Arabian Sands (47 page)

That evening, encamped outside Ibri, we heard that bin Ghabaisha and another Rashid had been there a week earlier. They had visited the Riqaishi, who had publicly insulted bin Ghabaisha, possibly because by now he was a well-known brigand, more probably because he was known to be one of my companions. Furiously angry, bin Ghabaisha got up and left the room. After dark he waylaid the Riqaishi’s coffee-maker, a person of importance in an Arab household, threatened to kill him at once if he made a sound and took him outside the town. There he tied the man up and loaded him on a camel. He then roused a cultivator and said to him, ‘I am bin Ghabaisha. Tell the Riqaishi in the morning that in return for his insults I have taken his servant, and intend to sell him in the Hasa.’

When I met bin Ghabaisha he told me that the Riqaishi had offered him fifty dollars for the return of his servant. I asked him whether he accepted. ‘No. I sent back word that I realized that the man was useless as a coffee-maker. Had he not left me without coffee when I called to pay my respects to the Governor? All the same he would fetch more than that in Saudi Arabia.’ Eventually the Riqaishi ransomed his servant for a considerable sum.

From Ibri we rode northward along the foot of the mountains towards Jabal Hafit, passing through the territory of the Bani Kitab and Al bu Shams. Both of these tribes would have stopped me if they could, but now, accompanied as I was by the Imam’s representative and
rabias
from the Junuba, Dura, and Wahiba, they were obliged to let me pass. We reached Muwaiqih on 6 April. We had ridden eleven hundred miles since we had left Zayid’s fort on 28 January.

Anxious to explore the Jabal at
Akhadar I return to Buraimi the
following year, but am turned back
from the Jabal by the Imam of
Oman. I leave Arabia.

I returned from England in November 1949 intending to complete my map of the Duru country, and if possible to visit Jabal al Akhadar. At Muwaiqih I found bin Kabina, his half-brother Muhammad bin Kalut, bin Ghabaisha, bin Tahi, and al Jabari of the Awamir. Bin al Kamam had unfortunately gone back to Dhaufar. The others were ready to go with me, but bin Kabina warned me that the Duru would prevent my re-entering their territory. With Zayid’s help I sent for Huaishil, the Duru Sheikh who had been with me the year before. My companions admitted that, accompanied by him, we were unlikely to have trouble with the Duru, since he was one of their most influential sheikhs. He arrived six week later, while we were hawking in the Sands to the west of Muwaiqih, and after much argument he promised to take me through the Duru country to Birkat al Mauz, where Sulaiman bin Hamyar lived. Only Sulaiman could take me to the Jabal al Akhadar.

Ten days after we had left Muwaiqih, we had breakfasted and were saddling our camels when bin Kharas, the same unprepossessing and truculent sheikh who had held me up the year before, arrived with a large following of Duru, and ordered us to return at once the way we had come. That night I had been stung by a scorpion, once in the shoulder as I rolled over in my sleep, and again in the hand as instinctively I reached up. There had been no moon and it had been very dark. I had woken bin Tahi, who was near me, but the old man only muttered, ‘I expect it was a mouse,’ and went to sleep again. Now, although the pain had stopped, I felt dizzy and rather sick, disinclined to listen patiently to the interminable wrangling of these exasperating Duru. All that day they argued, and the following morning they still refused to let us
pass. Huaishil was furious; I have seldom seen a man so angry. Suddenly he shouted, ‘By God we are going on, whatever you may say or do, bin Kharas,’ and strode off to fetch his camel. Bin Kabina and bin Ghabaisha led me aside, and bin Ghabaisha said, ‘Listen to me, Umbarak, Huaishil is mad with anger and will lead you into trouble if you follow him. These cursed Dura mean business and will shoot if we try to go on. You will be the first to die. Why die trying to see their country? What good will that do you? It is not even as if we were raiding. May God destroy these worthless Ghafaris!’ So far I had taken little part in the discussion, but now I called Huaishil and suggested that he should go to Ali bin Hilal, the head Sheikh of the Dura, and get his permission for me to travel in their country, the rest of us remaining where we were until he returned. He had already told me that Ali bin Hilal was well disposed towards me. Huaishil and the other Dura eventually agreed to this suggestion, but I heard bin Kharas mutter, The Christian is not going through our country even if a hundred Ali bin Hilals give him permission. Who is Ali to give us orders?’

Huaishil rode off, saying he would be back in three days’ time, and bin Kharas and his followers left for some encampments near by. In the evening a sheikh of the Afar turned up in our camp, accompanied by a Wahiba and a Harasis. They had heard that we were in trouble with the Dura, and being Hanawis had come to give us their support. They assured us that they would remain with us until Huaishil returned. The weather now turned horribly cold with a tearing gale from the north-east.

Three days later, bin Kharas was back demanding that we should leave, since Huaishil had not returned as he had promised; we both of us knew quite well that he would not travel in this bitter weather. For the next two days we argued almost incessantly. The Dura did not seem unfriendly. They agreed that I had done them no harm when I had been in their country, but maintained that if they allowed me to travel there at will I should be followed by other Christians in cars, looking for oil and intending to seize their land. The situation was complicated by a tribal feud among the Dura themselves.
These particular Dura had been for many years at variance with the Mahamid, the section of the tribe to which the sheikhs belonged. Bin Kharas, although himself of the Mahamid, was bitterly jealous of Ali bin Hilal and Huaishii, and anxious to increase his own authority by lessening theirs.

To divert their attention and to gain a little more time for Huaishil to arrive, I offered a prize of ten Maria Theresa dollars for a camel race. Anxious to win this money and to show off their animals, they agreed to race, after trying unsuccessfully to get me to increase the stakes. A particularly fine camel belonging to bin Kharas won easily. Although the Dura seemed almost cordial after the race, the Afar sheikh advised us to leave, maintaining that they were planning to kill us. They intended, he said, to invite Huaishil’s three companions to a discussion, and then to seize and disarm them before attacking us. Like all Dura, they hated the Rashid, and apparently bin Kharas was now saying that it was as meritorious to kill a Christian as to go on pilgrimage to Mecca, and in this case much less trouble’.

In the evening bin Kharas came to our camping place and said, The Christian must leave tomorrow morning. We are all resolved that he can remain here no longer.’ He refused the coffee which we offered him, and left immediately. After he had gone, bin Ghabaisha, who was pouring out coffee for the rest of us, glanced round the hollow in which we were camped and said, ‘If we are still here at this time tomorrow we shall be fighting for our lives.’ Bin Tahi agreed, and added, ‘We must leave; we should not stand a chance, but by God I will come back some time and take that camel off bin Kharas. He is not fit to have one like that.’ My companions were certain that the Dura were not bluffing. Even if I had thought otherwise I was dependent upon them and forced in such a case to follow their advice. So when Muhammad asked, ‘What do
you
think, Umbarak?’ I said, ‘We had better leave in the morning.’

Huaishii rejoined us when we were in the Sands eighty miles to the west. He told us that Ali bin Hilal had agreed to my travelling through their country, and explained that he had
waited at Ali’s encampment for the wind to drop before coming back to us. I was angry that he had not returned sooner, but said nothing, not wishing to antagonize him. He promised to take us in the morning to the Wadi al Amairi.

The wind had been southerly, but next day it went back to the north-east and blew another gale. Bitterly cold off the frozen uplands of central Asia, it was thick with sand whipped from the dunes around us. We sat throughout the day, without shelter, in a reddish obscurity, half-smothered by the flying grains which, reaching to a height of about eight feet above the ground, rasped our skins, filled our eyes, noses, and ears, and were gritty between our teeth. This continuous discomfort became almost intolerable with the passing hours. Sunset brought relief, for the wind dropped and the stars came out. Next morning I noticed that the dune crests had altered a little, but the general outline of the dunes themselves was unchanged. These sandstorms in southern Arabia must be mild compared with those that occur in the Sahara. One storm in which I had been caught on my way to Tibesti was far worse than any I experienced in the Empty Quarter. But even here these sandstorms sometimes had fatal results; for instance, bin Tahi told me of some Rashid who followed raiders into sands that were unknown to them and died when such a storm wiped out the tracks which they were following.

We travelled back through the Sands and then across gravel plains through country similar to that which I had seen before. In the Wadi al Aswad we met some Dura, one of whom was suffering from fever. I thought it was probably malaria and gave him quinine and aspirin; next day, however, bin Kabina went down with a similar attack. To rest him we remained where we were. In the morning bin Ghabaisha, bin Tahi, and one of Huaishil’s Dura were sick. We went on slowly, for our water was getting short, and the evening before we reached the Amairi I myself had a high temperature and a splitting headache, but as our water was finished we could not stop. Next day I was feeling so ill that it was an effort even to keep upright in the saddle, but as I rode along I had constantly to check our course with my compass and note how long we had travelled on each bearing; also I had to write down the
names of each watercourse that we crossed; otherwise the thread of my traverse would have been irreparably broken. It took us five hours to reach the Amairi. Some Duru fired on us as we approached the well, but Huaishil rode forward and spoke with them. They had been warned by bin Kharas that we might be coming this way and at first they were hostile. However, Huaishil persuaded them to let us pass. I recovered from my fever two days later, but at the time I hardly cared what they said or did, wishing only to be left alone. I think we were suffering from influenza. We heard later that there had been some sort of epidemic in Oman and several deaths. This was the only time I was ill during the years I was in Arabia.

Three days later we were camped in the stony foothills ten miles to the south-west of Izz. Huaishil and al Jabari went off to Sulaiman bin Hamyar at Tanuf to ask if I might visit him. After a further three days they returned to say that Sulaiman had invited me to Birkat al Mauz. On the way back, however, they found that the hue and cry was out, and when they tried to stop in the town of Bahlah for a meal, the inhabitants shut their doors against them. Huaishil had promptly sent a messenger back to Sulaiman asking him to come to our assistance and had then hurried on to warn us. He told us that a pursuit party sent by the Imam was close behind him, and advised us to move across the valley and camp above the village of Mamur where we should be in his own territory. There we were joined by some Junuba, who had been with me the year before, and by some Wahiba who had come to invite me to their country.

Next morning our camel guards reported that a hundred armed townsmen were collected in a watercourse near by and soon afterwards four of them came to our camp. Their leader, one of the Imam’s household slaves, ordered us to leave immediately, saying that the Imam had told them to kill me unless I did so. Huaishil answered that we intended to remain where we were until we heard from Sulaiman. They protested strongly, and a little later were overheard arguing as to which of them should shoot me and claim the reward. We therefore warned them that we would fire at any one who came near us. As I had with me
rabias
from the Dura, Junuba, and Wahiba,
I thought it unlikely that they would attack us; but when the situation was getting uncomfortably tense a messenger arrived from Sulaiman bin Hamyar to say that he was on his way. He arrived in the afternoon and camped in Mamur village, a cluster of palm-frond cabins and two or three mud buildings grouped round a small mosque. I met him there, in a courtyard crowded with his own retainers and those of the Imam. A big man, with a sallow complexion and a long black beard, he was dressed in a brown, gold-embroidered cloak of the finest weave, and a spotless white shirt, with an expensive Kashmiri shawl wrapped round his head and sandals on his feet. His dagger was decorated with gold. He impressed me at once as a powerful if not very congenial personality. It was obvious from his bearing and from the behaviour of his retainers that he was not a tribal sheikh ruling by consent, but an autocrat accustomed to obedience. As soon as I had been served with dates and coffee he took me inside the mosque, after stationing a guard at the entrance with orders that no one was to be allowed near. He was obviously angry with the Imam for having prevented me from coming to Birkat al Mauz at his invitation, and by meeting me here he had defied him. I doubted, however, that he would risk a more serious quarrel by taking me to the Jabal al Akhadar. I had always heard that he was without the narrow fanaticism of most Omani townsmen, and that he was interested in and prepared to use the inventions of the West. This lack of orthodoxy and his obvious ambition made him suspect with the Imam.

I soon realized that the Imam had just grounds for his mistrust for after we had talked for a while, sitting close together on a small prayer-rug, he leant closer to me and explained in a whisper that he wished to be recognized by the British Government as the independent ruler of the Jabal al Akhadar, with a status similar to that of the Trucial Sheikhs. I told him that I could not help him in this matter as I was a traveller with no official position, who had come here with no object but to explore the Jabal al Akhadar. He said, ‘If you can arrange what I have asked, come back again and I will take you wherever you wish to go.’ I suggested that I might have some difficulty in getting away from here, as my camp was surrounded
by the Imam’s followers, and he said, ‘Leave tomorrow and I will stay here for a day and make sure that no one pursues you.’