Arabian Sands (14 page)

We passed two or three families of Bait Kathir. They had no
tents but were camped under trees or in the shelter of rocks. Only the Arabs who live in the Sands use tents. We stopped for the night with Mabkhaut’s family under two trees on a spit of sand. His wife was there and his two sons, bright-eyed, longhaired children, the elder about twelve years old. A young man, who Mabkhaut said was his cousin, was living with them. He had been bitten by a snake two months before, and his leg was very swollen and pus was running out from beneath his toes. I washed the wound and gave him some medicine. Mabkhaut slaughtered a goat, and his wife cooked the meat for us. She was a middle-aged woman, very thin, and troubled with a cough which shook her while she worked. She was wrapped in the dark-blue clothes which these women wear, and was unveiled. Mabkhaut owned five camels and about thirty goats. These Bedu keep no other animals, not even dogs or chickens. The Qarra, who own cattle, do not live in the desert. The Manahil have sheep, but I never saw any with the Rashid or Bait Kathir.

Lying on the sand around me was everything this family owned – a few pots, a drinking bowl, some water-skins, another goatskin half-filled with flour, a heap of sardines spread out on a torn shirt, an old rug, and a few rags with which they would cover themselves at night. There were also two camel-saddles, a leather bucket for drawing water, and a coil of rope. The cousin wore a dagger, and held an old single-shot 450 rifle between his knees; he had eleven rounds of ammunition in his belt. Mabkhaut told me that this rifle belonged to him. He himself was at the time armed with one of the twelve service rifles which I had brought with me.

Next day we reached the well of Ma Shadid, two days after leaving Aiyun. The water was at the bottom of a natural hole in the limestone rock and the Arabs told me that it was forty-five feet below the surface. They reached it in the dark, clambering down seven shelves of rock with the help of ropes. The water flowed knee-deep and was said to come from Aiyun, for once a woman’s wooden comb which had been lost there was recovered here.

In this southern desert, between Oman and the Hadhramaut, there is little water. In areas as large as an English county
there are only single wells, and some of these will run dry after watering a few score camels. Yet this water has to suffice for all the human beings in the area and for their stock, not only in winter when it is cool but also in summer when the temperature often reaches 115 and sometimes 120 degrees in the shade – and there is no shade. But the country was not empty. I wished it had been. Every evening our unwanted guests -sometimes a dozen, sometimes more – turned up to make further inroads on our flour.

We rode across a sombre land. The rocks beneath our feet and the broken scattered fragments were dark with age, sepia-coloured. They looked as if they had been scorched by the sun and polished by the wind ever since they first emerged from beneath the sea. It was difficult to think that this stark land had ever been other than it was, that flowers and crops may once have flourished here. Now it was dead; the earth’s bared bones lay round us, sand-scoured beneath a glaring sky.

The Arabs talked of death. They named men who had died in recent raids and pointed to low ridges where they had fought. I thought of the blood that had splashed on the ground and darkened for a while the colouring of the stones. Round us were the graves of the ancient dead: tumuli, grouped together on high places. Immensely old, they had grown into the desert floor; only their shapes indicated that they were once the work of men. On some of them were set upright slabs of rock, such as I had seen erected by the Danakil on similar burial mounds to scare away hyenas and to stop them from digging out the corpses. There were other monuments of long-dead people flanking here and there the paths and shallow watercourses which marked the mountain slopes.

I called out to Sultan that I was going over to look at some of these monuments which I could see two hundred yards away on our right, but he said, ‘Don’t bother about that lot. There are many more beyond that ridge. Come, I will show you’, and with his stick he tapped his camel on the side of her neck to turn her aside from the others. We reached the ridge and saw ahead of us a small plain rimmed with crumbling grey cliffs a few feet high which drained down to a tributary of the
main valley on our right. Some
harmal
bushes, shiny-leaved like laurels but only eighteen inches high, marked a stony watercourse. Nothing else grew here. I could see the monuments aligned with the watercourse, like stone flowerbeds on a gravel lawn. They were trilithons in groups of from three to fifteen, each one consisting of three stone slabs about two feet high, standing on end and leaning against each other with their base forming a triangle; a few were capped with a fourth and usually round stone. They were in line a yard apart, each group surrounded by an oval bed of small stones. On one side of each group, parallel with it and about three yards away, was a line of fireplaces consisting of piles of small stones. I had seen the Bedu grilling meat on similar piles of stones which they had heated in a fire. There were also some rocks arranged singly in line, probably as seats. Near the trilithons were burial mounds, and also some circles about twelve feet in diameter, bordered with large stones and filled-in with a level floor of pebbles.

The trilithons were plentiful on the northern slopes of the Dhaufar mountains, but were uncommon farther to the east or west. I saw a few of them as far westward as the Saar country, and others near Ghail ba Yamin, in the country of the Humum. I also saw one set in the top reaches of the Wadi Andam in Oman. The number in a group varied, five being the most frequent, but I noticed groups of three, five, seven, nine, twelve, fifteen, and once twenty-five. They were always aligned with a watercourse or path but otherwise appeared to have no special orientation. A few of the slabs bore inscriptions of a type called Tamudic, a script usually found in north and central Arabia and dating from pre-Islamic times.

Bertram Thomas thought these trilithons marked the sites of graves, but I frequently found them erected above solid rock. I think they may have been commemorative, like the memorials which I had seen erected near a path by the Danakil in Abyssinia. It seems to me probable that the people who set them up placed their dead in the tumuli which were scattered on the hill-tops near by. Even today the Bait Kathir on the plateau seldom dig a grave, but wall-in a corpse against a rock or in a fissure in a cliff. Whatever may have been their purpose,
these piles of uncut stones are among the few tangible monuments which the Arabs of the past have left behind them in Arabia. They seemed to me a fitting memorial to the ancestors of a people who, at their best, have cared little for material things.

I wandered about among the monuments, taking photographs and looking for inscriptions, while Sultan sat on a rock near the two couched camels. Eventually he called out, ‘Come on, Umbarak.’ This was the name by which they now called me. ‘Get on your camel and let’s catch up with our companions. This is no place to hang about; Shisur is not far away – a bad place for raiders. Come on – those things have no value. They are just bits of rock stuck up by the Early Ones. Come on man, mount, and let’s be off.’

I mounted and we rode after the others. I could see them a couple of miles away, a cluster of tiny dots moving imperceptibly across Arabia. I thought, They could go on and on, until at last they come to Syria or Transjordan and they would probably not pass a village or even a palm-tree; and yet it is as far from here to Damascus as it is from the southern tip of India to the Himalayas.’ I wondered idly how many Arabs there were in Arabia; between six and seven millions is, I believe, the generally accepted figure, and of these only about a quarter are Bedu. Yet only Bedu can live in the deserts that cover all but a small part of Arabia. The other Arabs have settled in the few places where it is possible to make a living from the soil. Except for some serfs and the rabble in a few of the larger towns, all these Arabs are tribesmen. Most of them live in the Yemen, that fertile corner of Arabia which the Romans called Arabia Felix; perhaps it was there that the Semitic race originated. They themselves divide their race into the
Arab al Araba,
or pure Arabs, who they say are descended from Qahtan or Joktan and originated in the Yemen, and the
Arab al Mustaraba,
or adopted Arabs, descended from Adnan, the offspring of Ishmael, who originated in the north. European experts have confirmed the existence of two races in Arabia, the round-headed southerners and the long-headed northerners; but both have been in Arabia since earliest times. Shut off from the outside world by the desert and the sea, the
inhabitants of Arabia have kept their racial purity. The neighbouring countries, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, have been highways for invading armies and migrations, but there is no record of any migration into the Arabian peninsula. Abyssinians, Persians, Egyptians, and Turks imposed their uneasy rule at intervals on the Yemen, Oman, the Hajaz, and even on the Najd. They held the larger towns and waged intermittent and often unsuccessful war against the tribes. Their mercenaries spawned in the garrison towns, but they never mixed their blood with that of the tribesmen. No race in the world prizes lineage so highly as the Arabs and none has kept its blood so pure. There is, of course, mixed blood in the towns, especially in the seaports, but this is only the dirty froth upon the desert’s edge.

As I rode along I reflected that nowhere in the world was there such continuity as in the Arabian desert. Here Semitic nomads, resembling my companions, must have herded their flocks before the Pyramids were built or the Flood wiped out all trace of man in the Euphrates valley. Successive civilizations rose and fell around the desert’s edge: the Minaeans, Sabaeans, and Himyarites in southern Arabia; Egypt of the Pharaohs; Sumeria, Babylonia, Assyria; the Hebrews, the Phoenicians; Greeks and Romans; the Persians; the Muslim Empire of the Arabs, and finally the Turks. They lasted a few hundred or a thousand years and vanished; new races were evolved and later disappeared; religions rose and fell; men changed, adapting themselves to a changing world; but in the desert the nomad tribes lived on, the pattern of their lives but little changed over this enormous span of time.

Then, in forty years, less than a man’s lifetime, all was changed; their life disintegrated. Previously the great Bedu tribes of the Najd and the Syrian desert had dominated central and northern Arabia. All traffic between the oases, villages and towns, the pilgrim caravans, everyone in fact who moved about Arabia, had to pass through the desert, and the Bedu controlled the desert. They levied tolls on travellers or looted them at will; they extorted blackmail from villagers and cultivators and from the weaker desert tribes. Bedu raiders, as elusive as the bands of Norsemen who once harried the coasts
of Europe, had only to regain the desert to be free from, all pursuit, whether by Roman legionaries or Turkish mercenaries.

The ascendancy of the Bedu was, however, moral as well as physical. Valuing freedom far above ease or comfort, careless of suffering, taking indeed a fierce pride in the hardship of their lives, the Bedu forced an unwilling recognition of their superiority on the villagers and townsmen who hated and affected to despise them. In the Hajaz I had heard men, sitting full-fed round the coffee hearths of great halls, disparage the Bedu as uncouth and lawless savages and curse them as infidels who neither prayed nor fasted. They had spoken scornfully of their poverty, marvelling that any human beings could endure this desert life. Then inevitably they had spoken of the Bedu’s courage and their unbelievable generosity, and they had told stories, many of them fantastically improbable, which they vowed were true, and had recited long passages of verse about the Bani Hilal. Listening to them I had realized that the hungry ragged men whom they had just been reviling had been transmuted into the legendary heroes of the past.

The Bedu themselves never doubted their superiority. Even today such tribes as the Mutair and the Ajman would not regard it as an honour to give a girl from their tents in marriage even to the king of Arabia. I remembered asking some Rashid, who had visited Riyadh, how they had addressed the king, and they answered in surprise, ‘We called him Abd al Aziz, how else would we call him except by his name?’ And when I said, ‘I thought you might call him Your Majesty’, they answered, ‘We are Bedu. We have no king but God.’

After the First World War, cars, aeroplanes, and wireless gave government for the first time in history a mobility greater than that of the Bedu. The desert was no longer a refuge for raiders but an open plain where concealment was impossible. It was a strange coincidence that at the same time as the Bedu in the Syrian desert were being brought under control with the help of modern weapons, the greatest king in Arabian history should reign in central Arabia. Abd al Aziz Ibn Saud had already broken and brought to heel the most powerful tribes in the peninsula before he introduced a single car or aeroplane
into his kingdom. The peace which he had imposed would normally have disappeared with his death, and the desert would have reverted to the state of anarchy necessary to Bedu society; but I knew that the mechanical innovations which he had introduced would enable his successors to maintain the control which he had established. The desert had been pacified, and raids and tribal warfare had been effectively prevented from the Jordan valley to the northern edge of the Empty Quarter. Only here, on the far side of this great barrier of sand, did the old way of life linger on, little affected as yet by the changes in the north.

The society in which the Bedu live is tribal. Everyone belongs to a tribe and all members of the same tribe are in some degree kinsmen, since they are descended from a common ancestor. The closer the relationship the stronger is the loyalty which a man feels for his fellow tribesmen, and this loyalty overrides personal feelings, except in extreme cases. In time of need a man instinctively supports his fellow tribesmen, just as they in like case support him. There is no security in the desert for an individual outside the framework of his tribe. This makes it possible for tribal law, which is based on consent, to work among the most individualistic race in the world, since in the last resort a man who refuses to accept a tribal decision can be ostracized. It is therefore a strange fact that tribal law can only work in conditions of anarchy and breaks down as soon as peace is imposed upon the desert, since under peaceful conditions a man who resents a judgement can refuse to be bound by it, and if necessary can leave his tribe and live by himself. There is no central authority inside the tribe which can enforce the judgement.