A Reed Shaken by the Wind (6 page)

When the singing was over our host called to a young negro slave with a humorous and
sympathique
face and asked him to dance. “Ma’agdar, Ma’agdar,” he protested, as the singer had, but soon he was on his feet, and the squatting crowd shuffled a foot or two back from the fire, leaving him a space perhaps five feet by five.

I realised in the first few seconds that though the marshmen’s singing required a co-operative effort from the listener a little akin to that demanded of a hypnotic subject, the impact of the dancing was full and complete and to me irresistible. The rhythm was staccato yet somehow fluid, each movement whether of limb or torso somehow resembling a pause and a pounce. The dance was a narrative, as are many of them, and song and mime was a part of it, all held within the framework of a tight unvarying iambic rhythm.
Ti-tumti-túm, ti-tumti-túm;
the audience took up the rhythm, each stamping out the tune with the heel of an extended right foot, each with his arms outstretched before him and his hands locked with extended fingers to produce a finger-click as loud, literally, as a man may make by clapping his palms together. Even the small children can do this; a shrimp of six years can with his soft baby fingers make a crack like the report of a small pistol.

I could not follow the words that the slave sang as he danced, but the mime made the theme plain, a labourer cheated of his hire. His voice was light and plaintive and
whimsically protesting; its pathos seemed the aggregate of generations of unquestioning slave tradition. As the dance neared its end he squatted on his heels and in exaggerated time with the rhythm he bounced round the little open space, searching for the labourer’s hire of which he had been cheated, lifting the corners of the reed matting, peering into the coffee pots and among the embers of the fire, chanting pitifully, “I want my pay, I want my pay.”

The next dance was, like most that I saw during the journey, erotic. These dances have been described in the journals of learned societies as “erotic but not obscene”; the distinction is a nice one, but the words would require close definition before the point could be maintained. Most of the movements in these dances are specifically and frankly sexual; sometimes the dance is composed almost exclusively of such movements, and becomes a stylised pantomime of the sexual act, ending with a formula to represent climax; sometimes the sexual movements are used arbitrarily among others, as though a dancer were using his whole repertoire and adding these for piquancy. Each dancer is in any case his own choreographer; he learns gradually when he is very small how to perform and perfect simple steps and body movements, and these he develops, elaborates, and intermingles into dances that are thus essentially his own though using the dance-language of his culture.

It seems likely that many hundreds of generations of dancing in the tiny confined space about the hearth of reed huts, with the necessity for the maximum movement in the minimum space, have been responsible for the great development of body-movement as opposed to footwork for which there would be inadequate room. Thus, any dancer worthy of the claim, often if he is still quite a small child, is able to call into play groups of muscles of whose very existence in himself the average European is unaware; and an important part of every dancer’s vocabulary, as it were, is a violent and prolonged shivering of one or both shoulders. Precise and
almost acrobatic use of the pelvic muscles lends a sexual flavour to nearly all dancing, the movements ranging from direct crissation to sinuous rolling motions or plain high-speed bottom waggling; this last nearly always draws enthusiastic laughter from the audience.

The slave’s second dance that night at Ramla was on a theme that is very familiar to the marshmen, an exploitation of the
risqué
possibilities inherent in the Muslim attitude of prayer with the forehead pressed to the ground and the rump high in the air. He was a superb artist, and there was certainly nothing slipshod or haphazard in the execution of the performance, but whether it would have been labelled erotic rather than obscene in England seems a very academic point; it was a beautifully danced dirty joke.

Besides the talented and enthusiastic amateurs, of whom there are a number in every village, there are also professional dancers, or rather entertainers, for they are expected also to sing, to drum, and to perform “variety turns”. They travel among the villages, and they are, of course, all male, for no woman ever makes an officially public appearance. The boys wear their hair long, and the rhythmic swinging of its heavy dark mass is a feature of their dancing; a thing that I never saw, for the only professional dancing boy we met with other than in the streets of Basra had had his hair shorn two days before, in preparation for school. In view of the erotic nature of the dancing itself it is perhaps not surprising that these boys are also semi-professional prostitutes, but they marry young, and often bring up their own children in the same tradition.

Among the villagers themselves, children are encouraged to dance from their earliest years, and at no age does absorption with or great skill in dancing carry any un-masculine connotations. A very good dancer, whether child or adult, is generally very good at everything else, and must, too, possess enormous physical energy, for the dances are long, violent and exhausting, and the audience calls for repeated
encores. They are intolerant of a bad adult performer, but I have seen some sixty or seventy men and boys maintain a feigned absorption for half an hour while a five year old flopped and stumbled his unconvincing way through an interminable impromptu.

It was long after midnight when the singing and dancing were over and we finally settled down to sleep. The gale still roared outside and rustled and rattled the house of reeds and probed under the reed matting on the floor, lifting it in undulating waves like a ground swell at sea. Both Thesiger and I were impatient to leave Ramla, he because of the burden that he placed upon our host, and I because the true marshes were still before us and I felt that we were lingering on the threshold.

I
N
the morning the clouds had gone, but the wind still blew like an express train. Thesiger was not at ease about our departure.

“We’ve got to go, and that’s all there is to it. This man’s killed half his chickens already, and it may blow like this for days. Trouble is to get where we’re going we have to cross Zikri, which is a lake of more or less open water a dozen miles across. People get drowned there every year, and the boys are scared; the
tarada
won’t stand much in the way of waves with all this baggage on board.”

We left at about nine-thirty, and my last sight of the dry land was the mad semaphore of the palm branches and the billowing, fluttering clothing of the group who stood below them to wave us good-bye. Our host of the past two nights accompanied us as a pilot, paddling a little flat hunting canoe that had little more than two inches freeboard and looked as if the first gust of wind must swamp it.

The defined waterways grew fewer and disappeared, and soon we were amid a maze of crooked alleys in a jungle of trumpeting wind-tormented reed stumps and withered sedge. Gradually the channels grew wider and less distinguishable, until we were moving through open blue lagoons fringed and islanded with giant golden reeds growing dense and twenty feet high. They were as ripe standing corn must appear to a mouse, huge and golden in the sun, with only a tiny fringe of new green growth in the blue water at their feet. As yet there were so many islands that it was easy to find shelter; they were dense and solid-seeming and only their very tops bent under the gale that urged them majestically over the water, for most of these islands are unanchored, and drift slowly about the lagoons as calved
icebergs drift in polar seas. Between them one could glimpse the open water of the lake itself, ruffled and royal blue under the sun, stretching away to where, very far off, the confining reed-beds at the farther side looked like long yellow cliffs of sand. There were no definable edges to the lake; the reed islands only grew fewer, and the lagoons on which they drifted wider and deeper blue, until there were no more islands.

Under a storm sky this landscape, too, could seem bleak and terrible, but now it seemed a wonderland, and the colours had the brilliance and clarity of fine enamel. Here in the shelter of the lagoons the reeds, golden as farmyard straw in the sunshine, towered out of water that was beetle-wing blue in the lee of the islands or ruffled where the wind found passage between them to the dull deep green of an uncut emerald. It was a landscape as weird as a Lost World, and through it flew birds as strange and unfamiliar in flight as pterodactyls; snake-necked African darters, pygmy cormorants, pelicans and halcyon kingfishers.

These last held for me the splendour of something once seen with the clear eye of childhood and long remembered, for the contrasts of the glorious electric-blue back and wings, the rich chestnut breast and crimson bill, had held me enthralled when I was at a preparatory school. The drawing master had one day placed upon my desk the stuffed skin of a halcyon kingfisher, and said, “If you think you can paint, try and paint those colours, boy, and be humble.” Long and often I tried, and long and often he comforted me for my failure, and when the term was over and the holidays were to begin I found it on my pillow on the last night with a note that read, “I think you like it as much as I do, and you can see it more plainly. By which I don’t mean I’m going blind.”

There were familiar birds, too, a profusion of coots and diving duck dotted everywhere over the open water, and presently Thesiger said, “It’s pretty uncertain where we
shall have to spend tonight; we’d better shoot something if we don’t want to go hungry. Shooting here is not a bit like any ideas you may have. It’s a strictly unsporting business, and we expect—and get—at least two hundred per cent.” (This was quite untrue, though I did not yet know it; it was a laudable effort to instil principle rather than fact.) “You get as many coots in a row as you can; you can only take single flying shots at duck and so on, and then God help you if you miss. It’s food we’re after; we can’t carry enough cartridges for sport. Your reputation among these people will stand or fall absolutely by what you kill or don’t kill, and they’re all watching you.”

As an encouraging introduction to shooting while sitting cross-legged in the bottom of a perilously wobbling canoe I felt that this could hardly have been improved upon, but when he solemnly handed me two cartridges with the words, “These are all you’ll get”, I realised that I had been wrong.

The crew steered for the nearest coots. It seemed to me that they displayed a really remarkable lack of intelligence; to begin with they approached the coots upwind, which in the shelter of the floating islands was not strong enough to blow the birds back over us when they became airborne; and they seemed to forget, too, that if they headed the
tarada
straight for their quarry I should have three men and the high curving prow of the boat between me and my target. For these reasons their first efforts were unqualified failures, and my two cartridges remained comfortingly intact and non-committal in the chambers. I was conscious, however, that with every passing minute their potential for disgrace was growing steadily.

At last the
tarada
made an oblique downwind approach to a restless bunch of coots in the lee of an island. At eighty yards they began to scutter off the water, but they had to turn into the wind to do so, and by the time they were fully airborne they were within range. They were sadly strung out, however, and I was surprised to see two fall to my first
barrel. The rest were snatched by the wind and swirling away from me now, and the canoe caught a gust and began to turn away too; I realised that to turn one’s body as one sits cross-legged one would require a torso that revolves from the hips like a tank turret. Suddenly I saw a little group of three coots that had not taken alarm until after my first shot, and were only now leaving the water. They made a solid little black patch in the air, and they fell as one bird.

Any possible pretence that two hundred per cent was customary or expected among Thesiger’s crew was at an end; they were beside themselves with excitement and congratulation. Thesiger looked like a scoutmaster whose oldest and most oafish pupil has tied an accomplished and esoteric knot by accident. “Pity you aren’t leaving us now; trouble about reputations won on flukes is that they’re so shortlived.”

To gather the most distant of the coots we had to leave the shelter of the floating islands and enter the troubled water of the open lagoon. Laden as the
tarada
was she had about four inches freeboard amidships. The coots were drifting before they were gathered; and one was wounded and led us a long chase on the open water. The
tarada
was drifting still farther while the boys decided the direction of Mecca before slitting the birds’ throats, and by the time we were at last ready to go on we were farther from the shelter we had left than from the nearest island ahead of us. It was not much more than four hundred yards away, but the wind was tearing through in great gusts between the dotted islands away on our right that partially screened the open lake itself. Every yard of the distance was touch and go. Hassan had taken over the little hunting canoe from our pilot and was struggling along a gunshot away on our right; from where I sat the little craft was hidden completely, hull down between the sparkling blue and green waves, and only his torso showed paddling like a maniac. But his canoe was light and unladen, and he was in better case than we were,
for we had seven men and heavy baggage aboard. We were shipping water over our side from every wave, not much each time, but already the aggregate was enough to determine the issue if the waves should get just that much bigger.

“Do these things float bottom up when they capsize?” I called to Thesiger.

“No. They sink like stones. I hope you’ve enjoyed your sight of the marshes.”

It looked as if my reputation for shooting coots was secure after all; we would all be “leaving today”. I am unable to swim a stroke, despite the fact that a large part of my life seems to have been spent on water, and none of our party could in any case have made that distance. Somewhere I had a kapok coat, but it was deeply buried in the baggage and this was no time to look for it. It seemed as good a place to drown as any other. Amara looked back from the bows once, and his face was very frightened.

The
tarada
wouldn’t have floated for another fifty yards. We drove at the island like a drunkenly tilting lancer, and the great curved prow thrust far into the reeds and undergrowth of its face; one second there had been the cold bright water at our sides and the next we were sitting in a boat on dry land in a green bramble thicket with the tall golden reeds meeting overhead; the uncompromising anti-climax that is at the heart of all salvation.

Hassan in the hunting canoe had been unable to reach our island. To do so he would have had to turn his already waterlogged canoe quarter on to the waves. He had to keep the bows of the canoe turned into them and he made another island by the skin of his teeth, an island some hundred yards away and no bigger than a haystack.

We offloaded the
tarada
as fully and carefully as though this had been our destination, for, as Thesiger pointed out, we might well be there for days; moreover the
tarada
could not rescue Hassan from his ivory tower until it was emptied both of baggage and water. Our island was perhaps fifteen
paces across, a jungle of giant reeds and bramble undergrowth, and it drifted sluggishly across the blue lagoon, slowed to a snail’s pace by its soggy sea-anchor of roots and turf. We made a clearing on the highest part of it, and the piled cases of ammunition and medicine gave us shelter from the wind. Amara and Sabeti set off to rescue Hassan in the now surprisingly seaworthy
tarada,
and Kathia and our late host began to cook.

Later during our long journey I used to look back with regret to that first somewhat perilous day in the marshes, for its freedom and spontaneity. Those may sound strange words to apply to some hours confined upon a drifting hulk of water-logged vegetation, but they were untrammelled by the rigid formulae of a guest—host relationship that was to become the rarely relieved pattern of all our wanderings—a double guest—host relationship for me, for I was the guest of a guest—and perhaps, too, since all decision had always to come from Thesiger, I was subconsciously pleased by something beyond his control. Freedom it seemed, and one could stretch one’s body into attitudes too informal for the hearthside of an Arab home, and stand straight upon one’s feet and feel the dignity of seeing the world from man’s natural height.

The cooking was simple in the extreme. The skinned and split coots were impaled on cut reed stumps stuck into the ground at the edge of the fire. Our host who had come as pilot had brought with him some flour and a large fish; with the flour he made thick wads of stiff dough and jammed these on to more cut reeds about the flames; the fish he merely buried among the hot feathery ash of the reed fire. These proceedings did not, it must be admitted, produce the delicious meal that would make a suitable and traditional climax to their description; in fact the majority of civilised beings would, after the first mouthfuls, have preferred to go hungry. I, who habitually eat little and have few dislikes, found it mildly distasteful, but was hungry enough to
swallow the great quantity of grey ash with which each item was coated as a rissole with breadcrumbs.

In the afternoon the wind moderated a little, not enough to give passage to the loaded
tarada,
but enough for the hunting canoe to struggle a little perilously about the lagoons. We were now without food and faced by the possible prospect of a night upon the island, so I went out with Hassan to look for more coots. No raft upon a great ocean can ever have seemed as insecure as did that hunting canoe to me; the bright blue waves broke right at the gunwale, and the whole craft lurched wildly at every stroke of the paddle. Duck and coots were everywhere, but they were wild as the wind itself, rising far out and whirling down it like leaves in an autumn gale, over the gusty water and the high reeds that were blue and gold and glorious. At length a single tufted drake came scudding downwind high and wide and black-and-white in the cold sunshine. This seemed a target on which my reputation could not suffer irretrievably; furthermore he was crossing our bows and I did not have to attempt the impossible gymnastic of turning as I sat cross-legged. I did not expect to kill him, but I did; clearly Hassan had not expected it either, and his amazement was very gratifying.

There seemed nothing more in the lagoon, and we began to return. Then, in full sight of our island, we cornered a party of coots who could not make up their minds to rise into the wind towards us. We got within thirty or forty yards of them before they rose in a bunch. Exactly as I fired the first barrel the canoe tipped downward on that side and the shot passed a yard below them; then as it lurched upward the second barrel passed six feet over their backs. Hassan stared. Never, since as a boy at a covert shoot I missed fourteen pheasants in succession and in a remarkably conspicuous position, have I felt such agonising inadequacy; moreover no one had been depending on those pheasants for food.

Thesiger, waiting at the island, was not comforting. “Now I suppose we shall have to go on no matter what the weather’s like; that little duck won’t go far among seven people, will it? I told you about the dangers of a reputation built on flukes. Your name’s mud among these boys now.”

But the wind was dying when we left in the early evening. We skirted the fringe of Zikri, threading our way between the islands and through lagoons that gradually became smaller until we were once more among broad, ill-defined waterways with the reed-beds and bulrushes lower and less dense at our flanks.

As the sun began to set the wind dropped to a breath, and the confined water became glass calm, a mirror reflecting a sky from which all colour had ebbed, and even the sun sinking behind the sharply etched
cheval de frise
of reed tops was a blanched glare of light without hue. The great wilderness of water and reeds became pressing and mysterious as does a forest when the darkness comes, and with the hush of evening came the voices of the frogs.