Arbid undoubtedly grow to a very great size. Some weeks after I had shot this first snake as the conclusion to a curiously mixed bag, I had a fleeting and extremely close-up view of a snake whose size I should not, for fear of ridicule, care to estimate. We were travelling between villages in the fully laden tarada, with the crew of four canoe boys. Thesiger habitually accorded me the place of honour in the tarada, near to the stern of the canoe and facing forwards, while he himself sat opposite to me facing astern. There were two paddlers behind me, and two in the bows beyond him, but he was the only man who faced backward over the ground we had covered. We were passing through a narrow waterway with tall reeds pressing close at each side when my glance came quite by chance to rest on Thesiger’s face. Just as it did so I saw his own gaze freeze with an expression of unbelieving horror on a point that seemed to me to be my own right elbow. His expression was so totally unfamiliar, so shockingly unlike his normal impassivity, that my head flicked round without a thought of asking him what he saw. About two feet from the side of the canoe, and a very little behind me, the last few feet of a great snake were slithering from the reeds into the water. From the character of the movements alone it was clearly the very end of the snake’s body, yet the part that I was looking at was as thick as my forearm—which must, incidentally, have passed within touching distance of the head a second or two earlier. Thesiger had seen little more of the snake than I had, for it had not caught his eye until a fraction of a second before I had turned my head to see those last disappearing coils.
We were entertained that night by a dancer whose name I can no longer remember; it must, I think, have been a difficult name, for I referred to him then, and think of him now, as the Performing Flea. He must have been about eight years old. When at rest he looked a very small dreamy child with preternaturally large and luminous eyes like a lemur, and a face of gentle sadness. His appearance gave no more suggestion of his weird potentialities than does a stick of high explosive, yet when I think now of dancing in the marshlands it is that tiny whirlwind scrap of humanity that comes to my mind first.
Starlight and star-reflecting water through the slit doorway; inside, the focus of firelight, pale high-thrusting flames from a long column of reeds, and fifty-four people huddled round it in a space of four yards by four. The heads of those farthest from the fire were dim in the shadows. “Dance,” said someone to the boy, and he made no half-hearted excuses. The centre of the circle shuffled back a little from the fire, leaving him a space which I judged to be no more than three feet by four.
The drums started, in slow rhythm at first, as the child began, two paces forward, two paces backward, without turning. Ti-tumti-túm, ti-tumti-túm. The child looked solemn, graceful, and controlled; his limbs moved with the sure precision of an adult, but there was as yet no hint of violence in the dance. Slowly the drums gathered speed and urgency and his feet kept pace with them quicker and quicker, ti-tumti-túm, ti-tumti-túm, ti-tumti-túm. His body lunged forward as though he would invade the crowd, and shot back from them again as though catapulted from their faces. The tempo grew faster and faster, and suddenly his shoulders began to keep time with his feet, each moving independently as though they were part of a machine driven by the same pounding crankshaft. Back and forth flew the feet, up and down shot the shoulders, and the huddled figures beyond the firelight roared out a chant in time with the drums while their clicking fingers smashed out the quickening rhythm. As the flames flickered down, the squatting holder of the reed bundle too absorbed to remember his task, the silhouette of the dancer was lost in his whirling dish-dasha; then, abruptly, as the reeds were thrust up again into the smouldering ash and the flame shot up, the outline of the dancer’s body was thrown into sharp relief behind its thin covering, childish and slight as a tadpole. The boy brought another group of muscles into play, and his hips leapt and thrust in time with the flying feet and jerking shoulders, so that every part of the wildly capering figure was in separate and intricate movement. The dance was now frankly erotic. As the rhythm became faster still the boy would halt suddenly while first one and then the other shoulder shivered and vibrated in convulsive spasms, or his hips writhed and shimmied in a paradox of controlled abandon. His eyes rolled and his tongue protruded; only the exquisite timing of his movements to the drums betrayed that he was not in epileptic seizure.
So caught did he seem in the demoniac rhythm of his own weaving that there seemed no possible end to the dance; here, it seemed, was the magic by which le moment critique became l’ heure critique. For more than twenty minutes he maintained the pace without a falter, then suddenly he flung himself to the ground and lay jerking and twitching to the beat of the drums in a frenzied yet stylised pantomime of orgasm.
The drums stopped, and he rose in a storm of laughter and applause. Seated cross-legged again at the side of the reed hearth he was once more a staid and demure child, big-eyed, shy and wondering. His breathing was not perceptibly quickened, nor at the end of a twenty-minute encore was he more ruffled than if he had awoken from a light refreshing sleep.
In the morning we went out to shoot pig. Much as the water buffaloes are the mainstay of the marshmen’s life, so the wild pig of the marshes are the greatest and most universal enemy. They are one of the commonest animals of the marshes, and they compare to the wild pig of Europe, or, I think, of India, as a Great Dane would compare to a terrier. They are probably the largest pig in the world. They are huge, evil-tempered, and useless; for their flesh is unclean food to any Muslim, and their drab, well-camouflaged hulks lurk in every reed-bed. Here they build for themselves little soggy islands of broken reed on which to sleep, and often a party of hashish-gatherers, forcing its way through the reeds, stumbles unaware on a still form that becomes in a moment a raging tornado of slashing tusks that rip the flesh like knives and leave white bone open to the sky. Whether the pig actually kills or not is largely a matter of chance and whether the victim has fallen on his back or face, for after a sort of routine savaging of a few seconds the pig usually makes off.
The most serious injuries result when the victim has fallen on his back, exposing his face, throat, and stomach to the onslaught of the tusks, and these wounds are often fatal. But because the pig never stays to make sure that his enemy is dead there is always a good chance of escape, and a great many of the Ma’dan carry scars of past gorings that they have survived. Pig will even attack a large canoe if it surprises them while sleeping, and Thesiger told me that he had seen the bows of a thirty-six-foot tarada completely stove in in this way.
It is small wonder that the marshmen hate the wild pig, and kill them by any possible means. Thesiger, who is a very good shot with a rifle, had earned the gratitude of many villages many times over, for he had killed literally hundreds of pig during his years among the Ma’dan, and they now felt it to be part of his natural function, like the doctoring of their diseases. But firearms are not universal, and ammunition rare by comparison to the great number of pig, so that the marshmen’s means of attack are strictly limited. They say—though I never saw it done myself, and it contrasts strangely with the terror I have seen them display toward a moribund boar struggling in deep water—that when a pig is swimming a man will dive into the water and drown it by imprisoning the hind feet. Many pigs, too, are killed by spears and clubs as they swim; one village we passed through claimed to have killed as many as a hundred and forty pigs in a year. The young fallow-spotted piglets they slaughter unmercifully and unpleasantly, for they are the enemy shorn of his weapons, and can show no fight. In these circumstances the marshmen show an active cruelty no different from the treatment of any other scapegoat elsewhere, but difficult superficially to distinguish from their normal total indifference to animal suffering. They do not at any time or in any way identify themselves with animals, and this utter callousness can give a misleading impression of active sadism. Every animal that a Muslim ever kills must, if it is to be eaten, be bled to death with a slit throat and its head poin
ting towards Mecca, and this, if it is a large animal, can be a peculiarly revolting procedure. Since all reaction to animal situations can only be a result of identification with the animal, and since the identification is entirely absent, there is no inhibition about display of other emotions that may be aroused; amusement, for instance, at the grotesque movements of a wounded animal. They can detect no element of pathos. I have seen several Arabs roaring with genuine laughter at the weird gyrations of a wild duck with a partially slit throat. Quite a different element creeps in when the wounded animal is a pig, but the nuance is difficult to detect.
In the same way, a pig hunt is imbued with a subtle intensity that is foreign to the pursuit of any other quarry. The feelings and the recollections of those pig hunts are with me now as I write, the remembrance of something stealthy and atavistic, something intent and destructive.
Paddling silently along the edge of the reed-beds and listening. Heads cocked on one side, strained, alert. The minute liquid tinkle of the water-drops that fall from the dipped paddle as the canoe slides forward soundlessly. The unfamiliar croak of a purple gallinule and a faint crackling of dry sedge deep in the undergrowth. The sudden sound of an eagle stooping, the air vibrating in the stiff pinions like a rush of winds in the reeds. The paddles thrust noiselessly, and the bright drops trill back from them on to the blue lagoon water. The canoe rasps and grates through a belt of reeds, forcing its way through to a new lagoon; the noise seems outrageous, deafening. At eye level is stretched the untenanted web of a spider, filled with a hundred flies; the sun glints on their green metallic bodies splayed on the deserted net. The canoe leaves the reeds, the din stops very suddenly, and one is again in a world of silence. Overhead the sea eagles wheel on the blue sky and a kingfisher scintillates dazzlingly across the bows. Everyone is listening, listening for some small sound which will be unrecognisable to me when it comes.
For this, the sound of the enemy, the marshmen’s ears have an almost incredible sensitivity and selectivity. During the short time that I was among them, one rustle in the reeds remained to me much like another; the small sounds that came from the unseen inhabitants of the reeds seemed undifferentiated. But to the Ma’dan each, however small, produces a clear picture of what is taking place out of sight.
They ignored a heavy splashing and crackling that I thought could only be a startled pig; then, seconds later, they stiffened at some sound inaudible to me. Fingers pointed feverishly, Thesiger stood up amidships in the canoe and unloosed the safety catch from his rifle. Even the tinkle of water dripping from the paddles seemed to be stilled, and we moved over the mirror-smooth surface in utter silence. Thesiger took aim at something I could not see, in a low reed-bed some fifty yards away to our left.
The slam of the rifle was followed instantly by squealing and crashing in the sedge, and a hairy brown shape somersaulted backward into the water. The pig floundered and plunged, swimming in a tight circle like a cat chasing its tail. Its shattered lower jaw dangled from the head, gushing blood into the blue water until the surface closed over it and only a patch of scarlet was left. A terrible and revolting animal, dying a terrible and revolting death.
If every violent death is tragedy
And the wild animal is tragic most
When man adopts death’s ingenuity,
Then this was tragic. But what each had lost
Was less and more than this, which was the ghost
Of some primeval joke, now in bad taste,
Which saw no less than war, no more than waste.
We emerged soon after this on to the great lake of Daima, a vast expanse of pale satin blue with its confining wall of reeds far off and small. As we came out through the widening channel into the open water I saw a fishing spear thrown for the first time.
The five-pointed fishing spear is, together with a short metal-headed club and a curved knife whose sheath is a buffalo horn, part of every marshman’s equipment. Shaped like a trident, but with five prongs, the iron head is mounted on a pole some ten feet long, and it is with this alarming—but, in its proper context, inefficient—weapon that the greater number of fish in the marshes are killed. It is used against pig, too, and occasionally against human beings, and against these solid and visible targets it is deadly, though it is most commonly thrust at random into the water at the foot of the reed stems where fish may be lurking.
More occasionally it is flung, as it was now. Amara threw down his paddle, seized the spear that lay beside him, and stood up in the bows. Some ten or fifteen yards ahead there was a very faint ripple on the smooth surface. Amara hurled the spear with all his strength; it struck the centre of the ripple and stuck quivering with two feet of its length hidden in the shallow water. No one, I think, except possibly myself, expected there to be anything on the end of the spear when we reached it, but there was; a fish little more than nine inches long and firmly impaled by three prongs of the spear. If I had left the marshes then I should have returned with tales of the marshmen’s fabulous skill with the spear, of a target nine inches by three hit squarely at forty-five feet from a moving canoe. Alas, it was like my own reputation, so soon to be temporarily redeemed, for the mass killing of coots; it could not last.
Far out in the middle of the lake lay a long solid line like land, perhaps a mile of it, and dark as charcoal. As I looked at this my eye was caught by something above it, something hurtling downward like a diving aircraft, and then another and another. A line of white foam suddenly edged the dark strip that looked like land, and a muttering roar like the undertow of a wave came to us across the mile of still water. The dark line was formed of coots, many, many thousands of them, bunched together under the repeated attacks of five eagles. The eagles could not strike while the coots remained on the water, and again and again they hurtled downward, trying to panic the great throng into taking wing. Under each attack the whole mass spread their wings and scuttered forward for a few yards, driving a frothing wave before them, and as the eagle pulled out of his dive and began to climb again the coots bunched tightly together so that one could not have dropped a pin between them. Here was an occasion on which the meanest shot might indeed have fulfilled Thesiger’s demand for two hundred per cent on cartridges fired.
We started off across the lake towards them, but before we had got halfway the eagles had grown bored and dispersed. Two of them came sailing by low over our heads; these were the white-tailed sea eagles that breed in the reed-beds, and, when their young are in the nest, often terrorise the hashish-gatherers who trespass on their territory. The others were smaller and very dark; I hesitate to try to pin the correct label on any animal or bird from the marshlands, since the only living creature I brought home proved to be totally new to science. During the winter and early spring eagles are one of the commonest of all birds in the marshes, and there is rarely any moment when, if the sky is not a mere strip between the towering reed tops, there are not half a dozen or more in view. They seemed to me to be of a bewildering number of species. They are not killed by the Arabs, and so have little fear of man; like the cynical-looking black-and-white crows, they perch as do reed warblers on the bending stems of the giant reeds, and often allow a canoe to pass close beneath them.
Now that the eagles were far off the coots had become less densely packed, though they still appeared as a mass solid enough to walk upon for perhaps half a mile, and they had less fear of rising. They began to scutter off the water when we were some eighty yards away, and a gigantic smother of fine spray filled the air, multi-hued like a rainbow. Had they been overhead they would literally have cut off the light like a canopy, but they were well out to our right. There were so many of them, and their places in the air were so instantly filled by those behind them, that it was difficult to see whether anything at all fell to my shots, but when the whole great concourse had gone and the rainbow mist of their going still hung on the air there were no fewer than nineteen left on the water.
I lost all illusions I had held as to t
he marshmen’s accuracy with a fishing spear. Some of these coots were wounded and diving, and these we had to chase with the canoe. Again and again Amara or Hassan flung the spear at a coot no more than three paces from the boat, and again and again they missed by feet. A more inept performance could hardly have been contrived.
We ate as we had eaten on our first day in the marshes, on a drifting island with the high reeds leaving only a sky-patch above us, charred coots, dough bread, and Amara’s memorable fish. To this was added some date treacle, of which we were the second or possibly third thieves. The keen eyes of the canoe boys had spotted it hidden in a thicket of reeds, several basket-work jars of a thick glutinous substance not unlike black treacle. It was pronounced to have been stolen and concealed, so now it was stolen again.
The wind sprang up again before we got home that night, and in the house at Bumugeraifat the lee-side of the fire was suffocating with the smoke of the buffalo dung, the windward side swept by an icy gale through the gaps in the reed wall.
Those were our first three days in the permanent marshes, and it was ten days before we came back to them, for the next morning we left for Rufaia, a village on the edge of the cultivating country, which was the home of Amara and Sabeti. We had in three days passed through the central marshes—those, that is, lying to the west of the Tigris—from south to north, and were now at their northern extremity, some twenty miles south of the town of Amara. The waterways, even outside the perimeter of the permanent marsh, remain the arteries of all transport, and the change is gradual. The reeds grow shorter and more scattered, then cease altogether; the waterways become clogged and red-brown with mud. When the wind blows, the water of these channels takes on a strangely individual colour, which is at first difficult to identify. The surface becomes ruffled into a formation like little conical sand dunes; one side of each dune is a warm buff, the colour of the cloudy water, and the other is turquoise-blue reflecting the sky. Thus the whole, which seems an indefinable and absolutely characteristic colour, is in fact a mosaic of two colours whose symmetry in movement gives the effect of being one.