Night had come before we reached the mudhif, and the moon was like a marshman’s curved dagger lying bright on dark velvet.
We travelled the next morning to a mudhif belonging to one of Jabir’s brothers. He had not, it seemed, suffered as badly at the hands of his misguided father as had Jabir, for it was a noble building, on the bank of a broad, brimming river, and it appeared the fresher and better tended for the sprigs of green corn-stem that decorated the arches in recognition of the New Year. The reed matting skirt of the wall next to the river had been furled up to allow entry to the cool breeze, and from where I sat I watched for more than two hours a monstrous profligacy of nature; a squandering, a wastage so gigantic that the thought of numbers became as meaningless as when the brain tries to embrace the concept of the Milky Way. The river water flowed past the mudhif at some five or six miles an hour, and it was sixty yards across, yet during all of the two hours hardly a square foot of that smoothly sliding surface was bare to the sky. As the static waterways of the marshes were blanketed by a dense layer of white-and-gold flowers, so this river carried a great moving carpet of a myriad shivering, dying insect wings. Somewhere, perhaps far up the river’s course, these delicate gauze-winged creatures, in appearance something between a dragonfly and a mayfly, had hatched in their unthinkable millions, and sailed down the river, drowning as they drifted, to form this stupendous funereal pageant.
We came in the evening to a big mudhif at a point where three waterways joined, with dry land on all sides and, here and there, thinly scattered palm groves. We were greeted by a slave on the bank who led us into the mudhif and went in search of his master. There was only one man there when we entered; he was seated cross-legged against the right-hand wall, and he did not rise nor audibly acknowledge our greeting. There was little of his face visible, for he wore his agal muffled round his face and mouth as though he had toothache. We sat down opposite to him, and he remained quite motionless, watching us with black eyes that seemed totally expressionless. He was, as far as one could see, a young man, tall and well-built, certainly not a haji, who would be most likely to express disapproval of our presence in this way. I tried returning his stare, but he did not look away.
“A singularly bloody-minded young man,” said Thesiger after a while. “Probably another Sayid who is going to harangue the company about the degradation of eating with Christians; though if he feels like that about it I can’t understand why he doesn’t go. A trouble-maker; you’ll see.”
Presently the sheikh arrived, and gradually the mudhif began to fill up, and after an hour there were some thirty or forty people all chattering away, but still the muffled figure sat quite silent. We ate, but he did not eat with us, nor did he chide anyone else for doing so.
Thesiger said, “Can’t understand it. He’s holding his fire; he’s up to no good, that’s one thing that’s quite certain.”
Another hour passed and at last we said that we were tired and wanted to sleep. The company rose and began to file out, but still the figure opposite to us remained quite motionless. If anything the intensity of the stare increased. A slave came up and muttered to Thesiger, who turned to me.
“He’s wounded—pig got him in the face. He’s been waiting all this time to ask if we can do anything for him. We maligned him.” He signalled to the man, who came diffidently across to him.
Under the agal his face and head were swathed in rag bandages that were stiff and brown with dried blood. They separated with difficulty, and as I watched the man’s eyes I could see now that he was in great pain.
The wounds were appalling. Something had driven clean through his cheek, smashing the teeth of both upper and lower jaw and tearing the tongue; moreover this great hole in the left side of his face gaped as if flesh were missing, and could not be drawn together. On the right side was another smaller wound in whose edges were embedded fragments of broken molar; there were other ragged punctures below the jaw bone on the left side, one of which had narrowly missed the jugular vein, and still another an inch below the eye. His left hand and wrist, too, seemed a lump of macerated flesh.
He had been in the bows of a canoe, we were told, which had run right on to the top of a pig sleeping in a reed thicket. The canoe had been overset, tipping him into the shallow water, and the pig had inflicted this fearful damage in a matter of seconds.
Thesiger did what he could. “And now,” he said, turning to me, “you know what almost happened to you. Perhaps you won’t be so offhand about it next time.”
Because I did identify myself with this man, my own cheeks with this face that looked like a burst sausage in a frying pan, I was anxious for every detail of what had happened, but I could learn little more. He had thrown up his left hand to save his face—his right arm was underneath him—and the tusk had driven through his cheek and teeth into his mouth. That was all; I reflected that it was unreasonable to expect him to remember the minute details of a shattering assault that had lasted only seconds. But I could not visualise the scene; I could not see how the tusk of any ordinary boar could drive completely through the face so that it came out through the farther cheek, for the tusk lies close to the boar’s snout, and is a weapon of sabre-slash rather than foil thrust. There, anyway, but for the grace. …
We did not see the man again in the morning, and I had stopped puzzling about his wounds by the time we left, rather earlier than usual, in order to avoid the visit on official business of the Provincial Governor’s deputy. We travelled for some three hours, the watercourses giving place to marsh again, low and green, with every inch of open water choked with a dazzling and sweet-smelling blanket of white water buttercup. Sometimes there were whole lagoons of it, acres and acres of white, more dazzling under the sun than a mountain snowfield. I remember a corner of one of those lagoons, where above the white and golden flowers two brilliant halcyon kingfishers perched on a bent reed, and low overhead flew an osprey with heavily labouring wings, a great fish held in the stiff down-stretched clutch of its talons.
At about midday we came to a tiny village on a low island; there were only four houses upon it, and a hundred yards away across the water stood a fifth, farther away from the community than the marshmen usually like to build. We ate in the open air against the side of a house facing across to this single dwelling, eating roast—or, more aptly, burnt—coots that we had shot on the way. Chahala, the otter cub, pottered about in the rustling dry reeds at the house side and avidly bolted shreds of meat from the coots. After a time I noticed that the isolated house opposite to us seemed untenanted; there was no canoe tied up beside it, nor any sign of livestock, though on the buffalo platform was a pile of cut hashish that was just beginning to turn brown in the sun.
Our host confirmed that the house was empty; it had been deserted two days ago. The people who had lived in it were at odds with their sheikh, some question of unpaid dues, and the sheikh had sent an expedition to take reprisals. This expedition took the form of a small party of men who were to raid the house at night and remove everything of value that the householder possessed. They had come in a canoe about the middle of the night, a party of four men, and no one had woken when they entered. They were in the act of carrying out the wooden chest in which a marshman keeps the family’s possessions when the householder had awoken. He sprang up, and seizing his fishing spear which stood against the wall beside him he had hurled it with all his strength at the head of the nearest figure. The five-pointed spear struck his face, he screamed and fell with the ten-foot shaft of the spear sticking up from his head. By now the rest of the little village was awake, dogs were barking, and men were calling across the water. The raiders dragged the wounded man into their canoe and made off into the night; the village could still hear his screams and groans when the canoe was far off in the darkness. The chest lay where the raiding party had dropped it, just inside the door of the house.
The householder, however, was in a state of panic. He had seen the shaft of the spear sticking out from the
man’s head as he lay upon the ground, and he was convinced that he had inflicted a mortal wound. He would be the object not only of terrible reprisals from his sheikh, but of a blood-feud with his victim’s family. There and then he had packed his few belongings into his canoe, and towing his water buffaloes behind them he and his family had fled in the opposite direction from that taken by the sheikh’s men.
Thesiger asked quickly where the raiding party had come from, and was told the name of the village where we had stayed the night before.
“No wonder they seemed odd wounds for a pig to have made,” he said; “that man had a whole fishing spear through his face. They must have cut it out with a knife; that’s why there were great holes with flesh missing from them. I don’t wonder he looked a bit old-fashioned at us.”
I tried to remember the wounds in detail, and realised how lucky he had been. The centre prong of the five is nearly double the length of the flanking ones, and it had only been the fact of this longest point striking the molars at the far side of his jaw that had prevented the shorter ones penetrating his throat below and his eye above; I remembered the shallow punctures above the cheek-bone and below the jawline. His right hand must have been carrying the chest, and he had thrown up his left in a last-moment attempt to protect his face as he saw the spear in the air. Those were the lacerations at his wrist and between his forefinger and thumb.
Thesiger looked moody; no one likes being deceived.
That night we spent at a large village of the Nuafa, a section of the Abu Mahommed tribe. It was a dense, crowded village on a low mud island, and we stayed at a house well back from the water, so that to reach it one ran the gauntlet of many pi-dogs who gave us slow calculating and uncanine stares as we passed. Our host was absent on a pilgrimage, and his son greeted us, a shifty-looking stripling of eighteen or so who did not seem particularly pleased to see us. We handed over to him our canoe-poles and baggage for safe keeping with some ceremony. Thesiger said “You want to watch these people. They’ve got no sheikh, haven’t had one for three months—an experiment of the government. That means they’re not answerable to any immediate authority they’re scared of, which is always a bad thing with these people.”
Chahala, the otter cub, attracted the usual amount of attention, and presently a boy brought two wagtails for her to eat. He had pulled out the long feathers of their wings, and they lay there helpless in his hands, their eyes bright with terror and the tiny bodies shaken by the hammering of their hearts. He had caught them, he said, in a miniature model of the big clap-nets in which on the cultivating land surrounding the marshes duck are caught. He caught several small birds every day, “to play with”. I knew by now what that would mean among these people; the wing feathers would be pulled out as these were, and a child would drag the bird about with a string tied to its leg until he got tired of it, when a cat would take up the sport where he had left off. The boy was proud of his skill; he looked at us with soft eyes in a gentle flower-like face, and offered to show us his net. One could no more be angry with him than one could reproach any beautiful little beast of prey. Thesiger spoke my own thoughts. “It’s no use getting worked up about it; these people are what they are, and animal suffering means nothing to them. You can’t let these go anyway, he’s pulled the wing feathers out.”
He took them and pressed his thumb over their hearts, and with a little shivering flutter they were dead. Chahala ate the meat from their breasts, and she was as beautiful as they, though it was her last day of life. Later that evening we shot a buff-backed heron for her, and she wolfed the shredded flesh avidly. It was the last food that she ate.
It was very cold that night. Over my head was a gap in the reed matting of the roof through which the stars showed bright and unobscured, but a thin wind that seemed as chill as the tinkle of icicles rustled the dry reeds at the foot of the wall, and I slept fitfully. Chahala was restless and would not stay still in my sleeping bag; I did not know that she was dying, and I was impatient with her. All night there was movement about the low fire beyond the reed platform at the centre of the house, and once I woke to see the youth who was our host standing naked on the platform and apparently rearranging the bundle of canoe-poles that was propped against it; but I had forgotten what Thesiger had said, and I thought nothing of it.
In the morning I took Chahala to a spit of dry land beyond the edge of the village to let her walk, and only then I realised that she was very ill. She would not move, but lay looking up at me pathetically, and when I picked her up again she instantly sought the warm darkness inside my pullover.
I wanted to tell Thesiger about this, but when I came back to the houses he was surrounded by a great crowd of people all talking and shouting at once, and I could not get near him. There was nothing very strange about this; the surgery hour often got out of hand and assumed much this appearance. I did not understand that this was an angry crowd—I had noticed before how like the expression of one emotion among these people was to another—and I thought nothing of it. By this time I could sometimes follow the gist of a conversation in Arabic, though I spoke little, but no individual words were distinguishable in that babel of voices. I wandered away again, reassuring myself that Chahala was no worse than when Sheikh Jabir had given her mutton, and that she would recover. The village seemed half empty now that so many people were gathered round Thesiger, and I used the unwonted peace to take photographs less handicapped than usually. The prows of rows of canoes at the edge of the water were reflected as a pattern of black downturned claws, and above them on the blue sky were strange white clouds that faithfully repeated the design.
But the pathos of small and helpless deaths seemed everywhere that morning. Near the water’s edge toddled a brood of wild goslings that had been reared under a hen. A black-and-white crow came and perched on the prow of a canoe near by, and cocked his head at them with a cold bright eye and a bill like the black blade of a commando knife. The hen clucked fussily and began to lead her brood away from the water, but one was farther away than the others, and as he hurried after her with a forward-leaning run there was a clop of black wings overhead and the crow was on him. The crow killed him very slowly, allowing him to escape apparently unhurt several times and hurry cheeping pitifully after the hen. It was after the third time this had happened that I saw the gosling now had only one eye. He was still living when the crow carried him off across the water, the small webbed feet feebly paddling the air. And not a sparrow falls. … How very heavy, I thought, must be the heart of the Creator.
When I approached the crowd again Thesiger was forcing his way through it, and shouting to make himself heard. I remember that at his elbow a woman gesticulated furiously and screamed out what could only be abuse; balanced on her head was a full basket of buffalo dung from which not a fragment fell. Thesiger strode through the villagers like a giant among pygmies.
“Dogs!” he was shouting, “dogs, and sons of black dogs! Black dogs and children of pigs!” In the background I could see our canoe boys carrying our baggage down to the tarada. Thesiger was so angry that he could spare few words of English explanation to interrupt his rich flow of rhetoric. “Stole our things in the night, that boy who was our host… all in on it, the whole village. …” We reached the tarada, and as we pushed off he stood up in the bows and went on rebuking the hostile crowd on the shore. He kept it up till we were fifty yards from them, and then sat down, presenting to them the uncompromising back view of righteous indignation.
I learned the story by degrees; he was still much too angry to want to talk unless to an enemy. During the night our bamboo canoe-poles had been taken, and worthless poles of mirrdi, the big reed, substituted for them. (The two are barely distinguishable, but the bamboo poles, which are imported, are tough and valuable, while those made from the local reed are worthless and weak.) It had been some phase of this substitution that I had seen when I had woken in the night to see the youth standing naked on the platform, and his nudity had no doubt bee
n designed to suggest that he had but that instant woken from sleep, aroused by the poles slipping down on to him from where they were propped. When the substitution was discovered Thesiger had taxed him with it and received an insolent reply that those battered and crooked reeds were the poles with which he had been entrusted the evening before. Thesiger then boxed his ears, but he kept on protesting his innocence.
Those are the kind of circumstances in which I am perpetually amazed and abashed by other people’s unfaltering conviction that they are acting rightly. Had I been Thesiger I should by then have been convinced that I had made a mistake and was beating up the wrong man; the situation, too, would not have been easy to redeem. Thesiger, however, was tormented by no such doubts, and at length the boy had offered to restore the poles.
It took him some time, for he had distributed them among all the neighbouring houses. Each time he returned with one he said that it was the last of which he knew anything, but each time threats had driven him out again until at last the collection was complete. Thesiger had left the house then, and had become immediately engulfed in the hostile crowd where I had glimpsed him.
“We were running quite a big risk, really,” he said; “they might easily have turned savage and got out their rifles—and all the time you were wandering about the village taking photographs as if you were a tourist in the Vatican City!”
When all the canoe-poles had finally been collected a passenger whom we had carried with us for the past twenty-four hours had reported that his club had been stolen during the night. Thesiger sent Hassan back to tell the tearful youth that unless it were given up at once the Englishman would come back. Without word or demur the boy produced the club from beneath the reed matting on the floor.