A Reed Shaken by the Wind (15 page)

In the Eastern Marshes there are a greater number of tumulus islands than to the west of the Tigris. Many of these, though some are as much as twenty feet high, are too small to carry more than one or possibly two houses, and are thus unoccupied; for the Ma’dan are afraid of robbers and bandits, and prefer to group their houses close enough for mutual support. The whole surface of many of these tumuli is littered with pottery, much of it glazed; with bricks, whose presence is difficult to explain, and with pieces of laval-looking black stone; some have crater-like formations at their summits, equally inexplicable. A number are burying places for the Ma’dan, and these can never be excavated, for no Muslim will tolerate the disturbance of his dead.

From the top of one of these islands the marsh forms the horizon on all sides, and by that season of the year it is green for the most part, streaked with the gold-buff of high reeds tall enough to hide the scattered villages that lie among them.

From Turabah we travelled northwards through this country, heading for Dibin, the largest of all these tumulus islands, on the northern edge of the Eastern Marshes. It was a day’s journey, and we ate on the way at the small village of Abu Sukhair, at a curious dwelling with a wren’s-nest entrance three feet up its wall, the only one of that type that I saw. At that house I bought two otter skins, from which the entire carcases had, with seeming impossibility, been removed through the mouth, leaving the skins without a single incision. One of these skins, and the live cub that I
eventually brought back to England, proved to be of a race new to science.

It was after dusk when we arrived at Dibin, but the western sky was still yellow on the horizon. The silhouettes of the houses were black against it, and the lit fires within them were of the same colour as the sky, mirrored in still water. A black figure came out from a black house and threw up two black hens on to the roof; they strutted there sharp-edged against the afterglow.

The only
mudhif
at Dibin was owned by a woman, a remarkable departure from normal custom. She was the widow of a sheikh’s agent, and now in precarious circumstances as a result of the sheikh’s dismissal of his employees.

It would have been impossible to live in Iraq even for a few weeks without having already heard much of this sheikh, one Nasr, son of Salman, for his name was a byword of perfidy and shame.

He was the youngest son of his father, having a number of half-brothers born of Salman’s other wives. Nasr’s mother acquired vast influence over the old sheikh Salman, and had schemed and plotted for her son to gain all the inheritance that should rightfully be divided among the half-brothers. It was said that she had poisoned one of them, and was suspected of murdering two others who came to his funeral. Finally, she had persuaded Salman to make over all his property to Nasr.

Nasr made full use of the situation. Within a few months he had acquired the reputation of a cruel and despotic tyrant, extortionate and without interest in the welfare of his people. He had made friends among the more undesirable Europeans in Basra and Baghdad; he drank and he gambled and made ever greater demands on those who owed him allegiance; the wake of his speedboats roaring down the rivers swamped the canoes and houses of the villagers who paid for his luxuries.

At length his nephew Talib, son of one of his murdered
half-brothers, could stand no more. Talib was a boy of only sixteen years, but he rallied his tribesmen and declared war on old Salman, his grandfather who had betrayed him and given all to Nasr. On learning of this, Salman wanted to go himself in his
tarada
to reason with him, but his councillors pleaded with him that this would be suicide; Talib, they said, was outraged beyond all reasoning, and would undoubtedly kill his grandfather. Salman compromised; he agreed to send instead a Sayid as ambassador, whose person Talib would feel obliged to respect. This assumption, however, proved wholly erroneous, for when the Sayid approached Talib’s fort, waving on a reed his blue
keffia,
a burst of machine-gun fire cut the canoe in two, and the Sayid was fortunate to escape with his life.

From that time onward Nasr’s position became ever more perilous. Salman became ill, and his doctor whispered in his ear that Nasr had offered him an assassin’s fee of 3,000 dinar to poison his patient. Salman believed him, and instantly sought to rescind every document made in favour of the son whom he now saw in his true light. Nasr fought him through legal channels, a thing considered shameful in the extreme between son and father, and the dispute was raging in Baghdad when we had arrived in Iraq. The policy of the government was still uncertain. Every Ma’dan was partisan in the dispute; very few stood behind Nasr, and those who did were in all probability inspired by terror of reprisals should Nasr emerge the victor. A young wife whom Nasr had divorced took her revenge by composing a song about his wickedness, and this became the season’s song-hit, to be heard on the lips of every cultivator,
hashish-
gatherer and buffalo-herd.

We were to be in the thick of this dispute on the following day, but what claimed my attention that first night at Dibin was a remarkable bird. After we had eaten the evening meal I had gone out for a moment, and returned to find my cushion usurped by a creature whose great orange eyes, an
alarmingly long way above the cushion, reflected the firelight. It was, the people told us, a kind of eagle that they had never seen before; it had risen from the reeds in front of some
hashish-
gatherers
,
who had knocked it down with a canoe-pole. It had been stunned, but was quite uninjured. I turned the beam of a torch on to the dim shape, and the bird blinked but did not move. It was one of the most splendid creatures I had ever seen; an eagle owl, without a feather of its gold and black plumage ruffled, and vast eyes of so intense an orange that it seemed as if some fire must burn behind their lenses. His captors had cut the long feathers of the wings, and it would be many months before he could fly again; it was not difficult to guess that once the novelty of this captive king had worn off he would quickly be allowed to starve. To guard against this, I arranged through Thesiger to pay three dinar for the eagle owl if he was still in good condition when we returned to Dibin in two or three weeks’ time. The woman of the
mudhif
agreed readily, and asked what she should feed him on. I explained that he ate flesh, and immediately an old man sitting opposite to me suggested throwing the
mudhif
cat to the bird; indeed he had grabbed the cat and was about to do so when Thesiger intervened. I remembered that every
mudhif
was alive with bats and sparrows, and at once an enthusiastic crowd began poking and rattling sticks in the dark crannies of the reed arches. The bats escaped easily, shooting through the low door and out into the quiet starlight; sparrows fell, but the cat, unconscious of sentence or reprieve, was on them before ever they touched the ground. I wished, after a while, that the old man had had his way with her, for it was half an hour before we had collected enough to feed the owl.

The next day Nasr’s eldest half-brother Jabir arrived at Dibin. How much Salman’s rightful heirs had lost became
apparent, in that Jabir did not even own a
tarada.
His retinue of some half-dozen men was, however, heavily armed, and his face looked wolfish and purposeful.

He was distrustful of our presence, and did not immediately disclose the purpose of his visit. Presently he mentioned Salman and Nasr, almost casually, testing the ground in front of him. Thesiger said, “I do not know your father, but I have heard nothing but good of him; of Nasr I can only say that I dislike him the more each time I meet him, and that the last time I went to his
mudhif
I came away hungry.”

With this lead Jabir began to elucidate the position. He had surrounded Nasr’s nearby fort, and sent word to its occupants that anyone who showed his face outside its walls would be killed. As a result, Nasr’s fort, which had been progressively strengthened over a number of years, had now, to avoid bloodshed pending the legal decisions in Baghdad, been reinforced by a police contingent.

Jabir was here to canvass the allegiance of these tribesmen whom Nasr had usurped from him, so that in the event of a government decision in favour of Nasr they would follow Jabir into war. Old Salman had given four hundred armed men to Nasr at the time when he had made over to him all his property, but three hundred and fifty of these were rumoured to have deserted back to Salman when they had heard the doctor’s story of the bribe to poison the old sheikh.

Jabir promised land to those who would fight for his cause, and his retinue distributed ammunition. The trouble, it seemed, was to begin in three days’ time.

Thesiger said, “Now we shall have to get out of this district. It’s our responsibility to keep clear of internal troubles in the country, no matter where our sympathies may lie. I’ve never been involved in politics, internal or external, and I’m not going to start now.”

But we were in for a noisy afternoon, despite these admirable sentiments.

Jabir sat with his retinue at one side of the coffee hearth.
Presently he called for a cigarette packet to be propped against the inner wall of the
mudhif,
above the entrance some ten yards from him. When this had been arranged to his satisfaction he threw up his rifle, took a long aim, and pulled the trigger. The cigarette packet fell to the ground in a golden shower of reed fragments, followed by a fusillade of applause. A man ran forward to pick it up, and found that it had not been hit. Nettled by this, Jabir had the packet set up again, and his third shot struck squarely in the centre. He invited us to try the same target; we were somewhat farther down the
mudhif
than he, and we had a Colt .45 pistol against his rifle, but both Thesiger and I were fortunate with our first shots. Then a matchbox was substituted for the cigarette packet, and the whole performance started again. At the end of ten minutes a cigarette had taken the place of the matchbox, and the
mudhif
was cloudy with the thin bitter haze of expended cordite. We were consistently lucky; I use the word with no false modesty, for the dimensions of the cigarette were in fact smaller than the grouping capacity of our weapon at that range. There was nothing half-hearted in Jabir’s acceptance of the challenge; he went on shooting in rapid fire until he blew a cigarette in half with his twenty-seventh shot.

The stub still remained stuck in the reed pillar, and instantly an elderly Sayid, the chief of Jabir’s retinue, grasped his rifle and sprang to his feet. He stood splay-legged, waggling a little, like a golfer addressing his ball, threw up the rifle to his shoulder and fired apparently without taking aim. A little fountain of reed chaff shot out from the pillar no more than an inch to one side of the cigarette. Thesiger got up and walked across to it; he had his finger in the hole the bullet had made, and was in the act of turning back to speak, when I saw the rifle-butt slam into the Sayid’s shoulder for a second shot. I yelled to Thesiger to duck, and as he did so the bullet passed six inches over his head and grazed the paper of the cigarette, leaving the
tobacco showing. I doubt if Thesiger had been nearer to death or mutilation during his five years in the marshes.

The Sayid ran from the
mudhif
to the hard earth outside the door, and crying,
“With Salman against Nasr!”,
he fired his rifle into the air. Jabir followed him, and behind Jabir went everyone in the
mudhif
,
jostling to form a circle round him.
“With Salman against Nasr!”,
shouted Jabir, and the crowd took up his words in a chant as they began to stamp in the savage rhythm of the war dance. As they danced they swung their rifles round their heads, firing them the while, and the bullets whined away over the empty miles of marsh which were Jabir’s rightful heritage. Most of these men, if they went through with what they had begun, would be dead within the week, for without heavy arms the sheikhs’ forts are almost impossible to take by storm. But the garrison of Nasr’s fort must have trembled, for to them it must have sounded as if the battle had already begun.

“We must go,” said Thesiger. “We’re here by courtesy of the Iraqi Government; we can’t be partisans.”

When the
hausa
was over we said good-bye to Jabir, breathless and sweating and with his headrope askew over one eye, and we left.

I
T
was three weeks before we returned to Dibin. We travelled north to Baidha, at the upper limit of the Eastern permanent marsh, and then turned eastward again towards Persia, along the dividing line between seasonal and perpetual water. By thus turning at right angles to our course we followed two sides of a great lake unmarked on any map. So wide was it that at the horizon the water met the sky without any dividing line between them, and the black dots of resting waterfowl scattered over the great expanse were difficult to distinguish from slow-moving birds of prey in the air above them. We passed through villages of the Sharanba Tribe, a widely scattered people who number only a few hundred in all, villages that, because of the mosquito-filled reed-beds closely encircling them, would be deserted before the coming of summer. Here the villagers were less friendly and more rapacious; one settlement at the edge of the great lake even tried to charge money for the use of a hunting canoe for an hour, and we were often poorly and insufficiently fed. The reputation of the Ma’dan for being uncouth and boorish is not quite unearned, for Thesiger told me that before he had come to know them he had encountered much the same atmosphere in villages such as Bumugeraifat and Gabab.

We arrived at dusk at one of these villages, by name Sharsh, just as the inhabitants were preparing to leave for their summer quarters a few miles away. There had been no water there until a day or two before, when the thaw of the high Kurdish snows had begun to pour a cool flood over the lands of seasonal marsh. In the morning the whole village was in exodus. Laden canoes of all types moved out from the single water “street”, carrying, besides all the goods of
the households, reed matting and reed columns for building arches, cut reeds for weaving, chickens, cats, dogs and calves, while the water buffaloes were towed, protesting, behind the canoes of their owners; as we followed the procession the air was full of the particular yodelling cry that urges on the swimming cattle.

Late in the morning we arrived in company with the migrating villagers at the mud island which was their destination. Abu Malih, it was called, “The Father of Salt”; there was so much salt in the soil that the water around it was brackish. There were several hundred yards of flattened earth a yard or so above the level of the water, and every inch of them seethed with human activity. Many of the people had come before us, some of them on the previous day, and there were houses in every stage of construction. All along the banks were drawn up the canoes of the earlier arrivals, and men and women were struggling up the low banks, bent under the load of their cargoes. More canoes arrived every minute, and soon the shallow water at the side from which they had come began to look like a car park outside an English race-track.

As each party arrived and off-loaded their canoes, they would make for the piece of land on which they had staked their claim and at once erect on it, by draping reed matting over an upright canoe-pole, a temporary shelter some four feet high. Into this the women carried the cooking pots, and each family had a fire of buffalo dung burning outside the entrance within minutes of arrival. The men and boys laboured to and fro between the canoes and these temporary tents, and before unloading the building materials they would bring up all the household’s possessions and stack or scatter them before the entrance to the shelter.

It was possible, in this confusion, to see objects not commonly visible in the dim interior of a stabilised house, and there seemed little variation between the property of one family and another. The most intimate and valuable
possessions, such as bangles, clothing, and money, are housed always in a big wooden chest with a domed lid, usually studded with iron or brass, which is normally kept in the women’s half of the house. These, as they stood on the bare ground beside the building sites, were the largest solid objects amid a gaudy jumble. There were cushions; blankets of the flaring orange-red that is perhaps the most characteristic of all man-made colours in the marshlands; rugs; an occasional quilt; pots and pans; baskets and trays of close-woven bulrush; fishing spears, and bitumen-headed clubs. Somewhere in each pile lay a corn-grinder, two six-inch-thick discs some two feet across, working on the principle of the upper and the nether millstone, but here the necessary weight was supplied not by stone but by bitumen. A few families owned porous clay water-containers such as are common to houses on the river banks outside the marshes, a long vessel tapering to the lower end and supported by a four-legged wooden stand; and many, too, a clay tray on three legs for burning buffalo dung. Here and there, among the possessions of the few families that owned two or three sheep, were flat ground looms, and wool, raw, spun, and woven, always in the several shades of brown that are the natural colours of the animal. Thesiger told me that he believed there were no local dyes, and that the rugs were made either by the Beni Lam, a pastoral tribe at no great distance, or brought over the frontier from Persia. Most of the weaving in the villages is of the thin hard woollen cloaks that every man wears in the far Eastern Marshes.

The women squatted in the entrances to the shelters and busied themselves with cooking rice for their men or with suckling their babies, and looked out over the stacked household goods to the intense activity all about them. Some of the houses were already complete and looked as if they had stood there for years; some were skeletal frameworks of a gold lighter in tone than the deep blue sky
behind them; some were stately rows of straight outward-leaning reed columns, plumed and feathered at their summits, not yet bent together to form arches.

I was able to watch each stage of the building; and to time it, too, for several houses which were not begun when we arrived at 10.30 were complete when we left two hours later. Three or more men worked on each house, and they began by digging, with a spade much like the peat-cutters of the Scottish Highlands, two parallel rows of holes for the feet of the reed arches. Into these holes, two and a half feet deep, they set the base of the long twenty-foot columns in such a way that they leaned outward from the floor-space at an angle of about seventy degrees. Next they made from cut and bound reed bundles a tripod five or six feet high, to be used as we would use a step ladder. Standing on this surprisingly firm and rigid structure a man would reach up and catch with the foot-edge of a spade the upper part of a reed column, bend it down to his own level, and hold it there while he or an assistant reached for the other half of the arch. These two he would bind securely together with twisted lengths of sedge leaf, and move his tripod along to the next column. When the row of five arches was complete, the slenderer bundles of horizontals, fourteen of them in all, connected the whole structure into an integrated anatomy ready for its covering of reed matting. Two hours to build a house—a practical and inexpensive method of prefabrication.

The bustle of building went on for the whole two hours we were there, for new arrivals streamed in incessantly. Through this golden bone-forest of reed columns and house skeletons wandered parties of bellowing buffaloes whose precious dung the children collected as it fell, running with it to the site of their new home. Some of the small boys were naked but for a silver collar set with rock turquoise, the blue stone that has power against the evil eye; they raced and scampered among their preoccupied elders, and splashed
and chased each other in the shallow water about the margins of the island.

Though we were able to stay no more than two hours at Abu Malih, I had been fortunate, for not once in his five years among the Ma’dan had Thesiger seen a village in the process of erection.

We could travel only eastward or southward, for there was little marsh water to the north of Abu Malih; one could walk almost dryshod from here to the town of Amara, some thirty miles to the north-west. We kept on due east towards Persia, and we were within a mile or two of the frontier before we turned back on our course. We were now in the territory of the Suwaid, enemies of the Faraijat; we had learned at Abu Malih that there had recently been an exchange of buffalo raids, each raid and robbery followed by a counter-raid into the other’s territory.

At Mekri, the next semi-nomad village of buffalo people, the foothills of Khuzistan were crouched and tawny on the horizon. They were far off, for here the marshes extend many miles into Persia, but it was strange to see at last an horizon above the level at which one stood.

I remember Mekri in particular for the great beauty of some of its people, the regularity of their features and the perfection of white and even teeth. In the Suwaid villages there seemed, too, fewer people suffering from eye diseases, possibly fewer in all the Eastern Marshes than in the Central. Among all the Ma’dan the teeth usually appear to be either very bad or very good; they clean them with salt, and the worst mouths may be no more than the effect of negligence, but at Mekri the standard was so near to perfection that the plainest face could be transformed in an instant by a smile. One child I remember in particular; the curve of lips no less perfect than the teeth they covered; the column of the neck from straight slim shoulders, the long shaded eyes that held the gentleness of the gazelle’s gaze. There was something moving in the composure of those small
shapes wrapped in the hard brown woollen cloaks; in the softness of the faces and the harshness of the work-worn hands; so vulnerable within that armour of beauty.

The very last of these villages, the extremity, as it were, of our eastern journey, was Kirsuwa, a village of no more than seven houses, and it was almost waterless. We had reached it, as we had come to Jeraiwa a week before, through ankle-deep waterways that often petered out into dry land; and a hundred times, it seemed, we had turned back from these blind alleys to make yet another wide detour leading us away from our destination. In the end we had to leave the
tarada
several hundred yards from the houses and walk.

What little water there was here, and it was all that the people had to drink, was literally the colour of pea soup. It lay in small puddles and patches, green, with a dense buff-coloured scum at the edges; in the largest pool, perhaps a hundred yards from the houses, lay a dead buffalo, the hair gone from the stretched hide, through which the white ribs had burst. Two black-and-white crows were excavating the interior with enthusiasm. The flies had become noticeable at the first of the nomad villages; here they were pestilential.

We could go no farther than Kirsuwa, and we turned back westward over the same course, through Mekri and Jidaid and on, still farther west, to the large land village of Baidha. Here there were big trading boats, and the waterways were alive with many types of craft loading and unloading. My eye had now grown long accustomed to the wide treeless horizons of the marshes, and accordingly magnified into disproportion any object intruding on the bare skies; here I mistook for a full date grove a verdure that revealed itself on closer approach as half a dozen scrubby dwarf palms in the compound of a
mudhif.
We spent the night there as guests of Ghaghban bin Faleh, son of Faleh bin Fahut, one of the greatest sheikhs of the area. In this
mudhif
there was electric light, and the thumping of
the single-stroke engine that produced it took me further back than the few weeks that I had been out of the civilised world; back to childhood and Scotland and the moorland house that had been my early home, where through drowsy summer days that same sound had made a background to a world of sunshine. There were crickets on the floor of the
mudhif,
and during the evening their thin singing was shrill above the chatter of the frogs and the dull thudding of the machine.

I used to find these long evenings in
mudhifs
wearisome, for even when I could understand a little of a conversation I could never join in it, and the easy atmosphere of the common houses was, among the majority of these august people, subdued by formality. It brought me a belated sympathy for a man whom I had known during the war, who had a nervous breakdown because, he said later, I and a brother officer had ignored him. He was a promoted Quartermaster Sergeant, stationed with us as Quartermaster in one of those remote houses on the West Coast of Scotland where agents such as Odette carried out a certain stage of their training before being parachuted into enemy-occupied territory. He was a colourless little man with whom, apart from the accident of educational differences, I doubt if I could have found much in common; and with my other colleague I conversed, I suppose, from a background of tastes and interests that he did not share. So callously unobservant were we that the first symptom we saw was, as far as we were concerned, the last; he appeared one morning at breakfast stark naked and flourishing a service revolver—moreover he was, for some reason that now eludes me, spattered from head to foot with green ink.

I wiled away the time that evening by studying the details of the magnificent
mudhif,
a building that, in striking contrast to the houses at Abu Malih, had taken a hundred and fifty men three weeks to put up. The floor space was sixty-five feet long by twenty wide. There were nine arches,
fifteen feet high, and each tied with a hundred and twenty double rings of rope—nearly five hundred yards of rope to every arch, for the average circumference from the yard-thick base of the columns to their tapering tops in the dim ceilings was not less than six feet. Beyond the arches lay the horizontals, a hundred and twenty four-inch-thick reed bundles tied every four inches of their whole length. Another thousand yards of rope. These horizontals continued to within three feet of the floor, below which there was a bare skirt of matting that could be lifted to relieve the heat. A veritable palace of reeds.

As we journeyed north-west the next day we passed through low marsh country where there were patches of green grass and tenuous tentacles of navigable water. The ground and the air were alive with birds of all kinds, and there were small scattered flocks of Sacred Ibis; for some reason it was one of these, rather than hosts of more edible fowl, that the canoe boys demanded should be shot for them. The ibis were, however, wise and wary, and not one came within eighty yards of the
tarada.
The crew chattered at me to shoot at every bird within a quarter of a mile, and eventually, more to put an end to this nuisance than with expectation of ruffling so much as a feather, I fired at a single ibis passing a full hundred yards away on our flank. To my utter astonishment it fell stone dead; it was not until some time later that I realised that the cartridges had got mixed up in my pocket, and that I had accidentally used one containing LG shot, six huge pellets intended for pig shooting.