A Reed Shaken by the Wind (13 page)

By the time they had left us, a little after midnight, the guests had gone from the bridegroom’s house, and the moonlit village was very quiet. A little later a single shot signalled the consummation of the marriage; during the small hours there were three more shots at about hourly intervals, each of them sending every dog in the village into a frenzy of hysterical barking that took minutes to subside. I wondered what would have been the effect on the village of the discharge of a Sten-gun magazine.

Firearms play a large part in the life of Ma’dan tribes, and few celebrations of any kind are considered complete without the ear-splitting bangs made by guns or rifles in a small house. Some of the tribes are more heavily armed than others; the Faraijat seemed to me to have more weapons than any other tribe we travelled among, but that may have been only because we spent longer with them. (The tribes overlap each other, so that a village may contain members of two or more tribes; Kidi is partly Fartus, who in the main live farther west, and partly Faraijat. A tribe may be partly true Ma’dan or marsh dwellers and partly cultivators on the land outside the marshes, but each is identifiable to another by accent and use of words.)

The commonest type of weapon in the marshes is the
muzzle-loading shot-gun. They are made locally, and look it; the barrel may be any old piece of metal tubing, and several that I saw had quite plainly been constructed from old iron bedsteads, of which some enterprising pedlar had perhaps carried a load to one of the river towns surrounding the marshes. The crude woodwork is usually attached to the barrel by encircling strips of raw aluminium or brass, and sometimes the owner decorates it by a coin or two nailed into the stock. The ammunition for these perilous-looking weapons can be bought at most of the larger villages outside the permanent marsh, black powder, and flat sheets of lead pellets all joined together, from which one may break off as many or as few as one likes. The pellets are not round, but neither, for that matter, are many of the gun barrels. When the owner is unable to afford the standard ammunition he will load it with any scraps he can get, but metal of any kind is at a premium in the marshes.

By far the most common of the rifles is the British S.M.L.E., called by the marshmen
ghurka,
after the Indian regiment that introduced them during the First World War, and the Persian service rifle, which they call by the name of its Czechoslovakian manufacturer, Brno. During the British occupation after the last war these could be bought for four dinar (about
£
4) apiece, but now, though most of them are in bad condition, they command upwards of one hundred dinar, and the ammunition for them some ten shillings a round.

With the muzzle-loading shot-guns the marshmen are amazingly proficient; those of them, that is to say, who make a practice of wildfowling and become skilled in it. They do not, of course, shoot birds flying, and the fact that I found it easier to bring down single duck well up in the air than to shoot several swimming coots with one shot never failed to amaze the canoe boys. The Ma’dan wildfowler stalks his quarry, either from a tiny flat boat like a miniature open-decked gun punt, or wading naked and
shoulder-deep in water that is often ice-cold. The smallest hunting canoes are propelled not by paddles or poles, but by the occupant’s arms as he lies flat, like the action of the beetle that is called “water boatman”. There is a half-way house between lying flat in a hunting canoe and wading with a bunch of reeds held to screen the face, for I saw an elaborately constructed and camouflaged gun-rest designed for a man to push in front of him as he swam or waded crouching in the water. This stalking horse was a V with the point towards the quarry and the sides embracing the fowler—two methodically tied bundles of reeds six feet long, with a wedge bound in at the fine end to keep the arms of the V separate and the structure rigid. Every few inches along the two arms were tied upright sprigs of a scrub thorn bush, and at the junction of the arms a forked stick made a permanent rest for the gun muzzle.

Though, because of the unsuitable terrain, little if any netting of duck is done in the marshes, a great number of birds are caught annually in the flood lands that surround them. A man will rent a suitable site from his sheikh, and will pay thirty dinar or more for the privilege of netting there for one season. There in water an inch or two deep he digs a shallow trench, shaped like the outline of a leaf, to conceal the folds of the clap net. He builds a reed hide directly opposite to one end of the net (if he is not directly opposite, the pull cord will not close the net), and baits the area with grain for long enough for it to become an accustomed feeding place. The side of the hide facing the trap has two holes, one for spying and one for the pull rope, and the fowler squats with one eye to the spy hole and his hand on the rope, waiting for the moment at which the birds are thickest in the catching area. The nets are small, no more than eighteen feet long by twelve across at the widest point, but a man may take up to 120 duck, waders, or whatever happens to be inside the net when he pulls. The netters catch geese very much more rarely than duck,
but I was told that last year someone had taken thirty at a single pull.

Throughout the rest of Iraq, outside the marshes, the destruction of bird and animal is pursued on a grand and relentless scale. Without taking account of the innumerable shots fired from muzzle-loading weapons, more than a million shot-gun cartridges are imported, and fired, every year. Partly because of a certain parsimony native to the people, and partly because of the enormous numbers and comparative tameness of the migratory wildfowl when they first arrive in the autumn, it is probably safe to say that those million cartridges represent the death of a million birds. It is a favourite sport among the wealthier people to shoot from cars, whose danger birds are slow to recognise even in countries where they are more common. It has become a popular sport, too, to chase the desert gazelles in this way, and there are taxi-drivers in Amara who make a speciality of it; a party will kill some fifty or more gazelles in a day.

It is, in fact, the species that can most easily be hunted by car, such as the black partridge, that show the most obvious decrease; the great hordes of migratory wildfowl seem as yet untouched. Even in the spring, when many of the migrants have gone, the numbers seem fabulous; every dusk is sibilant with the passage of thousands of wings overhead, every dawn sky speckled with long strings of wild duck heading for the broad lagoons where they will sleep through the day.

At Kidi I saw an example of the rough summary justice that replaces the processes of law in the tribal areas. A youth, the son, I think, of a merchant, borrowed from Thesiger a silver propelling pencil. An hour or so later he returned, saying that he had given the pencil to a child to bring back to the house where we were staying, but that this child had dropped it in deep water; and, it being night, the pencil was
now irretrievably lost. Our host was the son of the local sheikh’s agent, and he carried, as a mark of his status, a cane not unlike the swagger canes familiar in the British Army. Whether or not the merchant’s son already had a reputation for dishonesty I do not know, but the cane-bearer immediately suspected him, and accused him, of theft. Thesiger took no part in the situation, and we were both spectators of what followed.

The merchant’s son received a blow across the face with the cane, and he screamed. Several men hustled him to the farther half of the house, beyond the partition; and there, judging by the sounds, he was more or less thoroughly beaten up. The sounds were very unpleasant. At the end of it our host extracted five dinar from the wretched youth, and gave these to Thesiger in compensation for his loss. Thesiger accepted, saying that he would give them back when the pencil was returned to him.

An hour later the merchant’s son re-entered the house, the weals showing red across his face and the side of his neck. With him he brought the pencil, very slightly damp and lacking its lead; there was little evidence of any kind to show whether or not it had been dropped into the water. Thesiger was handing him back the five dinar when our host intervened; the money, he said, should be forfeited as a fine for the attempted theft. He tapped his swagger cane judicially, but with a certain menace, on the palm of his hand, and the youth cringed, protesting that the money had been held against the return of the pencil, and that it was now rightfully his. Thesiger upheld him, and the incident closed with everyone in possession of his own property.

We ate, before leaving Kidi the next day, with a past member of Thesiger’s crew, a young man who had been so quarrelsome that in the end he had been forced to become a nomad. The length of poor Yasin’s stay in any community with whom he settled was the time he took to alienate his neighbours; sometimes it was only days, sometimes weeks.
As if to compensate for his precarious status he had built himself the most perfect reed house I had yet entered. The entrance was direct from the water, and the floor on to which we stepped no more than four inches above it. Not a reed was out of place; it had the air of a model made for a museum, that should be inhabitated only by plaster figures who could do it no damage. Halfway down the wall swung a suspended cradle of bulrushes, and the pink baby was clothed in the only piece of pure white material that I ever saw in the marshes. The rugs and cushions were not Yasin’s; what he had not got he had borrowed for our reception, for he was almost penniless. The warmth of his greeting to Thesiger was pathetic; he kissed his hand, bowing over it in a fusillade of tremulous greeting and worship, and he trembled from head to foot as though he had a fever. He could not escape his reputation, for when some three days later we discovered that part of the
tarada’
s mooring chain was missing, Amara and Sabeti suggested immediately that it was Yasin who had stolen it; not because he wanted it, but in order to throw a suspicion of dishonesty upon them.

From Kidi we made a short journey through open marsh of island and lagoon to Agga, a dense village built on one large island of solid land; round its perimeter there were more houses dotted over the surface of the water; as though the crowd on land had pushed them off and they were now floating. Here there was an epidemic fever with a mottled rash, and Thesiger was at once in demand to visit those whose condition was worst. He would not allow me to expose myself to the unknown infection, and I left him at the door of the first house he entered, where he stood aside to allow stately and leisured exit to a cow buffalo and her string-muzzled calf. He gave me into the hands of a friendly Sayid, who for nearly two hours escorted me through the
village. It was a paralysing experience; we were followed at first by a score of onlookers, but after the first half hour the number had grown to more than a hundred, and the crowd swelled all the time, until nearly every man and child who was not sick with the fever was looking at the white man who was looking at their village. I could not speak to the Sayid because I did not know enough of his language, and I could not ignore him nor allow him to see my back because of the deference that was his due. I could not escape, because there was nowhere to escape to; and I felt, also, that I should be wasting an opportunity to see the whole of a marsh village, a thing that I had never been able to do before.

So I swept on through the village like a general at the head of his conquering host, defended in front by boys armed with sticks against the dogs, and despite circumstances so inhibiting to observation I was able to learn a good deal that I had not known before.

In particular I saw for the first time each of the processes of reed mat making, the industry on which the majority of the Ma’dan are dependent both for money and for covering their houses. The first stage, after the cut reeds have been brought home to the villages, is to split each stem with a short curved knife. This is done with extraordinary speed, but, I noticed, an amount of bloodshed unexpected among people so practised. When the reeds are split one spreads them out flat upon the ground and pounds them with a long-handled mallet whose head was, here anyway, a section of palm log some eighteen inches long. The pounding reduces the reeds to flat strips formed of from three to six still connected strands, and they can be stored at this stage, for the pounding prevents them from becoming brittle. A man weaves squatting on the ground with the reeds spread flat before him; the woven mat is shiny and golden, with the effect of a bold herring-bone pattern. It is these mats that trading boats from outside the marshes collect to sell all over Iraq and even far beyond its frontiers; the marshmen receive
about tenpence for a sheet eight feet by four. Recently I saw some similar matting in London, and learnt that it sold for
£
2 a yard.

Besides roofing and flooring the houses, the matting has many other uses. Big trays of it, with upturned edges, are used for drying grain under the sun, and this grain is afterwards stored in round structures like miniature gasometers, the sides formed of reed matting and the top sealed over with buffalo dung that sets hard like cement.

It was the time of day when the water buffaloes were coming home. Most came unattended; but one straggler was ridden, as she swam in across the lagoon with only her face above water, by a child who held one of her horns in each hand and balanced his folded
dish-dasha
on the top of his head. Those buffaloes that arrived before the canoes had returned with their loads of green
hashish
stood groaning in resentful parties round the walls of their owners’ houses. Here, as in other villages where there was dry land between the houses, the fragile walls were protected from the bumping of their heavy bodies and the scrape of their horns by a honeycomb of rectangular pits dug right along the foot of the wall. The buffaloes stared at these and groaned anew.

From time to time the Sayid made some attempt to disperse the dense crowd that thronged round us; and at length, sensing, I think, my embarrassment, he led me into a merchant’s house and left the disappointed multitude chattering disconsolately outside.