Arabian Sands (19 page)

Musallim made porridge for our evening meal, the only meal of the day. From now on we should be eating gritty lumps of unleavened bread, smeared with a little butter. We assembled to feed, and bin Kabina poured water over our outstretched hands. This was the last time we should wash, even our hands, until we reached the wells in Dhafara. Mabkhaut moved a rug for us to sit on, and uncovered one of the large pale-green scorpions that are plentiful in the Sands wherever there is any vegetation. I always hoped I would not tread on one with my bare feet. In Abyssinia I had once put on my trousers with a scorpion inside them, and knew how painful their sting could be. I was also afraid of treading on a snake when I fetched the camels after dark; there were plenty of them about. Most of them were horned vipers, but there was also a small burrowing snake, a diminutive boa, which was harmless. A year before, one of these snakes had burrowed its way out of the sand underneath one of the Rashid as he sat with us beside the fire. He was known there after as ‘the father of the snake’ and was not allowed to forget his momentary panic. But it was the spiders I really loathed, and they were common in all but the most arid places. They were as much as three inches across, with hairy, reddish legs, and pendulous bodies, and they scuttled about in the firelight. I saw one now and tried to kill it but it escaped. A little later bin Kabina tickled the back of my neck, and thinking it was this spider I jumped convulsively and upset my tea. Laughingly the others assured me that these spiders were harmless, which I already knew, but this knowledge did not lessen the revulsion which I felt for them.

A cold wind blew in gusts across the desert, charged with a fine spray of sand; the stars were very bright. We piled more wood upon the fire – long snake-like roots of tribulus and heliotrope which we had dragged out of the sand. I was still hungry. I knew that I should be hungry for weeks, perhaps months, but tonight there was plenty of water, so I told bin Kabina to make more coffee and tea. The others were busy in the firelight – sewing a buckle on a cartridge belt, patching a
rent in a shirt, seeing to a saddle, cleaning a rifle, or plaiting a rope. Sultan was digging with the point of a dagger in the horny sole of his foot, looking for a thorn, and al Auf was shaping me a new camel-stick. These sticks are brittle and I had broken mine the day before. While he heated the
abal
root which he had selected, before bending its end to make a crook, he spoke of the fighting on the Trucial Coast. I gathered that the Al bu Falah could call on the tribes in time of need. AI Auf explained: The bin Maktum of Dibai would have to pay for our service; we owe them no loyalty. The Al bu Falah are different; if one of that family, even a child, gave me an order it would be awkward to refuse.’ He added with a grin, ‘Being a Bedu I expect I should, unless it suited me.’ I gathered that the Al bu Falah had recently been successful in several raids. It was extraordinary how widely news travels in the desert. AI Auf had heard this news from two of his kinsmen when they had returned to the southern steppes with a rifle and three camels which they had captured. These men had travelled seven hundred miles across the Sands before they met him. He had then come four hundred miles to Mughshin, and now the Bait Kathir would carry the news down to Bai on the southern coast, a further two hundred miles, and from there others would take it up into Oman. Later my companions spoke of camels and grazing, and of how to cure mange, of the price of flour in Salala, of when the dhows might be expected to arrive there with dates, and of an old man who had died recently in Ghaidat on the Mahra coast. They agreed that he had been skilful in curing sickness with his spells, and cited cases. Musallim spoke of the festivities he had watched at a slave’s wedding in Salala, and bin Turkia described the feasting and dancing at a recent circumcision ceremony among the Mahra. Said said, ‘By God, Ali’s son made a fuss when they cut him. He cried out like a woman.’ The others laughed, and some of them exclaimed, ‘God blacken his face!’ I realized that this wretched boy’s failure would soon be known far and wide among the Bedu. Musallim next told a long story about an oryx hunt, which I had heard at least three times before. They discussed the Dahm raids and bin al Kamam’s mission to seek a truce. Then bin Kabina described the meals which
he had eaten when he was with me in the Hadhramaut, probably the first time in his life that he had had enough to eat. During the months ahead we were to talk often of food, of meals which we had eaten and of others which we planned. At Mughshin my companions had spoken of women, for then they were full fed and eating meat. The Bedu are a vigorous race with strong passions, and their talk of sex is vivid and frank, but never obscene. Similarly their swearing is direct and purposeful – ‘God’s curse on you.’ ‘May God destroy your house.’ ‘Cursed of your two parents.’ ‘May raiders get you’ – not the meaningless obscenities which pass for cursing among the gutter-bred Arabs of the towns. But we seldom spoke of sex, for starving men dream of food, not of women, and our bodies were generally too tired to lust.

Homosexuality is common among most Arabs, especially in the towns, but it is very rare among the Bedu, who of all Arabs have the most excuse for indulging in this practice, since they spend long months away from their women. Lawrence described in
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
how his escort made use of each other to slake their needs, but those men were villagers from the oasis, not Bedu. Glubb, who knows more about the Bedu than any other European has ever known, once told me that active homosexuality among them was almost unknown. I myself could not have lived as I did with my companions and been unaware of it had it existed among them; we lived too close together. Yet during all the time I was with them I saw no sign of it. Nor did they talk about it. They sometimes joked about goats but never about boys. Only twice in five years did I ever hear them mention the subject. Once when we were staying in a town on the Trucial Coast, bin Kabina pointed out two youths, one of whom was a slave, and said that they were sometimes used by the Sheikh’s retainers. He evidently thought the practice both ridiculous and obscene. On the other occasion bin al Kamam described an execution which he had watched in Riyadh. The man, one of the Habab from the Hajaz, had been sentenced to death for raping a boy. None of my companions showed the slightest sympathy for him; instead they muttered, ‘It was a just sentence. God blacken his face! He deserved to die.’

Bin al Kamam said: ‘We had come across to Riyadh from the Wadi Dawasir – Said was with me and Muhammad bin Bakhit’; and when I looked at him in inquiry he said, ‘No, you don’t know Muhammad. You have never met him. He spends his time in the Dakaka sands.’ He went on: ‘It was Friday and we had gone into the town to buy provisions, for we planned to leave next day for the Hasa. We had camped a little way outside the town. It was after the midday prayers and the market square was crowded. They brought the man out from prison, and as they led him through the crowd he chanted, over and over again, “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the Prophet of God.” He was quite unafraid. He was a young man, very good looking, and dressed in freshly-washed white clothes. He had darkened his eyelids with kohl and stained his palms with henna, as we do for a wedding. In the centre of the square they told him to kneel, and the executioner, a large slave, very black, dressed in a robe – which, by God, was worth a camel – drew his sword, and fastened back his long white shirt sleeve to bare his right arm. Then his assistant pricked the condemned man in the side, and as he stiffened, the executioner cut off his head with one blow. The head jumped among the crowd and the blood spouted an arm’s length into the air as the body collapsed. They left it lying there till sunset for the crowd to look at.’

I asked bin al Kamam what his feelings were as he watched, and he said, ‘It made me feel quite sick.’

In the morning we gave the camels another drink. Several of them, accustomed to clean-tasting water in Dhaufar, refused to touch this bitter stuff. We held their nostrils but they still refused, and finally we poured it down their throats by force. It was the last water we should find till we reached Dhafara. Some of the skins had leaked a little. We filled them up and plugged the tiny dribbling holes. The Arabs said their midday prayers, and then we loaded our camels and led them away between the golden dunes. We went on foot, for the full skins were heavy on their backs. It was 29 November. We travelled north-east towards Ramlat al Ghafa, where we hoped to find the Bait Musan and to change the weakest of our camels. The going was easy, along gravel flats splashed with
outcrops of white gypsum and fringed with bright-green salt-bushes. We camped at sunset, but there was nothing for our camels to eat. One of them cast a nine-month-old calf. They carry their young for a year. I noticed that Salim bin Turkia took water for the ritual ablutions before he prayed. I protested, saying he should use sand, as is the custom when water is short, and added that we should not have enough to drink if it was used for washing. He said, ‘It is better to pray than to drink.’ I answered that he would not be doing either in a week’s time if he wasted water. This incident worried me. It showed that some of the Bait Kathir had not begun to realize how narrow was our margin of safety. In the evening I warned them that Dhafara was twice as far from Khaur bin Atarit as was Salala. Sultan remarked gloomily, ‘In that case neither we nor our camels will ever live to see it.’

The next afternoon we found a little parched herbage on the flank of a high dune. We let our camels graze for two hours and then continued until dark. Throughout the day my companions had gathered any plants they had seen, to feed their camels as they went along; it did not matter how high up on a dune a plant was growing, someone was sure to dismount, scramble up, and collect it. They always did this, however long or tiring the march might be. Where we camped, the dunes were very big whale-backed massifs, rising above white plains of powdery gypsum. There was no warmth in this sterile scene. It was bleak and cheerless and curiously arctic in appearance. Twice I woke during the night and each time I saw Sultan brooding over the fire. We did another long day’s marching, ten hours without a stop; there was nothing to stop for among these lifeless dunes. We had picked up the Bait Musan tracks and were following them. In the evening we found a little vegetation.

We started again soon after sunrise. As Sultan seemed gloomy and little inclined for conversation I rode beside al Auf. He sat his restive, half-tamed camel with easy mastery, unconsciously anticipating her fretful movements, a confident, commanding figure, typical of a people whom no hardship can daunt.

I asked him whether it rained more often in summer or
in the winter, and he said: ‘It seems to have changed since I was a boy. Then I remember we got more rain in the summer; now we expect it in the winter, but as you can see there is not much at any time. The trouble is that when it does fall it is usually very local, and the grazing is difficult to find.’

I asked how much rain was required to produce grazing, and he answered, ‘It is no use if it does not go into the sand this far,’ and he indicated his elbow.

‘How long does it have to rain to do that?’

‘A heavy shower is enough. That would produce grazing that was better than nothing, but it would die within the year unless there were more rain. If we get really good rain, a whole day and night of rain, the grazing will remain green for three and even four years.’

‘Do you mean without any more rain?’

‘Yes, without another drop. It depends of course on the sands; some are better than others. We divide all the sands into “red” and “white”. We should call these sands “white”. The “red” ones produce the best grazing. The “red” downs in Dakaka are the best of all, You ought to go and see them sometime, Umbarak, they are wonderful sands.’

After a pause he went on: ‘We like winter rain best; it generally lasts longer. Summer storms, it is true, are often heavier, but the great heat at that time of year kills the seedlings, unless the rain has been heavy. However, praise be to God, rain is rain whenever it comes.’ He pointed to some dead tribulus: ‘Do you see that
zahra?
You would think it was quite dead, wouldn’t you? but it’s only got to rain and a month later it will be green and covered with flowers. It takes years of drought to kill these plants; they have such tremendously long roots. In a place where the plants really are dead, like the Umm al Hait, which we saw the other day, the vegetation comes up again from seeds when at last it does rain. It does not matter how long they have lain in the sand.’

I said: ‘Take, for instance, these Bait Musan whose tracks we are following, how long will they be able to stay here without water?’

Al Auf answered: ‘It depends on how good the grazing is. On good grazing they could remain here from the late autumn
until the spring. Of course, when the weather gets hot they will have to move back to within reach of the wells.’

‘So they may be here for six or seven months without any water? What do they eat?’

‘Camel’s milk is their food and drink. As long as there is plenty of milk the Bedu want nothing more.’

‘Don’t the camels ever get thirsty?’

He answered: ‘If you loosed a camel that was dying of thirst on fresh green grazing, not only would she recover from her thirst, but she would be fat within two months. Sometimes a camel gets so fat that her hump splits, and then she dies.’

‘How do you know where you will find grazing?’

‘In the autumn while they are still on the wells the Arabs send out scouts to look for it. These scouts must be good men, accustomed to endure, and their camels must be the best. During the summer we may have seen clouds or lightning in the distance, or while we are searching the desert we may find tracks of oryx or
rim
all going in one direction and follow them. We may go back to look at the grazing we had been on the year before or other grazing we had found during the winter. If there’s grazing in the desert we probably find it. We are Bedu; we know the desert.’