A Reed Shaken by the Wind (8 page)

Late in the afternoon, when the sun has begun to light the distant walls of reeds to a flaring orange, the laden canoes begin to labour homeward to their island houses. The green fodder is spread on the buffalo platform, the buffaloes return in an orgy of despair from their fruitless and weary day, and settle down with grudging satisfaction to a ruminative and sappy night with the
hashish.
In the end they are little other than patient machines for processing the reeds into a suitable fuel. Once on dry land these exigent creatures are easily tormented by mosquitoes and flies; and, perhaps because they are in a bovine way basically neurotic, the buffaloes quickly go down in condition if this nuisance is not dealt with. Here again their owners attend assiduously to their wants, and light small fires of dung above whose wreathing pale blue smoke the horned and wrinkled heads float disembodied as gods above a cloud of incense.

Despite their inimitable air of sloth the buffaloes give a strange impression of sentience and enlightened self-interest, and it is small surprise to learn that each cow answers her name promptly when she is called to be milked. The milking is customarily done by men, never by women, and Thesiger notes that the same is true of camels among the Bedouin of Southern Arabia.

I was never able to make out precisely what determined whether the buffaloes slept on the buffalo platform or round the fireside with the family. The calves, especially when string-muzzled at the time of weaning, often sleep right inside the house and near enough to the fire for their hair to singe and for sparks on their hides to be extinguished by the horny soles of bare feet. Sometimes the cows would be
driven back protesting when they tried to force an entrance, but at other times their lumbering forms seemed to be accepted as a sort of natural obstacle, like a dry watercourse, to be circumvented with acquiescence. Accidents do sometimes result from this mingling of the ponderous with the essentially fragile, and Thesiger treated more than one child whose face as it slept had been stepped on during the night by a restless buffalo.

Soon after we had eaten I was sent out to shoot duck for the pot, taking with me four cartridges, and returned after some two hours with a bag whose entry in a game book would suggest that I had passed a somewhat whimsical afternoon’s sport in a provincial menagerie. I had shot a tufted duck—so far so good—a red-crested pochard, a pelican, and a large water snake.

We had set out through a country of broad still lagoons on which rested wild and wary groups of duck and coot. I had learned my lesson about reckless expenditure of ammunition, and resisted firmly the urgent temptations of the boy who paddled my canoe to fire at the racing packs that whickered by two gunshots away. The red-crested pochard was alone and loath to leave the little lagoon he had made his own; he circled it and fell with a splash, lying with pathetic splendour of plumage on the smooth blue water. The tufted duck came next, and I felt that I had in some way atoned for my outrage by killing something so essentially dowdy and insignificant. The canoe rasped through a reed-bed and came out on another jewelled lagoon, upon whose surface rested a small flock of pelicans, uncouth yet stately.

For some reason the pelicans have not yet learned to fear man sufficiently, though small numbers of them are regularly killed by the Arabs, not for their flesh, which is left to waste, nor for any part of their plumage, but for the pendulous
pouch of skin below the bill. It is this thin membrane, stretched and dried to a smooth parchment-like surface, that gives to the Marsh Arabs’ drums and tambourines their peculiarly resonant note of urgency and hysteria. Often as the pitch of the drumming becomes faster and more fevered the membrane splits, and it is no unusual thing for a drummer to burst several drums in the course of an evening’s entertainment. But the great white pelicans, so oafish and ungraceful on land or water but so irresistibly glorious in their flight, have either not yet learned to treat man as a serious enemy or they underestimate the length of his reach. They display nervousness, it is true, but often when well within gunshot. They turn curiously truncated rumps to their pursuers, paddling away with short nervous strokes and backward glances that have an air of chagrin and reproach.

I was anxious for purely subjective reasons that the pelican I was required to kill should be killed cleanly and instantaneously, but the danger of shot puncturing the pouch precluded aiming at the head. I compromised with the base of the neck, and was relieved when my vast victim collapsed without so much as a wing-flap. At the shot his companions rose with slow orderly strokes of their mighty wings, and while the boy was stripping the pouch from the dead bird the poor boobies came back to wheel round and round on motionless sails low over our heads, looking down wonderingly at the white inert carcase.

We were on our way home, paddling over still open water with a high reed-bed some thirty yards away on our right when I saw the snake, bright and coppery against the yellow reeds, coiled spirally round a bunch of their stems a foot or two above the water. Both the colour and the pose were quintessentially evil, and it did not need the feverish chittering of the Arab boy to tell me that we were in the presence of a known enemy. In moments of extreme tension the marsh people find it difficult, probably impossible, to whisper; their voices emerge as a rapid and febrile squeak,
small, but with an impression of great force canalised through an infinitely narrow channel. The frustration inherent in the reduced volume finds simultaneous expression in magnified gesticulation, so that even the simple act of pointing becomes a series of rapier thrusts of the forefinger.

Just so the boy pointed out the snake to me after I had pointed it out to him, and as I brought the gun up to my shoulder the urgency of his injunctions to shoot was shrill as a flock of bats about my ears. It was not a very big snake, perhaps four or five feet long, and was unspectacular by comparison with the positive sea serpent of which I caught an uncomfortable glimpse a few weeks later.

I do not know whether these water snakes are all of one species, or even, with any certainty, their scientific name, for the Arabs hold them in such horror that to touch even a patently dead one creates a true panic.
Arbid
they are called by the marshmen, and they are said to be almost invariably deadly, killing in about twenty minutes after the bite. Thesiger had the previous year met a party returning from the funeral of a girl who had been killed by an
arbid;
they had carried the girl’s body in their canoe to the place of burial, and when they had lifted it ashore a great gush of black blood had come from her mouth. This tale suggests that the
arbid
is of the viper tribe, whose venom kills by producing violent haemorrhage, rather than one of the colubrines, which act chiefly upon the nervous system and bring about death by respiratory paralysis.

Arbid
undoubtedly grow to a very great size. Some weeks after I had shot this first snake as the conclusion to a curiously mixed bag, I had a fleeting and extremely close-up view of a snake whose size I should not, for fear of ridicule, care to estimate. We were travelling between villages in the fully laden
tarada,
with the crew of four canoe boys. Thesiger habitually accorded me the place of honour in the
tarada,
near to the stern of the canoe and facing forwards, while he himself sat opposite to me facing astern. There
were two paddlers behind me, and two in the bows beyond him, but he was the only man who faced backward over the ground we had covered. We were passing through a narrow waterway with tall reeds pressing close at each side when my glance came quite by chance to rest on Thesiger’s face. Just as it did so I saw his own gaze freeze with an expression of unbelieving horror on a point that seemed to me to be my own right elbow. His expression was so totally unfamiliar, so shockingly unlike his normal impassivity, that my head flicked round without a thought of asking him what he saw. About two feet from the side of the canoe, and a very little behind me, the last few feet of a great snake were slithering from the reeds into the water. From the character of the movements alone it was clearly the very end of the snake’s body, yet the part that I was looking at was as thick as my forearm—which must, incidentally, have passed within touching distance of the head a second or two earlier. Thesiger had seen little more of the snake than I had, for it had not caught his eye until a fraction of a second before I had turned my head to see those last disappearing coils.

We were entertained that night by a dancer whose name I can no longer remember; it must, I think, have been a difficult name, for I referred to him then, and think of him now, as the Performing Flea. He must have been about eight years old. When at rest he looked a very small dreamy child with preternaturally large and luminous eyes like a lemur, and a face of gentle sadness. His appearance gave no more suggestion of his weird potentialities than does a stick of high explosive, yet when I think now of dancing in the marshlands it is that tiny whirlwind scrap of humanity that comes to my mind first.

Starlight and star-reflecting water through the slit doorway; inside, the focus of firelight, pale high-thrusting flames from a long column of reeds, and fifty-four people huddled
round it in a space of four yards by four. The heads of those farthest from the fire were dim in the shadows. “Dance,” said someone to the boy, and he made no half-hearted excuses. The centre of the circle shuffled back a little from the fire, leaving him a space which I judged to be no more than three feet by four.

The drums started, in slow rhythm at first, as the child began, two paces forward, two paces backward, without turning.
Ti-tumti-túm, ti-tumti-túm.
The child looked solemn, graceful, and controlled; his limbs moved with the sure precision of an adult, but there was as yet no hint of violence in the dance. Slowly the drums gathered speed and urgency and his feet kept pace with them quicker and quicker,
ti-tumti-túm, ti-tumti-túm, ti-tumti-túm.
His body lunged forward as though he would invade the crowd, and shot back from them again as though catapulted from their faces. The tempo grew faster and faster, and suddenly his shoulders began to keep time with his feet, each moving independently as though they were part of a machine driven by the same pounding crankshaft. Back and forth flew the feet, up and down shot the shoulders, and the huddled figures beyond the firelight roared out a chant in time with the drums while their clicking fingers smashed out the quickening rhythm. As the flames flickered down, the squatting holder of the reed bundle too absorbed to remember his task, the silhouette of the dancer was lost in his whirling
dish-dasha
; then, abruptly, as the reeds were thrust up again into the smouldering ash and the flame shot up, the outline of the dancer’s body was thrown into sharp relief behind its thin covering, childish and slight as a tadpole. The boy brought another group of muscles into play, and his hips leapt and thrust in time with the flying feet and jerking shoulders, so that every part of the wildly capering figure was in separate and intricate movement. The dance was now frankly erotic. As the rhythm became faster still the boy would halt suddenly while first one and then the other shoulder shivered
and vibrated in convulsive spasms, or his hips writhed and shimmied in a paradox of controlled abandon. His eyes rolled and his tongue protruded; only the exquisite timing of his movements to the drums betrayed that he was not in epileptic seizure.

So caught did he seem in the demoniac rhythm of his own weaving that there seemed no possible end to the dance; here, it seemed, was the magic by which
le moment critique
became
l’
heure
critique.
For more than twenty minutes he maintained the pace without a falter, then suddenly he flung himself to the ground and lay jerking and twitching to the beat of the drums in a frenzied yet stylised pantomime of orgasm.

The drums stopped, and he rose in a storm of laughter and applause. Seated cross-legged again at the side of the reed hearth he was once more a staid and demure child, big-eyed, shy and wondering. His breathing was not perceptibly quickened, nor at the end of a twenty-minute encore was he more ruffled than if he had awoken from a light refreshing sleep.

In the morning we went out to shoot pig. Much as the water buffaloes are the mainstay of the marshmen’s life, so the wild pig of the marshes are the greatest and most universal enemy. They are one of the commonest animals of the marshes, and they compare to the wild pig of Europe, or, I think, of India, as a Great Dane would compare to a terrier. They are probably the largest pig in the world. They are huge, evil-tempered, and useless; for their flesh is unclean food to any Muslim, and their drab, well-camouflaged hulks lurk in every reed-bed. Here they build for themselves little soggy islands of broken reed on which to sleep, and often a party of
hashish
-gatherers, forcing its way through the reeds, stumbles unaware on a still form that becomes in a moment a raging tornado of slashing tusks that rip the flesh
like knives and leave white bone open to the sky. Whether the pig actually kills or not is largely a matter of chance and whether the victim has fallen on his back or face, for after a sort of routine savaging of a few seconds the pig usually makes off.

The most serious injuries result when the victim has fallen on his back, exposing his face, throat, and stomach to the onslaught of the tusks, and these wounds are often fatal. But because the pig never stays to make sure that his enemy is dead there is always a good chance of escape, and a great many of the Ma’dan carry scars of past gorings that they have survived. Pig will even attack a large canoe if it surprises them while sleeping, and Thesiger told me that he had seen the bows of a thirty-six-foot
tarada
completely stove in in this way.

It is small wonder that the marshmen hate the wild pig, and kill them by any possible means. Thesiger, who is a very good shot with a rifle, had earned the gratitude of many villages many times over, for he had killed literally hundreds of pig during his years among the Ma’dan, and they now felt it to be part of his natural function, like the doctoring of their diseases. But firearms are not universal, and ammunition rare by comparison to the great number of pig, so that the marshmen’s means of attack are strictly limited. They say—though I never saw it done myself, and it contrasts strangely with the terror I have seen them display toward a moribund boar struggling in deep water—that when a pig is swimming a man will dive into the water and drown it by imprisoning the hind feet. Many pigs, too, are killed by spears and clubs as they swim; one village we passed through claimed to have killed as many as a hundred and forty pigs in a year. The young fallow-spotted piglets they slaughter unmercifully and unpleasantly, for they are the enemy shorn of his weapons, and can show no fight. In these circumstances the marshmen show an active cruelty no different from the treatment of any other scapegoat elsewhere, but
difficult superficially to distinguish from their normal total indifference to animal suffering. They do not at any time or in any way identify themselves with animals, and this utter callousness can give a misleading impression of active sadism. Every animal that a Muslim ever kills must, if it is to be eaten, be bled to death with a slit throat and its head pointing towards Mecca, and this, if it is a large animal, can be a peculiarly revolting procedure. Since all reaction to animal situations can only be a result of identification with the animal, and since the identification is entirely absent, there is no inhibition about display of other emotions that may be aroused; amusement, for instance, at the grotesque movements of a wounded animal. They can detect no element of pathos. I have seen several Arabs roaring with genuine laughter at the weird gyrations of a wild duck with a partially slit throat. Quite a different element creeps in when the wounded animal is a pig, but the nuance is difficult to detect.