Arabian Sands (15 page)

In northern and central Arabia, while the structure of tribal life was breaking down as a result of the peace which had been imposed on the tribes and of administrative interference from outside, the economy of Bedu life was also collapsing. Deprived of their inaccessibility, the tribes could no longer blackmail the government into paying them large subsidies for their good behaviour. They could no longer levy tolls on travellers, nor exact tribute from the villagers and cultivators. A man who had lost his animals from disease could no longer
borrow a mount and ride forth with a raiding party to retrieve his fortune. But the most disastrous change of all was caused by the introduction of mechanical transport, which practically abolished the dependence of the townsmen and villagers on the camels which the Bedu breed. In the past the Bedu had always found a ready sale for their camels, especially the thoroughbreds, for which the Arab rulers and the richer merchants were prepared to pay large prices. Some tribes made money by carrying goods across the desert, and even where the carrying trade was in the hands of professional carriers the Bedu sold them camels and extorted tolls.

Money acquired by individual Bedu was soon distributed among their families and tribes. I knew, for instance, that the money I was paying to my party would be divided by them with others who had a share in the venture although they did not accompany us. My companions also frequently asked me for advances, explaining that they had been asked for a loan and that having money it would be unseemly if they refused.

The discovery of oil on the Persian Gulf has brought enormous wealth into Arabia. Partly as a result of this, and partly as a result of the war, prices in the towns have soared. In the desert the Bedu need very little to keep themselves alive. Their herds provide them with food and drink, but they have certain requirements which they cannot supply for themselves. They need cloth and cooking-pots, knives, ammunition, occasional loads of dates or grain, and such simple luxuries as a handful of coffee or a little tobacco. To get these things they visited markets in the villages or towns and sold a camel or a goat, a little butter, water-skins, rugs, or saddle-bags. Life in the desert ceased to be possible when the few, but entirely essential, commodities that the Bedu had hitherto been able to buy in exchange for the products of the desert became too expensive for them to afford, and when no one any longer required the things which they produced.

Bedu love money; even to handle it seems to give them a thrill. They talk of it incessantly. They will discuss the price of a headcloth or a cartridge belt intermittently for days. To pass the time on the march a man will put up his camel for sale, and the others, although they know that he has no
intention of selling her, enter into the spirit of the game and bargain noisily for hours. They are all obsessed by dreams of buried treasure. Frequently as we rode along my companions assured me that there was
dhahab
(gold) to be found here and
dhahab
to be found there – under enormous sand-dunes or great rocks or in the middle of a quicksand. In the Wadi Difin near Habarut they pointed out a tunnel twenty feet up in the face of a limestone cliff, inaccessible except with a rope from above. This tunnel, whose mouth was two feet by four feet, had been filled with a plug of clay which the Arabs had recently tried to remove, as they have a tradition of treasure buried there. They claimed to have penetrated about twenty feet along the twisting tunnel, but said that they had given up before they reached the end of the plug. There was a considerable pile of excavated earth at the foot of the cliff. Sometimes, finding their preoccupation with money tedious, I chided them for their avarice, and they answered: ‘It is all very well for you; you have plenty; but for us a few
riyals
may make all the difference between starving and not starving.’

On the oil-fields the Bedu could find the money of which they dreamt. They could earn large sums by sitting in the shade and guarding a dump, or by doing work which was certainly easier than watering thirsty camels on a nearly dry well in the middle of summer. There was plenty of good food, abundant sweet water, and long hours for sleep. They had seldom had these things before, and now they were being paid into the bargain. Their love of freedom and the restlessness that was in their blood drew most of them back into the desert, but life there was becoming more and more difficult. Soon it might be altogether impossible.

Here in the south the Bedu were still unaffected by the economic changes in the north, but I knew that they could not long escape the consequences. It seemed to me tragic that they should become, as the result of circumstances beyond their control, a parasitic proletariat squatting around oil-fields in the fly-blown squalor of shanty towns in some of the most sterile country in the world. All that is best in the Arabs has come to them from the desert: their deep religious instinct, which has found expression in Islam; their sense of fellowship, which
binds them as members of one faith; their pride of race; their generosity and sense of hospitality; their dignity and the regard which they have for the dignity of others as fellow human beings; their humour, their courage and patience, the language which they speak and their passionate love of poetry. But the Arabs are a race which produces its best only under conditions of extreme hardship and deteriorates progressively as living conditions become easier. Lawrence described the nomad life as ‘the circulation which kept vigour in the Semitic body’ and wrote ‘there were few, if indeed there was a single northern Semite, whose ancestors had not at some dark age passed through the desert. The mark of nomadism, that most deep and biting social discipline, was on each of them in his degree’.

Now as I rode along, ignoring Sultan’s repeated injuctions to catch up with the others, which I knew were prompted by his craving for conversation that I was in no mood to supply, I reflected on the Arab influence on world history. It seemed to me significant that it was the desert Arabs who had imposed their characteristics on the Arab race and not the more numerous inhabitants of the Yemen, with their traditions of an ancient civilization. It was the customs and standards of the desert which had been accepted by townsmen and villagers alike, and which were spread by the Arab conquest across North Africa and the Middle East, and by Islam across a great part of the world. The civilization of the Yemen had sunk into decay before the time of Muhammad, and the dialects of the south had already been superseded by northern Arabic as the classical language of Arabia. With the establishment of the new religion of Islam the importance of the south declined still further and the centre of power shifted north to Mecca. The northern Arabs had no traditions of civilization behind them. To arrange three stones as a fireplace on which to set a pot was the only architecture that many of them required. They lived in black tents in. the desert, or in bare rooms devoid of furnishings in the villages and towns. They had no taste nor inclination for refinements. Most of them demanded only the bare necessities of life, enough food and drink to keep them alive, clothes to cover their nakedness, some form of shelter from the sun
and wind, weapons, a few pots, rugs, water-skins, and their saddlery. It was a life which produced much that was noble, nothing that was gracious.

These desert Arabs were avaricious, rapacious, and predatory, born freebooters, contemptuous of all outsiders, and intolerant of restraint. In the seventh century, united for the first time in their history, they swept out of Arabia under the banners of Islam and carried all before them. They overran the richest provinces of the Roman Empire and the whole of the Persian Empire. A little over a century after the battle of the Yarmuk in A.D. 636, which decided the fate of Syria, their rule extended from the Pyrenees and the shores of the Atlantic to the Indus and the borders of China. They had established an empire greater in extent than the Roman Empire. They had emerged from the desert craving for plunder and united by a new faith. It would not have been surprising if they had proved to be another scourge similar to the hordes of Attila and Genghis Khan, which swept across the world leaving only devastation behind them. It is one of the miracles of history that they created a new civilization, uniting into one society the hitherto incompatible cultures of the Mediterranean and Persia. Arabic, which had been evolved as the dialect of nomad tribesmen in the deserts of Arabia, was soon spoken from Persia to the Pyrenees and, superseding Greek and Latin, developed into one of the great cultural languages of the world. As the Muslim faith and the Arabic language spread throughout the Empire, the distinction between the Arab conquerors and their subjects largely disappeared, and conquerors and conquered tended to become fellow Muslims in one community. This Muslim civilization was profoundly influenced by Greek thought, for the Arabs translated every available Greek work into their own language; but while this civilization assimilated all it could, it was not merely imitative, and it made its own contribution to the civilizations of the world in architecture, literature, philosophy, history, mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and medicine. Few of the great intellectual figures of this society were Arabs, and several of them were not even Muslims but were Jews and Christians, but the rulers of the state in which they flourished were Arabs,
and it was Arabs who had founded and inspired this civilization. Without them neither the Alhambra nor the Taj Mahal would ever have been built.

Today sixty million people speak Arabic as their native tongue and most of them claim to be Arabs, although in fact few of them are of Arab descent. A seventh part of the human race professes Islam, the religion which Muhammad founded in Arabia in the seventh century. It is a religion which claims to regulate not only a Muslim’s religious beliefs and the ritual of his religious observance, but also the structure of his society and every aspect of his daily life, even how he should wash after sexual intercourse. The customs and conventions which Islam imposed upon its adherents were those of Arabia. I knew that wherever I went among Muslims, whether it was in Nigeria or in China, I should find much that was familiar to me in the pattern of their lives. It seemed to me not altogether fanciful to suppose that if the civilizations of today were to disappear as completely as those of Babylon and Assyria, a school history book two thousand years hence might devote a few pages to the Arabs and not even mention the United States of America.

The others were unloading their camels on a patch of hard sand when we caught up with them. From afar off they had seen the wisps of greyish grass which distinguished this hollow from other hollows they had passed on their way across the flint-strewn plain, and had turned aside to stop. Luckily, camels had grazed here years before, and their bleached droppings gave us a little fuel; but not enough to cook a proper meal.

Tonight while I was warm in my sleeping-bag the others would shiver under the cold north wind. They were Bedu, and these empty spaces where there was neither shade nor shelter were their homelands. Any of them could have worked in the gardens around salala; all of them would have scorned this easier life of lesser men. Among the Bedu only the broken are stranded among the cultivations on the desert’s shore.

The Rashid meet us at Shisur well
and we travel to Mughshin on the
edge of the Sands. An accident
deprives me of all but two of the
Rashid.

We watered at Shisur, where the ruins of a crude stone fort on a rocky mound mark the position of this famous well, the only permanent water in the central steppes. Shisur was a necessary watering-place for raiders and had been the scene of many fierce fights. At the bottom of the large cave which undercuts the mound there was a trickle of water in a deep fissure. This water could only be reached with difficulty down a narrow passage, between the rock wall and a bank of sand, thirty feet in height, which half filled the cave. When we arrived at the well the water was buried under drifted sand and had to be dug out. I offered to help but the others said that I was too bulky for the job. Two hours later they shouted that they were ready, and asked us to fetch the camels. In turn they scrambled up the slope out of the dark depths of the cave, the quaking water-skins heavy on their shoulders. Moisture ran down their bodies, plastering the loin-cloths to their slender limbs; their hair, thick with sand, fell about their strained faces. Lowering the water-skins to the ground, they loosed jets of water into leather buckets, which they offered to the crowding camels, while they sang the age-old watering songs. Showers of camel-droppings pattered on to the ground, and rolled down the slope into the water, and small avalanches of sand, encrusted with urine, slipped down to add more bitterness to water that was already bitter. Each camel, as soon as she had been watered, was couched near by. Every now and again one of them rose jerkily to her feet, anxious to wander off, and her owner ran across the gravel stream-bed to bring her back, shouting her name, Farha (joy), Matara (rain), Ghazala (gazelle), Safra (the yellow one), or some other name which in battle might be his war-cry.

Suddenly the sentinel on the slope above gave the alarm. We seized our rifles, which were always at hand, and took up our position round the well. The camels were quickly collected behind the mound. In the distance we could see riders approaching. In this land all strangers are counted hostile until they declare themselves. We fired two shots over their heads. They came on steadily, waving their head-cloths, and one of them jumped off his camel and threw up sand into the air. We relaxed. As they drew near, someone said, ‘They are Rashid – I can see bin Shuas’s camel.’ Bedu can always recognize camels much farther off than they can distinguish human beings. Meeting a stranger, they can tell which tribe he belongs to by numerous signs perceptible at once to their discerning eyes: whether he wears his cartridge-belt buckled tightly or sagging low in front, whether he wears his head-cloth loosely or more closely wound round his head; the stitchings on his shirt, the folds of his loin-cloth, the leather cover in which he carries his rifle, the pattern on his saddle-bags, the way he has folded his rug above them, even the way he walks, all these reveal his identity. But above all they can tell from a man’s speech to which tribe he belongs.