A Reed Shaken by the Wind (19 page)

A few of the rare tumulus islands in the marshes are said to be haunted, and at least one to hold buried treasure guarded by a fearful
djinn
; but it would seem that it is the darkness of which the marshmen are really frightened, and the whole obscurity of the night rather than any particular places that they tend to people with mischievous spirits.

We left Abu Malih early next morning, through narrow, blind watercourses with high mudbanks. On either side the land beyond the bank stretched away desolate and bare, the dead grey mud of cultivating land where as yet no green showed nor any water lay, but in front of us palm trees showed a mile or so ahead, and soon we turned into a wider channel whose beauty was breathtaking. Again and again I noticed it in the marshes and in the cultivating land around them—how enormously the impact of colour and verdure is heightened by the contrast that has gone before it, so that a single orange homespun blanket spread to dry on the side of a reed house may take on the splendour of an imperial robe, a single green tree hold the glory of a thousand returning springs, the mystery of eternal forests. To no part of the earth can spring bring transfiguration as it does to the flat lands of the Tigris and Euphrates. In the juvenescence of the year came Christ the tiger.

The waterway into which we turned now seemed Eden itself. On either bank grew groves of date palms, and in the spaces between them a riot of blossom spread against a sky of unbroken turquoise. Feathery golden acacia made a lattice work against that blue, the vivid flowers flaring in the slant of a sun that was not yet high, and low over the water that reflected the sky with the sheen of enamel trailed weeping trees, some with a crimson flower and some with a
white. It was the simple primary colours stippled upon the background of green growth that made the perfection; yet in the transient flash of wings were added wilder and more gorgeous hues. Across the water flickered the halcyon kingfishers, electric blue and chestnut and red, and from palm to palm in undulating flight flew rollers of unbelievable splendour, a flutter of pale blue and purple. Overhead, in the empty patch of sky above the water, a single flamingo flew southward, the sun catching the sheet of blood-colour under his wings.

Even the canoe boys seemed not quite unmoved; Sabeti leaned forward and touched me on the shoulder between strokes of the paddle.

“Zayn hinna, Gavin?”

“Na’am, kulish zayn.” It was simple to have a limited vocabulary; I did not have to try to put my confused thoughts into words.

To Thesiger I said idly: “I should like to build a reed house on that bank and live here.”

“The Iraqi government wouldn’t allow you to.”

No, one could not be allowed to build and live in Eden. One could look and perhaps remember, and in time the memory would lose its brilliance. Others were living in Eden, for there were scattered houses throughout the palm grove, but some were empty and abandoned. Their owners, perhaps, had seen Eden in the nearest oil-well or in the scrubby streets of Amara; for here, far north and outside the permanent marshlands, we were in the periphery of western influence.

The palm groves lasted for perhaps a mile, and then once more we were in open country, though here and there a golden acacia still flowered on the banks, so close to the water that Amara and Kathia, who were towing the canoe, had to stop and pass the rope round the water side of each. In an open space upon the bank, where no shrubs grew, we came upon a small herd of dun-coloured cattle, herded by
two small girls in vivid cotton dresses. Every cow had her udder painted magenta, but one at the water’s edge had been singled out for particular attention, for the most intimate part of her anatomy was dyed a gaudy cobalt blue. In close attendance upon her, and a little apart from the others, was the bull; his entire external sexual apparatus had been dyed to match. The cow wandered away from the herd and the bull snuffled after her; apart from the bright patch of colour on each they were dun-coloured against a dun landscape. The effect was more than grotesque, for their outlines merged into their neutral background, leaving only the blue portions substantial and significant, as bones show on a skeletal X-ray photograph; disembodied sexual organs out for a courting stroll on a fine spring morning. Thus must Adam and Eve have seemed to each other in the first awful moment after they had eaten of the fruit.

It conjured up great possibilities in my mind, this painting of whatever part of the body was of the greatest significance at the moment. It would be
de rigueur
for guests at a banquet to come with blue mouths and hands; for the speaker at a lecture to have a blue mouth and his audience blue ears. Visitors to art gallery or theatre would have blue eyelids; every dowager as she bent to sniff a blossom at the Chelsea Flower Show would have a blue nose. … And yet on reflection it was frightening to think how many people and for how much of the time would look just like the bull and the cow.

Two hours later we turned into the Chahala, a broad placid river with a fringe of palms and reed houses at both banks, and spent the night at the stone fort of Sheikh Sadam. With two or three other sheikhs’ homes I remember this place as unusual in that it was possible to stretch one’s legs and walk, even wander for a short distance, molested neither by dogs nor by crowds. Between the fort and the river was a big grassy stretch, almost a lawn, where one could stroll in company with a scruffy-looking tame Sacred
Ibis, and even the towpath of the river itself was deserted and delectable for the greater part of the time.

At the darkening we went across the two-hundred-yard-wide river to a house of Sabians upon the opposite bank. The great majority of skilled work in Southern Iraq is done by Sabians, and we wanted two things repaired; Hassan had finally succeeded in breaking the fishing spear which had first broken my nose, and I had lost the chain ring from the end of a pocket knife to which I was particularly attached.

Even now there is still much to be discovered about the Sabians, though their communities extend far into accessible territory.

In all there are perhaps ten thousand Sabians in Iraq. Their name is that of a religion, not of a race, and it is neither Muslim nor Christian; though, together with those and the Jewish faith, Mahommed classed them as “People of the Book”. Christ they look upon as a perverter of the truth, and he has no place in their religion, but John the Baptist they regard as a teacher of great wisdom, for they regard flowing water as the life-fluid, and with it are bound up all their elaborate rituals and customs. Thus they cannot live in the marshes, where the water is static, but on the rivers that surround them; and only the more secluded ones at that, for they seek privacy for their rites. (Once I told Thesiger of a cocktail party in London where in a momentary dead silence a voice went on loudly with the last words of a sentence. “… and only copulate at two o’clock in the morning, in running water.” “Ah,” said Thesiger, “Sabians”; but in fact the speaker had been describing some species of wildfowl.)

The Sabians, or
Subbi
as the Arabs call them—and the word has its root in the idea of immersion—have a script of their own, known only to their priests, and it is not uncommon to find fragments of pottery inscribed with their holy writings. Their religion has not spread beyond the frontiers of Iraq, and outside their own country they are
known chiefly for their silverwork, a closely guarded process whose result has the appearance of a photograph reproduced on smooth silver.

The two Sabian craftsmen to whose house we went that night were father and son, and apart from the difference in their ages were as alike as Tweedledum and Tweedledee, with whom they had in common, also, a certain squat solidity. Both were very short men with full patriarchal beards, that of the father white and that of the son black; both had a certain nobleness and placidity of expression, and both wore wire-rimmed spectacles with completely circular eyepieces. They wore long white robes, European jackets, and the red check headcloth that in other parts of the Middle East distinguishes a Sunni from a Shi’a, but which in Iraq is worn only by the Sabians. The house which we entered was also the workshop, and against the matting wall between the reed arches lay a handful of tools and a varied collection of scrap metal. The old man began to work on my knife, and as I watched him I was reminded vividly of somebody else.

When I was a child my family had a gamekeeper whose hobby it was to work with small mechanical things, and for this he had a genius that might, had he been born into a different
milieu,
have made of him a great inventor. Nothing broken but Hannam could mend it, from a wrist-watch to the axle of a car; no engineering problem was of too complex invention for Hannam to overcome it. When I was sixteen he made for me the only really efficient silencer for a .22 rifle that I have ever seen, and I remember his telling me then that he had discovered how to make a total silencer for a shot-gun, but that he would never make the invention public because it would be murder. All this intricate work he carried out in a primitive shed which he had built from hammered-out oil cans. He was comparatively well equipped with the tools of his trade, but that he could handle them at all with those great horny hands was a perpetual miracle.
I remember his thumbs as having the general appearance and degree of mobility of the big toes of a giant who went habitually barefoot, and when he was working with soldering irons I have seen the smoke curling up from them and smelt the tang of singeing flesh while he was unaware of any discomfort. Between one of these thumbs and a correspondingly unsuitable forefinger he would try for long minutes at a time to pick up some tiny screw that eluded him, and to aid him in this seemingly impossible task he would adjust a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles, the very counterparts of those that the Sabians wore, whose enormously thick lenses showed that their function was not to correct the vision but only to magnify. The comparison was extraordinarily complete; the spectacles, the big horny inept-looking hands, the innate dignity of bearing and gentle courtesy of manner. In such a community Hannam would have been among kindred spirits, though he would have had little patience with the rituals of religion. One day the Minister of the kirk met him on the road and reproached him with his habitual failure in kirk attendance, but Hannam replied good-humouredly: “Na, na, Minister, we’re the dodos, and we maunna fall oot wi’ each other. The next generation will have no use for either your profession or mine.”

Like Hannam, the Sabians were satisfied with no less than perfection in their work; and, also like Hannam, they would accept no payment for it, though this, I think, was in deference to Thesiger’s reputation as a benign power.

Early next morning we went on down the Chahala, broad, slow-running, and dreamy, reflecting a blue sky on a pale satin surface and fringed at both banks with reed houses and scattered palms. There was a
mudhif
every few hundred yards; the sheikhs here were two a penny, or, as one of the canoe boys put it in characteristically vivid phrase, “each
one in the fundamental orifice of the next”. After an hour we stopped at the
mudhif
of Yunis ibn Hafudh, a villainous-looking young man whom I would have wanted neither as friend nor enemy. The
mudhif
was bright with cushions and carpets spread by numerous and very black slaves; the rugs laid near to the door in the places of honour were garish and gaudy with aniline dyes and crude designs, but farther back and hiding apologetically in the shadows were a pair of old and really magnificent carpets, each some twenty-five feet long and ten feet across. One was worn in places, but the other was perfect; I know little of rugs, but these I could see were certainly worth quite a few hundred pounds. Thesiger followed my gaze.

“Fine, aren’t they? I’ve often noticed them. They don’t value them at all; it’s modern trash they like, and if they’ve got money that’s what they furnish their houses with. Don’t admire them or he’ll give them to us, and it would be embarrassing—I never accept presents in the marshes.”

The talk, for some reason that I forget, turned on birds, and here was another astounding example of the superstitions filling the heads even of wealthy people like these who not infrequently visited the big westernised cities. Yunis questioned us quite seriously as to the existence and geographical location of the bird who can carry away the roc who is carrying away an elephant. How simple and exciting life would be, I thought, if one could seek these miracles in the external sensory world without recourse to the dismaying miracles of science or where the human mind has cliffs of fall, frightful, sheer.

After a time the talk turned on a matter that I could not understand, and I began to look out through the
mudhif
entrance. A tame gazelle grazed some thirty yards away; on the opposite bank of the river a strikingly beautiful little girl was pasting dough into the inside of a conical mud oven. Her features were almost perfect, and unadorned by any tattooing; the regularity of the bone structure in itself would
have been beautiful without the addition of those glorious eyes, the golden skin, and the blue sheen on the flow of her straight hair that fell like a dark sheet of falling water to her shoulders, without the delicate lips and the expression that still held the sweetness of childhood. She was, I thought, the most beautiful child I had ever seen; then, as she straightened from the oven, her bright blue cotton dress outlined her small high breasts, and I realised that to these people she was not a child, and was in fact almost marriageable. She might have been twelve years old, but small for that age.

Sabeti, sitting at my shoulder, had noticed my absorption. “Helu, Gavin?” he whispered, nudging me, “t’arid?” “Na-am, helu,” I replied coldly. The image of that superb little creature in the arms of some loutish Ma’dan was not wholly pleasing.

Nearer to hand, just outside the entrance of the
mudhif,
a large reddish-coloured sheep, uncouth and comfortable-looking, lay munching with gusto from a pile of cut green
hashish.
Someone, a child perhaps, had twined a blue ribbon in the wool of her neck. She chewed the cud with her mouth open, and belched more than once; she appeared to enjoy what she was doing very much. As I watched her a man came round the corner of the
mudhif
carrying unsheathed a big curved knife. He grasped the sheep by the wool of her neck and dragged her protesting but still munching out of my line of vision. Thesiger had told me that this was a hospitable household who would probably kill a sheep for us; somehow it seemed to me unthinkable to eat that preposterous old harridan with her oafish and confiding ways, and that if I were required to swallow one mouthful of her I should be sick. She would still be munching as the knife slit her throat, and then she would die very slowly until at last she was choked by her own blood, and the blue ribbon would be sodden with it. Thesiger was unsentimental about animals, so I kept my thoughts to myself and ten
minutes later the man with the knife reappeared, carrying under his arm a huge pile of freshly cut
hashish.
At his heels trotted the egregious ewe, marvellously intact, uncouth and voracious as ever; in a kneeling attitude she began immediately upon the replenishment to her larder which was set before her.