A Reed Shaken by the Wind (4 page)

In the morning, grey and cold as an English autumn, the fourth member of Thesiger’s crew arrived. Kathia was one of those confusing people of whom one’s first impression is almost necessarily misleading, whose personalities seem after a little while to disintegrate into seemingly unrelated facets. He was a big chunky youth of nineteen or twenty, with perceptibly Mongolian features. There are a number of this type in the marshes, possibly remote descendants of the pillaging armies of Hulagu, grandson of Jengis Khan, who at his sack of Baghdad in 1285 slaughtered nearly a million peaceful citizens. (He deliberated for a while whether or not to kill their ruler, the Caliph, and brought together a meeting of clairvoyants to tell him whether some cataclysm of nature would result from this act. The seers replied cautiously that none had followed the martyrdoms of John the Baptist, Jesus Christ, or Hussain; so Hulagu took a risk on it, and put the Caliph to death in circumstances of peculiar horror.)

Kathia, who seemed at first sight happy, extravert, and competent, was in fact a neurotic, subject to alternating moods
of depression and gaiety, and was by far the least reliable of the four.

We loaded the
tarada,
and as the crew manœuvred its great length through the ditches of the palm village, lifting the palm-trunk bridges as bridges over great waterways are lifted to give passage to large vessels, the true journey began.

We turned out into the Euphrates and followed its near bank upstream for a mile or so before crossing to Huwair on the north bank. Huwair is a busy, teeming village of reed houses, one of the boat-building centres on which the marshmen and riverside dwellers are dependent. Because there is no wood in the marshes, and little in all Southern Iraq but palm trees, the materials are all imported except the bitumen with which all canoes are coated.

This boat-building community contained a very high proportion of Sayids (those claiming descent from the Prophet), who become rarer the farther one penetrates into the permanent marshlands. Sayids distinguish themselves in dress by the wearing of a dark blue headcloth, which is usually the normal Shi’a black-and-white
keffia
with the addition of dye. Some of these men are wanderers, more or less parasitic upon the peoples with whom they live temporarily, for they claim the right of support by virtue of their holy descent; others, on the waterways that surround the marshes, live in communities where they preponderate, and are as industrious as other men.

It is the Sayids who are most inclined to be hostile to the Christian, or to anyone who is not of the faith, and Thesiger had, early in his exploration of the area, found difficulties to be overcome. One Sayid, a fellow guest at a house where Thesiger already had friends, publicly rebuked his host for the presence of an unbeliever, and lamented the decay of the faith which allowed unclean Christians to eat in the houses of the faithful. It was probably the publicity of this attack
that tipped the scales in Thesiger’s favour, for no Arab host could permit his guest to be slighted or insulted. He replied to the Sayid that he was no theologian, but that Thesiger was his guest and should be treated as such; and as for cleanliness he seemed at least quite as clean as they were. After this forthright statement of policy the other guests in the house felt required to declare their sympathies, and one by one they left the side of the Sayid and came to sit with Thesiger. A little later he was able, in several villages, to doctor Sayids’ children and was by now accepted by the majority. At Huwair, however, I noticed that they would not drink from the same vessels as we did; they washed the cups immediately after we had used them, and with what seemed an unnecessary ostentation.

We stayed at Huwair only long enough to have new paddles made for the
tarada,
and in the afternoon we left for Ramla, the last of the dry land villages before the great marsh.

I
T
was blowing hard and cold when we left the village, and the sky was empty and grey without individual clouds. We left the palm groves and the stretches of dry land behind us, and soon the horizon was flat and bare, and the yard-high stubble of burnt reeds and bulrushes through which the ill-defined watercourses ran was paler than the blue-grey horizon sky. Very far away in front of us a few dark specks showed the last of the palm groves before the edge of the permanent marsh. The earth seemed flat as a plate and stretched away for ever before us, vast, desolate and pallid; pale bulrush stubble standing in water that reflected a vast pale sky, against which strained here and there the delicate shape of a long reed bent before the wind, the silhouette urgent as the keening of a violin. As the gusts grew stronger and ruffled the water among the reeds into flurries of small ripples, it tore a chorus of strange sounds from the stiff, withered sedge stumps, groans and whistles, bleats and croaks, and loud crude sounds of flatulence; if the devils of Hieronymus Bosch could speak from the canvas this would be the babel of their tongues, these the derisive notes of the trumpets at their backsides.

There was no colour anywhere, and the grey sky, unbroken by hill or tree, seemed as immense as from a small boat far out at sea. Occasionally a flight of pelicans would sail majestically by, riding the wind on stiff outstretched wings, rigid and bulky in body as seaplanes; and once a flock of white ibis drifted past very high up, to fan out into a wheeling kaleidoscope of white petals on the great empty sky. It was in some way a terrible landscape, utterly without human sympathy, more desolate and inimical than the sea itself, except, perhaps, when it breaks in winter on a long
shingle beach and the land behind it is flat. Here in the limitless stubble of pale bulrush one felt that no sheltering ship could sail nor human foot walk, and there seemed no refuge for any creature whose blood was warm.

For three hours we moved through this unchanging landscape with the weird clamour of the reeds about us, while the little dark blot of the palm grove at Ramla grew slowly bigger, and at length we were in waterways where the reed stubble grew on firm ground at our sides, and the reed houses of Ramla showed huddled round the palms.

Though Ramla stood on a low mud island with scattered palm groves about it, and thus was not a true Ma’dan village, it was yet the first of the primitive communities I had seen, for at Huwair we had been close to the road and to civilisation, and had stayed in the
mudhif
of a sheikh and not with the common people. Here the houses were small, some twelve feet wide by thirty-five feet long, and many of them appeared disordered by the gale that tossed and flung the threshing palm trees into alternately beckoning and suppliant shapes. The shallow water of the marsh petered out into mudbanked ditches and scum-covered backwaters among the houses, and above the level of the water the wind churned up an eddying dust-storm of sand and small reed fragments. A group waited for us on a bank by one of the nearer houses, their robes and headcloths flapping wildly, and after the first exchange of greetings we were ushered—as I was to regret so often and for so many reasons in so many other villages—straight into the house. The entrance was a slit in the vertical reeds forming the end of the house, so narrow that one could only enter sideways.

At this early stage in the journey I was as nervous of committing social
gaffes
as a worshipper in a church with whose ritual he is not familiar. I had been careful to put my hand over my heart after shaking hands, as did those who greeted me, and had been at a loss for response when one of them kissed my hand; now, as I was halfway through
the door, I remembered that I should be barefoot in the house. My shoe lace ran into a knot, and the party fretted behind me while I unravelled it half in and half out of the entrance.

Inside, the house was like the vast majority of all those in the marshes. There were nine reed arches, and halfway along a low bed-like platform, also made entirely of reeds, jutted out from the right-hand wall and divided the house, by effect rather than by fact, in two roughly equal halves. The platform is in fact not a bed, despite its resemblance to one, for the marshmen always sleep on the floor. It is used as a European would use a cupboard, for storage of household goods, and on this one were stacked canoe paddles, grain, blankets, pillows, and other things that were indistinct in the darkness, for no reed house ever has a window.

The two halves of the house correspond roughly to the two ground-floor rooms of an old-fashioned cottage; one is the cottage kitchen, in which the family cooks, eats, sits, and in this case sleeps, and the other is the “parlour”, which is rarely used except for guests. Beyond the platform I could see women and children squatting round a fire and a cooking pot on a tripod, and the light from the flames shone also upon various livestock, two dogs, a cat, a number of chickens, and three calves. On the near side of the platform the floor was laid with the same reed matting as covered the outside of the house, four strips of it laid to leave a bare patch in the centre where a small fire of reeds burned beside a row of coffee pots. Our host fetched cushions with hard wool covers woven in bright designs, and in a moment we were seated cross-legged again as we had been in the
tarada.
This, though I did not yet know it, was to be the pattern of the whole journey; two or three hours of sitting cross-legged is painful to those unaccustomed to it, and to step out of the canoe only to resume the same position in a matter of seconds can be real torture.

We drank dessertspoonfuls of coffee from tiny cups as we
had done at Huwair, and then we drank tea from minute glasses half filled with sugar, which is what every marshman offers to his guests, even when he cannot afford coffee. As the hours passed, the house began to fill up, until at last there were more than sixty people crowded on to the floor of that eighteen-by-twelve-foot space; all men and boys, for the women are kept apart, and may not mingle with menfolk outside their own families. It would seem impossible for that sardine-pack to be in any order of precedence, yet they were; and each, too, somehow avoided presenting a complete back view to the man behind him, for that, like presenting the sole of an outstretched foot, is the height of bad manners.

I was astonished by the rigmarole of social ritual with which these primitive people surrounded themselves. Each entering guest greeted his host, and in some cases the formal exchange of greetings between the two was extended to a machine-gun fire of fifteen or twenty questions and answers. Then the guest would select a place and sit down, but the social duties of his arrival had only just begun. No sooner had he settled himself cross-legged in his cramped position than a single voice out of the crowd would bid him good evening.

“Messàkum Allâh bil khair.”

The newcomer would half rise to his feet, his legs still scissored under him.

“Messàkum Allâh bil khair, Ahmed,” he responded, and began to settle himself again. Then it came from another corner of the room, and again he would bob up on the triangle of his crossed ankles. “Messàkum Allâh bil khair, Daoud,” and soon he would be bouncing up and down like a piston. “Messàkum Allâh bil khair, Mahommed,” “Messàkum Allâh bil khair, Hussein,” “Messàkum Allâh bil khair, Faleh,” until every grown man in the room had shot his round and the newcomer could relax and time the firing of his own ammunition at the next comer.

Presently a lantern was lit and stood on the dividing platform at the centre of the house, but its little circle of illumination was closed in by the figures round it, and the throng of faces was lit only by the wildly flickering fire of reeds. Our host knelt at the hearth with a great bundle of reeds gripped between his knees, and as the fire consumed them with big wind-gusted flames he moved the bundle up a foot at a time. The fire was like the end of a moving staircase, where the conveyor slides out of sight under the firm ground. Each time as he thrust the reeds farther up into the flames a frantic exodus of small dun-coloured caterpillars could be seen hurrying along the stems away from the fire, going the wrong way on the moving staircase; but the reeds burned slower than the caterpillars could hunch along, so that they always won in the end. I lost sight of them between our host’s knees, and as they seemed never to reappear I wondered what became of them.

It was beyond my understanding that the house did not catch fire. The gale roared and rattled in the reed matting outside; the burning reeds crackled and flared and the sparks flew upward and glowed in the dim reed roof; cigarettes were stubbed out vaguely and at random on the dry reed matting of the floor. It seemed as though either the reed house or the flames and the sparks must be an illusion, a montage for a cinema set, or a superimposition. I wondered what premium a European insurance company would set on a policy to cover these houses against fire.

In fact the gale that night did start a fire in a neighbouring village, and left half its inhabitants homeless; one of the greatest disasters, other than death or disease, that can afflict the marsh people; for they may have to travel great distances to replace the high reeds from which the houses are built, and to buy at the time of their greatest poverty the new reed matting with which to cover them.

This was my first night in a village house, and but for one incident it was typical enough of the pattern of all those that
followed it. Sometime before midnight Thesiger said that we were ready to sleep, and the assembled company of guests began to file out of the house. Our host scattered the ashes of the fire, and our canoe boys spread out blankets on the floor about it and disposed our effects with the extreme precaution against robbery that is customary in the marshes. Jacket and trousers formed the pillow, and Sabeti, who had assumed responsibility for me, stowed my every possession beneath my sleeping bag—field-glasses, camera, gun—until I felt like a Gulliver reclining on a Lilliput mountain range. Then began the massage that is one of the strangest, and at times most painful, customs of marsh society. It is a deep kneading massage that seems to leave no muscle unexplored, and to the uninitiated it is at first extremely uncomfortable. The people themselves have the profoundest belief in its therapeutic value, but its practice is a purely social custom, a gesture of goodwill and friendship that may be extended to convey various shades of meaning. While it is practically a ritual before retiring, it may be employed at any time or in any place, and one’s immediate neighbour as one sits among a crowd of guests in a house or stands in a throng out of doors may start work upon biceps or thigh as casually and thoughtlessly as he would play with the string of beads that is his inseparable toy.

Sabeti’s massage was agonising on the limbs and ticklish on the torso; I squirmed under it for a quarter of an hour before I felt that good manners would permit me to say that it was enough. Thesiger, I noticed, was submitting to the combined mauling of Amara and Hassan with the greatest apparent equanimity. At last it was over, and the lantern was extinguished, and under the cover of the darkness I surreptitiously removed my gun and field-glasses from their excruciating position below my spine. The gun I laid in the few inches between me and the wall; I was barricaded in by the sleeping bodies of Sabeti, Hassan and Kathia, and to me it seemed secure enough from any thief in the night. I twined
the strap of my field-glasses through the fingers of my left hand and went to sleep.

I sleep very lightly, and I woke with a start without knowing what had awoken me. It was quite dark, and there were gentle snores all round me, and not so gentle snores from Sabeti, whose shaven head was touching mine, as he shared my pillow with his feet in the opposite direction. I could see nothing at all but the paler slit of night sky at the door, and I could hear nothing else but the rattle and batter of the gale in the reeds of the house. I was about to settle down again when I felt a gentle exploratory tug on the strap of the field-glasses between my fingers. I moved my right hand over to the strap, and felt gently up it. I touched a hand, and instinctively I grabbed it; then, even as I did so, I realised that the fellow to it might be holding a knife, and as the fingers wrenched back out of mine I let go. For an instant the paler slit of the door was darkened as the visitor slipped out. I put my hand out in the dark and felt for my gun where I had laid it a few inches from my side and there was nothing there. I realised that my sybaritic attitude towards sleeping with a gun under my spine would be exposed, and my subterfuge revealed, but I felt that there was nothing for it but to wake Sabeti. I fished out a torch, confirmed that the gun was not there and did so. I could not explain to him what had happened, for my Arabic vocabulary was at that time limited to some dozen words, but I was able to say that the gun wasn’t there. Sabeti launched on a low chatter of reproof that was as plain in sense as if he had spoken in English, and ended by throwing back his own blanket to show his legs scissored round my gun as though he were climbing a rope. I felt as foolish as he intended.

Our waking, too, was like many that followed it during the next two months. First, when one was still heavy with sleep, the insistent barking of dogs, outside but only a few feet from one’s head, would invade unconsciousness, then
the sounds of the household busying themselves beyond the dividing reed platform with preparations for the day. One could ignore the sound of the dogs, I found, but the sound of articulate human speech, even if the words were not understood, would not allow sleep. There would be the curiously defined and intimate ringing sound of a metal mortar pounding roasted coffee beans in a metal pestle, and on the floor near at hand the protesting groans and stretching of our awakening canoe boys. This would usually be punctuated with dull thuds, as Thesiger, with scoutmasterish jocularity, belaboured their heads with a small pillow, hard and heavy-seeming as a sandbag; a treatment that he affected to believe painless. Washing was of ritual simplicity, a splash of cold water poured on one’s hands from the unvarying long-spouted copper water jug as one squatted outside the door; we shaved every three or four days or when we were to be the guests of some sheikh. Blankets were folded and stowed and the fire lit at the coffee hearth in the middle of the floor, and we sat cross-legged round it to drink the tiny glasses of sweet tea and eat the thin bread that more prosperous households produce for their guests’ breakfast. All Arab bread is unrecognisable by the European connotation of the word; for it is without yeast, greyish and pliable sheets of dough whose surface the flame of a mud oven has irregularly blackened. In the marshes the normal everyday bread, some half an inch thick is made by plastering the sheet of dough to the walls of an acorn-shaped mud oven, open at the top and with the fire burning in the middle of it, so that the flame licks the dough. The thin bread, however, which is something of a luxury and a dainty, is made by pouring a cream-like mixture of flour and water on to a large inverted smooth-bottomed plate supported on three clay bricks over the fire. A second plate, like the lid of a large saucepan, is placed over the bread, which can be peeled off after about a minute, golden coloured and very like a large pancake. Unlike the normal
bread, which would be considered inedible by most Europeans, the thin bread is appetising both in appearance and in taste.