A Reed Shaken by the Wind (20 page)

Our evening meal, however, was ruthlessly chased to a standstill before our eyes, but tasted none the worse for it. We had gone on a mile or so down the river to Mutashar, part of a straggling ribbon development on banks that were now of drab mud, unrelieved by any growth. There was much traffic on the river here, big dhows with forty-foot masts, whose full sails did little more in the still thundery air than counteract the river’s current against them, so that the labouring men on the towpath, grotesquely naked from the waist downward made no more than some two miles an hour. Then the rain came, and the surface of packed mud between the houses became in a moment a puddled expanse of slippery clay. Here, still outside the marshes, there were no reeds to be thrown down as sand is thrown on any icy road in an English winter, and in a few minutes patches of water had formed, into which the big drops of the thunder shower splashed and sizzled.

The rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun, but it left an interesting terrain for the capture of our dinner. With the end of the shower poultry had come out from the shelter of their owners’ houses, and were regarding with obvious discontent the unscratchable surface around them. We were sitting in a
mudhif
from which the covering reed matting had been rolled up for the first four feet all round, so that the overhead structure formed a canopy, as it were, leaving unimpeded vision on all sides. Our host called a boy to him and indicated a splendid and extremely inedible-looking cock who picked his way majestically among the puddles. He was a very remarkable bird, and would have commanded more than passing attention in any farmyard.
He had the vivid colouring of the wild Indian jungle fowl, more familiar to most people now through nineteenth-century prints of cock-fighting, but he was as big as a Rhode Island Red and his spurs were four inches long.

The boy beckoned another, and the two of them began to close in upon this gaudy fowl with cautious squelches through the mud. He realised their intention at once, and early lost his dignity, his steps becoming short and uncertain, his neck craning from side to side in little nervous jerks. At length he undertook a flurried rush, his fright bursting from his throat in staccato hysteria. One of the two boys bounded to cut him off, slid, and came down on his face in the mud. By the time he had recovered himself the cock, with the second boy hard on his heels, had disappeared round the corner of a house. The hunt was out of our sight for perhaps a minute, though a swelling babel of shrill cries told that the cock was holding off the challenge. At length he shot into view again, leading by a full ten yards a rabble of a dozen or more children of all ages armed with sticks or reeds, splashed from head to foot with mud, and skidding in wild pandemonium at every corner. A girl dashed out from her house trying to head off the quarry, lost her footing and went over on her face with her sole garment round her shoulders and her round golden posteriors bare to the sky. Round and round, in and out among the houses laboured the panting procession, the cock still holding his lead and the pack behind him growing every minute. At length two or three pi-dogs, gradually stirred by the commotion out of their flea-scratching lethargy, began to harass the fugitive in a half-hearted sort of way from the flanks and the front; and the cock, now panting and exhausted, suddenly sought sanctuary. It was a cruel chance that he sought it in the heart of the enemy camp. The pack was out of sight behind him as for perhaps the twentieth time he legged it across the open space outside our
mudhif,
and, outflanked by a yapping cur, he made a sudden dive for
its shelter. He stood among us in the half light within, gasping but quite motionless, the splendid green plumage of his tail trembling lightly. I would have accorded him the sanctuary that the dim light and the arches seemed to demand, for even the humblest
mudhif
is a little like a cathedral, but our host leant over with a laugh and scooped him up; he left the
mudhif
with the cock in one hand, swinging by the legs, and a curved marshman’s knife in the other.

At Mutashar we were near to the edge of the permanent marsh again, and only a few miles from Dibin. Someone in the
mudhif
had recently returned from there, and told us that three days ago the eagle owl had been alive and well. We reached Dibin the next evening, and as the permanent marsh closed round us again, greener, denser, and more confined than it had been three weeks before, I realised that I welcomed it, and that some part of me had fretted for it during our stay among the cultivating people. I could have made the marshes my home, but never the unfriendly wastes of mud and irrigating channels that surrounded them.

We went to the
mudhif.
The scene had changed much since we were last here; Dibin seemed no longer a mud island in a great lake on whose surface grew scattered and withered sedge, for the new verdure of soft and bending reed leaves grew everywhere to within a stone’s throw of the houses, and a few hundred yards away, where the passage of boats had not hindered their growth, a canoe and its standing occupant became quickly hidden among them.

No one referred to the eagle owl, and after a little time I inquired for it. I thought the people looked a little furtively at each other. It was not well, they said, had not been well for two days. They brought it to me. Those three weeks since I had seen it had made the changes that as many months would have made for a human prisoner in Buchenwald or Belsen. There was no flesh at all upon the breast, and the
great blade of the bone stood out like a knife through the feathers. The feathers were coated with hardened slime and filth, and someone had pulled its tail out; one eye was inflamed and partially closed. Its crop, however, was full, and bulging with some soft squashy matter. It had grown dark in the
mudhif,
and I carried the bird out of the circle of the firelight and set it down in the deep shadows between the feet of the farther arch columns. I was angry for the humiliation of something beautiful and savage, angry as I would be for these people themselves when they became humiliated by the soiling contact of our modern civilisation. They felt none of this, any more than the people of the oil fields felt it for the tribesmen who drifted in to them and put off their
dish-dashas
for soiled and shoddy western clothes, their primitive convictions for soiled and shoddy western ideas that fitted no better than their shabby suits. The sight of all humiliation is unbearable to me, and I have often regretted my ready ability to identify myself with animals as well as humans, bringing as it does a sharing of too much misery.

I came back to the circle and asked what they had given the bird to eat. What I had told them, they said; a few birds, bats from the roof of the
mudhif,
and sometimes a little fish. Then I asked what its crop was full of at the moment. Thesiger did the translation for me, and he was infected a little by my anger, for he had a feeling for creatures of prey. They said they did not know, for the woman of the
mudhif
had fed it that day. I went back to the owl with a torch. It had brought up the contents of its crop, and was very obviously dying. At first I thought that it was some kind of meat that lay on the ground beside it in the dim light of the torch. Then I saw what it really was; it was date pulp. The woman came into the
mudhif
just then, and I went back to the fire and told Thesiger about the dates. Thus driven into a corner this shocking female confessed unashamedly to having forcibly fed that great bird of prey first with whole
slabs of doughy Arab bread and then, when it looked rather unwell as a result, with a mush of pulped dates. Probably it had never had a morsel of flesh since we left Dibin. “And I suppose,” Thesiger concluded a summary of her mental powers, “that if you had a captive lion you would feed it on grapes and
hashish
.”

The great bird died a few hours later, draggled and contorted. Poor humiliated eagle of the silent glittering night, wings clipped, tail pulled out, stuffed with bread and dates until it died squalidly on the ground, stained with its own excrement, in a dim corner of its captors’ dwelling, one great orange eye still open and staring out to the stars.

I brooded over the owl. Part of my tension, I recognised, was due to the removal from me of a promised shred of responsibility; I should have had the well-being of a living creature to care for, a little outlet for my restless and frustrated energy, an object for the desire to protect something that is always strong in me. I felt an unreasonable hatred for that witless woman with her show of bustle and competence, and contempt that even her avarice had not mastered her stupidity. Thinking of these things, I was not trying to understand the conversation around me when the words
“celb mai”
caught my ear. “What was that about otters?” I asked Thesiger.

“I think we’ve got you that otter cub you said you wanted. This fellow comes from that village half a mile away; he says he’s had one for about ten days. Very small and sucks milk from a bottle. Do you want it?”

I said, “It sounds exactly what I wanted, but I think we’d better not say anything definite. It might be the owl over again; probably they’ve been giving it methylated spirits.”

The otter’s owner said he would fetch it and be back in half an hour or so. He got up and went out; through the entrance of the
mudhif
I could see his canoe glide away silently over the star-reflecting water.

Presently he returned carrying the cub, came across into the firelight and put it down on my knee as I sat cross-legged. It looked up and chittered at me gently. It was the size of a kitten or a squirrel, still a little unsteady on its legs, with a stiff-looking tapering tail the length of a pencil, and it exhaled a wholly delightful malty smell. It rolled over on its back, displaying a round furry stomach and the soles of four webbed feet.

“Well,” said Thesiger, “do you want her?” I nodded. “How much are you prepared to pay for her?”

“Certainly more than they would ask.”

“I’m not going to pay some ridiculous price—it’s bad for prestige. We’ll take her if they’ll sell her for a reasonable price; if not, we’ll get one somewhere else.”

I said, “Let’s make certain of getting this one; we’re near the end of the time now, and we may not get another chance. And after all the prestige doesn’t matter so much as this is your last visit to the marshes.” I saw this fascinating little creature eluding me for the sake of a few shillings’ worth of prestige, and the negotiations seemed to me interminable.

In the end we bought the cub for five dinar, the price to include the rubber teat and the filthy but precious bottle from which she was accustomed to drink. Bottles are a rarity in the marshes.

Most infant animals are engaging, but this cub had more charm per cubic inch of her tiny body than all the young animals I had ever seen. Even now I cannot write about her without a pang.

I cut a collar for her from the strap of my field-glasses—a difficult thing, for her head was no wider than her neck—and tied six foot of string to this so as to retain some permanent contact with her if at any time she wandered away from me. Then I slipped her inside my shirt, and she snuggled down at once in a security of warmth and darkness that she had not known since she was reft from her mother. I carried her like that through her short life;
when she was awake her head would peer wonderingly out from the top of the pullover, like a kangaroo from its mother’s pouch, and when she was asleep she slept as otters like to, on her back with her webbed feet in the air. When she was awake her voice was a bird-like chirp, but in her dreams she would give a wild little cry on three falling notes, poignant and desolate. I called her Chahala, after the river we had left the day before, and because those syllables were the nearest one could write to the sound of her sleeping cry.

I slept fitfully that night; all the pi-dogs of Dibin seemed to bark at my ears, and I dared not in any case let myself fall into too sound a sleep lest I should crush Chahala, who now snuggled in my armpit. Like all otters, she was “house-trained” from the beginning, and I had made things easy for her by laying my sleeping bag against the wall of the
mudhif
, so that she could step straight out on the patch of bare earth between the reed columns. This she did at intervals during the night, backing into the very farthest corner to produce, with an expression of infinite concentration, a tiny yellow caterpillar of excrement. Having inspected this, with evident satisfaction at a job well done, she would clamber up my shoulder and chitter gently for her bottle. This she preferred to drink lying on her back and holding the bottle between her paws as do bear cubs, and when she had finished sucking she would fall sound asleep with the teat still in her mouth and a beatific expression on her baby face.

She accepted me as her parent from the moment that she first fell asleep inside my pullover, and never once did she show fear of anything or anyone, but it was as a parent that I failed her, for I had neither the knowledge nor the instinct of her mother, and when she died it was because of my ignorance. Meanwhile this tragedy, so small but so complete, threw no shadow on her brief life, and as the days went by she learned to know her name and to play a little as a kitten does, and to come scuttling along at my heels if I
could find dry land to walk on, for she hated to get her feet wet. When she had had enough of walking she would chirp and paw at my legs until I squatted down so that she could climb up and dive head first into the friendly darkness inside my pullover; sometimes she would at once fall asleep in that position, head downward with the tip of her pointed tail sticking out at the top. The Arabs called her my daughter, and used to ask me when I had last given her suck.

I found myself missing Chahala as I wrote of her, so I set down my manuscript book and pen and went to the open door and whistled, and out of the sea fifty yards away came Mijbil, Chahala’s successor, and galloped up over the sand and pranced round me like a puppy, and then came in with me and went to sleep on his back on the hearthrug. Mijbil was a very important otter, of a race quite new to science, and that discovery might never have been made if Chahala had not died; but still I think I would rather she had lived and
Lutrogale perspicillata maxwelli
had remained incognito, for in assuming my name and remaining my constant companion for a year he took too much of my heart.