The Prophet's Camel Bell (20 page)

Who could be angry? He was a hunter. He simply could not help shooting. But I could see, nevertheless, that these cheetah would be an embarrassment to us. For all official purposes, they must be said to have been shot on the other side of the Ethiopian border. And who could prove they were not?

One of the beasts was still alive when Abdi hauled it out of the Land-Rover. With the Somalis' usual nonchalance about a wounded animal, all the men in camp stood around, poking at it, tormenting it, laughing. Beautiful and destroyed, it crouched on the ground. It was bleeding terribly, and its strength was almost gone, but its eyes still shone with menace. Jack and Gino were both out at the
balleh
site, and I could not cope with this situation. When I asked Abdi and the Illaloes to kill the cheetah, they paid no attention. They were enjoying this too much. Why cut short their pleasure?

The cheetah, panting and nearly dead, suddenly put every vestige of its remaining strength into one last effort. Incredibly rousing itself, it lashed out and tore a labourer's leg from knee to ankle.

Outraged shrieks all around.
Wallahi! Shaitan!
I stood aside, looking at the shocked and bleeding labourer, and could feel nothing but coldness. Fortunately, Jack arrived at this moment, fetched by the nimble Mohamedyero, who had raced out to the
balleh
with the news. He took one look, then fetched a crowbar and immediately killed the cheetah. I bandaged the labourer's leg, which was not seriously damaged, for the rip did not go deep, but I remained aloof.

Why should they have any mercy for the cheetah, who killed their sheep when it could? Life was too hard, here, for any such sentimentality. I knew this very well, but I could not help admiring the desperate courage of the animal. The Somalis thought I was foolish to want the cheetah put out of its pain at once, and I thought they were cruel to want to prolong its agony. Neither of us would alter our viewpoints.

The labourers skinned the animals and pegged the skins out to dry in the sun. The Somalis had no way of curing animal hides, other than sun-drying them. Later, several labourers spent the entire day working the skins with their hands, as Eskimos do with their teeth, to soften them. One skin was sold in the Hargeisa market, and Abdi and the Illaloes who were with him shared the money. The other, Abdi gave to us. It was a light yellow pelt with well-defined black spots. The cheetah, we learned, was the fastest animal on four feet. It was considerably smaller than the leopard, and the leopard's tail always ended in black, whereas the tail of the cheetah ended with light fur. We kept the cheetah skin, and at last smuggled it out of the country. It stayed on the floor of living-rooms in many houses, for many years, in England and West Africa and Canada, a hazard to unwary feet, and a reminder to me of different points of view. Ultimately it became a legendary beast, for our two children, when they were old enough to enjoy stories of the “olden days” before they were born, somehow developed and would not relinquish the belief that it was their father who shot this cheetah as it charged at him in the wilds of distant lands.

When Gino went on leave, there was no one in the camp who could work with metals, so Jack hired a man of the Tomal, the traditional blacksmiths to the Somalis. Mohamed Tomal
was a wisecracking but hardworking young man, full of arguments and always eager to prove his point. One day he and Jack got into a long discussion about
khat
, a leaf widely used throughout the Muslim world, where alcohol was forbidden, and chewed for its narcotic effects. In Somaliland it was against the law to sell
khat
, but truckloads of it were constantly smuggled in from Ethiopia. Mohamed Tomal put the old question to Jack.

“You
Ingrese
drink whisky and gin, but you say Somalis must no chew
khat
. How so?”

“I didn't make the laws,” Jack said. “Personally, I don't care whether you chew
khat
or not, except that it would probably make you sleepy and you wouldn't be able to work as well.”

“Oh, no!” Mohamed Tomal was shocked. “
Khat
never make man sleep. It helping he for work. A man which chewing
khat
, he work all night. All night – I swear it. And he never feel tired.”

“Oh?” Jack was sceptical.

Mohamed Tomal gave him an offended glance, but said no more. The following day, however, the blacksmith came to Jack with two gifts – a short spear, double-barbed like a fish hook, the shaft gracefully bound with brass wire, and a long knife with a wooden handle decorated with burned patterns. He had fashioned both these weapons during the night.

“I work all night,” Mohamed Tomal said triumphantly, “and I chew
khat
all night – you see, sahib? You see now?”

Jack, laughing, had to concede the point. But he still had to forbid
khat
in the camp, not that this edict ever stopped anyone.

We were becoming acquainted with the new men in our camp. Apart from Mohamed Tomal, there were the six tractor
drivers. One of the two men who had had some previous experience on tractors was Mohamed Magan. In his late twenties, he had a bulky, almost chubby appearance. His round face was impish and confident. When he walked, he had a swaggering sailor-like gait. He had never held any one job for long, for he was decidedly temperamental. Once, he told Jack, he suddenly felt fed up with his job, so he simply stopped his tractor and walked away. In the beginning, he was much the best operator of the crew, but the others began to catch up with him, for he tended to be too sure of himself and was often careless. Nevertheless, he had more feeling for machinery than the others, more dexterity and a better sense of timing in handling the Cat and scraper. But he hated to be told off about anything. One morning he was late for work, and Jack called him down about it. Mohamed Magan did not say anything, not a word. But that night we were wakened by a sudden noise.

Jack sat up, jerked into consciousness. “That's one of the Cat's starting engines!”

He had a shrewd suspicion of what was going on, so he did not hurry unduly to go and have a look. By the time he reached the
balleh
site, there was Mohamed Magan, beginning work. It was exactly four a.m.

“You tell me not to be late,” he said.

Jack did not know whether to be angry or amused, especially when Mohamed Magan put on an elaborate pantomime to show how he had to get off the tractor and feel the scraper with his hands to determine whether or not it was fully loaded, for he could see nothing in the enveloping darkness.

A complete contrast to Mohamed Magan was Ismail Ahmed. An extremely handsome boy with straight well-cut
features, he had attended Qoranic school in Hargeisa, and could read and write in Arabic. He was unusually serious about his religion, and this, in a country where everyone took religion seriously, meant that he had almost a sense of vocation. He seemed cut out for the religious life, and perhaps should have been an
imam
, a priest.

“Ismail Ahmed is not like other people,” Hersi said of him, and this was true. There was about him a quietness and a reserve which the others did not have. But he was always the first to offer to help Jack if anything needed fixing on a tractor. As a driver, he was not as good as some of the others, for he worked almost too carefully.

The one whom Jack thought would ultimately become the best driver of all was Isman Shirreh. He was an Arap, which was a tribe looked down upon by most of the others, but despite this handicap, Isman was one of the most popular men in camp. He was friendly to everyone, quick on the uptake and yet not over-confident. He and Arabetto became close friends, and in some ways they were similar. Both were, in a sense, outcasts, and both had an irrepressible laughter. Sometimes at dusk, when the Illaloes were going through their drill routine, Arabetto and Isman would march up and down nearby, burlesquing the whole performance.

Does every group, inevitably, choose a clown for itself? Ours was Ali Wys, who looked more like a Frenchman than a Somali. Slender, almost delicate, with a thin face and a long mournful nose, he wore always a quizzically humorous expression. He had a high hoarse voice which many times a day rose above the drone of the engines, as Ali shouted his comical complaints. He walked in a slow, loose, ambling fashion, and seemed to take pleasure in his role as jester. And yet there was something sad in his subtly expressive face. He had to endure
a good deal of mockery from the others, because he was neither deft nor strong enough to shift the Cat gears without apparent effort, and when he struggled at it, the others were quick to notice and taunt.

The tallest man in our camp was Omar Farah, who was called
Omar Wein
– Big Omar. Lank, gangling, rather awkward, slightly hunch-back, Omar looked like a country boy astounded to find himself in a mechanized society. He was not a boy, actually, at all, being older than most of the others and having a wife and children in Hargeisa. He was the steadiest of the drivers, solid, plodding in his work, conscientious. He had none of Ismail Ahmed's other-worldliness, and yet he was always one of the first to go out to the brushwood mosque as sundown approached and the time for evening prayers arrived.

Jama Koshin had worked on tractors before, and this was why Jack had picked him. But he wore a dull expression and seemed unresponsive to explanations about the work. The others made fun of him mercilessly, calling him stupid, and he tended, perhaps not unnaturally, to be sullen and unsociable. We were never able to penetrate his mask at all.

The Cat operators worked in two-hour shifts, spelling each other off, for the work was heavy, the sun was hot, and the dust was hard on the lungs. Jack, however, like the Cats, was at the site most of the day, from six in the morning until six at night. Even after dinner, his work was not finished, for it was a rare evening that did not bring at least one dispute to be settled. Men out in camp, cut off from their families and thrown constantly into one another's company, disagree violently and often.

“Some small trouble, sahib – I think you must listening to these informations.”

Hersi's familiar voice, and there they would be, a dozen men grouped and ready for a
shir
, the traditional Somali meeting at which the two opposing men stated their cases at fiery length, and everyone else then gave his own version of the case, holding forth with all the passionate appeals and detailed verbal reconstructions of a skilled lawyer.

A labourer had lost a purple cotton robe, and swore he had seen another labourer wearing the identical garment. The accused swore by Allah, by his entire tribe and by his mother's life that he was innocent. Did Nuur Ahmed imagine this was the only purple
lunghi
in the whole of Somaliland? But Nuur Ahmed maintained his cloth had a tear in one corner, and when Hersi Jama, acting as mediator, examined the cloth worn by Yusuf Farah, lo and behold – there was the torn place, plain as dawn. Terrific shouting followed, as the assembled company took sides. The evidence of each side was always diametrically opposed, and it was never possible to obtain any clear picture of what had actually happened.

“You know, I really wonder,” Jack said after one of these sessions, “whether they hold these
shirs
with any intention of settling the matter at all, or if it isn't merely a form of entertainment.”

But as they expected him to participate in the
shirs
, he could not very well refuse. He was concerned mainly with keeping some kind of equilibrium in camp. If these disputes were not settled in some fashion, they grew and assumed grotesque proportions.

With Gino gone, Jack was now the only one in camp who knew how to fix anything that went wrong on a tractor, so he often had this type of work to do in the evenings as well. Only gradually did I realize what a strain he was working
under, and how difficult it was for him, sometimes, to maintain an even temper. Occasionally it was impossible.

One late afternoon, Jack dropped into the brushwood hut for a quick cup of tea before going back to see about changing the oil in the tractors. All at once he dropped his cup and shot out of the hut like a man gone berserk. What on earth had happened? I stared out, but all I could see was Ali Wys, driving a tractor and scraper to its usual night-time place in the camp.

“Stop that engine!” Jack bellowed. “My God, man, what do you think you're doing?”

Stunned, Ali stopped and looked at Jack with blank incomprehension.

“I think you want the
agaf-agaf
over there, sahib –”

For a moment Jack could not trust himself to speak. Then he nodded brusquely and began to explain. When he came back to the hut, he gave me a wan grin.

“That was a narrow escape.”

“What did he do?”

“The oil was drained out,” Jack said. “If he'd run it any longer that way, the motor would have been ruined. He didn't realize. The oil pressure gauge still doesn't mean anything to him. He wasn't there when I told the others not to move the Cats. He thought he was being helpful. But damn it all, he might have wrecked it.”

The blunders made by the Somali drivers were not done on purpose, as many Englishmen here believed, nor did they indicate any lack of intelligence – another belief common among
Ingrese
. They were simply the actions of men who had virtually no mechanical experience. How would we have fared, if we had been given a dozen camels and told to wrest a living from the desert?

“I remember, as a kid, taking an old Model-T apart and putting it together again,” Jack said. “I was always tinkering with radios – all kinds of things like that. But men like Ali Wys and Omar Farah learned as kids how to throw a spear and how to recognize the tracks of their camels in the sand.”

We realized, more and more, the complications caused by this difference in accumulated knowledge. Yet, under the tensions and demands of the moment, it was not easy to remain patient. Sometimes Jack would explain a point at great length, and the drivers would all nod and say “Oh yes, we understand,” and immediately go and do the opposite. In the evenings, Jack would go over these difficulties endlessly, trying to puzzle out reasons for them, trying to discover ways of communicating with men who spoke his language only slightly and who had none of his technical and mechanical background.