A Reed Shaken by the Wind (14 page)

There is a shop in nearly all of the large villages; it differs in no way from any other marsh house except for the small white flag that flies from a single reed above it. Inside, the back of the house is packed with simple commodities; rice, tea, sugar and salt, sometimes a few bales of cheap cloth, and cigarette tobacco and paper. The tobacco is, by European terms, incredibly cheap; even full-size made cigarettes in cardboard packets cost only about fourpence for twenty, and by rolling their own cigarettes the marshmen can smoke
the same number for twopence. Smoking is therefore an item which can hardly trouble any man’s budget, and the children begin when they are quite small, sometimes as young as four or five. Despite these encouragements few of the Ma’dan seemed to me to be heavier smokers than the average Englishman who begins in his late teens; and who, at the moment of writing, pays more than twenty times as much for the cigarettes he smokes. Because of their cheapness in Iraq it is customary for a host, if he is at all well-to-do, to offer, as a matter of course, a whole packet of cigarettes to each of his guests, in the same way as in Europe a guest is offered a single cigarette from a cigarette case or box. This is at first disconcerting, more especially as in the
mudhif
of a sheikh these packets are themselves pretentious, gilded and overwritten with flowery Arabic letters. As Thesiger’s crew smoked very little, and Thesiger not at all, I used often to leave a
mudhif
with a hundred and twenty free cigarettes thus decoratively clothed.

In this merchant’s house there was a wireless set, one of the only two that I saw in the marshes. The sound of it filled the little room, and its anachronism was not apparent, for it was wholly beautiful; a noble voice, full and sweet, intoning verses from the Qu’ran. Like Christianity, modern Islam makes full play upon the senses for the ready emotionalism that they can evoke.

At length Thesiger joined me in the merchant’s house, full of descriptions of the fever and its symptoms, and the most embarrassing afternoon of my whole journey came to an end.

In the evening a gale blew up, and the night was full of the rattle and slap of wind in the loose reeds of the house-front, the crying of small children and the batter of rain upon the reed roof. The roof leaked, and a thin trickle of water streamed from it on to my face; I thought the floor too
packed with sleeping figures for me to try and change my position, but after a time of uneasy dozing an indistinct figure took me by the feet and dragged me, inert, to another corner. There was some bustle and activity, and I made out that our host was taking up the reed matting from the floor to reinforce the roof. A simple life, where one’s carpets and roof tiles are of the same material.

From Agga, completing a northward loop of our course, we returned to Bumugeraifat. As we went farther into the heart of the marshes the change in their vegetation became ever more noticeable, for now we moved through a deep and enclosing forest of green reeds. Night came with all the grandeur that I had come to associate with the setting of the sun in the marshlands. The sky was chrome-yellow at first, turning hotter and hotter behind the black lattice of the reed-beds, while to the east their stems were lit to a glaring orange, and the water was purple below an already bright full moon. Far up between two scarlet cloud plumes a single eagle rode the fading wind. As the last of the sun’s light went, the water was dabbled with bright moon-chips and the stars burned staring and splendid in a sky bare but for two long streamers of black cloud.

The moon and stars were brilliant overhead when we reached the village and drew up the
tarada
at the same island house at which we had stayed a fortnight before. To return to a known place, amongst so much that was strange and unfamiliar, seemed in some way a homecoming.

But it was not, in fact, the coming of guests that preoccupied the household, for we stepped from the
tarada
into the circle of an argument that gave every appearance of having already lasted several hours. The group sitting round the fire suspended it for long enough to give us civil greetings; then they were at it again hammer and tongs.

It appeared that someone in the village had, for some reason that never became apparent, beaten up someone else, and the village head man was trying to regularise the position
with the culprit. When we entered, these two were discussing—a mild word, in the circumstances—the pros and cons of the situation. Neither would listen to what the other had to say; within seconds it had become what it had obviously been before our arrival, a screaming match. There were lulls. The head man demanded three dinar in compensation for the injuries of the victim, and the accused agreed. “All right, we pay, but we leave tomorrow.” So final, so easy. In five minutes it had all broken out again. The question was still unresolved when the party dispersed before supper.

When we had eaten, the Performing Flea danced for us again. He had sat, small and solemn, through the unseemly bickerings of his elders; now it seemed that he made his own wordless comment on the futility of speech. I would not have believed that his dance could have been wilder than before, but it was; it held now all the tension of the angry voices to which he had been listening, the frustration of the man who was obliged to pay for his exhibition of temper, and the triumph of the victim who saw his oppressor pilloried. One half of all humanity, it seemed to me, crouches nursing a tormented pride, while the other clowns and mimes, vicariously disowning a part in that suffering. There was little that the Flea could say by rhythmic movement of his body that he had not said before; but to express his mood he introduced into his dance a new—and to me a terrifying—extemporary variation. As he paused, jerking and twitching, before each member of the group who surrounded him, he would seize the spectator’s nose and give an insolent tug of conquest before moving on to the next. The bones of my own nose had not yet set since the humiliating incident of the Father of the Horns, and the least touch upon it was still an exquisite agony. I sat in terror with my hand shielding my face until at last someone whispered to the child the reason for my lack of co-operation. When he next stopped before me he tore my hand
from my face; and, while I was preparing for the worst, he planted a warm wet kiss upon my forehead.

Rain had reduced the buffalo platform to a swamp of dung and
hashish
; in the family half of the house three calves lay contentedly beside the fire, smothered in dung from wallowing outside, and the sickly-sweet tang of it and the cleaner smell of their warm breath was on the air all night. Before I lay down to sleep I went out on to the buffalo platform to relieve myself; I picked my way between the ponderous bodies of the buffaloes, their sides and the ground around them slippery with dung. From the water’s edge I had a view of the next house and its buffalo platform, lit by the fire that still burned beyond it; a dog climbed on to a sleeping buffalo’s back and composed himself for the night. On the back of the neighbouring buffalo stood a hen, pecking industriously, and on the spine of a third a tiny child balanced upon one leg. Overhead there were wild geese calling far up under the stars.

Thesiger left Bumugeraifat the next day in order to negotiate in a neighbouring village the details of Amara’s marriage, and Amara and I set off in a borrowed canoe to shoot pig. We each killed two; it was much easier than I had expected. My second, which I shot swimming, so that his head just disappeared below the surface and never rose again, was the largest boar that I ever saw in the marshes.

Thesiger’s negotiations were successful, and the evening became a riotous celebration of Amara’s engagement. The tempo increased through drumming and singing and the Performing Flea’s wild firelit capers to volleys of shots fired through the reed roof. In the midst of this, when the tumult was at its craziest, a huge figure in the shadows beyond the firelight began to struggle through the squatting
press, clutching in both hands a great brass-bound muzzle-loading shot-gun. For a moment or two this formidable piece of artillery wavered uncertainly round the heads of the crowd; then with a roar and a sheet of flame and smoke it had gone off through the ceiling. The report was followed by a long shower of broken reeds and debris; then, in a moment of dead silence, a large bat fell with a clang on to the coffee pots.

It was about this time that the Performing Flea, resting a while from his cyclonic activities, came to the end of a cigarette that he was smoking. He tossed the butt in the direction of the hearth, but it fell short, and landed upon the thigh of a merchant named Hussain, far famed for his meanness and pomposity. The Flea watched, fascinated. For some seconds the stub smouldered unnoticed; then, as it burned through the cloth of the
dish-dasha
to the skin, Hussain leapt to his feet with a yell of surprise and pain. He glared fiercely round him; then, fearful of mockery, and seeing that everyone was looking at him, he turned his yell into the opening chorus of a war dance. In an instant the whole crowd was on its feet, stamping out the rhythm of the
hausa,
roaring the wild menacing chant until the whole reed house vibrated with it. The lantern went out, and the fire became trodden under by the stamping feet, and the darkness was punctuated only by the flash of the guns, each followed by a spatter of loose fragments from above.

When it was all over there were a great many holes in the roof, and everyone got rather wet during the night, but Amara’s engagement celebrations had been a great success.

F
ROM
Bumugeraifat we went into the sun in the morning, heading for the Eastern Marshes beyond the Tigris.

We slept the first night at Hauta, the first of the nomad villages, whose people herd great droves of buffaloes and move with them according to their seasonal needs. Here the houses were entirely different from those of the settled Ma’dan, for they seemed no more than insignificant appendages to the huge buffalo-shelters, or
sitras,
that projected from them. These, though joined directly and without division to the end of the house of arched columns, were fifty or more feet in length, and built without arches, the reed tops interlocking in a pointed Gothic arch at the midline of the ceiling, their feathered ends drooping down like a long row of fox brushes. The leaves are not stripped from the reeds used for building
sitras,
and they hang as thin pennants, decorative as though by intention, down the whole length of the upper walls. At the end of that great length the sides and roof taper inward and downward to an entrance small enough for the building to give the maximum shelter to its inhabitants, the huge streams of buffaloes that were sloshing or swimming homeward in herds of a hundred or more as we arrived. As spring progresses, and the need for weather protection becomes less, the buffalo shelters are gradually demolished and used for fuel.

For a long time Amara’s family had been at blood-feud with a family of this village; it had recently been settled by a payment of women, but throughout the evening I thought he seemed jumpy and ill-at-ease.

The food was the most primitive that I had yet encountered, rice and sour milk; and, since there was no
partition between the buffalo-shelter and the human living quarters, when I lay down to sleep it was with a buffalo at my head, her warm breath stirring my hair. In the night there was a sough of wind in the long dark tunnel, and it began to rain gently; the fine drops fell cool on my face through a gap in the reeds overhead, and I remember waking to see in the small flicker of firelight a woman suckling her child from withered but gourd-shaped breasts.

The fleas in that house were so numerous that I could actually feel them walking over my body in a dozen places at once. By now, since fleas have a peculiar penchant for me, there was little fresh pasture for them; bite touched bite over most of my body, and their great activity must, I think, have been an effort to find a patch where some other of their number had not already dug his knife and fork. They irritated me so much that at length I got out a torch and began the futile task of trying to reduce their numbers. Up till this time I had supposed, since the opportunities for examination were small, that the near-raw condition of my body was due to fleas alone; now I realised that I was also lousy, and that two separate armies were fighting for possession of my skin. After a moment of nausea, I considered this and realised that there was in any case nothing that I could do about it at that moment, and that it had not worried me while I did not know, so I went to sleep again. It was another week before I had the opportunity to wash myself all over, and when I did, the lice disappeared magically and for ever.

There was, however, nothing that I could do to improve the condition of my feet, and they remained an unpleasant sight throughout the whole time that I was in the Marshes. This was because it was the custom to be barefoot in the
tarada,
as if one were in a house; and though the mosquitoes were never very bad there were enough of them to make a considerable impression upon any surface exposed in
continuous immobility for several hours of each day. When the mosquitoes are tiresome a Ma’dan will always cover his feet, as he sits cross-legged, with the skirt of his
dish-dasha,
and I used to envy Thesiger, who habitually wore this garment of the people, since he was able to cover his feet either from the cold or from insects with a mere flick of his skirt. This was only one of many ways in which I found European clothes grotesquely unsuited to the life I was leading; after the first few weeks of distressed acrobatics it became plain to me that the
dish-dasha
was the only possible garment to deal adequately with the living conditions. The wardrobe which Thesiger had outlined in London had sounded exiguous; it proved, in the event, to be sufficient in quantity, but had I lived for the rest of my life among the Ma’dan I should never have learned how to make grey flannel trousers a manageable garment for a wearer who must both wade in marshlands and conform to Arab customs. It would have been absurd for me, who had arrived speaking none of the language, to have dressed as one of the people, but had I had to consider no one but myself, I would have exchanged the discomfort for the ridicule.

On the day we left Hauta we had said good-bye to the Central Marshes, those that lie to the west of the Tigris; for early that morning we crossed the great river, and never returned to them. We crossed open water with a line of palms on the horizon, and as we approached them anachronism sprang up to meet us; a motor horn blared from a few hundred yards away, followed by the forgotten sound of rubber tyres squealing on a hard surface. We passed under the main north—south road, and then we were in the Tigris itself, with the soaring blue-green dome of Ezra’s Tomb breaking the line of palms at our left. When the palms ended the river ran through a mud-brown land, flat and featureless; a few yards from the bank the road ran parallel, and down it
sped a scarlet Cadillac convertible. The car was open, and the driver’s
keffia
streamed behind him in the wind; he can have been travelling at little less than a hundred miles an hour, though his father had probably never been faster than a camel or a horse could carry him.

We followed the Tigris upstream for some miles, and presently the road and the twentieth century diverged from it. We met huge rafts of cut reeds, a hundred feet long and a third as wide by ten feet high, that drifted infinitely slowly downstream. They carried two or three men each; they were floating down to Basra, and the journey would take several weeks.

But reminders of the west were with us again when we stopped to eat at a sheikh’s fort on the river bank; there was an empty bottle of Gordon’s Gin standing among the coffee pots, and one window of the fort had been repaired with a sheet of tin advertising an American oil company.

The fort was the only sign of human habitation within the limits of vision; on the one side the Tigris flowed between brown mudbanks, its surface chopped by a cross-current wind blowing from an empty pale-blue sky, and on the other the silvery edge of the low marshes stretched away over the Persian frontier.

We turned out of the Tigris within a few hundred yards of the fort, and at once we were travelling through the beginning of the Eastern Marshes.

Both the Eastern Marshes and their peoples have an entirely different flavour from those to the west of the Tigris, and this difference is compounded of so many small things that at first I found it difficult to analyse. The people are less formal, both in manner and in dress; the black-and-white
keffia
of the Shi’a becomes rarer the farther east one travels, and becomes replaced by the brown headcloth worn turban-fashion and without
agal
; the European-style jackets so often worn over the
dish-dasha
in the Central Marshes became fewer and finally non-existent. Hospitality tends to be
much less lavish; the people surround themselves by less custom, and display their emotions the more freely. Many of the people, particularly among the nomad Faraijat and Suwaid tribesmen, seemed to me to be of a different physical type, many of them strikingly fine-featured, not rarely with green or blue eyes, and growing a fair beard and moustache.

The nearness to the frontier produces, perhaps, a little of the ambivalent mentality common to many frontier folk; there are bands throughout the Eastern Marshes whose chief occupation is smuggling and who are frequently involved in armed clashes with the frontier posts. As, after the first few days, we came nearer and nearer to Persia, the canoe boys became progressively more alert for banditry, for it is easy here for a robber to slip across the frontier.

We travelled north-east, coming diagonally closer to it. We had spent the first night at Baidhat el Nuasil, a seasonal settlement of the Shadda tribe, and our second at Abu Laila (which has the evocative meaning of “Father of Night”), a large village of Faraijat nomads. Beyond Abu Laila the water was scarce, and the
tarada
became stuck in endless blind channels of a water-maze. Here most of the reed-beds had been burned; they remained only as blackened patches prickled with the spikes of new growth, alternating with the deep intense blue of the water patches. This ground was alive with birds: flocks of glossy and sacred ibis, egrets, many species of heron, storks, pelicans, and a myriad waders; above them the eagles wheeled on a blue sky with bursting plumes of white cloud. At the end of this burnt land, when we seemed to have turned back from a thousand cul-de-sacs, we came to a few nomad dwellings, houses with giant
sitras
already partially demolished, and at the first of these we stopped.

Our host was small, wizened, and ragged beyond words. He wore a single garment only, a khaki overcoat that looked
centuries rather than decades old, held round his waist by a belt of twisted reeds; the coat did not meet, and revealed the fact that he had allowed his body hair to grow freely. About his head he wore, turbanwise, a twisted rag of unrecognisable colour.

It was here at Jeraiwa that I felt again a quality inimical, almost terrifying, in the landscape itself. The wind had begun to rise soon after we arrived; the sun was suddenly obscured, and the colour drained from the world, as bright sea pebbles dry drab and magicless when wave and sun have left them. Round all the pale horizon the wind bowed and ruffled the silvery sedge, mile upon mile with nothing solid but the immediate foreground.

Yet the height of the distant reed-beds was deceptive, for we had journeyed little more than an hour from Jeraiwa before we reached a large permanent village built upon a huddle of mud islands with broad waterways forming streets between them. Turabah; the name itself brings back to me the curious, uncomfortable savour of an incident that I saw there for the first time, an incident that is a commonplace to these people.

The wind had grown stronger during the past hour, and when we landed it was blowing a rustling, gusty gale, whirling reed fragments into the eyes and covering everything with a fine dust from the dry mud of the islands.

Thesiger had sought shelter from this behind the house, where he was doctoring a child who had had his shoulder ripped open by a pig. Our host was with him, and I was glad that there was no necessity to go immediately into the house and be cross-legged once more. I was standing outside, near to the entrance of the house, looking out across the street-like strip of water between us and the buildings opposite.

The happenings of the next minute were, of course, unrelated, but their strangely precise sequence left me with a single dream image that has not disintegrated.

First, from some unseen quarter of the village came the call to prayer, the only time I had ever heard it in the marshlands. The light was just beginning to fail, and it was the time of day when the women go out from the houses to draw water. From the far bank three women, a few paces apart and equidistant from each other, came down carrying the great jars on their heads, and from the bank on which I stood three more went down facing them. All six drew water, standing knee-deep as they did so; each lifted her vessel on to her head, and turned back towards the house from which she had come. They left the water in unison, as though this were something of mystic significance and often rehearsed, and as they did so a great flight of white egrets came surging low over the surface between the houses, like the foam on a single broad wave sweeping forward; they passed swiftly with a soft rustle of snowy wings, and were gone.

Suddenly from the house immediately opposite to me there broke forth a wild pandemonium of shrieks and wails. Two children burst from the doorway and threw themselves on to the narrow strip of ground between the walls and the water, beating at it with their fists and tearing up handfuls of mud and fallen reeds. Men ran out beating their breasts and bellies, striking insanely at the walls of the house, gathering great handfuls of rubbish and dashing it against their heads. Then two women rushed from the house, frantic and screaming; they ran blindly with their arms upraised, and plunged flat into the water. They remained thrashing at it, floundering deeper and deeper until only their heads were above the surface, and screaming all the while. By the time, minutes later, that they had waded ashore, there were wailing boatloads of mourners converging upon the house from all sides, until the space within it had overflowed and those in the canoes could not land; they stood where they were, bowed and beating their breasts in a frenzy of lamentation.

I had witnessed the moment of death of an old man in the house.

Much of this abandoned, hysterical grief is not so much assumed, or acted, by those to whom the death is of no great personal significance, as communicated to them by the close relations in their moment of agony. Once it has been communicated it is felt as something real; and the whole chain of reactions can be set off by chance, as it were, when in fact there is no death to mourn.

I saw an example of this a few days later, when a woman brought to Thesiger a child with some quite trifling ailment. It was a warm day, and the people of the village—a small nomad village where there was as yet little water—were about their everyday affairs all round us. The child squawked while Thesiger was examining it, and without any warning the mother began suddenly to wail and to beat her breasts. Crying out that her child was dying, she seized some buffalo dung and smeared it on her forehead, and then threw herself prostrate on the ground. Some twenty paces away two women were pounding grain; instantly they threw down their mallets and doubled up in an ecstasy of howling grief, and some children, who had been playing near them, all began to cry. Within two minutes every woman in sight was wailing and striking at her body with her hands, and every child was weeping with the slow desolate misery that is the voice of childhood despair, the voice of the abandoned and unloved. By now Thesiger’s patient was terrified and wailing too. The situation was completely out of hand. Thesiger shouted to the people that the child was perfectly all right, and spoke fiercely to the mother. She stopped wailing as suddenly as she had begun, and her face was left frozen in an expression that, now that she was motionless and her crying had ceased, might as well have been a grin of laughter as a grimace of grief. When she saw that her
child was after all not dying, she began to laugh, and between the set of her face in her previous misery and her present relief there was not the least difference. Within a moment all the adults were back at work, and the children playing, as if there had been no interruption.