The Prophet's Camel Bell (15 page)

“Here is the man. He is yours.”

The thief sweated and shook. His accomplice had fled, he said, but he agreed to take Jack to the place where the stuff was cached, provided Jack would promise not to go to the police. Jack's sense of British justice at that point was not nearly so strong as his desire to recover his theodolite and the invaluable papers which represented months of work. He readily agreed. They drove out across the Haud, and there, in a deserted
zareba
, they found everything hidden. Recalling it, Jack laughed.

“You won't believe this,” he said, “but I swear it's true. After he showed us the
zareba
, the first thing he did was to ask me for a cigarette. I was so surprised that I gave it to him. I figured that any man who had that much brass neck deserved one.”

The thief had revealed his disappointment in the theodolite. It was in a large wooden box, and when he stole it he thought it was a chest full of gold.

As we listened to the story, Mohamed brought around mugs of tea.

“No Ramadan today!”

They would make up the day of fasting later. Such days as this did not occur often. This was a victory, to be celebrated
fittingly, with healths drunk in scalding tea and the story, embellished and embroidered, recounted again and again.

We discovered, a few days later, that people in nearby Somali camps were very upset about the theft, as they considered it a blot on their honour. Some of the Eidagalla pointed out that the thieves were members of the Arap tribe, and there were murmurings in the area to the effect that no one would feel safe until “spears have been raised against the Arap.” Thus are tribal wars touched off. Fortunately the muttering died down after a while, and no spears were raised.

But the tale lived on, and was told many times around the fire at night, and lost nothing in the telling. For all we know, fifty years from now the Eidagalla in the Haud may be chanting a
gabei
called
The Thief of Selahleh
which tells how Abdi the warrior and Hersi the orator outwitted the enemy and vanquished him utterly, although by that time it will have been forgotten what was stolen and from whom. And so perhaps the theodolite case may be transformed, after all, into some rare carved chest laden with golden coins and necklaces like the sun.

A
t last the long-expected news – the tractors and scrapers for the job would be arriving soon. Berbera had no port facilities for unloading such heavy equipment, so the machines were being sent to Djibouti in French Somaliland. We set off for Djibouti to collect them.

Guś and Sheila and Musa travelled with us. Guś wanted to do some language research among the Esa people of Borama district and also among the Djibouti Somalis. When we arrived at Borama, however, a message was waiting – the ship had been delayed.

“I might have known something like this would happen,” Jack said bitterly. “We may as well stay here until we hear from the shipping agent.”

His patience was almost at an end. He had been waiting for this equipment for months, and now was beginning to wonder if it would somehow elude him for ever.

Guś and Musa decided to push on to Djibouti alone, while Sheila remained with us at Borama. They went on foot, hoping to catch a passing trade-truck. When they had departed, we were a dismal trio. The resthouse was bare and
cheerless, and we had nothing to do. Jack was depressed, feeling he would never get started on the actual construction of the
ballehs
, the sites of which had been chosen and the plans completed for some time. Sheila was worried about Guś, who had set out with enthusiasm but hardly any money.

“What if they can't get a lift? They can't possibly walk –”

Already in her mind's eye she saw him lying dead of sunstroke or dehydration on the scorching sands of the Guban. I would have felt exactly the same if it had been my husband who had gone, but as it was not, I had no doubt that Guś and Musa would make the trek in perfect safety. What I did feel, however, was a sharp sense of disappointment over their departure, for I had hoped we might continue at Borama the work begun at Sheikh, that of translating some of the Somali poems. Pessimistically, I felt they would arrive back at Borama just as we were leaving.

But one evening Guś and Musa returned. They were in poor condition, having been forced to walk a good part of the way back. Although they travelled at night when the sand was cooler, they had worn out their sandals and had almost worn out the soles of their feet as well. Plied with tea, food and questions, they made a rapid recovery and recounted some of their experiences.

“We were lucky to get a ride to Djibouti with that English doctor,” Musa said, “but when we got started, we found he was taking along a young officer of the Somaliland Scouts, as well. Now this officer is a real sahib – you understand what I mean? We are driving along the road, you see, and an old man is crossing and does not get out of the way quickly, so the doctor slows down. The Army man says ‘Shall I get out and shoot him?' A joke, yes, but as I am Somali, like the old man, I am not greatly amused. Next we stop at a well,
where many Somalis are drawing their drinking water. Our officer gets out and washes his hands in the well. Now, you know, to Muslims this is a very offensive thing. Guś and the doctor try to explain, but no. What does he care? The people at the well begin to threaten, and finally we manage to drag him away. When we reach Djibouti, the doctor goes off to the hospital. Guś and I go to the town. The Army man goes somewhere – I don't know or care, and I think I will never see him again. But such good fortune is not to be. Later, we are walking along the shore when we see the doctor. He is very angry, and we soon see why. The Army man has got drunk and has taken the doctor's car away. He has left it on the beach while he went swimming. The tide has come up, and now the car is stuck. We help the doctor to get it out – what a business, wading in the sea, the water up to our knees. At last we get it going, and then the Army man comes floating in like a big fish, and says he does not see why the doctor is making such a fuss. The doctor then says some things which I shall not repeat to you. Next, we all go back to town. The doctor asks us to look after his car while he finishes his business. This we do, but the officer, who is still not very sober, stays also. The sellers in the marketplace begin to crowd around, offering melons for sale. These melons are not worth one rupee each, you understand, but I think if the officer wants to spend a whole rupee on a melon, why should I say anything? He becomes rather confused, and takes one melon, then another, then another and another – one rupee, one rupee, one rupee. Never have I seen such spending. He cannot stop – more melons, more rupees. I almost say ‘Here is my head – one rupee'.”

Musa's piratical moustache quivered with his deep laughter. To him, the poetic justice of this one episode was worth the whole wretched trip.

Now that Guś and Musa were back, we settled down to work on the poetry. It was a three-way process. Musa knew a great many
gabei
and
belwo
, and had a wide knowledge of the background and style of Somali poetry, but while his command of English was fluent, he had to discuss the subtler connotations of the words with Guś in Somali. Guś and I then discussed the lines in English, and I took notes on the literal meanings, the implications of words, the references to Somali traditions or customs. I would then be able to work on this material later, and attempt to put it into some form approximating a poem, while preserving as much as possible of the meaning and spirit of the original.

I had never before found Musa easy to talk with. I had been impressed by him – who would not be? He looked like a young sultan. But I had never felt at ease with him. For one thing, he was not accustomed to women who talked as much as I did, and sensing some constraint or disapproval in him, I tended to agree with him too often, mistakenly hoping to set the matter right in this way but in fact only making it more difficult for both of us. Now, one evening, discussing a long
gabei
by Salaan Arrabey, who was reckoned to be one of the best Somali poets, I was all at once aware of how easily we were talking and arguing. Tomorrow, probably, we would once again feel ill-at-ease with one another. But for a while, discussing this
gabei
which interested both of us greatly, the awkwardness was forgotten.

There were so many poems which could have been done, and we had such a limited time that we were able only to skim a little of the surface. Still, it was something. When Jack and I left Borama, I had a sheaf of notes to work on, several
gabei
and perhaps a dozen
belwo
.

——

Near Borama were the ruins of an ancient city, or perhaps several cities built on the same site. One might have been pre-Islamic, although nothing much seemed to be known about it. The more recent one, we were told, was believed to be about a thousand years old. It had been built originally by Arab traders, and why it was deserted was a mystery. In his book
Somaliland
, Drake-Brockman suggested that these ruined cities, which were to be found in several places in this country, were abandoned by the Arabs when they found the ivory and ostrich-feather trade was falling off, or when they discovered that the local Galla people would bring their goods to the coast and sell just as cheaply there. To what extent this theory would be supported nowadays by archaeologists, I do not know. Many of the walls of this particular city still stood, and where they had crumbled it appeared to be due to time and to the crowding in of foliage rather than any sudden devastation.

Amoud
was the name the Somalis had given it. The word means “sand,” and the name was apt, for the city had returned to the mountains and the desert. When it was alive, Amoud must have spread up the hillside, the brown-yellow houses mellow in the sunlight, among the stiff acacias and the candelabra trees. In the marketplace, the donkeys and camels would have been laden with the sacks of aromatic gums and ivory, the bundles of ostrich plumes, and would have set out for the coast, where the goods would be taken by dhow to Arabia. The young Arab traders would have brought back to Amoud their dark-skinned Galla brides, those women from whom came the beginning of the Somali race. The town would have been a babble of noise, shouting and haggling, the scuffing of feet along the rough stone roads, the uproar of camels.

But now, as we walked through it, Amoud had been dead a long time. The walls were falling away, and the mosque
was desecrated by birds and small wild animals. The candelabra trees had grown inside the houses, their bright green tapers looking as though they had been here always. Generations of the
galol
tree had grown old and fallen, and their boughs were strewn around the ground. Blue flowers the colour of kingfishers grew in the tangled grasses, and the trees cast long shadows on the skeleton of Amoud.

On the way down the shale-littered hillside, we saw three young Somali girls on their way back to their huts at the foot of the hill. The girls paused and stared at us, calmly, disinterestedly. Looking at them, I felt they had something of the same timeless quality as the hills and the sand. The Arabs came and went, and they left their religion and their sons. The British came and soon would go, too, leaving, for what they were worth, some ideas of an administration different from the tribal patterns, some knowledge of modern medicine, some ability to read and write in a European language. But the bulk of the Somali people were not greatly affected by these things. They still built their round grass huts, and herded the camels, and told tales around the fires at night, and scorned the settled life, just as they did before the Arabs came, a thousand years ago or more. Change had been slow here. Maybe it would quicken its pace soon. Perhaps their own leaders would be able to think what to do with a country that was so largely sand and thorn trees. Within the next few generations, the nomadic tribal ways might splinter and break, and from their breaking a new thing might grow. Or perhaps their leaders would wrangle interminably, unable to discover a way of overcoming the desert. But whatever happened, for a long time the people would go on as they always had, herding their camels between the wells and the grazing, the grazing and the wells.

Looking at Amoud, and then at the nomads' huts crouched at the bottom of the hills, I could not help thinking of the western world with its power and its glory, its skyscrapers and its atom bombs, and wondering if these desert men would not after all survive longer than we did, and remain to seed the human race again, after our cities lay as dead as Amoud, the city of the sands.

At Abdul Qadr, a very small village, the only one between Borama and Zeilah, the hills were completely bald. A heat haze shimmered glassily from the black rock, and the village coiled around the hillside like something out of a science-fiction story, an earth settlement with a precarious foothold on a hot and empty asteroid. When we drew closer, however, we were astonished to see a procession of women and girls coming to meet us, all of them carrying vessels filled with fresh camel milk. Where did they feed their herds? Milk was always a problem for us. Our staff, like all Somalis, craved it, and in the Haud, the best grazing area in the land, even after the
Gu
rains we had difficulty in obtaining enough. How was it that at Abdul Qadr we found plenty? Mohamed expressed the belief that the Abdul Qadr people left vessels of water in some magic place and when they returned they found the water turned to milk.

“The dry thorns in this place,” Omar suggested, “give better milk than the finest camel.”

They were joking, but only half. We were all in agreement – the people of Abdul Qadr must be the personal friends of Allah.

Our lightheartedness disappeared as we left the hills behind and crawled in convoy, Land-Rover and trucks, out onto the Guban. Our map of Somaliland classified the roads as “Roads, principal; Roads, other; Tracks (motorable in some
cases),” but in fact there were no “Roads, principal” in our sense of the words, no smooth highways where driving was easy. Most of the roads were “other,” and a good many of them fell into the third category. When we emerged onto the coastal plain, the track meandered through the sand and frequently disappeared altogether. All we could do was head in the right direction and hope for the best. The Land-Rover bumped over the rough desert, and we were shaken like seeds in a gourd rattle. The heat was so intense that I breathed raspingly, gulping at the air. Whenever we stopped the Land-Rover and got out, the sun was like a hammer blow on my head and the nape of my neck. Headache trammelled like hooves through my skull. We drove on and on and on, seeing around us only the rusty sand and occasional clumps of coarse grass.