We turned from these muddy waterways into narrower channels cut between rice fields, and there were earth banks at our sides where crabs’ claws and carapaces and the shells of big mussels were crusted like decorated stucco.
The rice country is flat and featureless, and everything is of one colour. When the reed matting is first laid on the houses it is bright corn-gold, but it soon weathers to a dull mud-grey, and becomes part of a background where all is dun, the ground, the reed houses, even the cows and sheep; only the young thrusting shoots of the rice itself are a tender green. It is a land of monotony, a land, for me perhaps, of agoraphobia, for I never felt at ease in it, and when we were outside the marshes I longed always to return to them.
It was when we came to Rufaia that night that I realised how greatly my seldom-varying posture of the past three days had affected my muscles. When I climbed up the mudbank to the group who awaited us my legs felt unfamiliar; I straddled and staggered like a new-born foal, and my head felt too high in the air. Every bone and muscle from the waist downward ached and creaked in unison. I wanted nothing but that the ten or twenty yards between us and the house should prolong itself into as many miles, but I was on my feet for less than a minute, a minute of dust-storm and bare horizons, before I was again seated cross-legged on the floor of a reed house.
Here, in a village from which two of Thesiger’s crew came, the house filled quickly, and the medicine chest was in immediate demand. As at Ramla there was too much dust and wind for the patients to congregate outside, and they were treated at one end of the little house. It seemed mystic, ritual; the orange spotlight of the dipping sun breaking through gaps in the reed wall to bring fine focus to an eye, the curve of a lip, a dapple over a moving hand. When the sun had gone and the throng was lit only by the flickering light of the buffalo-dung fire, Thesiger’s form bending over a patient seemed huge and menacing as that of a witch-doctor, the shroud of the blanket that he wore as a shawl casting on the arching walls a great bird-like shadow with flapping wings.
At this time the physical ills of the people still made a vivid impression upon me, for, describing that hour, I find that I wrote in my notebook:
“The number of people with only one eye.
” ” dog bites.
” ” pig gores.
” ” miscellaneous, but horrifying ills.
Four noseless faces tonight.”
As time went on I came to accept these things as part of the milieu, so that at last to eat from the same rice bowl as a leper with only one finger left on his right hand seemed worthy only of a brief sentence, a jotting under a date.
I remember it as a restless night. Through the hours of darkness dogs barked and growled round the thin reed walls of the house, and about three in the morning began an interminable conversation between a few elders who squatted round the embers of the fire. It was the first of seemingly endless debates about Amara’s marriage to Sabeti’s sister, the arrangement of bride price and date, the anticipation and prevention of disputes that might arise. All through the night it dragged on while Amara, frankly indifferent, slept within touch of them, his handsome arrogant young face purged by sleep and the dim light of an habitual expression often near to cruelty.
Chapter Five
S HEIKHS are for the most part much what Europeans traditionally expect them to be. They tend to be stout men, they wear flowing robes—often elaborated with much gold braid—and flowing head-dresses. They squat cross-legged, so that their legs look exaggeratedly short and small in proportion to their bodies. They are accustomed to having their hands kissed often and obsequiously, and look used to getting their own way. Some of them appear despotic, some jolly and benign; a few seem vacuous and evil. Usually they are a little pop-eyed.
They rule over a greater or lesser area of land which may be rich cultivating ground with an intricate irrigation system, or some permanent marsh unimprovable except by the millions of dollars derived from oil fields. The word sheikh implies little more than “squire” or “laird”; a heritable title involving status and responsibility. All land in Iraq belongs ultimately to the State, but the sheikhs hold their traditional acres in a kind of feu from the government, and it is they who are responsible for the welfare, administration, and peace of their people.
When, before the First World War, this land was under the Ottoman Empire, tribal warfare was intense and constant, and was encouraged by the Turks in order to keep the tribes in too weak a state for united revolt. Serious fighting came to an end during the period of British rule, and the sheikhs’ hereditary status as tribal leaders in warfare is at best anachronistic, their very existence but a transitional stage in the fulfilment of an idea that may never be completed. The basic problem of the country is water, and its fair control and distribution is the most convincing reason for maintenance of the sheikhs in status quo. When a sheikh is responsible for land it is in his interest to see that all his cultivators receive water for their crops at the right time; each sheikh or his wazir knows the local aspect of this problem, and how and when each parched rectangle of land may receive its vital supply. Ideally, some government official might effect the distribution with an equal impartiality, but they could learn only from the sheikhs’ agent, and this apprenticeship would involve, to them, an impossible loss of caste.
The controller, too, has no incentive to see that each cultivator gets water when he requires it unless he himself benefits; it is too easy and tempting to accept a bribe by which he who pays most gets the water, necessity notwithstanding. Sometimes the maintenance of a local water supply involves the building of huge dams—an extremely difficult, complicated, and often dangerous process—which is made possible only by a feudal edict from the sheikh, uniting under plain compulsion a group of people who would never voluntarily co-operate with each other. By the present policy the government is taking half the land from the sheikhs and dividing it among the cultivators; who then will guarantee to each the water without which his land must become infertile and his family déraciné? The Biblical sin of Onan was the sin of a people who lived in a waterless land, the guilt of the diversion of all true fertility.
From the very earliest times the conquerors of the flat lands of the Tigris and Euphrates have recognised the flowing water as life-blood, without which all existence would cease. They did not strike at the great arteries and veins, allowing the liquid to seep away into futility; they struck at the heart itself by killing or deporting the wazirs who knew where the water must go for life to continue. There are great areas now that have remained desert since the times of the early conquerors, their peoples extinct or drifted without legend to tell of distant migrations from the terrors of drought in the flat lands.
Not all sheikhs, however—and more especially this is true of those who have had contact with the urgent western culture which is beginning, inevitably, to invade their perimeter—fulfil their hereditary responsibilities. A sheikh held land irrigated entirely by water pumps. Europeans taught him their customs; he became a gambler. He could not wager his land, which belonged ultimately to the State, but he gambled away the only movable assets upon it, his water pumps. The winner came and took them away, and the land became a desert, and the people left and there is no memory of where they went. An outraged government intervened to take the land from the sheikh, and gave it to a worthy and wealthy merchant who reinstalled the pumps and brought in fresh cultivators to work the ground. A feud then started between the merchant and the evicted sheikh, who claimed that his land had been appropriated. A skirmishing civil war began and the State had once more to intervene.
Few, if any, rich sheikhs actually live in the permanent marshes, though their jurisdiction encloses, piecemeal, every Ma’dan tribesman. They dwell on the dry banks of the great waterways at the marsh’s edge, in embattled stone fortresses, waited on by a bevy of African slaves who have acquired in the course of generations both their religion and the benefits of a tolerance that amounts in effect to racial equal
ity. The slaves’ children grow up playing with the sheikh’s children, and few if any of them would voluntarily leave the service of their masters. They are privileged and protected, and live in a security greater than that of the tribesmen themselves. Another type of sheikh lives within the perimeter of the true marshes, whose status is due rather to inherent quality than to inherited riches. These men often own no land; they or their fathers have been chosen by the community as suitable leaders in the settlement of disputes ranging from blood-feud to petty theft.
The fortresses of the feudal sheikhs are of a uniform type, squat and expressionless; and, in all those that I saw, of a uniform interior decrepitude. Each contains a European-type reception room, whose general introduction dates from the later part of the British occupation, and is now rarely used except for the entertaining of government officialdom. It is a long narrow room, round whose walls are ranged, shoulder to shoulder, heavy and identical arm-chairs and sofas, mass-produced in Basra and Baghdad. The room is usually deep in dust, the walls peeling and the paint cracking, and from the ceiling dangle weak and naked electric light bulbs as bleak as a whore’s smile. It was in such a room that we were invariably received, and as I never penetrated to the residential portions of the forts I retained only impressions of decay, though essentially a hospitable decay; cool shade from the heat outside and the rare privilege of relaxing one’s limbs into the postures to which they had been trained.
Near to his fort every sheikh, and many a man of lesser importance, maintains a mudhif, or guest-house, the vast nissen-shaped house of reeds, at which any passing stranger may partake of his hospitality. A halfway house, as it were, between mudhif and fort is the sarifa, a smaller rectangular reed building designed for the entertainment of a smaller number of more intimate friends, but these are by no means general.
Nearly every family of important sheikhs is related to every other by marriage, much as are many dukedoms in England, so that after we came that evening to the mudhif of Abd el Nebi bin Dakhil, a scion of one of the greatest families, I found that the mudhif s that we visited subsequently were often the property of his uncles, nephews, grandfathers or cousins, shoots of a genealogical tree so bewilderingly luxuriant that it would have required drastic pruning to become comprehensible.
We had left Rufaia through narrow hard-banked irrigation channels running between strips of date palm and rice fields over which flocks of rooks strutted and squawked beneath a clouded sky; by comparison with the brilliant colours and weird birds of the deep marshes the scene appeared commonplace and insipid, almost European. We turned into broader channels some fifty yards wide, the water pale buff and opaque, fringed with willow and tamarisk and dotted irregularly with houses, whose baying, snarling watch-dogs forced our crew on the towpath into a constant and capering rear-guard action.
The clouds had cleared as the sun began to go down, and we turned into the last wide stretch to see the mudhif as a dark dome against a yellow sky painted with stylised egret-plumes of black and crimson. The black feathers were spread and tufted as though applied with an almost dry brush; they were as dark as the mudhif itself, as the featureless land, as the single palm tree that jabbed the horizon far off; almost as dark as the high claw of the tarada’s prow, cutting the clear yellow distances on which they drifted. Nowhere have I seen sunsets at once as strange and as beautiful as those that flared nightly over the plains of the Tigris and the Euphrates; in the cultivating lands their colours, I think, appeared more intense by contrast with the daytime monotony of the drab earth and the dead reeds of the houses, but these sunsets avoided, somehow, the extravagant and ominous vulgarities of the north, where every colour on the palette is slashed together in Wagnerian tumult.
Though every day’s end over the flat lands seems sharply individual, and the same hues and combinations are rarely repeated, there is a sequence of light changes that remains constant. At first the sun is low and blinding. Figures and reed houses on the river banks are focused as with an orange spotlight against an eastern horizon of smoky violet; a homing flight of pelicans is lit from below as though their breasts wore shields of brass. Above them the night is already dull blue and immense, stippled with stars. The sun sinks abruptly below the horizon, and the sky it has left is a band of harsh orange-yellow, merging above first into green and then into dull blue; it is separated only by a finger’s width of dark land from the reflecting water. Slowly the yellow smoulders out into a carmine stripe, the distance becomes dim, and the stars become brilliant overhead. Against the still pallid water move the high prows of the canoes, their thin scimitar curves cutting into the embers of the horizon sky.
It was in this melodramatic light of the last moments before the sun was obscured by the thin horizon-stripe of land that we came to Abd el Nebi’s mudhif. All the light had gone from the land, but the great arched building of drab and faded reeds blocked the horizontal rays until it glowed as yellow as gold.
Abd el Nebi had succeeded his father Dakhil as a result of an accident whose tragedy and confusion extended, as does all violent death in the marshes, far beyond its moment. Dakhil had been a close friend of Thesiger’s, who had stayed regularly and often at this mudhif; and at length Dakhil asked him to come instead to the stone fort, saying that he should by now consider himself to be one of the family. The morning after Thesiger had stayed for the first time in the fort, Dakhil proposed a day’s duck-shooting in the marshes with a number of other guests, including a certain Aboud, his nephew and son-in-law.
On their way out to the shoot Thesiger noticed a number of twelve-bore cartridges marked “LG”; and, not having seen them before, asked Dakhil what they were. He replied that they were duck-shot, and in curiosity Thesiger opened one. Six vast lead pellets trickled out into his hand.
“Someone will get killed by these,” he said, “they are for shooting large animals such as pig. They would be terribly dangerous to use at a shoot like this.” But Dakhil’s attention was distracted, and he paid no heed.
The party separated among the reeds, each gun in a small canoe with one paddler, and out of sight of each other. A few duck were soon on the move and there was some desultory shooting. Once Thesiger heard the peculiar hollow echo that comes from a shotgun fired straight in the direction of the hearer, and remarked that someone was shooting dangerously.
At about noon a shot was fired not far from Thesiger, and suddenly the voice of Dakhil was crying: “You have killed me, you have killed me!” His nephew Aboud appeared in terror from behind a reed-bed some seventy yards away, protesting incoherently that he had not known his uncle to be there. He did not wait to see whether or not he had killed; fear overrode all other considerations, and he fled wildly through the sheltering reeds, urging on his terrified paddler.
It is thus among the tribesmen that a blood-feud begins. A life, even if taken accidentally, must be paid for by a life, if not by that of the killer himself then by that of a male blood relation, and that in turn by a man of the blood of that killer, and so the whole pathetic rigmarole goes on until at length it is settled by a payment of women. Tribal murder does not receive the normal sentence from the State, and its penalties are reduced still further if the act has been committed in hot blood, that is to say within a certain number of hours of the killing which it avenges.
In the eyes of this community there was only one possible course of action for Aboud to have pursued. His father should have taken him to Dakhil’s father Mehsin—a powerful sheikh and one of the great figures of Southern Iraq—and said to him: “Here is my son on your mercy—he has killed your son in an accident; take his life in return if you wish.” Then, they say, he would have been shown mercy.
Thesiger approached Dakhil’s canoe within moments of his being hit; he saw Dakhil collapse and the paddler contrive miraculously to keep the canoe afloat. Dakhil was unconscious now, and over his left breast there was blood on his shirt; opening it, Thesiger found a puncture mark on the nipple.
He recovered consci
ousness while they were carrying him home, and sent urgently for his son Abd el Nebi, who, barefooted on the thorny ground at the edge of the waterways, could not keep up with the party. Those who carried Dakhil would not risk waiting, so the dying man sent word back to his son that whoever fired the shot must be returned unharmed to his father.
Once back at the fort, there was much argument as to where Dakhil should be sent, but by now there was in any case little hope. Finally a special plane was sent to fly him from Amara to Baghdad, but it did not arrive until some thirteen hours later. Dakhil died in Baghdad twenty-six hours after the shot had been fired.
Meanwhile the terrified Aboud had fled to his father, who, instead of taking him to the father of the dead man and throwing themselves on his mercy, surrendered his son to the government authorities, a treacherous defiance of tradition that could only expect hatred in return. He employed official channels and lawyers, and Aboud was finally sentenced to three years’ imprisonment, which is the customary penalty for tribal murder.
Mehsin wanted vengeance. Another of his sons had been killed in mysterious circumstances, and his only surviving heir was not the apple of his eye. He mourned for Dakhil, saying, “Now I have no son left worthy of the name,” and he awaited Aboud’s release from prison.
At last Aboud’s sentence was ended, and he at once received word from Mehsin saying that he would be killed if he came back to the area. Terrified, he appealed to the government, who sent him back saying that the State would be responsible for his life. Mehsin raised the tribesmen, and Aboud’s canoe was ambushed and sunk before ever he reached home. Aboud escaped, and bolted back once more to the government authorities.