“Salaam aleikum –”
He was flustered at the sight of us, so bedraggled, but he did not forget his manners. Because he was old, and given to formalities, he used the Arabic greeting rather than the Somali, for we were foreigners. He was thin and stooped, with a white beard. His frayed green and black robe and ancient khaki jacket hung lankly on his withered body. Abdi explained our plight, and Haji Elmi clucked his tongue like a mother hen and ushered us in to his tea shop.
A small square building, it was, clay plastered over branches, roofed with flattened paraffin tins. Inside, the roof was supported by gnarled galol branches, and the floor was earthen. A fire glowed in one corner, and into this fire a slender log was being fed, the bulk of the wood jutting out across the room. The air was heavy and pungent with woodsmoke. A few wooden benches were set around the room, and some coarse straw mats.
Haji Elmi’s two boys, grandsons perhaps, bustled around and made sweet spiced tea for us, and soon the old man was handing us plates of dried dates and bowls of steamed rice moistened with ghee, clarified butter made from goat’s milk. It had been a long drought, and there was not much food in any of the encampments throughout the Haud. But whatever he had, Haji Elmi gave to us. We crammed the rice and dates into our mouths – we had never eaten a meal as good as this one. When we had finished, we saw that the old man was searching through his treasure chest, a large tin box with a brass padlock.
“One still left – yes, I think so –”
Finally he found what he had been looking for. He held it up – a slightly mouldy pack of Player’s cigarettes. We could hardly believe it. This man was a wonder.
Next he brought a blanket and pillow, both embroidered in the Somali traditional designs, birds and stiff-petalled flowers in brilliant red and green and yellow. These he placed in an alcove for me, so I could rest before we continued our journey. While I was lying down, Haji Elmi talked with Jack, displaying the ceremonial sword he once received for saving the life of a district commissioner during a riot.
“I take the stones on my own body,” he said, “on my own body.”
In my alcove, I listened and wished he had not spoken in this way, sanctimoniously. But I recognized that the thought was foolish. He was not perfectly designed and lifeless like a cardboard cut-out figure.
We were not surprised when he came to us, many months later, with a flowery petition requesting Jack’s help in obtaining government payment for a small balleh which Haji Elmi had got his grandsons to dig and from which he had been selling the water at a profit quite handsome enough to have made his enterprise worth while without any attempt at procuring a completely unwarranted subsidy. Haji Elmi was not surprised, either, when Jack said he had no power to help the old man in such a request. He had not really expected Jack to plead the unlikely case with the government. But it might have worked – it was worth a try, anyway. Haji Elmi had a sharp eye for a shilling, and he was addicted to intrigue and oratory. The petition was as much a part of his nature as the proud display of the ceremonial sword or the much-folded letter, and neither aspect of him was in fundamental disagreement with the generosity he showed us in his tea shop the first day of the rains.
That day at Wadda Beris, when we rose to leave, he refused to take from us a chit for money in payment of the meal and cigarettes. No, he told us – he could not take payment for such a thing. If he met us in Hargeisa or if we came out to Wadda Beris under different circumstances, that would be another matter. But this time we were travellers in need, and a basic tenet of Islam was that the hungry wayfarer must be fed.
We could only thank him and drive away. But afterwards, whenever we recalled the drenched desert, the dripping thorn trees and threatening sky, we thought of this hospitality, compared to which our own, given out of a state of plenty, would always seem poor.
Aleikum salaam, Haji Elmi.
Back in Hargeisa, Mohamed and Hersi and the others greeted us as though we had returned from the dead.
“Wallahi! You are here! We think we never see you, never no more!” Mohamed shook hands with us vigorously, then rushed off to heat buckets of much-needed bath-water.
Hersi raised his arms as though in benediction. “I giving thanks to Allah this day, for He is saving you from bloody terrible death.”
Mohamedyero, Mohamed’s small helper, beat loudly and joyfully on an improvised saucepan drum.
“Hey, Abdi!” Arabetto cried in amazement. “How you get back, eh? You fly? I try to go find you, but my lorry can never pass that way.”
Arabetto was the good-natured and slightly jazzy youth from Mogadisciou, half Arabian and half Somali, who drove our Bedford truck. He had gone out, together with another driver and truck from P.W.D., to search for us, but had been forced to turn back. Now we realized how fortunate we had been. If we had been driving a heavy truck, we would never have got it out. The nature of our vehicle, the chance encounter with the tribesmen – these were strokes of luck. But if it had not been for Abdi’s tenacity, we would probably not have made it. We felt a new bond with him, the sense of having lived through something together, and the awareness that we might owe our lives to him.
We were forced to wait in Hargeisa until the Gu rains were over. Our house was close to the tug, and in the darkness, through the steady hammering of the rain, we could hear the deep voice of the night river. When we walked out early in the morning, however, the rain had stopped and the tug was almost dry. Huge piles of sand had been deposited in the riverbed, like brown snowdrifts with fantastic contours, and Somali children were already playing there, in the same spot where only a few hours earlier the spate of water had foamed.
When the rains were reckoned to be nearly over, we went back out to camp in the Haud. The change in one month was unbelievable. We could scarcely recognize it as the same land. On that portion of the plain where once only the red termite-mounds stood, now the grass grew several feet tall, ruffled by the wind and swaying greenly. The thorn trees were thick with new leaves and the country seemed to have filled in, the grey skeleton no longer visible. The whole land was laced with flowers. White blossoms like clover were sprinkled through the short grass under the acacias. There were pale yellow flowers the colour of rich cream, and small mauve wah-harowallis, and the scarlet flowers of the aloes spreading out on slender branches like some mythical tree. The air was full of the songs of birds and the high-pitched whine of insects. The swallows flew at such speed that they could be seen only as a blur of blue. The vultures were no longer in evidence – life had come back, and the birds of death had hidden themselves. Along the road, clumps of butterflies gathered around pools of water. They were small and light green, these butterflies, and clustered together they looked like a gigantic flower with innumerable fluttering petals. As the car approached, they swarmed into flight. The flower broke, and all the petals were scattered, only to form again into the living green water-lily when we had passed by.
We saw remainders of the Jilal, the skeletons of camels that had died in the drought. Now the grass and wildflowers twisted around the bare bleached ribs. But we had not yet been here long enough to realize, as the Somalis did, that the Jilal would come again.
The Somali tribes were walking out into the interior with their flocks and herds. Now the people smiled and waved as we drove past. The women were wearing new clothes, the red and blue and gold of their robes looking appropriate in a land suddenly grown to colour again. Some of the girls walking across the Haud, leading the burden camels, were so striking in appearance and moved with such an easy grace that they would have made the polished products of Mayfair look clumsy in comparison. They were voluptuous looking women, with coppery brown skin and softly rounded faces. Their eyes were large and dark, with long lashes. They seemed to glide along, almost like ballet dancers, with a perfection of balance that may have been gained from carrying jars and baskets on their heads. Many men of the desert were extremely handsome as well, tall and lean, with straight sharp features and keen eye
s. The young herders had new robes, a flashing white, which they wore jauntily, the cloth draped around them in the manner of a toga and flung across one shoulder. What a contrast the people were, to themselves of a few months back. The season of new grass and plentiful water would not last long, so they made the most of it while they could. In the evenings, we could hear the sound of singing and the rhythmic clapping of hands from the nearby encampments.
“We are happy now,” Hersi said, “for meat and milk have come back to our land.”
The sheep and goats were lively, and the camels had their humps back again. Soon there were new flocks, too, composed entirely of lambs and baby goats, and these were invariably tended by a Somali child, a little boy or girl who pranced along as lightly as the young animals.
All was not paradise in camp, however, despite the season. We had taken up residence in the back of the Bedford truck, mainly because I felt more secure when sleeping at some slight distance from the ground. We had draped a mosquito-net across the open end of the canvas-covered structure, and had placed inside this makeshift caravan our camp chairs and table, and our bed, a new one complete with airfoam mattress. Let hardier souls sleep on canvas cots – they were not for me. I have never seen any reason for being more uncomfortable than necessary. Our truck-home would have been perfect had it not been for one thing. The renewal of life in the desert naturally did not exclude the renewal of insect life. Nightly, we waged a battle of the bugs. Mohamed would rush from the cook-tent to the truck with our dinner, hoping that not too many flying-ant wings would land in the food en route.
“Quick, quick!” He would shove the plates in under the net, but never quickly enough. “Oh-oh, I think some small something fall in –”
A dozen detached ant-wings and several frantic beetles would be floating like croutons on the surface of the venison soup. If this invasion had occurred when we first arrived in this country, I would probably have starved out of sheer repugnance. Not any more. Stoically, I spooned the bugs out and began to eat. The soup was easy – it was the rice which presented a problem. Mohamed cooked rice with snippets of fried onions in it, and in the half-light of our dining hall it was not easy to distinguish insects from onions. To Mohamed, the situation presented limitless possibilities for laughter.
“I get dinner with no light in the cook-tent tonight,” he announced, grinning broadly. “Everything very dark. I can no see nothing. I think maybe no bugs come, that way.”
No bugs, perhaps, but goodness knows what he had put in the dinner, groping his way around the cook-tent in the darkness. The mosquito net on our truck-house was alive, a crawling mass of wings, and Mohamed was fond of making comments on them.
“Ei, wallahi! Look here! Must be we call in the Locust Control men!”
Sometimes he would classify the creeping tangle of wings and antennae.
“Many different tribes here. See this small one? Plenty this kind – I think this one Habr Yunis. Plenty, plenty – but very small.”
He himself was Habr Awal, and could not resist this dig at a rival and larger tribe.
“What about that big beetle there?” Jack asked him. “Which tribe is he?”
“That one is Ogaden,” Mohamed said without hesitation, “Ogaden who get lost from his tribe.”
We set our pressure lamp at a distance from the truck, in order to attract the bugs away from us, and although the method did not appear to work very well, we had only to approach the lamp to see how much worse the insects might have been on our net. Around the lamp they were a grotesque sight. They battered their wings against the scalding glass and even managed to thrust themselves compulsively inside until they reached the bare flame. The lamp was clogged with them and the ground was littered with charred wings.
My bête noire was the balanballis madow, the black butterfly. It was really a giant moth with a corpulent furry body and eyes that glowed red like a demon’s in the darkness. Each night at least one of these moths insinuated itself into our truck, and flapped around like a panic-stricken bird.
I had grown used to all manner of crickets and cicadas, to stink-ants with an odour that verified their name, to hordes of fawn-winged moths, to the green praying mantis with its coral limb-joints and its piously uplifted arms, to zooming beetles the size of golfballs. But I could never become accustomed to the black balanballis. To me, they were like the bats of hell.
Our relations with the nearby Somali camps had improved. Tensions had eased now that the Jilal was over, and the tribesmen’s tempers were not so strained. They visited our camp often, and usually talked quite amicably with us. But the old rumours persisted. They always mentioned that they had heard that the water in these new ballehs would be poisoned, or that the government planned to put a heavy tax on the use of the water. Occasionally we met with active opposition. One day when Hersi and Omar were out digging test holes near a proposed balleh site, some Eidagalla men came up and threatened them.
“You have no right to dig there.” The words were emphasized with a brandishing of spears.
Hersi, however, knew precisely how to reply.
“Is this your country,” he enquired haughtily, “or is it Allah’s?”
He had them there. They remained surly, but they lowered their spears.
The nomads continued to seek medicine from us. This season, which at first appeared wholly good, had its own evils. With the rains came the anopheles mosquitos, laden with malaria. We had obtained large supplies of quinine from the Hargeisa hospital, and we distributed these pills as widely as possible, but they reached only a relatively small number of people.
These particular quinine tablets had been left behind by the Italians when they were driven out during the war, after their brief occupation of this country. For some unknown reason, the pills were coated with a thick scarlet waxen substance which did not dissolve in the stomach, and so the quinine had to be chewed in order to do any good. Carefully, I explained this fact to each tribesman as I handed over the pills. Then I questioned Hersi – was he sure the man had understood?
“Oh yes, memsahib. He is understanding completely all your instructions.”
But did he really? I had no way of knowing. We heard from time to time of tribesmen spreading warnings against this quinine, maintaining it to be useless. I sometimes had the feeling that most of the quinine would be wasted because the tribesmen, although many of them seemed to have faith in its efficacy, did not comprehend at all why it should be necessary to chew the bitter-tasting pills. For all I knew, they might feel the same towards these impressive red disks as they would about a Yibir’s amulet – the advantage of it was in the possession of a powerful thing rather than in any physical action such as that of chemicals upon disease parasites. It was not a matter of intelligence but of viewing the whole of life through different eyes. How could I hope to explain the necessity, in my view, of rendering under Caesar the things which were Caesar’s? If you are going to use the potions of science you must use them scientifically. But for the Somalis, nothing was Caesar’s – everything, in effect, was God’s. If the medicine had power, it was essentially a spiritual power. What could it possibly matter whether the pills were chewed or not? I was wasting my breath in explanations which simply did not strike home. We were looking at the same object, the tribesmen and I, this vial of red tablets. But I suspected that we were not seeing the same thing.
It was certainly not that they lacked the powers of observation. These were acute, a fact which was borne out by an odd item in an old book I had come across recently, written in the mid-1800’s by an Englishman who was big-game hunting in Somaliland. The sahib had been troubled with malaria which, he said, was well known to emanate from the noxious night fumes around swamps and river-beds. The Somalis, he added with amusement, had a quaint belief that malaria was brought on by the bite of mosquitoes.
In some ways this story seemed to contradict my feeling that the tribesmen looked for spiritual causes and cures, but it did not really do so, for
the insect had merely been observed as the agent or carrier, and what we termed disease germs might here be regarded as malignant djinn. But these were only theories, possibly quite unreliable. My difficulty was in discovering how the tribesmen actually looked at things, for without a knowledge of basic concepts, communication is impossibly confused.
Had they really understood? I asked Hersi again, seeking his reassurance – nonsensically, for I was by no means certain that he knew, himself, the reasons for the instructions he was conveying to them.
“They are hearing all,” Hersi replied decisively.
Hearing, yes. We understood each other’s words but not necessarily each other’s meanings.
A great many people were ill with malaria throughout the Haud. Groups of women arrived at our camp carrying in their arms children who were so lethargic with fever that they could barely open their eyes. Malaria is the largest child-killer in all Africa. If a child manages to survive until the age of five or six, the chances are that he has developed quite a strong resistance to the disease. But it is the children under six who are most afflicted, and it was these young ones whom I found hardest to look at. Their small limbs burned to the touch, and they shuddered spasmodically with the fever’s convulsive chills. Their eyes occasionally flickered open in a kind of bewilderment. And I turned away, unable to meet those eyes.
For many of the Haud women, the brief time of rejoicing after the rains was already over. They had managed somehow to keep their children alive during the season of drought, only to see them die of malaria in the season of plenty. I no longer marvelled that the Somalis believed in a God of ultimate mercy who at the Last Day would restore all things.
Who shall give life to bones when they are rotten? He shall give life to them who gave them being at first, for in all creation is He skilled: who even out of the green tree hath given you fire, and lo! ye kindle flame from it.