The Prophet's Camel Bell (32 page)

“They told me I must carry a lamp,” he said mildly, “but they didn't specify that it should be a lighted one.”

The true lantern he carried, of course, was always lighted – it would never go out until he died. Because his faith illuminated him so, it was tempting to see him simply as a saintly man, some gentler John the Baptist. But how intricate must be the forces which make life seem possible to some men only in the wilderness.

We travelled many miles over terrible roads to see the government geologist. His wife ushered us into the bungalow – would we like a cup of tea? Aubrey was working and could not be disturbed. Perhaps we would like to wait, or if not, could we return some other time? She spoke of him as though he were an artist whose inspiration must not be intruded upon. And in a sense, that is just what he was.

We waited for an hour or so, and finally Aubrey came stomping out of his study and beckoned to us, managing to look cordial and absent-minded at the same time.

“Come in, come in! Sorry to keep you waiting, but if I let people interrupt me, you know, I'd never get a blessed thing done.”

His study was like a small natural history museum, crammed with maps, charts, rock specimens, animal skulls, collections of butterflies and insects.

“Rainfall records – that's what you wanted, wasn't it? Let's see, now –”

He ruffled through thousands of documents and emerged triumphantly with the records Jack needed for his work. Aubrey was something of a legend in this country. He had done geological surveys, maps, charts of tribal migrations, rainfall records and heaven knows what-all. He was completely bound up in his work, and it seemed to him that there was never enough support for his projects. Only slowly were his reports and maps printed. He carried on a running battle with the Secretariat. He was on friendly enough terms with the administrative officers individually, but collectively he appeared to view them as a mammoth stone wall against which he was doomed forever to batter. He told us about it in gloomily ironic tones.

“No money, saith the government. It was ever thus. These things of mine have got to be printed, you know, but do you think they'll see that? Not they.”

All the same, he knew his work was valued here. I only hope it will be valued as much in the independent Somali Republic.

The Colonel owned an infant ostrich and an exceedingly pregnant grey mare. The mare's condition was a source of anxiety to him.

“She's been pregnant for such a long time, I'm beginning
to wonder if she'll ever foal. Or if she does, what on earth will come forth?”

Perhaps she mated with a camel by mistake, and at this very moment some exotic hybrid was being formed, some creature which required an unusually long period of gestation. The Colonel and Aul, his stable-boy, fussed over the swollen but placid mare like two worried physicians. When at last she dropped her foal, it was a little brown filly, perfectly formed, and the Colonel was almost disappointed.

The Colonel was retired from the Army and now served as an aide to the Governor. He was thoughtful and courteous, the gentlest of men, and his favourite pastime was telling ghastly battle stories. From him I learned more about the famous Mullah campaigns half a century ago, for he had read everything he could find on the subject, and he spoke almost as though he had been there.

“Now this shows you what sort of chaps the Somalis are when they're fighting – it was during the 1912 campaign, I believe, when a Somali dragged himself into the Berbera hospital one day with a bullet in his leg and a spear wound right through his body. The doctor started to take out the bullet, and the Somali gasped, ‘No, no – never mind that. But for the love of Allah, do something about this spear wound – it hurts when I laugh.'”

And although this same anecdote had probably been told, with local variations, of warriors in every army since the days of Genghis Khan, the Colonel laughed delightedly.

“I can quite believe it, you know,” he said. “We had some very good men in those campaigns, too. Corfield, who founded the Camel Corps – he was killed, of course. And Swayne – he led the Second Expedition. Along with Risaldar-Major Haji Musa Farah, he trekked across the Haud
with five thousand tribesmen, to attack the Mullah's forts. Think of it – all that way. Water was the problem, and fever. The Mullah was holed up with all the water he needed. It wasn't a simple matter of spears, either – the Mullah's forces had rifles.”

His face grew sombre as he recounted the series of campaigns that went on for twenty years. “When we got up the Third Expedition, we had regular forces of Sudanese and Sikhs as well as the Somalis. The worst battle was at Gumburu – our men were terribly outnumbered, holding out inside a
zareba
and entirely surrounded by the Mullah's men. After a while it looked as though the whole British force would be killed. And indeed they were, to a man. But first –”

The Colonel paused, for he was very much moved by this story, and hearing him tell it, so was I.

“Just before the Mullah's dervishes swept in,” he finished, “Captain Johnson-Stewart broke up the Maxim guns so that they would never fire again.”

We were silent, both of us, thinking of all the brave young men, the dead young men. But at least the gentle Colonel never doubted that they died for something worth while. And perhaps, after all, they did, if they believed they did. While on the other side, also believing, the Mullah's young Somali warriors died crying
Allah Akbar!

Whether Mohamed Abdullah Hassan was a madman and a religious fanatic, as the British claimed, or an early nationalist and divinely inspired leader, as the Somalis claimed, was not a matter that could ever be settled. Perhaps he was both. Even the Somalis did not deny that he was a cruel man, but in their eyes this was not such an unusual thing for a sultan to be. He was a great
gabei
poet, and some of his poems survived to this day and were often recited by Somalis.
The one I had heard showed skill and deep feeling and did not sound like the work of a madman.

“That may be,” the Colonel said, “but we must remember that many of the tribesmen in the interior were not on the Mullah's side and were looking to us for protection against him.”

Plain fact or wishful thinking? Again, probably both. One point, however, the Colonel conceded willingly.

“The Mullah was a courageous man,” he said. “No one would deny that. Insane at times, no doubt. But he would never admit defeat, and that is something one has to admire, always.”

Matthew had often been mentioned to us by the Somalis.

“Wait until you are meeting him,” they told us. “There is a man.”

Scarcely another Englishman in the country did they hold in this kind of esteem. We, however, were suspicious. Whenever I am told I will be certain to like someone, I become convinced that I will not like him at all. But when we finally met and got to know Matthew, we saw what the Somalis meant.

He was a District Commissioner, and as such he was entitled to one of the new large stone bungalows. But he could not be bothered with such fancy accommodation – it simply did not interest him. He lived in a small and almost shack-like bungalow, closer to the Somali
magala
than to the European settlement. His house was cluttered with files and papers, massive texts on Qoranic law, and every book that had ever been written about Somaliland. Matthew lived happily in the midst of this muddle, flicking the ash from his constant cigarette on the floor, for the ashtrays were always buried somewhere beneath the debris of paper.

There was about him a quickness, a kind of nervous energy. He did not belong to the “dinner-jackets-in-the-desert” set. He dressed in baggy khaki trousers, a bush jacket and an old Australian bush hat, and he took the formalities of colonial life as lightly as possible. He was the only Englishman in government service, as far as we could discover, who spoke really fluent Somali, and one of the few who understood the complexities of tribal organization and tribal law.

When fighting broke out between the Somalis of the Protectorate and the Ogaden Somalis on the other side of the border, or when a Protectorate tribe had a disagreement with the Ethiopians, Matthew was the person most often sent as government representative to the
shir
, the meeting between the opposing sides, where an attempt was made to Teach a settlement of the trouble, for he was able to cope with the endlessly involved orations of a
shir
better than anyone else.

Like the Somalis themselves, Matthew was a skilled and rapid talker. Once he managed to quell a budding riot by cracking jokes in Somali – no mean feat, as the Somalis were hypercritical of any outsider attempting to speak their language, and their standards of wit and word jugglery were high. But sometimes his unorthodox methods went beyond speech. A friend told us why Matthew was awarded the M.B.E. The Desert Locust Control men in Somaliland set poisoned bait for the young hoppers, and at one time many Somalis believed that this locust poison would kill their camels which were grazing in the same places. One large section of a tribe in the Guban became so enraged that they were all prepared to take up their spears and massacre every locust officer in the area. When Matthew arrived on the scene, the tribesmen had gathered and were worked up to a fantastic pitch of anger and excitement. It was an isolated spot; there was no road, and the
place was rarely visited by Europeans, so Matthew knew he could expect no help. The tribesmen threatened to kill him if he did not agree to stop the bait-laying. He refused, and at dusk they surrounded his camp. When darkness fell, Matthew somehow managed to escape, and made his way across the desert to a small tea shop on the Zeilah Road. He got away just in time, he later learned, for during the night the tribesmen made up their minds to kill him. They entered his camp, and furious at finding him gone, they burned the tents, slashed his clothes and even speared his bush hat. The next day they arrived at the Zeilah Road tea shop. If anything, they were angrier than before, having been cheated of a victim the previous night. It was too late for prolonged talk. Matthew said only one thing.

“If this locust poison doesn't kill a man, will you believe it won't kill your camels?”

The tribesmen murmured among themselves, and finally agreed – yes, they would believe it, in that case. But what was the use of such talk, when everyone knew the locust bait would certainly kill a man?

“No, it won't,” Matthew said. “I'll prove it.”

He then scooped up a handful of the poisoned bran and ate it himself. The tribesmen stared with considerable curiosity, and finally, when he did not drop dead, they dispersed.

A simple solution. But although he knew the locust bait did not poison camels, at the time when he ate it, he had no idea what effect it would have on a human. Camels, after all, are able to digest inch-long thorns, but men are not.

One evening we asked Matthew about this story. He was embarrassed. He laughed and shrugged.

“It was only that I couldn't think what else to do. Anyway, I thought I could probably get back to my bungalow
in time, if necessary, and dose myself with a strong emetic. Never fear, I had no intention of dying for the cause or any nonsense like that.”

I was relieved to hear it. I mistrusted martyrs, for I suspected that self-glorification was at the core of most self-sacrifice. There was nothing like that about Matthew. He would have performed such an act in the firm belief that he could pull it off. But he might not have pulled it off. What is bravery except the taking of a calculated risk, in the strong hope of winning but also in the realization that one may not win? This was the quality the Somalis perceived in Matthew when they said of him – “There is a man.”

He explained to us, in other terms, the reason why he got along with the Somalis so well.

“I like them,” he said quite frankly, “because they are so bloody-minded.”

He valued in them the very qualities which many Englishmen abhorred – their argumentativeness, their passionate dramatization of events, the indestructible pride of these desert people.

He was delighted at one aftermath of the locust-bait crisis. The tribesmen, with that astonishing reversal so typical of Somalis, later came to him and told him that they now realized he was their friend and they would therefore like to offer him the full blood-compensation of a hundred camels for having once been determined to kill him.

Some months after we left Somaliland, we saw Matthew again in England, where he was on leave. He breezed into our flat in London, wearing an odd-looking suit of heavy hairy tweed.

“Damn silly, this suit,” he said apologetically. “I had to buy something, you see, so I walked into a shop and when I was
riffling through some off-the-peg suits, I saw one that had a most enticing label. It said
Thorn-proof
. Ah, I thought, just the job. So I bought it. It was only afterwards that I realized I wouldn't be likely to encounter many thorns along Oxford Street.”

Matthew finally left Somaliland. We received a card –
Merry Christmas From Jerusalem
, with a picture of camels, and in his scrawled writing – “This reminds me of the Haud.” He was working in the re-settlement of Arab refugees. Ultimately, he returned to Africa, as he was almost bound to do, and took a post with the Information Service in a country which has recently gained its independence. He was by turns elated and depressed.

“We've been doing a radio programme of contemporary negro poetry – terrific! Shall I send you the script?”

But in the next letter he wondered if it would not be better if all Europeans left Africa, for he was discouraged at the number of people who had political or religious motives for their work. If only Europeans could work there simply because various technical skills would be needed until African countries developed enough technically educated men of their own. But so many whites had axes to grind. The Africans saw this, and were not impressed.