The Prophet's Camel Bell

  The brushwood hut in the evening was a place of contentment. In the navy-coloured sky, the white clouds scudded silently across the moon. Outside the thorn-bough fence that enclosed our camp, we heard the low sullen moan of a hyena or the yapping of foxes. Many hyenas came snooping around our camp at night, and from the half-joking comments of the Somalis, I began to suspect that there was some magical significance attached to them. When I enquired if this was so, Hersi shook his head in emphatic denial.

  “Our religion is forbidding such magical things absolutely,” he said. “We are Muslims, memsahib, Muslims.”

  I begged his pardon and the matter was dropped. But one day Mohamed told me that the night before they had heard a scuffling out beyond the camp, where our hyena trap was always set, and when they went out to see, they found that the hyena had pushed a stick into the trap and in this way had avoided being caught itself.

  “Hyena is very clever,” Mohamed said, tapping his forehead. “He think just like a man.”

  Then he told me that the Esa people around Borama were reputed to be able to talk with hyenas. This idea, I recalled, was expressed in a belwo.

  I ask the stealthy hyena

  That prowls past Dumbuluq’s fires,

  If he in his wide wandering

  Brings back one word of you.

  Mohamed told me that many people believed that every so-many years the hyenas lost their cowardice and became man-eating. There was a basis in fact for this belief, for in the dry Jilal the hyenas roamed the streets of the towns at night, looking for water, or going to the meat market in search of offal, and when they came in packs they sometimes carried off a small child. The supernatural powers attributed to hyenas might have been some survival of the totem idea, identifying tribes with animals in order to obtain the benefit of the animal’s powers. Perhaps the beliefs were also encouraged by the fact that hyenas always disappeared completely and mysteriously in the daytime.

  I took a keen interest in these magical beliefs, and then one day I was paid back in full measure for my unintentional condescension. Gino had made a miniature wood stove of cast iron, complete with oven, a perfect replica of the kind of stove I remembered from my childhood, and he said I might use this intriguing toy. It took a whole morning for me to bake a cake, for the stove was so small that it had to be fed with chips and shavings, and the cake took twice the usual time in the oven. On the first occasion, Mohamed was gloomy and disapproving.

  “I think you no bake today, memsahib.”

  Why not, I asked him.

  “Today Friday,” he said. “If you make cake today, must be it will not come good.”

  I disagreed. Friday might be the Muslim sabbath, but it was not mine. Besides which, I was not superstitious.

  I went ahead, and the carefully tended cake fell flat. Mohamed could not resist beaming broadly at this fulfilment of his prophecy. I never baked on a Friday again. And after that day, the cakes rose beautifully, just as Mohamed had known they would.

  ——

  We drove out at twilight across the great plain, looking for gerenuk and dero, for we had a lot of men in camp now and they needed meat. All at once we saw an appealing sight – a huge she-ostrich, very fussily maternal, with no less than eighteen young ones, all traipsing solemnly behind her, single file. She craned her neck and looked back to inspect her little troop – yes, they were all there, and safe. We drew up the Land-Rover and waited quietly until they had marched past. Young ostriches were often snatched by hyenas, but a mother ostrich would stand up to a hyena and could deal it such a powerful blow with her feet that it would go off yelping across the desert. In Hargeisa, a neighbour of ours had a pet baby ostrich which was cared for by the stable boy, a tall Somali youth whose nickname was Aul and who was as graceful as the deer of that name. When we went back to our house for an occasional week-end, we saw Aul every morning leaping lightly into the ostrich’s pen.

  “Gorayo! Is ka warran! ” He greeted it always in the same way. “Ostrich! Give news of yourself!”

  But the small ostrich, who was exceedingly dowdy and draggle-feathered, did not utter a sound.

  One day in the Haud we found an ostrich’s nest, with its two layers of gigantic eggs carefully covered with sand. The Somalis were overjoyed, as they loved to eat the eggs, one of which would make an omelette sufficient for several hungry men. We took one of the eggs for ourselves, and Jack blew it out so that we could keep the shell. To do so, he had to drill into it with a hand-drill, for it was of the consistency of thick bone china. When we had it cleaned out, and on display in our truck-home, the Somalis began to make optimistic remarks.

  “I think you get small boy now, memsahib,” Mohamed said confidently.

  What was this? What did he mean? Hersi obligingly explained.

  “Soon you will be conceiving,” he said gravely. “This ostrich egg is very helpful for such considerations.”

  This was the same Hersi who did not believe in magic. The ostrich egg, it appeared, was a powerful fertility charm. The Somalis had been concerned for some time about my childless state, and they knew quite well that I was concerned about it, too. They regarded the ostrich egg hopefully – aid had arrived. Only Abdi did not have sufficient faith in this object. Perhaps he felt that, being Ingrese, I would require double the usual quantity of helpful magic.

  “Lion fat,” he informed us. “I think you needing this thing. If woman eating fat from the libahh, soon she get child.”

  When he was out hunting gerenuk, he searched in the thickets and thorn bushes, but alas for my unborn children, he found no lion. Occasionally we heard their voices, rumbling and coughing in the night, and once or twice we saw pug-marks in the morning sand, but the beasts remained cannily hidden.

  One day Abdi found something else, however, almost as good. Although of no magical use, this catch was a triumph. He returned to camp with the Land-Rover horn blaring, his victory music, and everyone dashed out to see. Springily as a boy, the old warrior leaped out and showed us what he had brought back – two cheetah.

  It was against the law to shoot cheetah, and Abdi knew this as well as anyone. But he had seen four of them under a qoda tree. Old marksman that he was, he had been quite unable to resist the temptation. He shrugged and threw up his hands – how could anyone fail to comprehend his predicament?

  “I never no think,” he said. “I see them – one, two three, four harimaad. Quickly quickly, I taking rifle – bam! bam! I get two. You think sahib coming angry?”

  “No, I don’t think so, Abdi.”

  Who could be angry? He was a hunter. He simply could not help shooting. But I could see, nevertheless, that these cheetah would be an embarrassment to us. For all official purposes, they must be said to have been shot on the other side of the Ethiopian border. And who could prove they were not?

  One of the beasts was still alive when Abdi hauled it out of the Land-Rover. With the Somalis’ usual nonchalance about a wounded animal, all the men in camp stood around, poking at it, tormenting it, laughing. Beautiful and destroyed, it crouched on the ground. It was bleeding terribly, and its strength was almost gone, but its eyes still shone with menace. Jack and Gino were both out at the balleh site, and I could not cope with this situation. When I asked Abdi and the Illaloes to kill the cheetah, they paid no attention. They were enjoying this too much. Why cut short their pleasure?

  The cheetah, panting and nearly dead, suddenly put every vestige of its remaining strength into one last effort. Incredibly rousing itself, it lashed out and tore a labourer’s leg from knee to ankle.

  Outraged shrieks all around. Wallahi! Shaitan! I stood aside, looking at the shocked and bleeding labourer, and could feel nothing but coldness. Fortunately, Jack arrived at this moment, fetched by the nimble Mohamedyero, who had raced out to the balleh with the news. He took one look, then fetched a crowbar and immediately killed the cheetah. I bandaged the labourer’s leg, which was not seriously damaged, for the rip did not go deep, but I remained aloo
f.

  Why should they have any mercy for the cheetah, who killed their sheep when it could? Life was too hard, here, for any such sentimentality. I knew this very well, but I could not help admiring the desperate courage of the animal. The Somalis thought I was foolish to want the cheetah put out of its pain at once, and I thought they were cruel to want to prolong its agony. Neither of us would alter our viewpoints.

  The labourers skinned the animals and pegged the skins out to dry in the sun. The Somalis had no way of curing animal hides, other than sun-drying them. Later, several labourers spent the entire day working the skins with their hands, as Eskimos do with their teeth, to soften them. One skin was sold in the Hargeisa market, and Abdi and the Illaloes who were with him shared the money. The other, Abdi gave to us. It was a light yellow pelt with well-defined black spots. The cheetah, we learned, was the fastest animal on four feet. It was considerably smaller than the leopard, and the leopard’s tail always ended in black, whereas the tail of the cheetah ended with light fur. We kept the cheetah skin, and at last smuggled it out of the country. It stayed on the floor of living-rooms in many houses, for many years, in England and West Africa and Canada, a hazard to unwary feet, and a reminder to me of different points of view. Ultimately it became a legendary beast, for our two children, when they were old enough to enjoy stories of the “olden days” before they were born, somehow developed and would not relinquish the belief that it was their father who shot this cheetah as it charged at him in the wilds of distant lands.

  When Gino went on leave, there was no one in the camp who could work with metals, so Jack hired a man of the Tomal, the traditional blacksmiths to the Somalis. Mohamed Tomal was a wisecracking but hardworking young man, full of arguments and always eager to prove his point. One day he and Jack got into a long discussion about khat, a leaf widely used throughout the Muslim world, where alcohol was forbidden, and chewed for its narcotic effects. In Somaliland it was against the law to sell khat, but truckloads of it were constantly smuggled in from Ethiopia. Mohamed Tomal put the old question to Jack.

  “You Ingrese drink whisky and gin, but you say Somalis must no chew khat. How so?”

  “I didn’t make the laws,” Jack said. “Personally, I don’t care whether you chew khat or not, except that it would probably make you sleepy and you wouldn’t be able to work as well.”

  “Oh, no!” Mohamed Tomal was shocked. “Khat never make man sleep. It helping he for work. A man which chewing khat, he work all night. All night – I swear it. And he never feel tired.”

  “Oh?” Jack was sceptical.

  Mohamed Tomal gave him an offended glance, but said no more. The following day, however, the blacksmith came to Jack with two gifts – a short spear, double-barbed like a fish hook, the shaft gracefully bound with brass wire, and a long knife with a wooden handle decorated with burned patterns. He had fashioned both these weapons during the night.

  “I work all night,” Mohamed Tomal said triumphantly, “and I chew khat all night – you see, sahib? You see now?”

  Jack, laughing, had to concede the point. But he still had to forbid khat in the camp, not that this edict ever stopped anyone.

  We were becoming acquainted with the new men in our camp. Apart from Mohamed Tomal, there were the six tractor drivers. One of the two men who had had some previous experience on tractors was Mohamed Magan. In his late twenties, he had a bulky, almost chubby appearance. His round face was impish and confident. When he walked, he had a swaggering sailor-like gait. He had never held any one job for long, for he was decidedly temperamental. Once, he told Jack, he suddenly felt fed up with his job, so he simply stopped his tractor and walked away. In the beginning, he was much the best operator of the crew, but the others began to catch up with him, for he tended to be too sure of himself and was often careless. Nevertheless, he had more feeling for machinery than the others, more dexterity and a better sense of timing in handling the Cat and scraper. But he hated to be told off about anything. One morning he was late for work, and Jack called him down about it. Mohamed Magan did not say anything, not a word. But that night we were wakened by a sudden noise.

  Jack sat up, jerked into consciousness. “That’s one of the Cat’s starting engines!”

  He had a shrewd suspicion of what was going on, so he did not hurry unduly to go and have a look. By the time he reached the balleh site, there was Mohamed Magan, beginning work. It was exactly four a.m.

  “You tell me not to be late,” he said.

  Jack did not know whether to be angry or amused, especially when Mohamed Magan put on an elaborate pantomime to show how he had to get off the tractor and feel the scraper with his hands to determine whether or not it was fully loaded, for he could see nothing in the enveloping darkness.

  A complete contrast to Mohamed Magan was Ismail Ahmed. An extremely handsome boy with straight well-cut features, he had attended Qoranic school in Hargeisa, and could read and write in Arabic. He was unusually serious about his religion, and this, in a country where everyone took religion seriously, meant that he had almost a sense of vocation. He seemed cut out for the religious life, and perhaps should have been an imam, a priest.

  “Ismail Ahmed is not like other people,” Hersi said of him, and this was true. There was about him a quietness and a reserve which the others did not have. But he was always the first to offer to help Jack if anything needed fixing on a tractor. As a driver, he was not as good as some of the others, for he worked almost too carefully.

  The one whom Jack thought would ultimately become the best driver of all was Isman Shirreh. He was an Arap, which was a tribe looked down upon by most of the others, but despite this handicap, Isman was one of the most popular men in camp. He was friendly to everyone, quick on the uptake and yet not over-confident. He and Arabetto became close friends, and in some ways they were similar. Both were, in a sense, outcasts, and both had an irrepressible laughter. Sometimes at dusk, when the Illaloes were going through their drill routine, Arabetto and Isman would march up and down nearby, burlesquing the whole performance.

  Does every group, inevitably, choose a clown for itself? Ours was Ali Wys, who looked more like a Frenchman than a Somali. Slender, almost delicate, with a thin face and a long mournful nose, he wore always a quizzically humorous expression. He had a high hoarse voice which many times a day rose above the drone of the engines, as Ali shouted his comical complaints. He walked in a slow, loose, ambling fashion, and seemed to take pleasure in his role as jester. And yet there was something sad in his subtly expressive face. He had to endure a good deal of mockery from the others, because he was neither deft nor strong enough to shift the Cat gears without apparent effort, and when he struggled at it, the others were quick to notice and taunt.

  The tallest man in our camp was Omar Farah, who was called Omar Wein – Big Omar. Lank, gangling, rather awkward, slightly hunch-back, Omar looked like a country boy astounded to find himself in a mechanized society. He was not a boy, actually, at all, being older than most of the others and having a wife and children in Hargeisa. He was the steadiest of the drivers, solid, plodding in his work, conscientious. He had none of Ismail Ahmed’s other-worldliness, and yet he was always one of the first to go out to the brushwood mosque as sundown approached and the time for evening prayers arrived.

  Jama Koshin had worked on tractors before, and this was why Jack had picked him. But he wore a dull expression and seemed unresponsive to explanations about the work. The others made fun of him mercilessly, calling him stupid, and he tended, perhaps not unnaturally, to be sullen and unsociable. We were never able to penetrate his mask at all.

  The Cat operators worked in two-hour shifts, spelling each other off, for the work was heavy, the sun was hot, and the dust was hard on the lungs. Jack, however, like the Cats, was at the site most of the day, from six in the morning until six at night. Even after dinner, his work was not finished, for it was a rare evening that did not bring at least one dispute to be settled. Men out in camp, cut o
ff from their families and thrown constantly into one another’s company, disagree violently and often.

  “Some small trouble, sahib – I think you must listening to these informations.”

  Hersi’s familiar voice, and there they would be, a dozen men grouped and ready for a shir, the traditional Somali meeting at which the two opposing men stated their cases at fiery length, and everyone else then gave his own version of the case, holding forth with all the passionate appeals and detailed verbal reconstructions of a skilled lawyer.

  A labourer had lost a purple cotton robe, and swore he had seen another labourer wearing the identical garment. The accused swore by Allah, by his entire tribe and by his mother’s life that he was innocent. Did Nuur Ahmed imagine this was the only purple lunghi in the whole of Somaliland? But Nuur Ahmed maintained his cloth had a tear in one corner, and when Hersi Jama, acting as mediator, examined the cloth worn by Yusuf Farah, lo and behold – there was the torn place, plain as dawn. Terrific shouting followed, as the assembled company took sides. The evidence of each side was always diametrically opposed, and it was never possible to obtain any clear picture of what had actually happened.

  “You know, I really wonder,” Jack said after one of these sessions, “whether they hold these shirs with any intention of settling the matter at all, or if it isn’t merely a form of entertainment.”

  But as they expected him to participate in the shirs, he could not very well refuse. He was concerned mainly with keeping some kind of equilibrium in camp. If these disputes were not settled in some fashion, they grew and assumed grotesque proportions.