A Reed Shaken by the Wind

  Thesiger had sought shelter from this behind the house, where he was doctoring a child who had had his shoulder ripped open by a pig. Our host was with him, and I was glad that there was no necessity to go immediately into the house and be cross-legged once more. I was standing outside, near to the entrance of the house, looking out across the street-like strip of water between us and the buildings opposite.

  The happenings of the next minute were, of course, unrelated, but their strangely precise sequence left me with a single dream image that has not disintegrated.

  First, from some unseen quarter of the village came the call to prayer, the only time I had ever heard it in the marshlands. The light was just beginning to fail, and it was the time of day when the women go out from the houses to draw water. From the far bank three women, a few paces apart and equidistant from each other, came down carrying the great jars on their heads, and from the bank on which I stood three more went down facing them. All six drew water, standing knee-deep as they did so; each lifted her vessel on to her head, and turned back towards the house from which she had come. They left the water in unison, as though this were something of mystic significance and often rehearsed, and as they did so a great flight of white egrets came surging low over the surface between the houses, like the foam on a single broad wave sweeping forward; they passed swiftly with a soft rustle of snowy wings, and were gone.

  Suddenly from the house immediately opposite to me there broke forth a wild pandemonium of shrieks and wails. Two children burst from the doorway and threw themselves on to the narrow strip of ground between the walls and the water, beating at it with their fists and tearing up handfuls of mud and fallen reeds. Men ran out beating their breasts and bellies, striking insanely at the walls of the house, gathering great handfuls of rubbish and dashing it against their heads. Then two women rushed from the house, frantic and screaming; they ran blindly with their arms upraised, and plunged flat into the water. They remained thrashing at it, floundering deeper and deeper until only their heads were above the surface, and screaming all the while. By the time, minutes later, that they had waded ashore, there were wailing boatloads of mourners converging upon the house from all sides, until the space within it had overflowed and those in the canoes could not land; they stood where they were, bowed and beating their breasts in a frenzy of lamentation.

  I had witnessed the moment of death of an old man in the house.

  Much of this abandoned, hysterical grief is not so much assumed, or acted, by those to whom the death is of no great personal significance, as communicated to them by the close relations in their moment of agony. Once it has been communicated it is felt as something real; and the whole chain of reactions can be set off by chance, as it were, when in fact there is no death to mourn.

  I saw an example of this a few days later, when a woman brought to Thesiger a child with some quite trifling ailment. It was a warm day, and the people of the village—a small nomad village where there was as yet little water—were about their everyday affairs all round us. The child squawked while Thesiger was examining it, and without any warning the mother began suddenly to wail and to beat her breasts. Crying out that her child was dying, she seized some buffalo dung and smeared it on her forehead, and then threw herself prostrate on the ground. Some twenty paces away two women were pounding grain; instantly they threw down their mallets and doubled up in an ecstasy of howling grief, and some children, who had been playing near them, all began to cry. Within two minutes every woman in sight was wailing and striking at her body with her hands, and every child was weeping with the slow desolate misery that is the voice of childhood despair, the voice of the abandoned and unloved. By now Thesiger’s patient was terrified and wailing too. The situation was completely out of hand. Thesiger shouted to the people that the child was perfectly all right, and spoke fiercely to the mother. She stopped wailing as suddenly as she had begun, and her face was left frozen in an expression that, now that she was motionless and her crying had ceased, might as well have been a grin of laughter as a grimace of grief. When she saw that her child was after all not dying, she began to laugh, and between the set of her face in her previous misery and her present relief there was not the least difference. Within a moment all the adults were back at work, and the children playing, as if there had been no interruption.

  In the Eastern Marshes there are a greater number of tumulus islands than to the west of the Tigris. Many of these, though some are as much as twenty feet high, are too small to carry more than one or possibly two houses, and are thus unoccupied; for the Ma’dan are afraid of robbers and bandits, and prefer to group their houses close enough for mutual support. The whole surface of many of these tumuli is littered with pottery, much of it glazed; with bricks, whose presence is difficult to explain, and with pieces of laval-looking black stone; some have crater-like formations at their summits, equally inexplicable. A number are burying places for the Ma’dan, and these can never be excavated, for no Muslim will tolerate the disturbance of his dead.

  From the top of one of these islands the marsh forms the horizon on all sides, and by that season of the year it is green for the most part, streaked with the gold-buff of high reeds tall enough to hide the scattered villages that lie among them.

  From Turabah we travelled northwards through this country, heading for Dibin, the largest of all these tumulus islands, on the northern edge of the Eastern Marshes. It was a day’s journey, and we ate on the way at the small village of Abu Sukhair, at a curious dwelling with a wren’s-nest entrance three feet up its wall, the only one of that type that I saw. At that house I bought two otter skins, from which the entire carcases had, with seeming impossibility, been removed through the mouth, leaving the skins without a single incision. One of these skins, and the live cub that I eventually brought back to England, proved to be of a race new to science.

  It was after dusk when we arrived at Dibin, but the western sky was still yellow on the horizon. The silhouettes of the houses were black against it, and the lit fires within them were of the same colour as the sky, mirrored in still water. A black figure came out from a black house and threw up two black hens on to the roof; they strutted there sharp-edged against the afterglow.

  The only mudhif at Dibin was owned by a woman, a remarkable departure from normal custom. She was the widow of a sheikh’s agent, and now in precarious circumstances as a result of the sheikh’s dismissal of his employees.

  It would have been impossible to live in Iraq even for a few weeks without having already heard much of this sheikh, one Nasr, son of Salman, for his name was a byword of perfidy and shame.

  He was the youngest son of his father, having a number of half-brothers born of Salman’s other wives. Nasr’s mother acquired vast influence over the old sheikh Salman, and had schemed and plotted for her son to gain all the inheritance that should rightfully be divided among the half-brothers. It was said that she had poisoned one of them, and was suspected of murdering two others who came to his funeral. Finally, she had persuaded Salman to make over all his property to Nasr.

  Nasr made full use of the situation. Within a few months he had acquired the reputation of a cruel and despotic tyrant, extortionate and without interest in the welfare of his people. He had made friends among the more undesirable Europeans in Basra and Baghdad; he drank and he gambled and made ever greater demands on those who owed him allegiance; the wake of his speedboats roaring down the rivers swamped the canoes and houses of the villagers who paid for his luxuries.

  At length his nephew Talib, son of one of his murdered half-brothers, could stand no more. Talib was a boy of only sixteen years, but he rallied his tribesmen and declared war on old Salman, his grandfather who had betrayed him and given all to Nasr. On learning of this, Salman wanted to go himself in his tarada to reason with him, but his councillors pleaded with him that this would be suicide; Talib, they said, was outraged beyond all reasoning, and would undoubtedly kill his grandfather. Salman compromised; he agr
eed to send instead a Sayid as ambassador, whose person Talib would feel obliged to respect. This assumption, however, proved wholly erroneous, for when the Sayid approached Talib’s fort, waving on a reed his blue keffia, a burst of machine-gun fire cut the canoe in two, and the Sayid was fortunate to escape with his life.

  From that time onward Nasr’s position became ever more perilous. Salman became ill, and his doctor whispered in his ear that Nasr had offered him an assassin’s fee of 3,000 dinar to poison his patient. Salman believed him, and instantly sought to rescind every document made in favour of the son whom he now saw in his true light. Nasr fought him through legal channels, a thing considered shameful in the extreme between son and father, and the dispute was raging in Baghdad when we had arrived in Iraq. The policy of the government was still uncertain. Every Ma’dan was partisan in the dispute; very few stood behind Nasr, and those who did were in all probability inspired by terror of reprisals should Nasr emerge the victor. A young wife whom Nasr had divorced took her revenge by composing a song about his wickedness, and this became the season’s song-hit, to be heard on the lips of every cultivator, hashish-gatherer and buffalo-herd.

  We were to be in the thick of this dispute on the following day, but what claimed my attention that first night at Dibin was a remarkable bird. After we had eaten the evening meal I had gone out for a moment, and returned to find my cushion usurped by a creature whose great orange eyes, an alarmingly long way above the cushion, reflected the firelight. It was, the people told us, a kind of eagle that they had never seen before; it had risen from the reeds in front of some hashish-gatherers, who had knocked it down with a canoe-pole. It had been stunned, but was quite uninjured. I turned the beam of a torch on to the dim shape, and the bird blinked but did not move. It was one of the most splendid creatures I had ever seen; an eagle owl, without a feather of its gold and black plumage ruffled, and vast eyes of so intense an orange that it seemed as if some fire must burn behind their lenses. His captors had cut the long feathers of the wings, and it would be many months before he could fly again; it was not difficult to guess that once the novelty of this captive king had worn off he would quickly be allowed to starve. To guard against this, I arranged through Thesiger to pay three dinar for the eagle owl if he was still in good condition when we returned to Dibin in two or three weeks’ time. The woman of the mudhif agreed readily, and asked what she should feed him on. I explained that he ate flesh, and immediately an old man sitting opposite to me suggested throwing the mudhif cat to the bird; indeed he had grabbed the cat and was about to do so when Thesiger intervened. I remembered that every mudhif was alive with bats and sparrows, and at once an enthusiastic crowd began poking and rattling sticks in the dark crannies of the reed arches. The bats escaped easily, shooting through the low door and out into the quiet starlight; sparrows fell, but the cat, unconscious of sentence or reprieve, was on them before ever they touched the ground. I wished, after a while, that the old man had had his way with her, for it was half an hour before we had collected enough to feed the owl.

  The next day Nasr’s eldest half-brother Jabir arrived at Dibin. How much Salman’s rightful heirs had lost became apparent, in that Jabir did not even own a tarada. His retinue of some half-dozen men was, however, heavily armed, and his face looked wolfish and purposeful.

  He was distrustful of our presence, and did not immediately disclose the purpose of his visit. Presently he mentioned Salman and Nasr, almost casually, testing the ground in front of him. Thesiger said, “I do not know your father, but I have heard nothing but good of him; of Nasr I can only say that I dislike him the more each time I meet him, and that the last time I went to his mudhif I came away hungry.”

  With this lead Jabir began to elucidate the position. He had surrounded Nasr’s nearby fort, and sent word to its occupants that anyone who showed his face outside its walls would be killed. As a result, Nasr’s fort, which had been progressively strengthened over a number of years, had now, to avoid bloodshed pending the legal decisions in Baghdad, been reinforced by a police contingent.

  Jabir was here to canvass the allegiance of these tribesmen whom Nasr had usurped from him, so that in the event of a government decision in favour of Nasr they would follow Jabir into war. Old Salman had given four hundred armed men to Nasr at the time when he had made over to him all his property, but three hundred and fifty of these were rumoured to have deserted back to Salman when they had heard the doctor’s story of the bribe to poison the old sheikh.

  Jabir promised land to those who would fight for his cause, and his retinue distributed ammunition. The trouble, it seemed, was to begin in three days’ time.

  Thesiger said, “Now we shall have to get out of this district. It’s our responsibility to keep clear of internal troubles in the country, no matter where our sympathies may lie. I’ve never been involved in politics, internal or external, and I’m not going to start now.”

  But we were in for a noisy afternoon, despite these admirable sentiments.

  Jabir sat with his retinue at one side of the coffee hearth. Presently he called for a cigarette packet to be propped against the inner wall of the mudhif, above the entrance some ten yards from him. When this had been arranged to his satisfaction he threw up his rifle, took a long aim, and pulled the trigger. The cigarette packet fell to the ground in a golden shower of reed fragments, followed by a fusillade of applause. A man ran forward to pick it up, and found that it had not been hit. Nettled by this, Jabir had the packet set up again, and his third shot struck squarely in the centre. He invited us to try the same target; we were somewhat farther down the mudhif than he, and we had a Colt .45 pistol against his rifle, but both Thesiger and I were fortunate with our first shots. Then a matchbox was substituted for the cigarette packet, and the whole performance started again. At the end of ten minutes a cigarette had taken the place of the matchbox, and the mudhif was cloudy with the thin bitter haze of expended cordite. We were consistently lucky; I use the word with no false modesty, for the dimensions of the cigarette were in fact smaller than the grouping capacity of our weapon at that range. There was nothing half-hearted in Jabir’s acceptance of the challenge; he went on shooting in rapid fire until he blew a cigarette in half with his twenty-seventh shot.

  The stub still remained stuck in the reed pillar, and instantly an elderly Sayid, the chief of Jabir’s retinue, grasped his rifle and sprang to his feet. He stood splay-legged, waggling a little, like a golfer addressing his ball, threw up the rifle to his shoulder and fired apparently without taking aim. A little fountain of reed chaff shot out from the pillar no more than an inch to one side of the cigarette. Thesiger got up and walked across to it; he had his finger in the hole the bullet had made, and was in the act of turning back to speak, when I saw the rifle-butt slam into the Sayid’s shoulder for a second shot. I yelled to Thesiger to duck, and as he did so the bullet passed six inches over his head and grazed the paper of the cigarette, leaving the tobacco showing. I doubt if Thesiger had been nearer to death or mutilation during his five years in the marshes.

  The Sayid ran from the mudhif to the hard earth outside the door, and crying, “With Salman against Nasr!”, he fired his rifle into the air. Jabir followed him, and behind Jabir went everyone in the mudhif , jostling to form a circle round him. “With Salman against Nasr!”, shouted Jabir, and the crowd took up his words in a chant as they began to stamp in the savage rhythm of the war dance. As they danced they swung their rifles round their heads, firing them the while, and the bullets whined away over the empty miles of marsh which were Jabir’s rightful heritage. Most of these men, if they went through with what they had begun, would be dead within the week, for without heavy arms the sheikhs’ forts are almost impossible to take by storm. But the garrison of Nasr’s fort must have trembled, for to them it must have sounded as if the battle had already begun.

  “We must go,” said Thesiger. “We’re here by courtesy of the Iraqi Government; we can’t be partisans.”

&nbs
p; When the hausa was over we said good-bye to Jabir, breathless and sweating and with his headrope askew over one eye, and we left.

  Chapter Nine

  I T was three weeks before we returned to Dibin. We travelled north to Baidha, at the upper limit of the Eastern permanent marsh, and then turned eastward again towards Persia, along the dividing line between seasonal and perpetual water. By thus turning at right angles to our course we followed two sides of a great lake unmarked on any map. So wide was it that at the horizon the water met the sky without any dividing line between them, and the black dots of resting waterfowl scattered over the great expanse were difficult to distinguish from slow-moving birds of prey in the air above them. We passed through villages of the Sharanba Tribe, a widely scattered people who number only a few hundred in all, villages that, because of the mosquito-filled reed-beds closely encircling them, would be deserted before the coming of summer. Here the villagers were less friendly and more rapacious; one settlement at the edge of the great lake even tried to charge money for the use of a hunting canoe for an hour, and we were often poorly and insufficiently fed. The reputation of the Ma’dan for being uncouth and boorish is not quite unearned, for Thesiger told me that before he had come to know them he had encountered much the same atmosphere in villages such as Bumugeraifat and Gabab.

  We arrived at dusk at one of these villages, by name Sharsh, just as the inhabitants were preparing to leave for their summer quarters a few miles away. There had been no water there until a day or two before, when the thaw of the high Kurdish snows had begun to pour a cool flood over the lands of seasonal marsh. In the morning the whole village was in exodus. Laden canoes of all types moved out from the single water “street”, carrying, besides all the goods of the households, reed matting and reed columns for building arches, cut reeds for weaving, chickens, cats, dogs and calves, while the water buffaloes were towed, protesting, behind the canoes of their owners; as we followed the procession the air was full of the particular yodelling cry that urges on the swimming cattle.