Arabian Sands (9 page)

I asked them about the Rub al Khali, or the Empty Quarter, the goal of my ambitions. No one had heard of it. ‘What is he talking about? What does he want?’ ‘God alone knows. I cannot understand his talk.’ At last Sultan exclaimed ‘Oh! he means the Sands’, and I realized that this was their name for the great desert of southern Arabia. I have heard townsmen and villagers in the Najd and the Hajaz refer to it as the Rub al Khali, but never Bedu who lived upon its borders.

I found it difficult to understand their talk. In the Sudan I
had learnt Arabic among tribes who spoke it as their second language. I had really only begun to speak it when I was in Syria during the war. But there was a great difference between Syrian Arabic and the dialect of the Bait Kathir, whose pronunciation and intonation were entirely different from anything I had heard before, and many of whose words were archaic. The Bait Kathir were equally puzzled by my speech, but this did not stop them from asking questions, about The Christians’. ‘Did they know God? Did they fast and pray? Were they circumcised? Did they marry like Muslims or just take a woman when they wanted one? How much bride-price did they pay? Did they own camels? Were they tribesmen? How did they bury their dead?’ It was always questions such as these that they asked me. None of them had any interest in the cars and aeroplanes which they had seen in the R.A.F. camp. The rifles with which they fought were all that they had accepted from the outside world, the only modern invention which interested them.

They spoke of Bertram Thomas who had travelled with them. Bedu notice everything and forget nothing. Garrulous by nature, they reminisce endlessly, whiling away with the chatter the long marching hours, and talking late into the night round their camp fires. Their life is at all times desperately hard, and they are merciless critics of those who fall short in patience, good humour, generosity, loyalty, or courage. They make no allowance for the stranger. Whoever lives with the Bedu must accept Bedu conventions, and conform to Bedu standards. Only those who have journeyed with them can appreciate the strain of such a life. These tribesmen are accustomed since birth to the physical hardships of the desert, to drink the scanty bitter water of the Sands, to eat gritty unleavened bread, to endure the maddening irritation of driven sand, intense cold, heat, and blinding glare in a land without shade or cloud. But more wearing still is the nervous tension. I was to learn how hard it is to live crowded together with people of another faith, speech, and culture in the solitude of the desert, how easy to be provoked to senseless wrath by the importunities and improvidence.

Bertram Thomas had reason to be impatient. He lost
precious months of the cold weather waiting in Dhaufar for his guide, bin Kalut, and the other Rashid to arrive. The previous year he had reached Mughshin, and there, upon the threshold of the Sands, had been thwarted by his Bait Kathir companions. He was far from being a Bedu by nature, and yet I never heard these Bedu speak a disparaging word about him. I have known them criticize him for tiring their camels with the heavy foreign saddle on which he rode, or comment on his preference for sleeping apart from his companions; but these were idiosyncrasies which they accepted even if they never understood them, things which they now recalled with a smile.

He was the first European to come among them and he won their respect by his good nature, generosity, and determination. They remembered him as a good travelling companion. When I went among these exclusive tribesmen sixteen years after he had left them, I was welcomed because I belonged to the same tribe as Thomas. I had only met him twice, in Cairo during the war, and then only for a few minutes. I should have liked to meet him again before he died, to tell him how much I owed to him.

After travelling to the sands of
Ghanim and Mughshin we return
to salala. There I meet the Rashid
for the first time and travel with
them to the Hadhramaut.

This first journey on the fringes of the Empty Quarter was only important to me as my probation for the far longer and more difficult journeys that were to follow. During the next five months I learnt to adapt myself to Bedu ways and to the rhythm of their life.

My companions were always awake and moving about as soon as it was light. I think the cold prevented them from sleeping, except in snatches, for they had little to cover them other than the clothes they wore, and during these winter nights there was often a ground frost. Still half asleep, I would hear them rousing the camels from their couching places. The camels roared and gurgled as they were moved, and the Arabs shouted to each other in their harsh, far-carrying voices. The camels would shuffle past, their forelegs hobbled to prevent them straying, their breath white on the cold air. A boy would drive them towards the nearest bushes. Then someone would give the call to prayer:

God is most great.

I testify that there is no god but God.

I testify that Muhammad is the Prophet of God.

Come to prayer!

Come to salvation!

Prayer is better than sleep.

God is most great.

There is no god but God.

Each line except the last was repeated twice. The lingering music of the words, strangely compelling even to me who did not share their faith, hung over the silent camp. I would watch old Tamtaim, who slept near me, washing before he prayed. Every act had to be performed exactly and in order. He washed
his face, hands, and feet, sucked water into his nostrils, put wet fingers into his ears, and passed wet hands over the top of his head. The Bait Kathir prayed singly, each man in his own place and in his own time, whereas the Rashid, with whom I later travelled, prayed together and in line. Tamtaim swept the ground before him, placed his rifle in front of him, and then prayed facing towards Mecca. He stood upright, bent forward his hands on his knees, knelt and then bowed down till his forehead touched the ground. Several times he performed these ritual movements, slowly and impressively, while he recited the formal prayer. Sometimes, after he had finished his prayers, he intoned long passages from the Koran, and the very sound of the words had the quality of great poetry. Many of these Bedu knew only the opening verse of the Koran:

In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful.

Praise be to God, Lord of the worlds!

The Compassionate, the Merciful!

King on the day of reckoning!

Thee
only
do we worship and to Thee do we cry for help.

Guide us on the straight path,

The path of those to whom Thou hast been gracious;

With whom Thou are not angry, and who go not astray.

This verse they repeated several times as they prayed. Muslims should pray at dawn, at noon, in the afternoon, at sunset, and after dark. The Bait Kathir prayed at dawn and sunset, but most of them neglected the other prayers.

A little later I would hear bell-like notes as someone pounded coffee in a brass mortar, varying his stroke to produce the semblance of a tune. I would get up. In the desert we slept in our clothes so that all I had to do was to adjust my head-cloth, pour a little water over my hands, splash it over my face, and then go over to the fire and greet the Arabs, who were sitting round it: ‘Salam alaikum’ (Peace be on you), and they would stand up and answer ‘Alaikum as salam’ (On you be peace). Bedu always rise to return a salutation. If we were not in a hurry we would bake bread for breakfast, otherwise we would eat scraps set aside from our meal the night before. We would drink tea, sweet and black, and then coffee, which was bitter, black, and very strong. The coffee-drinking was a formal business, not to
be hurried. The server stood as he poured a few drops into a small china cup, little bigger than an egg cup, which he handed to each of us in turn, bowing as he did so. Each person was served until he shook the cup slightly as he handed it back, signifying that he had had enough. It was not customary to take more than three cups.

The camels were now rounded up and brought in to be saddled and loaded. Sultan went over to fetch Umbrausha, the camel I was riding. She was a magnificent animal, a famous thoroughbred from Oman. The other camels seemed to me to be very small, judged by Sudanese standards, and all of them were in poor condition. Sultan had told me that there had been no proper rain in the desert for the last three years, and that their animals were weak from hunger.

The camels which these Bedu rode were females. In the Sudan I had always ridden on bulls, since both there and in those parts of the Sahara where I had travelled the females are kept for milk and never ridden. Throughout Arabia, however, females are ridden from choice. The tribes which carry goods for hire use the bulls as pack animals, but the Bait Kathir slaughter nearly all the male calves at birth. They live largely on camels’ milk, and have no desire to squander food on animals which can make no return, since there is no carrying trade in this desert. Bull camels to act as sires are consequently very rare. Later, when I travelled to the Hadhramaut, I was accompanied by a man who rode one. We were continuously pursued by tribesmen with females to be served. We had a long journey in front of us and this constant exercise was visibly exhausting my companion’s mount, but he could not protest. Custom demanded that this camel should be allowed to serve as many females as were produced. No one even asked the owner’s permission. They just brought up a camel, had it served, and took it away.

Loading the camels was a noisy business, for most of them roared and snarled whenever they were approached, and especially when the loads were placed on their backs. I asked Sultan how they managed on raids when silence was important, and he told me that they then tied the camels’ mouths. The noise which our camels were makingwould have been heard two miles
away or even farther in the desert stillness. Sultan had brought Umbrausha over to the place where I had slept, leading her by her head-rope. He now jerked downwards on it, saying ‘Khrr, khrr’, and she dropped to her knees; she then swayed backwards, and after settling her hind legs under her, sank down on to her hocks; she then shuffled her knees forward until she was comfortably settled on the ground, her chest resting on the horny pad between her forelegs. Sultan tied one of her forelegs with the end of the head-rope to prevent her rising while he was loading her. Umbrausha was properly trained and this was not necessary, but an Arab near us was having a lot of trouble with a young animal. She struggled back to her feet after he had couched her, and even after he had tied her knees she half rose and then pivoted round among the loads which he had been trying to put on her back. She snarled and gurgled, spewing half-chewed green cud over his shirt. ‘May raiders get you,’ he shouted at her in exasperation. She looked as if she would bite his head off at any moment, but female camels are really very gentle and do not bite. Male camels will bite, especially when they are rutting, and they inflict appalling injuries. I had treated a man in the Sudan who had been bitten in the arm and the bone was splintered to fragments.

The southern Bedu ride on the small Omani saddle instead of on the double-poled saddle of northern Arabia to which I was accustomed. Sultan picked up my saddle, which was shaped like a small double wooden vice, fitted over palm-fibre pads, and girthed it tightly over Umbrausha’s withers just in front of the hump. Ibis wooden vice was really the tree on which he now built the saddle. He next took a crescent-shaped fibre pad which rose in a peak at the back and, after fitting it round the back and sides of the camel’s hump, attached it with a loop of string to this tree. He then put a blanket over the pad, and folded my rug over this, placed my saddle-bags over the rug, and finally put a black sheepskin on top of the saddle-bags. He had already looped a woollen cord under the camel’s stomach so that it passed over the rear pad, and he now took one end of this cord past the tree and back along the other side of the saddle to the original loop. When he drew the cord tight it held everything firmly in place. He had now built a platform over the camel’s
hump and the fibre pad which was behind it. Sitting on this, the rider was much farther back on the camel than he would have been if riding on the northern saddle, which is set over the camel’s withers.

My saddle-bags were heavy with money and spare ammunition, and the small medicine-chest which I took with me. Most of the other riding camels carried forty or fifty pounds of rice or flour; all of them would be heavily laden when we were travelling long distances between wells and all our goatskins would be filled with water. I had hired four baggage camels, and these carried between a hundred and fifty and two hundred pounds.

When all was ready we set off on foot. We always walked for the first two or three hours. While we were still in the mountains each of us led his camel, or tied her by her head-rope to the tail of the one in front. Later, when we were on the gravel plains or in the sands, we turned them loose to find whatever food they could as they drifted along. We would walk behind them with our rifles on our shoulders, held by the muzzle. This is the way Bedu always carry their rifles. At first I found it disconcerting, for I knew that all the rifles were loaded. Then I got used to it and did the same myself. When at length the sun grew hot we rode. The Bedu never bothered to stop their mounts and make them kneel before they got up, but pulled down their heads, put a foot on their necks, and were lined up to within easy reach of the saddle. At first they insisted on couching my camel when I wished to mount. This was meant as a kindness. So it was when they begged me to ride instead of walking as we started in the morning, and when they frequently offered me a drink, but I found this constant attention irksome, because I was only anxious for them to treat me as one of themselves.

A Bedu who is going to mount a couched camel stands behind her tail. He then leans forward and catches the wooden tree with his left hand as he places his left knee in the saddle. Immediately the camel feels his weight she starts to rise, lifting her hindquarters off the ground, and he swings his right leg over the saddle. The camel then rises to her knees and with another jerk is on her feet. The Bedu either sit with a leg on either side of the hump, or kneel in the saddle, sitting on the upturned soles of their feet, in which case they are riding entirely by balance.
They prefer to ride kneeling, especially if they mean to gallop. It is an extraordinary feat of balance, for riding a galloping camel, especially over rough ground, is like sitting on a bucking horse. A Bedu usually carries his rifle slung under his arm and parallel with the ground, which must add greatly to the difficulty of balancing. I could not ride kneeling; it was too uncomfortable and too precarious even at a walk. I had therefore to sit continuously in one position, which became very tiring on a long march. The first time I rode a camel in the Sudan I was so stiff next day I could scarcely move. This had not happened to me again, but I was afraid that it might when I started on this journey, for it was seven years since I had last ridden any distance. It would have been humiliating, for I had claimed that I was already an experienced rider.