A Reed Shaken by the Wind (18 page)

My plan was to get to the area where the duck had been, and squat down there, if necessary up to the waist in water, to wait for their probable return. There was, I saw, a very little cover which might be made to serve—not far from where I wanted to be there was a lump of earth about eighteen inches high, possibly the corner of a submerged earth dyke, and some way beyond it there was another, even smaller. The nearer was about two hundred and fifty yards from where I stood.

I left the canal bank and began to wade to it. The water came to a little below my knees, and the clay bottom was soft and gripping, with a prickle of burnt reed stubble that hurt the bare soles of my feet. My mind went off on the tack that was its childish favourite that morning. “Thesiger has canvas commando boots for this, but he never told me to bring a pair.” Buffalo had been on this ground before it was flooded, their deep footprints made treacherous potholes, and the bump of the camera on my chest reminded me that if I slipped once I might not be able to take any more photographs at all.

Halfway, and the cuffs of my trousers flopped down into
the water; I took a masochistic pleasure in the cold grip of the wet clay at my groin as I rolled them up again. I noticed that the sole of my right foot was bleeding quite a lot. A few duck had returned and were circling; I loaded my gun and went on. When they had gone the sky was great and empty and blue with one long plume of white cloud lying right across it.

I was about fifty yards from the lump of mud when I came to what looked like a ditch. Elsewhere the low green reeds were scattered, thin and irregular, but here was a defined belt perhaps a couple of paces across in which no reeds grew. I tested it cautiously with one foot, thinking it might be deep, but it wasn’t. The water reached just above my knee; I took a pace forward with the other foot.

At that moment I looked up. I had not, I think, heard anything; I was merely re-orientating myself upon my course. A little beyond and to the right of the lump of mud, and about eighty yards from me, was a very large wild boar. That was all my mind registered at first—surprise that so large an animal should have appeared where there had been no cover to hide it before. Next I noticed that the boar was facing me head-on and that it was moving. These stages of realisation must each have lasted a very, very short time, but they were quite clearly defined stages before the full impact of realisation came at me, and with it my heart came up into my mouth: the boar was charging me, and we were all alone, he and I, two little dark specks out in the glittering waste of water, the one stationary and afraid and the other. …

The gun. It came to me quite suddenly that I had a gun, that I was perfectly safe, that I could kill this creature that was coming to kill me. I almost laughed with relief. Then, even as I brought the gun forward to a ready position, I remembered that the cartridges I was carrying were not LG for pig but No. 5 shot for duck. The gun was useless, or almost useless. Mentally, I panicked, but my feet stood still. Infinitely far away behind me I heard a confused sound of
voices shouting. The boar seemed still a long way off, but getting nearer quickly.

I remembered all that Thesiger had told me; I was surprised that I could think so clearly when I was so very much afraid. “If you ever get caught with a charging pig and duck-shot in the gun, for God’s sake don’t do what the Arabs do and waste your ammunition in a panic when the pig’s twenty yards away. It’ll only sting him up and make him madder. You can’t stop him anyway, and you’re going to get badly hurt anyway, but you may not get killed if you keep your head. Wait till he’s not quite touching you and shoot between his eyes and fall on your belly so he can’t get his tusks in your guts. Never fall on your back.”

That reminded me that the camera would be wrecked; even at this stage my appreciation of the situation was evidently incomplete. I think the pig was still forty or fifty yards away by the time all this had gone through my head and been arranged into a knowledge of what I had to do: to stand still and let that great hulk gather pace and momentum until its tusks were almost touching me, then to shoot between its eyes and throw myself sideways on my belly into the water. The whole procedure seemed futile, and already my flesh was shrinking and cowering from the cut of the tusks. When I had killed my first boar I had been astonished by the structure of those tusks, totally unprepared for the long knife edge at their sides.

I could see them by now, though for some reason I only remember one, the boar’s left tusk. He seemed all shoulders and head, massive like a bull, his hindquarters obscured. He was throwing up a white splash of water all round him, and he was getting very near. Then I saw his tail go up over his back in the final concentrated sprint that was going to kill me. I started to bring the gun up and to shift into a more comfortable stance, but I found that my feet had bogged down into the clay and I had to wrench them free. I was feeling sick with fright as I took two paces back into the
shallower water behind what, such ages ago, I had at first taken to be a ditch.

I brought the gun up to my shoulder and sighted between the boar’s eyes. He was about fifteen paces away, and I know now that when a charging boar is only fifteen paces away he seems to be already on top of you. It took every vestige of self-control I had not to fire then. Ten yards. Five. After all I wasn’t going to let him touch me before I fired—I was going to shoot when he reached the opposite side of the “ditch”, the little reedless strip of water out of which I had stepped backward. That would be something between two and three yards from the muzzle of my gun. And then he was there and I was shooting, but even as I shot I realised that the gun was no longer aiming between his eyes.

At first I didn’t realise what had happened; I had been so keyed up for that moment that I had been unable to take in the last-minute change in the situation or to understand the freak of chance that had saved me. I had fired without realising that I was already out of danger, or that to fire could, logically, only lead me back into it. At the peak of his final sprint, when he was no more than three yards from me, the boar had reached the little strip of reedless water that separated us. A pig is never aggressive when out of his depth, and, like me before him, he must have taken this strip for a deep ditch. He swerved left along its bank with the full speed of his charge, and the shots that I had been too strung up to prevent myself from firing had taken him just behind the shoulder, right over the heart. A dark patch like a hole sprang out on his hide, but he gave no sign of feeling it; he galloped on across the shallow water, heading to cross the canal a hundred yards or so beyond the distant
tarada.

It was over. In all, it had lasted less than half a minute. I was left in a tremendous vacuum of anti-climax.

Over at the canoe there was a lot of confused activity. Thesiger’s shouting voice came to me on the breeze; the rifles were buried among the baggage and were not loaded;
the pig had crossed the canal and was galloping across semi-dry country on the other bank before he could take his first hurried shot. A miss, and so was the second, but the third, when the boar was some three hundred yards away and going at full speed, hit him somewhere behind the ribs. After that he was almost tail-on and small in the distance, and there was nothing more to be done.

I found myself unable to feel my usual sympathy for a wounded animal, indeed I felt nothing about it at all except regret that I was unable to see how far my point-blank shot had penetrated, and that I could not keep as memento those tusks that had so very nearly been in me. (In fact this would have been impossible anyway, as their extraction would have involved an insuperable amount of “uncleanness”.) My attitude towards wild pig had changed.

So had my attitude to lumps of mud that provided convenient cover for duck-flighting. There was only one now, where before I had seemed to remember two. I examined it very carefully and suspiciously before I resumed my interrupted wade. It was, however, a genuine lump of mud, very wet and sticky, and it would not give cover or camouflage until I had immersed myself in the water almost to the waist and embraced its clammy hulk with the rest of my body. Presently a garganey came streaking over my head and I missed it; it was not a satisfactory position from which to shoot. I considered the situation; up to the present, I thought, my dignity had been little impaired in the eyes of the onlookers, for they had had no means of knowing how extremely frightened I had been, but to squat here tied in cold slippery knots and miss a lot of duck would strike a false note. The
tarada
showed no signs of leaving, and after a while I uncoiled myself and hailed Thesiger across the water.

“Do you think it’s worth waiting?”

There was no reply, so I said it again, several times. The reply when it did come was indistinct and baffling. It sounded like “You bloody fool!”

I picked and sloshed my way wearily back to the
tarada.
Thesiger was in the best of good humours, and the canoe boys were chattering like monkeys; each of them insisted on kissing me ardently. Sabeti’s moustache tickled.

“What a man!” said Thesiger. “Here he is, charged by a boar from an unprecedented distance, absolutely no right to be alive at all, saved by some extraordinary miracle that deflects the boar at the last possible second—and then, when he’s safe, he has to go and
fire
at it with No. 5 shot! You really
are
a bloody fool! It was nothing but another miracle that he didn’t turn straight back at you. Well, well! Do you know I became quite fond of you when I saw you were going to be killed? I realised that I should definitely miss you when you’d gone. And then he walks on and wallows about in the mud like a hippo and misses a perfectly easy duck. Extraordinary fellow—quite mad. Anyway, I was very glad you didn’t panic and run away; we should never have been able to hold up our heads in the marshes again if you had. … Do you know I couldn’t help wishing in a way that he’d got you?—nothing personal, I mean, but I’ve never seen that happen before, and I wanted to see what he’d do to you. Incomplete, somehow. … Still, isn’t it true what I said about one’s not being frightened when one’s charged? There just isn’t time to be, is there?—I knew you’d find it so.”

I tried, in the interests of an analytic honesty, to explain that I had rarely if ever been more afraid in my life, but that the idea of turning my back on those murderous tusks and letting them out of my sight had been an even more unthinkable horror. Thesiger, I think, did not understand; I doubt whether he has ever experienced physical fear, as I know it, in his life. “No, no,” he said, “one can tell—you didn’t run away.”

Just as well, I thought; he would have had no respect for me had he known all that had gone on in my head during those long seconds.

M
Y
encounter with the boar exercised a profound effect upon my outlook. Perhaps it was because I no longer felt myself to be so perfect a cypher; at last one living creature in all this alien waste of water and sky had really taken notice of me, had thought me important enough to be worthy of destruction. It gave me some ecological status, as it were, even to be the target of a charging pig.

From the beginning my idleness had irked me; I had been a passenger par excellence. Perhaps for the first time in my adult life I had been responsible for nothing, neither for the least decision nor for the carrying out of the simplest piece of the party’s routine. Leisure has little appeal when all free-will action is removed from it, and indeed to light a cigarette was about all the free-will action I could perform without co-operation. Ordinary physical movement was almost completely inhibited, for I had had perforce to spend the greater part of my time either cross-legged in the bottom of a war canoe or cross-legged on the floor of a house. Even when we were not afloat, to take a walk, literally to stretch one’s legs, was out of the question, either because there was no land to walk on, or, when there was a dry-land village with hard earth between the houses, because of the savage dogs that patrolled the perimeter of every dwelling. Because of them one could not even leave a house to relieve oneself without announcing one’s intention and taking an armed guard who stood over one grotesquely the while.

This extreme restriction upon physical activity and lack of preoccupation with any responsibility did, I think, make me more mentally alert and observant than normally, but on the other hand its total effect was a feeling of reduction to
the status of a child, with concomitant resentment and frustration. Like a child, too, I often understood little of what the adults were talking about, and in the long evenings I had found that much of the charm of studying a circle of forty firelit faces is lost when one realises that each of the forty faces is studying one’s own. Now my narrow escape had at the same time satisfied a need of my own and made me the object of a more flattering interest.

We stopped that night at Abu Malih, a small densely built village of the Sudan tribe, on both high banks of a narrow, road-wide watercourse. We were still some ten miles north of the edge of the permanent marsh, and cultivating country stretched out beyond the confines of the villages, most of it still bare and arid-looking, for the water had not yet come. The village was noisy, noisier than any of the marsh villages, where the houses are less closely clustered; to the usual thunder of the dogs and the hoarse cries of their owners was added the cackling and trumpeting of a great number of domestic geese. One of the first things I noticed after we had scrambled up the steep canal bank into the waiting swarm of villagers was a brood of young chickens two or three days old. They were round as puffballs, and every one, from head to toe, was a brilliant aniline green. They looked very fabulous, and their dun-coloured hen fussed over them as though conscious of the rarity and importance of her charges. At first I thought this pleasing folly the work of a child, and was reminded momentarily of a revolting purple Pekinese that I had once seen languish into Claridge’s at the heels of a startling Parisienne. As I looked up from these ridiculous pieces of Disney animation, however, I found myself staring into the soft moon faces of a row of young calves. They were tied halter to halter, so that the slack loops of rope draped evenly and stylistically between their heads, and at the forehead of each, where there should have been a splash of white, flared a vivid patch of magenta. Beyond them stood a heifer with a
magenta udder and green teats. It was the time of the New Year by the Persian calendar, and these were potent charms against the Evil Eye.

This Evil Eye is not, as far as I could understand, a personal thing, lying in the power of an evil individual, but in a general sense the eye of evil and harm, the regard of malign powers. The brightly coloured animals appear an anomaly, however, for among the people themselves one infers that it must be the uninteresting, the insignificant or ugly, that escapes the attention of evil powers. Thus a child who is the successor to several who have died is often called by the name of something unpleasant or trivial, so that attention may be diverted from him, and the family escape further victimisation. Extreme names of this type are those of the most unclean objects that exist; parents in a panic through infant mortality may condemn their child to carry for ever the name “Pig”, or “Dog”, “Jackal”, or even “Shit”. Less extreme, and with the desire for anonymity among a host of similar insignificant objects, are such names as “Plate”, “Date” and “Coffee-cup”. I was surprised at the audacity of naming a boy Habib, which means Beloved, until I learnt that he was the youngest of five living brothers.

I learn that the Chinese use somewhat the same means of diverting malign attention from their children, giving to the boys female names and dressing them in girls’ clothes to deceive the evil spirits.

Personal charms, what the Italians call
“porta fortuna”
and English Catholics call medals, are of great importance to all the tribesmen, as seems general among many superstitious peoples, but they are used most particularly in childhood and in sickness. Sometimes a family may have quite a collection of these objects tucked away in the wooden chest that holds all their intimate belongings; occasionally there are enough for every member of the family to wear one in the case of a local epidemic. They vary a good deal in type. Wandering Sayids, parasitic as only holy men can be, play
upon their supposed status as descendants of the Prophet to sell to the villagers charms against illness, which, if the Sayid concerned is literate, may be a crudely written verse from the Qu’ran, or, if he is illiterate, a few meaningless squiggles that the tribesmen will hold in pathetic respect and awe. Occasionally one sees relics of what may be an earlier magic. At Bumugeraifat, in the Central Marshes, a boy with a low fever carried as a pendant round his neck a pierced round stone the size of a dove’s egg, dark, heavy, and very highly polished. Now there is no stone in the marshes, nor for a long way outside them, and by the appearance of this object it was of considerable antiquity in its present form. Thesiger was not with me that day, and my Arabic vocabulary was very small, but I managed to ask where it had come from and to understand that it had been dug up below one of the houses of the village. It seemed to me that it might be very old indeed, and that it might, too, throw some light on the remote and uncertain origins of the people, for the stone was unusual and its nearest
locale
should not be difficult to establish. I tried to buy it from the boy’s mother, and when she refused I thought she was bargaining. At length she turned down an offer that left me in no doubt that she was not, the
fus
simply was not for sale; and that, among so poor a people, where practically every material object has its surprisingly low price, was striking evidence of its significance in their eyes. I had seen another, of a bluer, more slaty stone, tied with some other charms into the greasy ends of a woman’s headcloth, the domineering yet whiny matriarch of the
mudhif
at Dibin where Sheikh Jabir had war-danced while the eagle owl blinked in the friendly gloom within. She had offered, characteristically, to exchange it for the gold-and-enamel Persian charm that I wore myself, but here my scientific curiosity had become confused by superstitions and sentiments of my own.

It was not until I finally returned to Basra that I acquired one of these stones. I was crossing the wooden bridge to the
suq
when I noticed an old beggar squatting at the corner of the bridge and the canal bank. He was very ragged; he wore the rough woollen
bisht
of a tribesman, and apparently no
dish-dasha
below it, for where it was torn his naked skin showed through it. The
bisht
was open at the chest, and on a mat of white hair lay an oval stone stranger than any I had seen before. I made my way back over the bridge to the workshop of a Sabian with whom I had recently dealt, and explained to him what I wanted. He came across the street with me and from a discreet distance I indicated the stone. He shook his head. “He not sell,” he said, and added an Arabic sentence that was too complicated for me. He saw that I did not understand, and tried again, in English. “From before … from very very before …
kulish, kulish,
strong holy, no sell. Finish.” “Try,” I said, “and also ask from where it comes. I will wait for you in the shop.” He came back after a few minutes, rubbing the stone on the palm of his hand. “Four dinar,” he said, “I take one—five, yes? He Ma’dan from other side Qurna.
Fus
—from his father.”

I wondered how much the beggar had received for his father’s charm, and hoped that it was at least half of the price the Sabian had mentioned. It was not difficult to understand how this stone had acquired a magic status, for it was an unusual and striking object in itself. It seemed like some kind of agate, opaque blue-grey with dark lines in it, and over all one side the distribution of colour formed an almost perfect eye; a blind eye, for the pupil was not defined, and there was a just perceptible milky film over it, as though it was the eye of a dead animal grown cold, the eye of a young calf or a gazelle. As I looked at it there came to me the words of a poem from a different landscape.

How great a part witchcraft and magic play in the life of the people I was unable to discover, nor was Thesiger able to help me. If it is prevalent it would belong to the women’s side of life, and that would be virtually impossible for any man, more especially a white man, to explore thoroughly. The very superstitious nature of the people would incline one to believe that it must play a large part. With this outlook events usually tend to form a circle; minor and major ills are attributed to spells, and this in turn encourages emulation by those who would wish to cast them.

Of our four canoe boys only Sabeti admitted wholeheartedly to belief in all
djinns
, but at least two of the others were quite plainly giving the response which they considered our own sophistication to demand; and the fourth, who was more prepared to find a natural explanation for unknown phenomena, was found to believe with childlike simplicity in circumcision by angels. This is an extraordinarily widespread belief among tribesmen, and is held even by minor sheikhs who have had at least some contact with western science. Our host proudly told us that he himself had been thus circumcised, and swore by Hussein that he had with his own eyes seen boys of three or four years lying still asleep in the morning with the severed foreskin on the pillow beside their heads and blood at the site of the cut. The most obvious explanation for this belief, that of convenience in the avoidance of an unpleasant operation, is not valid, for it is not a lawful circumcision by their custom, and those thus singled out for miraculous surgery must usually have a little more removed by human agency to make their condition acceptable to the community. Even our host admitted that the angels were not conspicuously efficient at this work, though in fact he himself had undergone no further operation. He became irritated at our obvious scepticism about angels with scalpels.

“There are boys here in this very
mudhif
with us who have been so visited by the angels! Here, Daoud, show
them what the angels did!” A boy of about twelve stepped over to us and without embarrassment lifted his
dish-dasha.
The appearance was at first sight misleading, but was in fact quite obviously within the limits of individual variation.

“See!” cried our host, “if we believe in Allah, whom we cannot see, why should we not believe in this which we can see with our eyes? And where was it lying?”

“On the pillow,” said the boy dutifully. I thought his voice lacked conviction.

“There! So it was also with me. And in your country is there then nothing that you cannot understand?”

Thesiger began a lengthy statement which I could not follow. Presently he stopped and turned to me. “I was telling them about flying saucers,” he said somewhat apologetically.

The company appeared keenly interested; all of them, it appeared, had seen flying saucers. These were quite small, white, and moved very slowly and soundlessly across the sky. Sometimes they would be in sight for twenty minutes or more. They were rather sausage-shaped than saucer-shaped, it emerged from Thesiger’s questioning, and they were by no means rare; perhaps we should see one in the morning. Clearly they were no stranger than many other unexplained phenomena.

In fact we did see one in the morning. Excited cries brought us to the door of the
mudhif
before we had finished breakfast. Hands were pointing, eyes were shaded. There wasn’t a cloud in the whole sky, and it was still pale blue before the heat of the day. Two sea eagles were twisting and diving upon each other in play far above us; otherwise I could see nothing. Then I saw what the people were pointing at. It was a minute silver vapour-trail from an aircraft flying at stratospheric height. As they had said, it was quite noiseless.

“It is an aircraft,” I said. There were cries of denial and
derision. I went back into the
mudhif
and fetched my field-glasses. Even with a magnification of sixteen the aircraft was only just visible, and was so far away that it seemed to be practically stationary, but it formed a speck of the right shape. I handed the glasses to our host. After a moment he returned them with a slightly disgruntled air. I was not absolutely certain what he said, but I thought it was, “I did not require these things to see what was on the pillow.”

Whether or not they admit it, the great majority of the marshmen are afraid of
djinns,
and afraid of the darkness that may hide them. A
djinn
is not, as readers of the better-known Arab fiction might suppose, something that always appears out of a bottle, a malign or beneficent creature of enormous power; it is, in fact, any manifestation of the supernatural, for anything not readily explicable is assumed to be the work of some
djinn.
The invisible world is peopled with a great multitude of these beings, and though Mahommed is held to have converted the evilly disposed
djinns,
the great majority of them are still frightening and destructive. They are credited with much greater powers than are “ghosts” in European countries, and are quite often capable of inflicting death. There is one such who is quite generally recognised in the marshes, and held in especial dread. He appears, I think, only at night, and the first that the traveller sees of him is a light, quite small, and by no means unusual or alarming. As the victim draws nearer the light begins to glow more intensely until at last it is huge and blinding and from the centre of it there appears the
djinn,
a giant negro slave, quite naked, and some fifteen or twenty feet high. Some who have seen the
djinn
may live to speak of it afterwards, but they are blighted mentally and physically, their limbs withered and their brains deranged. One of our canoe boys said he had seen this light from a distance more than once, but, knowing it for what it was, had gone no nearer. There may perhaps be gases in the marshes that produce a will o’ the wisp or Jack o’ Lantern, but the general
acceptance of the giant negro slave must owe its origin to one man’s raving; not, one feels, to a racial guilt conscience.