The Prophet's Camel Bell (10 page)

That evening Hersi came to see me.

“The Illalo corporal wishing me to telling you, mem-sahib, that the ear medicine is highest qualities. His pain, it is gone, absolutely. He says a thousand thanks.”

I gaped at him. How could it be? Faith, which could move mountains, could also cure ears, apparently. Surprised and delighted, I pretended to shrug it off.

I had a regular sick-parade some days. Gashed fingers, thorns to remove from hands and feet. Abdi's eyes became sore with the constant blown grit and dust, and I bathed them for him with boracic. Courteously, he thanked me.

“I pray Allah grant you a son, memsahib.”

I was moved by his gratitude and his prayer, and I felt a growing sense of confidence in my medical skills. I doled out aspirins and “number nines,” the standard Army laxative, usable only by those with bowels of steel, and I bandaged away with a will. What I had not noticed, however, was that nothing serious had yet come my way.

Then the Somalis from nearby encampments began to come to our camp in the hope of obtaining medicines. The gashes were deeper now, the thorn-slivers infected. Once it was a woman who had been bitten on the arm by a camel. The teeth had gone in on either side, and the festering arm looked as though it had been punctured right through. Camel bites frequently caused blood poisoning – this much I knew. I told the tribemen with her that they should take her to the doctor in Hargeisa.

They could not possibly do that, they replied. They had a small camp, and if two of them went in to Hargeisa with her, there would not be enough men left to care for the sheep and camels. So I bandaged her arm, uselessly. She thanked me, and I felt sick.

A Somali herdsman came to our camp one evening. His emaciated body, every bone showing through the dried and flaking skin, trembled as though with chill. He crawled like a shot deer under a thorn tree and lay there, breath fluttering
only faintly in him. I stood aside, for I did not have any idea what to do. Hersi and Mohamed and the labourers knew, however. They did not give him anything to drink right away. First they bathed him with water, and then they gave him a very little water in a cup, refusing to let him drink more until later. If they had allowed him all he wanted, he would have been twisted with cramps and would probably have died. When he had recovered sufficiently, we heard his story. He had been down at Awareh and had been travelling back alone with his camels. Thirst had almost killed him, and he had managed to survive only by the appalling process of killing one of his camels every eight days and sucking the moisture of the beast's guts.

What had I known of life here at all? I recalled the faith-healing of the Illalo's ear, and the simple boracic treatment of Abdi's eyes. It seemed to me that I had been like a child, playing doctor with candy pills, not knowing – not really knowing – that the people I was treating were not dolls. Had I wanted to help them for their sake or my own? Had I needed their gratitude so much?

For a while, after that day, I could not stand to look at my toy potions and powders. I shoved the tin box under a camp cot. I would have no more to do with it. Then I saw that this way, too, was an exaggeration. Would I do nothing simply because I could not do everything? The searching sun of the
Jilal
exposed not only the land but the heart as well.

Practical considerations forced me to dig out the inadequate tin box once more. Mohamedyero had sliced his finger with a butcher knife and was yowling as though he had just had a limb lopped off. I bandaged the small wound, thinking that all a person could do was what they could, but at least in the knowledge that it was only slightly more than nothing.

“Some she come to see you,” Mohamed announced.

They stood hesitantly at the edge of the camp, several women from the bush and desert, clad in their drab brown and black rags, their faces unveiled, for
purdah
was never worn by those who spent their lives leading the burden camels.

Among Somalis, only the women knew how to set up the portable huts, how to place the frames of bent roots in the earth and cover them with the woven grassmats. When the tribe set up camp, the women had to assemble the huts before they could rest. This division of labour was not as unfair as it sounded. The men protected the tribe with their spears, and led the herds to new grazing grounds, often going ahead to find the way. Men had to reserve their strength for their own demanding work. But the women's lives were harsh, and after marriage they changed from girls to lean and leather-skinned matrons in the space of a few years.

The women approached, eyed me penetratingly, whispered between themselves, and finally asked. Could I give them anything to relieve their menstrual pain?

Somali girls underwent some operation at puberty, the exact nature of which I had been unable to determine, partly because in our early days here every Somali to whom I put this question gave me a different answer, and partly because I no longer questioned people in this glib fashion. The operation was either a removal of the clitoris, or a partial sewing together of the labia, or perhaps both. But whatever was done, apparently a great many women had considerable pain with menstruation and intercourse, and the birth of their children was frequently complicated by infection. In the opinion of an educated Somali friend of ours, this operation was one custom which would take a very long time to die, for the old women would never agree to its being abandoned, he believed, even if the men would.

I did not know what to say to these women. They were explaining, almost apologetically, their reasons for asking. Walking with the burden camels, at such times, especially during the
Jilal
season – it was not easy to keep going.

What should I do? Give them a couple of five-grain aspirin? Even if they had money to buy future pills, which they had not, the lunatic audacity of shoving a mild pill at their total situation was more than I could stomach.

“I have nothing to give you. Nothing.”

This was the only undeceptive reply I could make. They nodded their heads, unprotestingly. They had not really believed I would give them anything. Women had always lived with pain. Why should it ever be any different? They felt they ought not to have asked. They hid their faces in their cloths for a moment, then spoke determinedly of other things.

The days went by, and the clouds gathered, but still it did not rain. Ahmed Abdillahi, a young chieftain, visited the camp and offered his assistance.

“I have heard much about the
ballehs
,” he said to Jack. “If you want me to go with you across the Haud, and guide you, and speak with the people, I will do it.”

The first sign that the
balleh
scheme might be gaining some acceptance. Jack was encouraged and accepted the offer. Ahmed Abdillahi stayed with us for some time, travelling along the border with Jack, everywhere talking with people, arguing, explaining. He looked rather like Robeson must have looked as a young man, very tall and broad, with strong features and muscular arms. He had a poise that seemed never to be shaken. Whatever questions or suspicions were raised by his fellow tribesmen, Ahmed Abdillahi replied in the same deep firm voice, never losing his temper.

I drove with Jack and the others to Lebesegale. While Jack examined the possibilities of the place as a
balleh
site, I looked around. It was a tiny settlement, dark brown huts, a few camels, a mud-and-wattle tea shop with roof of flattened paraffin tins. The inhabitants were thin and in rags, haggard with the long
Jilal
. The water hole, once a large one, had dried to a small pool of muddy liquid which somehow sustained the few people here, but could not have done so if even one more family had arrived.

Beside me, Hersi trudged. “Nothing here, memsahib. The people are very poor presently times.”

I nodded. There was certainly nothing much here. Only the bare red Haud soil, hard as stone, and incredibly, these few people, the old man who had come out of the tea shop to greet us, his two young grandsons, the three women with the flock of black-headed sheep. The rest of the villagers had left with most of the camels, to seek water and grazing elsewhere. Then I saw a small round brushwood enclosure within the almost-empty village. I asked Hersi about it.

“That is the mosque,” he replied.

I looked again at the thorn boughs that formed the place of worship. It seemed to me that more genuine faith might reside in this brushwood circle than in the jewelled and carved magnificence of the Blue Mosque at Istanbul.

Driving along the Awareh-Hargeisa road, we saw two burden camels laden with the crescent-shaped hut-frames and the bundled mats. They were halted by the roadside, and as we drew near, we saw one of the beasts slide to its knees, sunken in the apathy of thirst and exhaustion. Beside them, squatting in the sand, was a woman, a young woman, her black headscarf smeared with dust. She must have possessed, once, a tenderly beautiful face. Now her face was drawn and
pinched. In her hands she held an empty tin cup. She did not move at all, or ask for water. Despair keeps its own silence. Her brown robe swayed in the wind. She carried a baby slung across one hip. The child's face was quiet, too, its head lolling in the heavy heat of the sun. We had a little water left in our spare tank, and so we stopped. She did not say a word, but she did something then which I have never been able to forget.

She held the cup for the child to drink first.

She was careful not to spill a drop. Afterwards, she brushed a hand lightly across the child's mouth, then licked her palm so that no moisture would be wasted.

To her, I must have seemed meaningless, totally unrelated to herself. How could it be otherwise? I had never had to coax the lagging camels on, when they would have preferred to stop and rest and die. But what I felt, as I looked into her face, was undeniable and it was not pity. It was something entirely different, some sense of knowing in myself what her anguish had been and would be, as she watched her child's life seep away for lack of water to keep it alive. For her, this was the worst the
Jilal
could bring. In all of life there was nothing worse than this.

What we could do here was only slightly more than nothing. Maybe she would reach the wells. Maybe she would not. She might with good reason have looked at us with hatred as we began to speed easily away, but she did not. She was past all such emotions. She knew only that she must keep on or she would perish, and her child with her. As we drove away, we saw her rise slowly and call the burden camels. The beasts struggled up and began to follow her.

Across the great plains of the Haud, the wind swept the sand up into spinning dervishes of dust. The red termite-mounds stood like tall misshapen towers of the dead. On the
carrion of camels the vultures screeched and gorged themselves. In the afternoons, the wisps of cloud formed raggedly in the sky.

“
In sha' Allah
,” the Somalis said. “If Allah wills, it will rain.”

We, too, said the same thing now. What else was there to say? All other words had ceased to have meaning in the
Jilal
.

“V
ery shortly times,” Hersi said, his words more a prayer than a prediction, “you will be hearing the voice of the
tug
in this land.”

The
tugs
were dry river-beds for most of the year, but during the rains they flowed in spate, roaring briefly with their flood, hurling the water down to the sea, carrying it off where it could not be used. Hersi's expression had a biblical ring to it, almost like the Song of Songs.

If the rains ever came, perhaps even the Haud would be like Solomon's kingdom after the dry winter, when the flowers appeared on the earth and the vines were in blossom. It did not seem possible. The clouds had been gathering and thickening for so many weeks that we had ceased to expect anything of them. The rains would never come.

But at last they did come, and the violence of them matched the depth of the
Jilal
drought.

We had returned from camp and were temporarily based in Hargeisa. One afternoon we set off along the Wadda Gumerad road, Jack and Abdi and myself, on a short trip to a place in the Haud where Jack wanted to examine a possible
balleh
site. The road consisted only of the wheel marks of trade trucks, and even these had been obscured by the drifting sand. Somehow we took a wrong turning, and found that we were jouncing across the desert with not a trace of a road in sight. The Wadda Gumerad had completely vanished.

“We get lost, I think, sahib,” Abdi admitted, furious at himself, for usually he could find his way unerringly through any portion of the Haud.

We were still wondering how to find the road when a sudden wind shuddered across the red sand. The sky turned greyish yellow, and the thunder began to growl. Then we heard a slow plok-plok-plok and saw the first drops of water unbelievably falling and being swallowed by the dust.

“Rain!” Abdi stopped the Land-Rover and jumped out, turning his face up to the sky. He let the quickening rain course over him – he held out his hands to it.

“Praise be to Allah, Lord of the worlds!” He spoke the Arabic words aloud, a mighty shout of thanksgiving. As we drove on, he talked excitedly.

“All thing come fine, this time. Sheep get fat, camel get strong now. You will see. Plenty meat, plenty milk –”

We, too, were excited, jubilant, thankful. Only gradually did our present situation dawn upon us. The storm was gathering force, and we were still lost. Because we had expected to be back before dinner time, we had brought no food and only one bottle of water. Even our customary spare water tank was empty today. Abdi's face grew sombre once more. He felt responsible for the fact that we had wandered off the Wadda
Gumerad, but he reminded us, as well, that he did warn us not to venture out this afternoon in case the rains chose this day.