spectacular damage inflicted by wandering professional circumcisers, who, in return for a fee of five shillings, would perform a protracted and agonising
mutilation whose aftermath of sepsis and slow convalescence lasted often for many months. The near-universality of sepsis and complication had at first puzzled Thesiger, for by the very nature of their lives the marshmen have built up some small immunity, and it was not for some time that he discovered the almost incredible cause. The wandering circumcisers, to give full measure for their five-shilling fee, were in the habit of dressing the wound with a magic powder of which they carried considerable quantities; and this powder, it turned out, was composed entirely of dried and powdered foreskins. Thesiger’s despairing attempt to explain the rudimentary principles of anti-sepsis had brought furious scowls from the purveyors of the powder, and pleas from the suffering people that he would perform the operation himself. His first attempts had proved so rapid, painless, and free from after-effect that his competitors had felt inspired to put about a rumour that he rendered his patients sterile. Thesiger was so constantly on the move that they could not be aware of the weakness in this otherwise intelligent gambit, for they did not know how many grown boys and young men had been among his patients. By the following year a large number of them had fathered healthy babies, and the wandering circumcisers found themselves discredited as liars as well as butchers. Thesiger had taken the terror from the operation, and now few would consent to have it performed by anyone else. Would-be patients who had heard of our vicinity would sometimes follow us for many days, and would come in from neighbouring villages to wherever we were known to be staying.

Circumcision, which is normally performed in an arbitrarily chosen year somewhere between the ages of ten and nineteen, is something of an occasion, though the extreme informality of the proceedings is in contrast with that of many other peoples who perform ritual mutilations. The boys assemble, anything from one or two to fifty or more, and lie upon the ground in rows while the operator
moves round them as a doctor might move from bed to bed in a hospital ward. The greater part of the whole village forms a solid wall of spectators; women and girls of all ages form an appreciable part of the audience; and often a boy’s mother or sister will sit beside him, encouraging him before the operation and keeping the flies off him after it. Only occasionally a boy professes embarrassment at the presence of the women, and asks to be operated upon in surreptitious privacy; the true marshmen are so often naked in the presence of women that no element of shame attaches to it. Little sympathy, and often much mockery, is shown to a boy who is frightened or who cries out, but very few do, and I have heard one who was asked what Thesiger’s operation felt like reply “it felt as if a flea bit me”. As the operation is completed the boy’s mother gives vent to the weird cry of rejoicing that is described in technical literature as “ululating” (an onomatopœic word, for the sound is simply “ululululululululu” repeated in a high and rapid wail until breath gives out), and sometimes the father fires a shot or two from a rifle. Often each boy of a group that is circumcised together gives a small feast for the others, and it is said that some sort of bond or blood brothership grows amongst them.

After the circumcision the boys remain recumbent for an hour, as a safeguard against bleeding, and then they walk home. From then on, during the few days until they are healed, they wear two or three onions on a string round their necks, for the people are convinced that the wound will become septic if the boy should smell cooking, or baking, or any form of perfume. The boy who is in the vicinity of such smells will plug his nostrils with the small ends of the onions until the danger is past. Curiously, they believe the peril to emanate from these pleasant scents, never from stenches; furthermore native custom had previously required the operation to be performed in the height of summer, as the operators had held
that cool weather would cause the wound to become inflamed.

The gale blew unabated all afternoon, and by now it was clear that we must spend a second night at Ramla. As a rule Thesiger was at pains not to spend two nights under the same roof, for in the eyes of most marsh Arabs the demands of hospitality include the killing of chickens, and become a serious drain upon the householder’s resources.

I should have liked to wander over the small stretches of dry ground surrounding the village, but because of the dogs it was impossible; this too was a repetitive pattern throughout the long journey. Practically every house in the marshes is guarded by at least one, and sometimes as many as four or five large and almost invariably savage dogs. They are savage both because they are trained to be so and because, being an unclean animal, they are afforded little of the casual affection that household watchdogs may receive outside the Muslim world. Their attitude to all human beings other than those of the household they guard is dour, morose, and explosive. They bark so incessantly both by day and by night that many of them have strained their vocal cords; some produce no more than a husky whisper, others the cracked and disconcertingly alternating bellow and squeak of the human adolescent. As a result of constant and venomous bickering among themselves the older dogs are so tattered and frayed as to give the impression of being damaged beyond all reasonable hope of repair; their ears, if they still possess them, serrated like the fronds of a fern, their tails lopped to haphazard half-lengths, even the black buttons of their noses sometimes twisted to preposterous angles with their faces, or hanging by a thread of gristle; their flanks and shoulders criss-crossed with the scars of teeth. The basic type, before this distortion has been superimposed, is something between an Alsatian
and a Husky, with a dense, usually light-coloured, coat, and a tail that curls more or less tightly upward. The commonest pattern is sand-coloured or rufous, and suggests descent from the wild red dogs of India, but they may be blotched or brindled, and occasionally white. Whatever their origin they must by now have reached the maximum development of which the species is capable; there are no small dogs and no unaggressive dogs, quite simply because if there were they would be killed by the large and aggressive.

The religious—or in this case customary, for the marshmen cannot be said to possess more than the
mores
of their nominal religion—uncleanness of dogs does not prevent them being on terms of some familiarity with the household they serve, and more especially its younger members. The adults discourage a display of affection, but despite these sanctions I have seen children sleeping with puppies cuddled in their arms, and occasionally older children will play with a dog as do Europeans. Even in their unsentimental society the protection between dog and man is to a large extent mutual, and the killing of a dog can start a blood-feud as does the killing of a human being.

The dogs effectively restrict a stranger’s movements in a village or about its immediate precincts, and because of them it is impossible even to relieve oneself without a guard standing by; indeed it is surprising that the marshmen manage somehow to steal from each other as much as they do.

At nightfall the wind was still gusty and tumultuous, but its force must have slackened a little, for an exhausted fishing party made its way into the village after three days marooned without food on a small island. They had been poisoning fish, the only mass method of fishing that the marshmen allow themselves. For some forgotten reason fishing with nets is taboo, and the people who make their living in this way, the
Berbera,
are looked down upon as of
low caste, so that the marsh tribesmen themselves are confined either to the grotesquely inefficient methods of spearing or of strewing the water with poisoned bait; digitalis concealed in shrimps. The poisoned fish float to the surface, and their poaching by passing boats gives rise to frequent squabbles.

Night came down upon the marshes in utter desolation; there was no sunset nor hint of colour, the light just faded out of that roaring grey sky until the silhouettes of the tossing palm plumes became dim and indistinct and merged into the darkness of a starless sky. The house began to fill with guests as before, and when we had eaten and become once more part of a huddled throng who faced inward to the rearing flames of the reed fire, our host turned to a young man near him and asked him to sing. “Ma’agdar, Ma’agdar, I can’t, I can’t,” he replied with the preliminary and quite meaningless modesty that I found to be customary, but after a few moments of protestation in diminuendo he composed himself and began. It was a quartet; he sang the melody, while three companions held an even chord like the drones of a bagpipe; like bagpipe music, too, it was at first difficult for an uneducated ear to discover any defined melody. The voice was tenor, and as with many other primitive peoples it was produced nasally and with a constant tremolo, whose range seemed at times greater than that of the melody itself. At first I found it too curious and unfamiliar to be acceptable, but as song succeeded song I became engulfed by it and permeated with it and its poignancy began to move me; even the absorption and strain with which the strangely unvocal notes were produced enhanced rather than detracted from the total effect. Most of the marshmen are quite unable to sing and know it, but the knowledge in no way deters them from trying; day-long, for example, Hassan as he paddled our canoe would from his position a yard astern of me pour forth his profuse and noticeably unpremeditated strains, a cracked and
excruciating nasal shout whose impact on the ear drum was not unlike that of a crackling telephone. The approved method of voice production makes enormous demands upon the singer, and when he has failed to master it the result is no less than disastrous. In almost every village, however, there are a few whose voices, perhaps because of their purity in childhood, have had continuous enough practice to become accomplished; their singing can be both beautiful and evocative, and they are in great demand for the entertaining of guests or for any other occasion of feasting.