A Reed Shaken by the Wind (11 page)

At Hadam, a huge reed village standing in newly flooded seasonal marsh, we were told that the surrounding country
was swarming with wild pig, and that a child from a neighbouring village had been severely gored the week before. Here I had my first experience of a different kind of pig hunting.

Some half a mile from the village rose a low tumulus island, whose highest point, where it ran up from sloping banks to a small cairn of turf, was some thirty feet above the water. At the foot of this we drew up the
tarada,
and as we walked up the slope I saw that this had been a burial island, for through the grey-brown dried mud showed everywhere pieces of broken ochre-coloured sherd, bright wedges and chips of green and blue glazed pottery, and loose human bones. On the cairn at the top a dark eagle stood motionless until we were within twenty yards of him.

From the summit of the island we searched the seemingly dead landscape with field-glasses. On every side the water stretched away to the horizon, broken here and there by spits of still-dry mud, scattered bulrush stubble, and an occasional dense reed-bed. It was a landscape in two colours, the pale diffident blue of sky and water broken only by the drab of mud-reach and reed. It was strange how empty and lifeless this composition appeared to the naked eye, and how teeming it became through the lenses. Wherever there was a spit of dry ground hordes of small wading birds scurried hither and thither; some of the apparent islands revealed themselves as rafts of densely packed sleeping duck; a particularly opaque reed-bed was recreated as an immobile battalion of purple herons; and a small mud hump a quarter of a mile away showed itself suddenly as the enemy—a sleeping wild boar.

This was the first opportunity I had had to examine one of the wild pigs at leisure; and the bulk, compared with the insignificant creatures that I remembered from Kiplingesque pictures of subalterns pig-sticking in India, or from Teuton steel engravings of a fur-collared Kaiser Wilhelm drawing bead upon a pig as it scuttled across a woodland ride, seemed
no less than grotesque. This beast was as big, in round terms, as a donkey, but infinitely more solid and massive. There was none of the sparse bristly hair that one associates with a pig; this animal was as shaggy as the shaggiest of dogs, long matted hair of a pale-mud colour, showing dark streaks and patches where it divided between the tangles. He looked eminently able to kill a man.

We walked down the slope of the island and began to wade towards him, for the depth was not continuous enough to give passage to the
tarada.
The water was numbingly cold, not much more than ankle-deep, but below it one’s feet sank into another four or five inches of stiff sucking mud. After twenty yards I had discarded my shoes, which had been chosen to slip off easily when entering a house, and after fifty I was at least that distance behind Thesiger and Amara. It was not only that the legs of my trousers would not stay rolled up—the others had only to hitch up their
dish-dashas
round their waists—but as soon as I had removed my shoes I had found that the invisible mud bristled with a spiny stubble of burnt reeds as sharp as porcupine quills. It was like walking over a fakir’s bed of nails. Every two or three yards one of my feet would slip into the deep prints of an animal or human who had gone this way before, and as I staggered to recover my balance the other sole would come down firmly and with my full weight upon the spikes. I dropped farther and farther behind, while Thesiger and Amara, the former in rubber commando boots and the latter with the horny and insensitive soles of a lifetime barefoot, strode on as unfalteringly as if they walked on smooth dry land.

They were within a hundred and twenty yards of the boar—though I was still double that distance—before he got to his feet, stared truculently, walked a pace or two away, and turned to stare again. Thesiger planted his long fork-topped stick in the mud, rested his rifle upon it, and took aim.

At last I was comforted for my disgrace among the coots.
Thesiger, who is an excellent shot, and Amara, whom he had taught and who was also capable of an impressive performance, each missed the boar three times. The seventh shot struck him in the ribs but did not bring him down nor noticeably slow his progress. We watched him as, far beyond reasonable rifle shot, he trotted on and on through the shallow water until at length he disappeared into the thicket of a reed-bed fully half a mile away.

We followed him. For another half an hour I struggled with the suck of the clay, the slide into indented footprints, the needles of the spiny reed stubble; then, as we neared the tall reeds, the water became thigh-deep and the mud below it softer still. Thesiger halted for a conference with Amara, and I was able to gain a little ground.

Here, where the reeds were in places thick enough to hide a wounded boar, were the typical circumstances for a charge. We floundered forward warily, weapons at the ready, but as I surveyed the party from my ignominious position at its rear I felt that in the event of the pig breaking cover our greatest danger would not be from the pig but from each other. Amara had separated from Thesiger and was now wading at right angles to his course, his rifle horizontal and pointing straight at me, while Hassan, who from solicitude had maintained a mid-way station between them and me, zigzagged about brandishing a Colt .45 automatic whose muzzle menaced each of us in turn.

The boar, however, was not in the reed-bed, and when we emerged at the other side he was standing broadside in shallow water a hundred yards away. Thesiger and Amara fired simultaneously, and this time he died as big game should, shot cleanly through the heart.

This was the only boar, of the many that we killed, of which I had a chance to take a single measurement. He lay dead in water a few inches deep, and I stretched a tape-measure from one of the fore hooves while Amara held it taut at the shoulder. The height was forty-three inches, and
though he was old and his tusks were ingrown, curling into the flesh below his eyes, he was, I am certain, smaller than many that we saw and some that we killed. Smaller than the boar that later came very near to killing me.

Near Hadam we met with the first open hostility from a member of a sheikh’s family. The sheikh himself, though he was polite enough, was unprepossessing, a little like Mehsin stripped of his dignity. His son was an aggressive young man who wore a gigantic solitaire diamond ring, and who looked to me from the beginning as if he intended to make his presence felt in some way.

When we had eaten, the villagers began to crowd to the fort to be doctored by Thesiger. He had been working for perhaps half an hour, on the hard ground surrounding its walls. He was treating a girl of about fourteen when the sheikh’s son came hurrying from the fort, crying to the people to disperse, and to Thesiger that it was an unspeakable shame for him to doctor a girl of their people. He used the worst of all words for shame. Thesiger was naturally angry; the drugs that he used cost a great deal of money, he risked infection himself, and he worked hard for the people. The sheikh himself followed his son and intervened, telling Thesiger to pay no attention and to treat anyone he would, but the atmosphere was unpleasant and ambiguous. Thesiger closed his medicine chests and we retired to the shabby darkness of the fort’s reception room. Neither the sheikh nor his son followed us, but after some minutes an ambassador appeared in the form of a negro retainer begging us to examine his entirely healthy child.

Though the incident was not serious it was a reminder to me of the Muslim attitude towards women. By the stranger the women are simply ignored; they should neither be inquired after, nor greeted, nor looked at. The taboo extends to asking after a man’s family, because this automatically
includes his womenfolk. In Iraq the women are not veiled, but among the primitive people they will very seldom allow themselves to be photographed, and they keep so alert an eye upon the camera that it is almost impossible to take them unaware. The young girls are often vividly beautiful, with the enormous liquid eyes that have been so often compared to those of a gazelle, a delicate golden skin, and hair that—when it has not been dyed with henna and twisted into an ugly elaboration of many short plaits—is usually arranged in a short fringe over the forehead, fine, blue-black, and gently waving; but at some time during adolescence the complexion often becomes disfigured by one or more scars from the disease known as Baghdad boil. At about the same time, too, their faces are tattooed, not elaborately, but enough to impair a beauty dependent upon purity and simplicity. The tattooing does not vary much and is always the colour of blue-black ink; almost always it involves the eyebrows, sometimes as a line parallel to but above their own, sometimes following a line from which the hair has been plucked. The lines of the tattooing are always straight, destroying for ever the tender and moving planes of young frontal bones and temples; a thick line drawn downward from the centre of the lower lip over the point of the chin imposes a further impression of rigidity. This line sometimes extends down over the throat and between the breasts, with right-angle extensions outward over the torso, each line ramified by small projections like the teeth of a garden rake. I glimpsed this once or twice through a momentary accidental exposure, and I do not know how far down the body the tattooing customarily extends. The hands and wrists always carry the same rake-like pattern of straight lines, and often the palms and fingernails are dyed with henna. Though a woman’s everyday working clothes are black as a crow—the
abba
that corresponds to the man’s
dish-dasha,
and differs little from it except in the round collar line and the greater mass of material—girls
and young women often wear the gaudiest possible colours, vermilion, electric blue or multi-coloured floral designs. If the cut of the garments were more pretentious they would seem garish and shoddy, but the extreme simplicity of the straight falling lines flatters these cheap imported materials from India and Japan. Young girls have no headcloth; they simply wear the outer black cloak draped from the head rather than the shoulders and from under it they look sideways at a strange man with a doe-like allure and mistrust, but older women wind what appear to be several black cloths round their heads, an unidentifiable mass that gives a bulky effect like a big turban, and extends down the sides of the face and under the chin. Loose ends of this cloth hang to breast level, and often contain charms and other odds and ends knotted into them.

Women often carry enormous loads of decoration in precious metals or semi-precious stones, ear-rings of silver or turquoise, sometimes a heavy silver nose-ring in one nostril only, multiple bracelets, finger rings, and anklets. Whereas a man or a boy wears rings only on his right hand, women display them on both. Perhaps the strangest adornments are the heavy anklets of bright raw silver apparently shaped on
in situ
as a permanency, and appearing so bulky that it would seem impossible for the wearer to walk without acute discomfort. They are of the shape of a cylindrical horse-shoe, open and turned slightly outward at the Achilles’ heel, but the aperture is little more than an inch wide, and though I speculated much about it I came to the conclusion that they could not be removed without cutting through the metal.

The girls marry young, rarely later than seventeen and often several years earlier. They come virgin to their marriage beds, for the penalty for detected intercourse before that is no less than death; her brothers will cut her throat. The seducer, on the other hand, is held to be guiltless. It is through the womenfolk of his household that a man can be
brought the deepest shame in the eyes of his world, and he exacts for it the full penalty, without mercy and without compromise. If the killer be brought to justice the crime is treated with leniency; as in other cases of ritual murder among the tribesmen, he receives a sentence of three years’ imprisonment instead of the normal fifteen.

There are said to be a few, but only a very few, prostitutes in the area, and for the most part these are probably in the places of pilgrimage outside the permanent marsh. It would appear that a prostitute could only begin her profession as the daughter of another, or as a fatherless child whose brothers would for material reason connive in her shame.

Parents arrange the marriages of their children, and though in the marshes it is quite likely that the bridegroom will know his prospective wife by sight, there is no theoretical reason why he should. He will, except in unusual circumstances, be of the same tribe, and he or his father will have paid the bride price of 75 dinar (about £75) or three buffaloes. (The fact that a blood-feud can be settled, other things being equal, by the payment of seven women, suggests that a man’s life is valued at about £500.)

Muslims are allowed by their religion to have four wives at any one time, and unlimited concubines; divorce, furthermore, is dependent only upon a payment by the husband, who need give no reason for his action. The Prophet’s grandson Hassan had set an early example in this respect; he had run through no less than a hundred wives when, at the age of forty-one, a member of the current quartet murdered him.

Most of the marshmen, however, are unable for strictly economic reasons to embrace either these privileges or the risks inherent in them; they rarely have more than two wives, often only one, and no concubines. Quite a different situation obtains among the wealthy landowning sheikhs. Two days’ journey back from Hadam we had stayed at the fort of a sheikh who was away visiting a relation; we were
greeted by his son, a fat smooth-faced boy of fifteen who already had three wives.

Thesiger has described the marriage ceremony—or more properly celebration, for in the marshes it is a social rather than a religious function—in one of his published works.
*

“A marriage among the Ma’dan is always an occasion for great festivity. If the bride belongs to another village the bridegroom’s friends set out in the morning in their canoes to fetch her. The bridegroom never accompanies them but remains behind in his house. The greater part of the day is spent at the bride’s village in feasting and dancing. Towards evening everyone collects at the bride’s home where they dance the
hausa,
or war dance. One man sings a couple of lines, which the others then repeat in chorus as they stamp round in a circle, brandishing their weapons and firing off their rifles. The bride is then placed in a canoe and is taken to her new village, accompanied by a great crowd in canoes, singing and firing off shots. The party, known as
zuafif,
stops at any village through which it passes, and lands at one or more of the houses to dance the
hausa.
The rejoicing reaches its climax as they approach the bridegroom’s home. I recently attended the wedding of an orphaned boy called Dakhil. He had disposed of almost everything which he possessed in order to pay the bride price, and had not even a hut of his own. He had erected a small red mosquito net as his bridal chamber at the end of his cousin’s house, which he had spent the greater part of the day in lengthening. Since he belonged to a different tribe from the rest of the village, it seemed likely that his marriage would be a small affair, but as he was an old friend of mine I turned up with a party and we fired off a considerable number of shots while we fetched his bride. This firing attracted the marshmen from the surrounding villages and his marriage became, for this village at any rate, the event of the year. In the evening the house was packed to suffocation and many people had
to sit in their canoes outside, while inside the singing and dancing was continuous. At midnight I left, thinking that Dakhil would be glad if the party broke up. When I saw him in the morning he was without his headrope and his new shirt was sadly torn. His friends, who had remained behind in the house, laughingly maintained that when he went to his wife she had thrown him out into the water, a charge which he indignantly denied. With these Arabs it is customary for a man to fire off a rifle as soon as he has consummated his marriage. Dakhil certainly fired off a shot.”