A Reed Shaken by the Wind (7 page)

Of all the strange sounds and sights of the marshes I think that I shall remember longest the tumultuous voices of the frogs, those million million voices that could turn the great marsh desert into a cauldron of sound seeming more limitless even than the falling horizons themselves. Later during our journey, when we were crossing the open water of some great lake and the giant reed-beds were a low golden wall in the distance there would be a temporary silence, a silence that seemed somehow uneasy because of the absence of a thing familiar; then, when the
tarada
was still half a mile from the reed-beds, it would creep back into the air like the distant murmur of a great concourse of men. At a quarter of a mile the tone would change to the jabbering of tens of thousands of monkeys; then, as the reeds closed round the canoe, it became a jagged wall of sound that cut one off from the open world outside.

There are several individual types of voice that fuse to compose that mad babel; and on that first evening, as the white sun sank and silhouetted the reed tops, the voices began individually before they gathered sweep and volume to engulf the night, so that for a minute or two it was possible to isolate the notes and search for comparison. The first voice of which I was conscious was loud and staccato and near at hand, a quick chatter indistinguishable from that of a magpie, ragged teeth of sound cutting into the gleaming bubble of low sun and water and the small liquid noises of the paddles. A second voice answered, a rhythmic double note exactly like a man sawing wood, harsh and rasping; a third was boisterous and expansive and could be mistaken for the quacking of a farmyard drake; a fourth would have passed in any Kensington drawing-room for the yapping of a hoarse Pekinese dog. Inherent in each of these voices, despite their differences, is some quality suggestive of remarkable enthusiasm, as though their owners were engaged upon some pleasurable and essentially exhilarating task. These diverse sounds fuse into a continuous and confused uproar, until only the very nearest have any recognisable form.

One seldom sees the owners of these voices except as a quick retiring ripple in the water; and I think the majority, anyway, are of no great size. Once, walking over partially flooded land near the perimeter of the permanent marshes, I picked up one of the many empty terrapin shells that lay on the short green turf. I was turning it over in my hands, when, from the hole where the living tortoise’s neck should be, a small grey-green face emerged sharply. It gave a gruff and startled exclamation, regarded me glassily with the farseeing and imperious eyes of a senior naval officer, and withdrew. I was peering after it when a second head, greener and larger than the first, popped out from the other end, emitted a single outraged gasp, and remained staring for a moment or two with a pulse beating angrily in its cheek. Nothing
that I could do could persuade either of the occupants to show themselves again; I dropped the shell in a puddle and turned away. I had not taken more than two or three paces when I heard a chatter of insane laughter behind me, and whirled round in time to see a frog shoot out from each end of the terrapin and land with a plop in the shallow water. That was as near as I ever got to examining any member of the fabulous orchestra.

The daylight faded altogether from the sky, and the stars came out and were reflected in the water as chips of silver that wriggled like tadpoles in the ripple of the paddles. Now the marshes looked to me uniform and without landmarks, the reed tops showing barely darker than the sky, and the route we pursued among the winding waterways seemed arbitrary, our destination a pretence.

For more than three hours we moved through the darkness and the clamour of the frogs; then the reed-beds, whose surrounding presence we had felt rather than seen, became thinner, and suddenly there were lights ahead. It was my first sight of a marsh village at night, and it was not at first easy to make out what these lights were, flame-coloured and each shaped like a diamond on a playing card.

Nearly all marsh villages are built in the open water, a little away from the reeds so as to avoid the worst of the mosquitoes in summer, and each house is a tiny island of its own, an island built by staking its perimeter with cut reed-bundles in the shallow water and filling up the enclosed space with soggy vegetation until eventually its level is above that of the water. So little above the water, however, that in the dark the high triangle of light formed by the slit door is reflected on the surface of the lagoon without noticeable interruption of terra firma.

As we drew near to these strange houses and began to pass among them they appeared as a fleet of lit boats at anchor in a calm sea, the reed-railed buffalo platform projecting from the rear of each like the round after-decks of a
medieval galleon. Against the night sky showed the dark silhouettes of buffalo heads and horns and the high curving prows of canoes, and as we paddled soundlessly over the still water with the houses all about us we could see through their slit doors to firelit interiors where other buffaloes and their calves shared the warmth with the human family. Not galleons, perhaps, but Noah’s Arks.

In one of these houses of Gubur we spent the night; but, as we arrived late and left very early the next day, it was not until we reached, in the middle of the following morning, a small village with the curiously flatulent name of Bumugeraifat that I formed any real impressions of a marsh community.

Bumugeraifat was in some sense Thesiger’s headquarters, for he was perhaps better known here than anywhere else in the marshes; two of his crew had their homes here, and the villagers regarded him as their own property. It is a tiny village, each house its own island, some built on packed-down reeds and some on clay earth which may be no more than what the reed layers have become where a dwelling site has been inhabited for hundreds of years. The slit door of the house gives straight on to the water, separated from it, at the house at which we stayed both then and later in our journey, by two almost vertical feet of clay as slippery as vaseline. Directly below the eighteen-inch-wide doorway the clay is black with ash thrown out from the hearth, and appears treacherously solid, but it remains only vaseline covered with charcoal, and to step ashore from the canoe remained to me, then and always, impossible without the grip and pull of a host’s hand from the doorway.

Inside, the house differed little from that at Ramla, or from any other undistinguished house in all the marsh area, for the variations are small and somewhat unusual. It was a little more cramped and a little more untidy with broken reed fragments; and at the back, beyond the far half of the house where the womenfolk were cooking, extended the
short rounded buffalo platform that is the stereotype of every house in the permanent marshes.

The water buffaloes are by far the most important unit in the marshman’s economy, and much of the family’s life revolves around them. From excavations outside the marshes it has been possible to date the approximate year of their original introduction into the country from farther east as 3500
B.C
.; more than five thousand years of segregation have changed them somewhat from the form of their Indian ancestors, and they are more like ponderous black aquatic cows than buffalo.

Their movements are, I think, slower than those of any other animal that I have ever seen, except perhaps—but only perhaps—those of a leisurely elephant; even their cud is chewed at a rhythm no faster than one movement of the jaw in three seconds. In the water, where they spend all their time when they are able, showing only a weary head or a length of dripping back like the keel of a long-submerged wreck in shoal-water, the buffaloes seem primeval, pachyderm, patient and wearily enduring; a little tragic too, reminiscent, perhaps, of forgotten news-reels of swimming cattle left derelict by flood. Their eyes are suffering, reproachful. Their voice is the voice of despair, tinged faintly with resentment, expressing only the emergence of the first beasts from the primeval swamps to the bewildering new world of land; it is not a moo or a bellow, but a very deep and infinitely prolonged groan. A mother defending her calf blows a long protesting puff of sweet-smelling breath; her whiskers vibrate tremulously.

The buffaloes are never killed for food; never, indeed, unless they are dying anyway of some disease, when the owner may try to secure the price of the hide while there is yet time. So timeless, so patient, is the
adagio
rhythm of their existence that one feels that they should somehow cheat death by pure inertia, and when they do die of one of the various diseases to which they are susceptible their bloated
half-submerged carcases in the water, white-splashed with the droppings of pelicans and pygmy cormorants, have a strange pathos.

In fact they have little cause to complain, for their lives are passed in a rich and placid leisure immune alike from fear and frustration. They are maintained in privileged luxury for the sake of their milk and their dung; and of the two, safeguarding the bull calf from slaughter, the second is by far the more important. The marshmen drink the milk sour or as curds, or make from it butter churned by swinging the milk rhythmically in the suspended and dried skin of a sheep or a still-born calf, but it is in their dung that the true value of the buffalo lies. It is the marshman’s only fuel other than the dangerous and quick-burning reeds, and his only waterproofing, cement-like, substance.

The dung is gathered—by the women only, for this is an unclean task and relegated to the proper quarter; no man would dream of touching buffalo dung—and shaped, if it is to be used for fuel, into plate-shaped pats, each bearing the spread imprint of a woman’s left hand. When the pats are dry they are stacked as are peats in Scotland and Ireland, and the formation of the beehive-shaped stack is often of an intricacy and beauty that seem worthy of less transient an object.

A fire of buffalo dung is always laid and lit in the same way. Pat is built upon pat until a little dome-shaped oven is formed, with a side entrance like a wren’s nest or the entrance to an igloo. Into this aperture is thrust a bundle of burning reeds, which is held there for as long as it may take for the walls and roof of the structure to become aglow. Then the reeds are taken away, and the buffalo dung smoulders with a smoke dense, acrid and suffocating. The marshmen profess indifference to these hell-fumes, and found my own streaming-eyed agonies a perpetual source of entertainment; nevertheless I noticed a certain amount of selection about seating positions on the leeward side of the fire.

As cement, for it is of a fine consistency and dries quite hard, the dung has infinite uses. It may patch leaking reed-and-mat walls of houses and shelters; it seals and roofs the upright cylinders of reed matting which are used to store grain; it sometimes cements the reed horizontal of a house to the reed matting that covers the whole structure; it may occasionally roof a whole building with circular tiles fitted in mosaic one against another. Its uses are so diverse, and for them it is so completely without possible substitute, that one’s first reaction on learning that the value of a buffalo is about £25 is to think “All that dung for so little!”

Thus the buffaloes are, as it were, the marshman’s lifeline, and they are cherished accordingly. The settled families of the marshes—in contrast to the nomadic tribes at their fringes who own great herds and move according to their requirements as the Lapps move with their reindeer—rarely have more than half a dozen buffaloes and often only two or three. At each dawn the buffaloes, who have been sleeping on the buffalo platform, or quite frequently round the fire with their owners, leave, infinitely slowly and wearily, their wallowing progress continually punctuated with despairing groans, for the distant reed-beds beyond the open water. For a long time they stand on the edge of the buffalo platform, groaning to each other of the infinite fatigue of the coming day, until at last the leader takes a ponderous pace forward and subsides into the water. This first subsidence, dependent as it is almost entirely upon gravity, appears the most rapid movement that they ever make, unless it be for the swishing of their tails when on dry land among the flies; for even their frequent matings seem performed with no great relish, as a ponderous and wearisome necessity, a tired effort to rid themselves of a physical discomfort.

Once in the water a deep lassitude once more descends upon the party, as if they had by now forgotten their intention, and they may wallow there with low notes of
complaint for many minutes. The movements that at length remove them from the immediate vicinity of the house are so gradual as to pass practically unnoticed, but finally they are swimming, so low in the water that their noses seem held above it by a last effort of ebbing strength, their rolling eyes and despairing groans proclaiming that this is the end at last and that they are drowning.

So, patient and protesting and more or less submerged, they spend the day among the reeds and the bulrushes, grazing leisurely upon such green shoots as their antediluvian heads may find at eye level. Often, as we travelled, our
tarada
would come on them unexpectedly, heads with no visible bodies, and seeming the vaster for being at much the same level as our own. Outside the permanent marsh, where the floods come and go and the succulent new growth is often a foot or two under water, the buffaloes stand grazing with their heads submerged, often up to the horns, but it appears that this is a trick that requires learning, for the buffaloes of the true and deep marshes cannot take food beneath the surface.

These long-suffering animals are, however, far from dependent for a livelihood upon what food they may find for themselves during a day’s leisurely sloshing and grazing through the shoulder-deep water. At about the same time as they have launched themselves querulously from the buffalo platform, their owners have put forth in their canoes for what is often the better part of a day’s foraging in the reed-beds on behalf of their small herd. Often the whole family sets out soon after dawn, leaving their house guarded only by the indispensable watch-dog, and spends the day in the reed-beds cutting and loading into their canoes the green shoots that the buffaloes will eat at night. This green fodder is called
hashish
(literally grass) and its collection is the daily routine. On a still day in the marshes one may hear the
hashish
gatherers afar off, singing and shouting to each other through the golden curtain of the high reed forest, splashing
and crackling as they force their craft deeper into the dense and brittle tangle of the sedge. Often they are wading waist deep as they drag their canoes beside them, the men and boys naked, with the water bright on the warm colour of their skins.