Arabian Sands (16 page)

The riders were close now. The Bait Kathir could identify them. ‘That is bin Shuas’. ‘That is Mahsin’. ‘That is al Auf’. ‘That is bin Kabina and Amair – and Saad and bin Mautlauq.’ There were seven of them, all of them Rashid. We formed up in line to receive them. They halted their camels thirty yards away, couched them by tapping them on their necks with their sticks, got off, and came towards us. Bin Shuas and bin Mautlauq wore only loin-cloths; the others were dressed in head-cloths and shirts of varying shades of brown. I recognized the tattered shirt which bin Kabina wore as the one which I had given to him when we had parted in the Hadhramaut. Only he was unarmed, without rifle or dagger. The others carried their rifles on their shoulders. Bin Shuas and al Auf had their rifles inside covers made of undressed hide and decorated with tassels. When they were a few yards away Mahsin, whom I identified by his lame leg, called out ‘Salam alaikum,’ and we answered together ‘Alaikum as salam.’ Then one behind the other they passed along our line, greeting each
of us with the triple nose-kiss, nose touching nose on the right side, left side, and again on the right. They then formed up facing us. Tamtaim said to me, ‘Ask their news’; but I answered ‘No, you do it. You are the oldest.’ Tamtaim called out, ‘Your news?’ Mahsin answered, ‘The news is good.’ Again Tamtaim asked, ‘Is anyone dead? Is anyone gone?’ Back came the immediate answer, ‘No! – don’t say such a thing.’ Question and answer were as invariable as the responses in the Litany. No matter what had really happened, they never changed. They might have fought with raiders; half their party might have been killed and be lying still unburied; their camels might have been looted; any affliction might have befallen them – starvation, drought, or sickness, and still at this first formal questioning they would answer, ‘The news is good.’ They now returned to the camels, unsaddled them, and, after hobbling their forelegs, turned them loose. We had meanwhile spread rugs for them, and Tamtaim shouted to bin Anauf to prepare coffee. As soon as this was ready Musallim set a dish of dates before them; then, standing, he poured out coffee and handed the cup to Mahsin and to the others in their order of importance. They drank, ate dates, and were again served with coffee. Now at last we should get the real news.

They were small men, none more than five feet six inches in height, and very lean. They had been weathered by life in the desert until only the essential flesh, bone, and skin remained. They sat before us, very restrained in their movements, and quiet and slow of speech, careful of their dignity in front of strangers. Only their dark, watchful eyes flickered to and fro, missing nothing. Mahsin sat with his crippled leg stiffly out in front of him. He was a compactly built man of middle age, with a square face. His thin lips were pinched, and there were deep lines round his mouth and nose. I knew that until he had been wounded two years ago he had been famed as a raider, and that he had killed many men. He was reputed to be very rich in camels. But it was Muhammad al Auf who interested me most, for the Rashid had talked much about him when I was with them the year before. They said he had never recovered his old light-hearted gaiety since his brother had been killed by the Saar. He had a fine face. Skin and flesh were
moulded over strong bone, his eyes, set wide apart, were large and curiously flecked with gold, while his nose was straight and short and his mouth generous. He had a thin moustache and a few hairs on a dimpled chin. His hair, very long and wavy, was unbraided and fell round his shoulders. I thought he was about thirty-five years old. He gave me an immediate impression of controlled energy, of self-confidence and intelligence. Bin Kabina called out to me. ‘How are you, Umbarak? Where have you been since you left us?’ I thought he looked gaunt. He had grown an inch since I parted from him in Tarim. I was glad to see him again, for I had become much attached to him during the time he had been with me. I listened to the news. The Dahm had raided the Manahil, and the Manahil under bin Duailan, who was known as ‘the Cat’, had taken many camels off the Yam. The Saar had raided the Dawasir. They told us who had been killed and who had been wounded. There had been good rain two months before in the steppes, but the drought which had lasted for seven years near the Jiza was still unbroken. I asked about bin al Kamam and they told me that he had gone to the Yemen to seek a truce with the Dahm, and that the other two Rashid whom I had told Amair to fetch were far away in the Sands. I asked news of the other Rashid who had been with me, and they in turn asked where I had been and how my tribe had fared in my absence. We talked for a while and then dispersed.

Bin Kabina and I climbed to the ruined fort above the well and kept watch across the empty, shimmering landscape, while the others finished watering the camels and filling the water-skins. Bin Kabina asked me where I was going and I told him that I planned to cross the Sands, but pledged him to secrecy for I had not yet spoken to the others. He said, The Bait Kathir the other Rashid who had been with me, and they in turn asked where I had been and how my tribe had fared in my absence. We talked for a while and then dispersed.

When it stopped they thought it was because I was dead. There were eight of us and we were circumcised by one of the sheikhs of the Bait Khawar in the valley of the Kidyut. One of us was a Manahil, a grown man with a beard, the others were Bait Khawar. They were all older than I was. Before the operation our families rubbed our bodies with butter and saffron so that they shone. We were circumcised in turn sitting on a rock. Everyone had come to watch and there was a large crowd.’

I asked him if he had been afraid, and he said, ‘Of course I was. Everyone is afraid when they know that they are going to be hurt, but they don’t admit it. I was most afraid that I should flinch. As I was the youngest I was done first. The old man tied my foreskin very tightly with a piece of string and then left it to die. By God it hurt! It was almost a relief when he cut it off, though his knife was blunt and he went on hacking away for what seemed ages. One of the others fainted.’

I interrupted to ask if they put anything on the wound. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘a mixture of salt, ashes, and powdered camel dung –it stung like fire.’ He went on: ‘We were operated on in the evening. I started to bleed during the night. I had been asleep and woke to feel a warm wetness on my thighs. The sheepskin on which I lay was soaked with blood. It was pitch dark and we could not see anything until my mother lit a fire. I had bled very little when they cut it off.’ He added with pride, ‘The people who were watching said that I showed no sign of pain while I was being done.’ He told me that he had healed in three weeks, but that two of the others, one of them the Manahil with the beard, were still unhealed and very swollen when he left them two months later. When I asked why they waited till they were grown up to be operated on, he said that it was their custom, and added with a grin that some of the Mahra waited until the eve of their marriage. I wondered what effect it had on a boy to grow up anticipating this ordeal. Probably he was resigned, for he had no choice but to submit to it. Certainly during the operation the fear of lasting ridicule if he flinched gave him courage to endure, and his pride made him anxious to face the test. In southern Iraq I have seen fourteen- and fifteen-year-old boys thrusting each other aside,
as they crowded forward, as eager to be circumcised as boys to buy sweets at the counter of a school shop in England; and in the Sudan I have met Arab boys who had circumcised themselves because their fathers had delayed giving permission for the operation. Yet among Arabs, circumcision is not a coveted sign conferring special privileges and marking the emergence of a boy into manhood, as it is among many primitive tribes such as the Masai.

Bin Kabina had undergone the normal circumcision, obligatory for all Muslims, although it is usually performed on a child about the age of seven. As I sat there talking to him I thought of the ceremony I had watched five months earlier in the distant Tihama. For a fortnight the young men who were to be circumcised had danced each evening and late into the night, waiting for the day when the old men would announce that the positions of the moon and stars were favourable. The initiates wore short, tight-sleeved red jackets and baggy white drawers, tight at the ankle, the only time in their lives when they wore drawers, which were women’s dress. On the appointed day, riding on camels, they were paraded behind the musicians round the neighbouring villages, and then brought back just before sunset, followed by a large crowd, to their own village. Their friends helped them to take off their drawers, and then one after the other these young men, looking like girls with their flowing hair and delicate features, stepped forward in front of their tribe. Each of them stood, with legs apart and his hands gripping his long hair, staring motionless and unflinching at a dagger stuck in the ground in front of him, while a slave handled his penis until it was erect and then flayed the entire organ. When the slave stepped aside, his work at last completed, the lad sprang forward and, to the compelling rhythm of the drums, danced frenziedly before the eager, craning crowd, leaping and capering while the blood splashed down his legs.

This is the modified form of a rite far older than Islam. In the Hajaz mountains some of the tribes still performed ‘the flaying circumcision’, which was often postponed until a man was married and had children, and in which the skin was removed from the navel down to the inside of the legs. Ibn Saud
forbade even the modified form of this circumcision, which he declared was a pagan custom, but the young men were prepared to risk the severest punishment rather than forgo the credit of submitting to this rite. On this particular occasion one of them had already been circumcised as a child, but he insisted on undergoing this second operation. Even after it was over their sufferings were not yet ended. Each morning they were held down over a small hole in the ground so that their mutilated parts dangled down, to kipper in the heat and smoke which came up from a fire below. Lads who had stood unmoved while they were circumcised screamed with the agony of this barbarous treatment. I described what I had seen to bin Kabina, who said, ‘That is not circumcision – it is butchery.’

In the evening I gave bin Kabina the clothes which I had brought for him and the spare dagger which was in my saddlebag. He buckled it on with pride. A stranger would have thought that he should have expressed his gratitude, but this was not customary among Arabs. He had accepted my gift and felt that there was no need for words. He would express his gratitude by other means.

We left Shisur on 9 November in the chill of dawn; the sun was resting on the desert’s rim, a red ball without heat. We walked as usual till it grew warm, the camels striding in front of us, a moving mass of legs and necks. Then one by one, as the inclination took us, we climbed up their shoulders and settled in our seats for the long hours which lay ahead. The Arabs sang, the full-throated roaring of the tribes; the shuffling camels quickened their pace, thrusting forward across the level ground, for we had left the hills behind us and were on the steppes which border on the Sands. We noticed the stale tracks of oryx, saw gazelle bounding stiff-legged across the plain, and flushed occasional hares from withered salt bushes in shallow watercourses.

Bin Shuas told us how they had carried Mahsin, who was his uncle, for three days tied on a camel, with the bone of his shattered thigh sticking through the skin, while they tried to outdistance the pursuers who followed in their tracks. Then bin Mautlauq spoke of the raid in which young Sahail was
killed. He and fourteen companions had surprised a small herd of Saar camels. The herdsman had fired two shots at them before escaping on the fastest of his camels, and one of these shots had hit Sahail in the chest. Bakhit held his dying son in his arms as they rode back across the plain with the seven captured camels. It was late in the morning when Sahail was wounded, and he lived till nearly sunset, begging for water which they had not got. They rode all night to escape from inevitable pursuit. At sunrise they saw some goats, and a small Saar encampment under a tree in a shallow valley. A woman was churning butter in a skin, and a boy and a girl were milking the goats. Some small children sat under the tree. The boy saw them first and tried to escape but they cornered him against a low cliff. He was about fourteen years old, a little younger than Sahail, and he was unarmed. When they surrounded him he put his thumbs in his mouth as a sign of surrender, and asked for mercy. No one answered him. Bakhit slipped down off his camel, drew his dagger, and drove it into the boy’s ribs. The boy collapsed at his feet, moaning, ‘Oh my father! Oh my father!’ and Bakhit stood over him till he died. He then climbed back into his saddle, his grief a little soothed by the murder which he had just committed. As bin Mautlauq spoke, staring across the level plain with his hot, rather bloodshot eyes, I pictured the scene with horrible distinctness. The small, long-haired figure, in white loin-cloth, crumpled on the ground, the spreading pool of blood, the avid clustering flies, the frantic wailing of the dark-clad women, the terrified children, the shrill insistent screaming of a small baby.

I rode along haunted by the thought of that murdered child, while around me the watchful Arabs formed and re-formed into chattering groups. There was not one of them whose life would not be forfeit if we were surprised by Saar raiders. Vindictive as this age-old law of a life for a life and a tooth for a tooth might be, I realized none the less that it alone prevented wholesale murder among a people who were subject to no outside authority, and who had little regard for human life; for no man lightly involves his whole family or tribe in a blood-feud. I remembered that, in 1935, Glubb, describing the Bedu of the north, had written: ‘It was curious to think
that even in the anarchical days of raging tribal chaos in un-governed Arabia before the emergence of the Akhwan or the present establishment of law and order, there was probably less fear and apprehension abroad than there is today in peaceful England.’ It was easy to be shocked by the Bedu’s disregard for human life. After all, many people feel today that it is morally indefensible to hang a man, even if he has raped and killed a child, but I could not forget how easily we ourselves had taken to killing during the war. Some of the most civilized people I had known had been the most proficient.