The Prophet's Camel Bell (18 page)

Once when we got back to the consul's bungalow, we found the livingroom filled with locusts. The entire front of the house was like concrete lace, open to the air in geometrical patterns, a design which ensured a maximum of insects. The locusts were everywhere – the sound of their wings was
louder than the steady chunking of the ceiling fans. But we, exhausted and full of gin-and-lime, couldn't have cared less. Jack and the consul got out rackets and used the locusts as tennis balls.

“How many do you make it?” the consul puffed cheerily, swiping away at the locusts.

“I haven't a clue – I lost count after the first couple of dozen.”

Victory was achieved at last. The livingroom floor was strewn with locust corpses, and we retired and slept fitfully under the eternally whirling fans.

For Jack, the days were a nightmare. The equipment consisted of two Caterpillar D-4 tractors with scrapers, and a D-4 bulldozer. When he first went to the docks to supervise the unloading, he discovered that the machinery was packed down under everything else in the ship's hold, crated in gigantic wooden boxes, one of which was jammed solidly behind a pillar. No one had the remotest idea how to get them out. In the port, there were no cranes heavy enough, so the job had to be done mainly with the ship's limited equipment. Jack toiled like a coolie on the docks all day and every day. When the boxes were finally lifted out, the task of uncrating the tractors remained, and then loading them one at a time onto the old diesel truck, Alfie, and getting them back to Zeilah, where they would be temporarily left until they could be transported one by one back to Hargeisa. Ugo and Jack, in a situation filled with all kinds of technical difficulties, were forced to communicate in a tortuous manner. When Jack wanted to say something to Ugo, he gave Hersi the message in English. Hersi told Arabetto in Somali, and Arabetto passed the information on to Ugo in Italian. The reply came back in the same way. Considering that Hersi and Arabetto knew nothing
about tractors, and that the words for various parts of the machines did not exist in the Somali language, it was little wonder that Jack and Ugo frequently had to make wild guesses about what the other was trying to say. As if these difficulties were not enough, the crane operator at the port spoke only French, which none of our party could speak.

“I know now,” Jack said heavily, “exactly what the tower of Babel must have been like.”

The sun blazed down on the docks, and the harsh glare of light never let up for an instant. One afternoon Jack arrived back at the bungalow and hesitated in the doorway.

“Peg – give me a hand, will you?”

I was immediately alarmed. What was the matter?

“I can't seem to see,” he said, his voice tight with anxiety.

He had suddenly gone blind. He had a splitting headache and everything had turned to darkness. I was frantic with worry, but the consul remained unperturbed.

“Sunstroke,” he said calmly. “Bound to happen sooner or later, working out in the sun all day. It'll probably pass off after an hour or so.”

What if it didn't? I had the momentary unreasonable conviction that every doctor in Djibouti was incompetent, irresponsible and probably alcoholic. Later, when all was well, I recalled this feeling with some shame, and could no longer maintain the same comfortable scorn at the Hargeisa mem-sahibs' delusions about the country, the host of dangers they conjured up to frighten or entertain themselves.

After a few hours, just as the consul predicted, the mist lifted from Jack's eyes, and the next morning he was back at the docks again.

We were as glad to leave Djibouti as we had been to arrive. When the last piece of machinery was unloaded and
ready to be taken to Zeilah, everyone climbed aboard and we were off. The Land-Rover and trucks drove for the last time through the paved streets, past the misshapen old buildings, past the slickly shining new apartments, past shuttered mysterious dwellings, past the clean whitewashed walls of the
Pharmacie de la Mer Route
, past
Le Palmier En Zinc
, past the Italian
gialotto
shop, past the rotting shanties of the
magala
, past the date palms with their bunches of orange-brown fruit, past white-robed priests on bicycles and chalk-faced women looking forlorn under the small umbrellas of their topees.

Farewell to the homesick city, the shabby Paris of the Gulf of Aden.
Nabad gelyo
, Djibouti – may we never see you again.

From Zeilah, we set out onto the Guban in the late afternoon, when the heat was not quite so severe. As usual, we moved in convoy – first, the Land-Rover with Jack and myself and Abdi; next, Ugo driving Alfie, which was loaded with a tractor and was towing a scraper; then the Bedford truck, driven by Arabetto and carrying Mohamed and Hersi as well as the gang of labourers; and finally the old
P.W.D.
tractor from Zeilah, which we had borrowed to go part of the way with us, through the worst of the sand, in case the heavily loaded diesel got stuck. Jack did not want the new tractors driven back to Hargeisa under their own power, as the trek might wreck them and would in any event take too long.

Seven miles out of Zeilah, the diesel got bogged down in the sand. Everyone piled out and began digging, poking thorn boughs under the wheels, shoving. The
P.W.D.
tractor finally hauled Alfie out, but at that moment the diesel's steering broke. Ugo and Jack ingeniously managed to fix the steering with bits of wire, a job which took two hours. When we got going once
more, it was growing dark. We forged ahead and reached a dry river-bed where the loose sand lay thick and treacherous. The diesel sank down once more and almost turned over. This time it was seriously stuck. Even the old tractor could not budge it. Alfie's wheels spun furiously, unable to grip in the slithering sand. Even if the diesel could be dragged across the river-bed, the danger area extended for several miles ahead, the sand lying soft and crumbly as brown sugar.

Then, all at once, the night arrived and with it a sand storm. We were on the flat treeless Guban, with only a few clumps of grass to stop the blowing sand, and the wind was careering across the desert. Arabetto shifted the Bedford so that work could be done by its lights, and Abdi did the same with the Land-Rover. Fortunately, Jack had insisted upon bringing the boards from the tractor crate, thinking they might possibly come in useful.

“We'll try making a portable road,” he decided.

Everyone seized a board. These were thrown down in front of the diesel's wheels, and as Alfie began to heave out of the sand, towed by the old tractor, the wheels gripped on the boards and crunched slowly ahead. For some distance the moving road of boards continued. As the wheels came grinding forward, someone would pick up the last board and run with it to the front of the diesel. All the time the sand was whipping against us, peppering our limbs as though with buckshot, filling our eyes and mouths with grit. The wind howled and shrieked.

“
Wallahi!
” Mohamed gasped. “I think this wind is some
shaitan
, some devil.”

By midnight we had been travelling for eight hours and we had gone exactly twenty-five miles. Jack and I slept at last in the Land-Rover, while the Somalis and Ugo went to sleep
in the trucks. We were all so tired we hardly cared whether we lived or died.

But something had been changed by this tussle with the desert. After this night, when Jack managed somehow to devise ways of getting our unwieldy caravan across the shifting sands of the Guban, the attitude of the Somalis was subtly different. They began speaking, for the first time, of “the
balleh
camp” or “we belong to the
balleh
job,” as though the work now possessed an entity. And they began to call Jack
odei-gi rer-ki
, the old man of the tribe.

T
he green of the good season had faded from the Haud, and the Somalis were wondering if the
Dhair
rains, which sometimes fell in autumn, would come this year. If the
Dhair
rains failed, there would be trouble here when the winter drought set in, for the Habr Awal from the Guban were moving up into the Haud plateau this year. Every morning we saw families of Habr Awal trekking past our camp, the women and girls leading the heavily loaded burden camels, the children and old people shouting at the flocks that trooped dustily along, and in the distance, the men whistling and singing, or blowing on the wooden flutes which were used to keep the shambling camel herds together.

“These people having bloody poor brains,” said Hersi, who was Habr Yunis. “They should not coming this place.”

Mohamed, being Habr Awal, naturally took a somewhat different view.

“Many Habr Awal camels come too much sick this time,” he said. “I hear it – Habr Awal people all saying must be they find some different-different grass, for make their
camels get some healthy. Must be they come here. They never make trouble this place.”

The young camels were being weaned now. The Somalis had a sharply effective way of accomplishing this separation. They placed a forked stick over the small camel's nose, and when the infant tried to get milk from its mother, the prong of the stick jabbed the she-camel, and she moved rapidly away, no doubt leaving the bewildered young one, who was unaware that it had a spear on its snout, to wonder why it had been rejected so peremptorily. Could it be that the foul tempers of full-grown camels dated back to this early traumatic experience? The Somalis remained unaware of any such interesting possibility. Cast into abrupt independence, the young camels nibbled sadly at the coarse grass, and the milk was saved for the people.

Happy to be back in camp, I pottered around our truck-home, arranging our meagre furniture – bed here, table there, camp chairs next to the table, cases of tinned food stowed under the bed. Re-acquainting myself with the desert, I had a feeling of homecoming. Here at Balleh Gehli was the shallow pool, now only a shiny skin of cracked mud, where one morning just after the rains I walked down early and saw a child filling a water-vessel, and she, surprised, turned suddenly and gave me a smile of such radiance I could scarcely believe it was meant for a stranger. And here were the
myrrah
trees which a few months ago were covered with small yellow blossoms, the fragrance of which was subtler and sweeter than any bottled perfume. I was glad to see everything. Even the ember-eyed
balanballis
, haunting the truck at night with its black wings, seemed almost an old acquaintance.

Our camp had expanded to fairly large proportions. As well as Hersi, Mohamed, Abdi, Arabetto, Omar, Mohamedyero
and the labourers, we now had the tractor drivers. Also, this time Gino was with us, for now that the construction of the
ballehs
was about to begin, Jack needed a foreman on the job. A middle-aged Italian, Gino was built like a wrestler, a man of enormous strength, but very gently spoken. He lived in a caravan which he had built for himself, a marvellous structure complete with screened windows. He had promised to bequeath it to us when he went on leave, and although I did not wish him to be gone, I could not help eyeing the caravan enviously from time to time. Only those who have never experienced anything except comfort think that physical comfort is unimportant.

But we, too, had a luxury now – a separate diningroom which the Somali labourers had built for us. It was a brushwood hut made of twined acacia branches and filled in with clumps of a plant called
gedhamar
, a kind of herb with a pleasant smell similar to summer savoury. The woven branches allowed just enough sunlight to filter in, but the heat was kept out. Our water bottles, stored here, became chilled at night and remained cool until noon. When the sun was shining across the top of the hut, the bunches of
gedhamar
looked silvery grey, as though the ceiling had been hung with tinsel. During the days I worked in the hut, and it was the most agreeable place for work which I have ever had. I had finished with the translations of the Somali poems I obtained from Guś and Musa, and now I was collecting Somali tales, which were told to me by Hersi and Arabetto in their spare time.

The main cause for jubilation in our return to the Haud was that the excavation of the first
balleh
was about to begin. For us, this was a landmark, a historic occasion. The Somalis in camp, however, did not entirely share our excitement. They tended to be blasé about the whole thing. Having become
accustomed to the sight of the heavy machinery while the tractor drivers were being trained, Hersi and Abdi and the others now felt that these roaring giants held no mysteries. With a fine sense of onomatopoeia, they called the tractors
agaf-agaf
, and because they had no basic understanding of machinery, they took the earth-moving equipment completely for granted. Although they swanked a little when they showed it off to visiting tribesmen, they were not amazed at its performance. It was just one of those things. A
balleh
, after all, was only a hole in the ground – digging one should be a simple matter. They did not doubt that the
agaf-agaf
would accomplish this task easily, but they saw nothing to marvel at when the steel-clawed ripper successfully attacked the red Haud soil, which was almost as hard as concrete, and broke it so that the scrapers could follow and scoop it up. Jack was wryly amused.

“They don't know how difficult it is, nor how many problems we've had in actually getting to this point, so it doesn't seem wonderful to them in the slightest.”

I could understand their naïve sophistication, for I had no comprehension of machinery, either, but at least I had shared some of the headaches involved in reaching this stage of operations.

The project, as originally conceived, was to have provided a chain of reservoirs to catch and hold rainwater along most of the southern boundary of the Protectorate. On paper the scheme had appeared relatively straightforward, but Jack's initial reconnaissance over the west and central stretches of the area showed clearly that, like so many projects in Africa, this one would be anything but simple. The Haud was virtually featureless and such slopes as existed were generally long and gentle, particularly in the vicinity of the boundary. There were
not even the rudiments of streams, stream channels or defined water-courses, however seasonal. Dams were definitely out, because there was nothing to dam. Some form of pond would have to be produced which, while basically nothing more than a large hole in the ground, would be scientifically designed and sited.