The sun blazed down on the docks, and the harsh glare of light never let up for an instant. One afternoon Jack arrived back at the bungalow and hesitated in the doorway.
“Peg – give me a hand, will you?”
I was immediately alarmed. What was the matter?
“I can’t seem to see,” he said, his voice tight with anxiety.
He had suddenly gone blind. He had a splitting headache and everything had turned to darkness. I was frantic with worry, but the consul remained unperturbed.
“Sunstroke,” he said calmly. “Bound to happen sooner or later, working out in the sun all day. It’ll probably pass off after an hour or so.”
What if it didn’t? I had the momentary unreasonable conviction that every doctor in Djibouti was incompetent, irresponsible and probably alcoholic. Later, when all was well, I recalled this feeling with some shame, and could no longer maintain the same comfortable scorn at the Hargeisa mem-sahibs’ delusions about the country, the host of dangers they conjured up to frighten or entertain themselves.
After a few hours, just as the consul predicted, the mist lifted from Jack’s eyes, and the next morning he was back at the docks again.
We were as glad to leave Djibouti as we had been to arrive. When the last piece of machinery was unloaded and ready to be taken to Zeilah, everyone climbed aboard and we were off. The Land-Rover and trucks drove for the last time through the paved streets, past the misshapen old buildings, past the slickly shining new apartments, past shuttered mysterious dwellings, past the clean whitewashed walls of the Pharmacie de la Mer Route, past Le Palmier En Zinc, past the Italian gialotto shop, past the rotting shanties of the magala, past the date palms with their bunches of orange-brown fruit, past white-robed priests on bicycles and chalk-faced women looking forlorn under the small umbrellas of their topees.
Farewell to the homesick city, the shabby Paris of the Gulf of Aden. Nabad gelyo, Djibouti – may we never see you again.
From Zeilah, we set out onto the Guban in the late afternoon, when the heat was not quite so severe. As usual, we moved in convoy – first, the Land-Rover with Jack and myself and Abdi; next, Ugo driving Alfie, which was loaded with a tractor and was towing a scraper; then the Bedford truck, driven by Arabetto and carrying Mohamed and Hersi as well as the gang of labourers; and finally the old P.W.D. tractor from Zeilah, which we had borrowed to go part of the way with us, through the worst of the sand, in case the heavily loaded diesel got stuck. Jack did not want the new tractors driven back to Hargeisa under their own power, as the trek might wreck them and would in any event take too long.
Seven miles out of Zeilah, the diesel got bogged down in the sand. Everyone piled out and began digging, poking thorn boughs under the wheels, shoving. The P.W.D. tractor finally hauled Alfie out, but at that moment the diesel’s steering broke. Ugo and Jack ingeniously managed to fix the steering with bits of wire, a job which took two hours. When we got going once more, it was growing dark. We forged ahead and reached a dry river-bed where the loose sand lay thick and treacherous. The diesel sank down once more and almost turned over. This time it was seriously stuck. Even the old tractor could not budge it. Alfie’s wheels spun furiously, unable to grip in the slithering sand. Even if the diesel could be dragged across the river-bed, the danger area extended for several miles ahead, the sand lying soft and crumbly as brown sugar.
Then, all at once, the night arrived and with it a sand storm. We were on the flat treeless Guban, with only a few clumps of grass to stop the blowing sand, and the wind was careering across the desert. Arabetto shifted the Bedford so that work could be done by its lights, and Abdi did the same with the Land-Rover. Fortunately, Jack had insisted upon bringing the boards from the tractor crate, thinking they might possibly come in useful.
“We’ll try making a portable road,” he decided.
Everyone seized a board. These were thrown down in front of the diesel’s wheels, and as Alfie began to heave out of the sand, towed by the old tractor, the wheels gripped on the boards and crunched slowly ahead. For some distance the moving road of boards continued. As the wheels came grinding forward, someone would pick up the last board and run with it to the front of the diesel. All the time the sand was whipping against us, peppering our limbs as though with buckshot, filling our eyes and mouths with grit. The wind howled and shrieked.
“Wallahi! ” Mohamed gasped. “I think this wind is some shaitan, some devil.”
By midnight we had been travelling for eight hours and we had gone exactly twenty-five miles. Jack and I slept at last in the Land-Rover, while the Somalis and Ugo went to sleep in the trucks. We were all so tired we hardly cared whether we lived or died.
But something had been changed by this tussle with the desert. After this night, when Jack managed somehow to devise ways of getting our unwieldy caravan across the shifting sands of the Guban, the attitude of the Somalis was subtly different. They began speaking, for the first time, of “the balleh camp” or “we belong to the balleh job,” as though the work now possessed an entity. And they began to call Jack odei-gi rer-ki, the old man of the tribe.
THE BALLEHS
The green of the good season had faded from the Haud, and the Somalis were wondering if the Dhair rains, which sometimes fell in autumn, would come this year. If the Dhair rains failed, there would be trouble here when the winter drought set in, for the Habr Awal from the Guban were moving up into the Haud plateau this year. Every morning we saw families of Habr Awal trekking past our camp, the women and girls leading the heavily loaded burden camels, the children and old people shouting at the flocks that trooped dustily along, and in the distance, the men whistling and singing, or blowing on the wooden flutes which were used to keep the shambling camel herds together.
“These people having bloody poor brains,” said Hersi, who was Habr Yunis. “They should not coming this place.”
Mohamed, being Habr Awal, naturally took a somewhat different view.
“Many Habr Awal camels come too much sick this time,” he said. “I hear it – Habr Awal people all saying must be they find some different-different grass, for make their camels get some healthy. Must be they come here. They never make trouble this place.”
The young camels were being weaned now. The Somalis had a sharply effective way of accomplishing this separation. They placed a forked stick over the small camel’s nose, and when the infant tried to get milk from its mother, the prong of the stick jabbed the she-camel, and she moved rapidly away, no doubt leaving the bewildered young one, who was unaware that it had a spear on its snout, to wonder why it had been rejected so peremptorily. Could it be that the foul tempers of full-grown camels dated back to this early traumatic experience? The Somalis remained unaware of any such interesting possibility. Cast into abrupt independence, the young camels nibbled sadly at the coarse grass, and the milk was saved for the people.
Happy to be back in camp, I pottered around our truck-home, arranging our meagre furniture – bed here, table there, camp chairs next to the table, cases of tinned food stowed under the bed. Re-acquainting myself with the desert, I had a feeling of homecoming. Here at Balleh Gehli was the shallow pool, now only a shiny skin of cracked mud, where one morning just after the rains I walked down early and saw a child filling a water-vessel, and she, surprised, turned suddenly and gave me a smile of such radiance I could scarcely believe it was meant for a stranger. And here were the myrrah trees which a few months ago were covered with small yellow blossoms, the fragrance of which was subtler and sweeter than any bottled perfume. I was glad to see everything. Even the ember-eyed balanballis, haunting the truck at night with its black wings, seemed almost an old acquaintance.
Our camp had expanded to fairly large proportions. As well as Hersi, Mohamed, Abdi, Arabetto, Omar, Mohamedyero and the labourers, we now had the tractor drivers. Also, this time Gino was with us, for now that the construction of the ballehs was about to begin, Jack needed a foreman on the job. A middle-aged Italian, Gino was
built like a wrestler, a man of enormous strength, but very gently spoken. He lived in a caravan which he had built for himself, a marvellous structure complete with screened windows. He had promised to bequeath it to us when he went on leave, and although I did not wish him to be gone, I could not help eyeing the caravan enviously from time to time. Only those who have never experienced anything except comfort think that physical comfort is unimportant.
But we, too, had a luxury now – a separate diningroom which the Somali labourers had built for us. It was a brushwood hut made of twined acacia branches and filled in with clumps of a plant called gedhamar, a kind of herb with a pleasant smell similar to summer savoury. The woven branches allowed just enough sunlight to filter in, but the heat was kept out. Our water bottles, stored here, became chilled at night and remained cool until noon. When the sun was shining across the top of the hut, the bunches of gedhamar looked silvery grey, as though the ceiling had been hung with tinsel. During the days I worked in the hut, and it was the most agreeable place for work which I have ever had. I had finished with the translations of the Somali poems I obtained from Guś and Musa, and now I was collecting Somali tales, which were told to me by Hersi and Arabetto in their spare time.
The main cause for jubilation in our return to the Haud was that the excavation of the first balleh was about to begin. For us, this was a landmark, a historic occasion. The Somalis in camp, however, did not entirely share our excitement. They tended to be blasé about the whole thing. Having become accustomed to the sight of the heavy machinery while the tractor drivers were being trained, Hersi and Abdi and the others now felt that these roaring giants held no mysteries. With a fine sense of onomatopoeia, they called the tractors agaf-agaf, and because they had no basic understanding of machinery, they took the earth-moving equipment completely for granted. Although they swanked a little when they showed it off to visiting tribesmen, they were not amazed at its performance. It was just one of those things. A balleh, after all, was only a hole in the ground – digging one should be a simple matter. They did not doubt that the agaf-agaf would accomplish this task easily, but they saw nothing to marvel at when the steel-clawed ripper successfully attacked the red Haud soil, which was almost as hard as concrete, and broke it so that the scrapers could follow and scoop it up. Jack was wryly amused.
“They don’t know how difficult it is, nor how many problems we’ve had in actually getting to this point, so it doesn’t seem wonderful to them in the slightest.”
I could understand their naïve sophistication, for I had no comprehension of machinery, either, but at least I had shared some of the headaches involved in reaching this stage of operations.
The project, as originally conceived, was to have provided a chain of reservoirs to catch and hold rainwater along most of the southern boundary of the Protectorate. On paper the scheme had appeared relatively straightforward, but Jack’s initial reconnaissance over the west and central stretches of the area showed clearly that, like so many projects in Africa, this one would be anything but simple. The Haud was virtually featureless and such slopes as existed were generally long and gentle, particularly in the vicinity of the boundary. There were not even the rudiments of streams, stream channels or defined water-courses, however seasonal. Dams were definitely out, because there was nothing to dam. Some form of pond would have to be produced which, while basically nothing more than a large hole in the ground, would be scientifically designed and sited.
After miles of driving and tramping, working with compass and hand-level, after boring test-holes and digging test-pits, after examining rock and soil, after looking at the region’s few existing ballehs – the hand-dug shallow water holes of the Somalis, after pondering morosely on the possible and dreaming of the impossible, Jack at last got the pattern set. Each reservoir would be a large rectangular hole dug at the foot of a carefully selected slope. The earth which was removed would be banked up around the sides and lower end, making a huge U with the arms pointing uphill, although the slopes were so gradual that “uphill” was really too extreme a word. In order to reach out and gather the water that perhaps once a year, for a few brief hours, might come coursing down this slope in a thousand little rivulets, long walls would stretch out from the top of the U. Low banks of earth a thousand feet long or more, these wing-walls would check the water and deflect it very slowly towards the reservoir so that as little silt as possible would be carried with it. Beyond the ends of these walls, ploughed furrows would stretch further out and very slightly up, and would divert and channel the annual bounty on a front of over half a mile.
Rock too hard for a plough or a ripper existed no more than six or eight feet down, and so the reservoirs would be disproportionately shallow and evaporation would be more serious than one would wish. Ironically enough, although the rock was impervious to the attack of our equipment, it was not at all impervious to water, and no clay deposits were present here which could make the bottom of the ballehs water-tight. Fortunately there was some clay mixed with the silt and sand, and Jack knew from observation that the Somalis would drive their camels into the water when it had become shallow, so little by little the animals’ feet would pack a natural cement bottom as the years went by.
Thirty ballehs were to be built, spaced about ten miles apart, along the waterless area three hundred miles long, just north of the Ethiopian border. Each balleh would have a capacity of about three million gallons and would provide water for approximately three months after being filled by rain.
The planning of the ballehs and the selection of sites had been a long and painstaking business, but although Jack had had a good deal of anxiety over it, he had also enjoyed it more than any other job he had ever done, for this was the first time he had ever been able to put his own ideas into practice. He had been impatient to get started on the excavation, but even after the equipment had finally been hauled here all the way from Djibouti, the actual construction of the ballehs could not begin until Somali drivers were trained to operate the machinery.
Easier said than done, this. Swarms of eager young men had applied for the jobs, and although a few of them had driven trucks, most had never even seen a tractor, and the scrapers were totally unfamiliar to them, for there had never been any scrapers in this country before. Six men were finally selected. Being aware that the tractors were virtually irreplaceable, and therefore having a strongly protective feeling towards them, Jack was apprehensive about them in the hands of the all-too-enthusiastic Somali novices. The Somali boys, for their part, were terribly anxious to hold their jobs and to do well, and so they would frequently demonstrate their talent by attempting to perform some outlandish feat which would strain even those machines, tough as they were. Or, out of ignorance, they would zoom gaily along in the wrong gear, and Jack would have to dash out to save the precious machinery. With three tractors cavorting around in this manner, it was not easy to keep an eye on all of them at the same time. They reminded me of boys on bicycles at home – Look at me, Ma! No hands!
But now, at last, the drivers were trained, in a manner of speaking, and the great day was here. The first day’s excavation went well. From the sidelines, Mohamed and Hersi and I watched while the ripper chewed at the soil and the scrapers began to shovel up the chunks of earth. The wilderness was quiet no longer. The tractors whoomed unceasingly. Around us, the dust was churned up and settled like red flour at our feet.
In the evening, Gino brought a straw-covered bottle of Chianti to the brushwood hut. This was the champagne with which the job was launched.
“Here’s to the ballehs!”
We were optimistic, re-charged with hope. All our troubles were over, we felt, knowing full well they were not, but willing to believe for a moment that everything would go like a song from now on.
The evenings were cold. After dinner we sat in the brushwood hut, shivering in our sweaters and jackets, and listening to the squeaky trembling voice that issued from Arabetto’s old gramophone. He had a few well-w
orn Italian records, and he and Gino would listen nostalgically to Santa Lucia, one of them remembering Mogadisciou and the other remembering Milan. Arabetto was the only Somali who had a taste for this foreign music – the others pronounced it an abomination to the ears. Arabetto told us with amusement about the reaction of one of the labourers to the gramophone.
“He never see such thing before. He say – is it some devil, or is some small man inside?”
Another evening entertainment, if it could be called that, was watching the insects grimly battling. The large black crickets, noisy as a calypso steel band, emerged at sundown from the ground. We saw them digging their way up – plop! plop! – and there they were, hundreds of them crawling around at our feet. Then the sausage flies began buzzing through the air, their plump bodies clumsy and hardly able to fly, looking exactly like miniature sausages. An English sahib of local legend was reputed to enjoy eating these creatures – at parties, he would pluck them from the air and pop them in his mouth, and all the ladies would bleat and shriek to see him chewing. It struck me that there must surely be easier ways to establish one’s reputation as a character.
The next insects to put in an appearance at the evening battlefield were the killers, the black jinna or stink-ants, with their voracious jaws. When a sausage fly dropped bumbling to the ground, or a cricket faltered, the jinna would be upon it instantly, and within seconds it would have been devoured. We tried to avoid stepping on the jinna, for when we did, they gave off the most rank odour imaginable.
The Somalis had an enigmatic tale about the stink-ant. They said that if you went to the jinna and asked him why he was so thin in the waist, he would explain – “It is a result of riding a great deal on a fine horse. Anyone knows that riding draws in the waist.” And if you asked him why he had such a foul stench, he would answer, “Because I once visited a woman who had a stinking birth.” And if you asked him why his jaws were open so wide, he would reply, “Because I used to go with a group of boys from village to village, dancing, and I was the one who went in front, shouting that we did not come to beg food or money, but only came to dance.” I do not pretend to understand this story, but the Somalis considered it uproariously funny.