The Prophet's Camel Bell (19 page)

After miles of driving and tramping, working with compass and hand-level, after boring test-holes and digging test-pits, after examining rock and soil, after looking at the region's few existing
ballehs
– the hand-dug shallow water holes of the Somalis, after pondering morosely on the possible and dreaming of the impossible, Jack at last got the pattern set. Each reservoir would be a large rectangular hole dug at the foot of a carefully selected slope. The earth which was removed would be banked up around the sides and lower end, making a huge U with the arms pointing uphill, although the slopes were so gradual that “uphill” was really too extreme a word. In order to reach out and gather the water that perhaps once a year, for a few brief hours, might come coursing down this slope in a thousand little rivulets, long walls would stretch out from the top of the U. Low banks of earth a thousand feet long or more, these wing-walls would check the water and deflect it very slowly towards the reservoir so that as little silt as possible would be carried with it. Beyond the ends of these walls, ploughed furrows would stretch further out and very slightly up, and would divert and channel the annual bounty on a front of over half a mile.

Rock too hard for a plough or a ripper existed no more than six or eight feet down, and so the reservoirs would be disproportionately shallow and evaporation would be more serious than one would wish. Ironically enough, although the rock was impervious to the attack of our equipment, it was not
at all impervious to water, and no clay deposits were present here which could make the bottom of the
ballehs
water-tight. Fortunately there was some clay mixed with the silt and sand, and Jack knew from observation that the Somalis would drive their camels into the water when it had become shallow, so little by little the animals' feet would pack a natural cement bottom as the years went by.

Thirty
ballehs
were to be built, spaced about ten miles apart, along the waterless area three hundred miles long, just north of the Ethiopian border. Each
balleh
would have a capacity of about three million gallons and would provide water for approximately three months after being filled by rain.

The planning of the
ballehs
and the selection of sites had been a long and painstaking business, but although Jack had had a good deal of anxiety over it, he had also enjoyed it more than any other job he had ever done, for this was the first time he had ever been able to put his own ideas into practice. He had been impatient to get started on the excavation, but even after the equipment had finally been hauled here all the way from Djibouti, the actual construction of the
ballehs
could not begin until Somali drivers were trained to operate the machinery.

Easier said than done, this. Swarms of eager young men had applied for the jobs, and although a few of them had driven trucks, most had never even seen a tractor, and the scrapers were totally unfamiliar to them, for there had never been any scrapers in this country before. Six men were finally selected. Being aware that the tractors were virtually irreplaceable, and therefore having a strongly protective feeling towards them, Jack was apprehensive about them in the hands of the all-too-enthusiastic Somali novices. The Somali boys, for their part, were terribly anxious to hold their jobs and to do well, and so they would frequently demonstrate their talent by
attempting to perform some outlandish feat which would strain even those machines, tough as they were. Or, out of ignorance, they would zoom gaily along in the wrong gear, and Jack would have to dash out to save the precious machinery. With three tractors cavorting around in this manner, it was not easy to keep an eye on all of them at the same time. They reminded me of boys on bicycles at home –
Look at me, Ma! No hands!

But now, at last, the drivers were trained, in a manner of speaking, and the great day was here. The first day's excavation went well. From the sidelines, Mohamed and Hersi and I watched while the ripper chewed at the soil and the scrapers began to shovel up the chunks of earth. The wilderness was quiet no longer. The tractors whoomed unceasingly. Around us, the dust was churned up and settled like red flour at our feet.

In the evening, Gino brought a straw-covered bottle of Chianti to the brushwood hut. This was the champagne with which the job was launched.

“Here's to the
ballehs
!”

We were optimistic, re-charged with hope. All our troubles were over, we felt, knowing full well they were not, but willing to believe for a moment that everything would go like a song from now on.

The evenings were cold. After dinner we sat in the brushwood hut, shivering in our sweaters and jackets, and listening to the squeaky trembling voice that issued from Arabetto's old gramophone. He had a few well-worn Italian records, and he and Gino would listen nostalgically to
Santa Lucia
, one of them remembering Mogadisciou and the other remembering Milan. Arabetto was the only Somali who had a taste for this foreign music – the others pronounced it an abomination to
the ears. Arabetto told us with amusement about the reaction of one of the labourers to the gramophone.

“He never see such thing before. He say – is it some devil, or is some small man inside?”

Another evening entertainment, if it could be called that, was watching the insects grimly battling. The large black crickets, noisy as a calypso steel band, emerged at sundown from the ground. We saw them digging their way up – plop! plop! – and there they were, hundreds of them crawling around at our feet. Then the sausage flies began buzzing through the air, their plump bodies clumsy and hardly able to fly, looking exactly like miniature sausages. An English sahib of local legend was reputed to enjoy eating these creatures – at parties, he would pluck them from the air and pop them in his mouth, and all the ladies would bleat and shriek to see him chewing. It struck me that there must surely be easier ways to establish one's reputation as a character.

The next insects to put in an appearance at the evening battlefield were the killers, the black
jinna
or stink-ants, with their voracious jaws. When a sausage fly dropped bumbling to the ground, or a cricket faltered, the
jinna
would be upon it instantly, and within seconds it would have been devoured. We tried to avoid stepping on the
jinna
, for when we did, they gave off the most rank odour imaginable.

The Somalis had an enigmatic tale about the stink-ant. They said that if you went to the
jinna
and asked him why he was so thin in the waist, he would explain – “It is a result of riding a great deal on a fine horse. Anyone knows that riding draws in the waist.” And if you asked him why he had such a foul stench, he would answer, “Because I once visited a woman who had a stinking birth.” And if you asked him why his jaws were open so wide, he would reply, “Because I used to go with
a group of boys from village to village, dancing, and I was the one who went in front, shouting that we did not come to beg food or money, but only came to dance.” I do not pretend to understand this story, but the Somalis considered it uproariously funny.

The brushwood hut in the evening was a place of contentment. In the navy-coloured sky, the white clouds scudded silently across the moon. Outside the thorn-bough fence that enclosed our camp, we heard the low sullen moan of a hyena or the yapping of foxes. Many hyenas came snooping around our camp at night, and from the half-joking comments of the Somalis, I began to suspect that there was some magical significance attached to them. When I enquired if this was so, Hersi shook his head in emphatic denial.

“Our religion is forbidding such magical things absolutely,” he said. “We are Muslims, memsahib, Muslims.”

I begged his pardon and the matter was dropped. But one day Mohamed told me that the night before they had heard a scuffling out beyond the camp, where our hyena trap was always set, and when they went out to see, they found that the hyena had pushed a stick into the trap and in this way had avoided being caught itself.

“Hyena is very clever,” Mohamed said, tapping his forehead. “He think just like a man.”

Then he told me that the Esa people around Borama were reputed to be able to talk with hyenas. This idea, I recalled, was expressed in a
belwo
.

Mohamed told me that many people believed that every so-many years the hyenas lost their cowardice and became man-eating. There was a basis in fact for this belief, for in the dry Jilal the hyenas roamed the streets of the towns at night, looking for water, or going to the meat market in search of offal, and when they came in packs they sometimes carried off a small child. The supernatural powers attributed to hyenas might have been some survival of the totem idea, identifying tribes with animals in order to obtain the benefit of the animal's powers. Perhaps the beliefs were also encouraged by the fact that hyenas always disappeared completely and mysteriously in the daytime.

I took a keen interest in these magical beliefs, and then one day I was paid back in full measure for my unintentional condescension. Gino had made a miniature wood stove of cast iron, complete with oven, a perfect replica of the kind of stove I remembered from my childhood, and he said I might use this intriguing toy. It took a whole morning for me to bake a cake, for the stove was so small that it had to be fed with chips and shavings, and the cake took twice the usual time in the oven. On the first occasion, Mohamed was gloomy and disapproving.

“I think you no bake today, memsahib.”

Why not, I asked him.

“Today Friday,” he said. “If you make cake today, must be it will not come good.”

I disagreed. Friday might be the Muslim sabbath, but it was not mine. Besides which, I was not superstitious.

I went ahead, and the carefully tended cake fell flat. Mohamed could not resist beaming broadly at this fulfilment of his prophecy. I never baked on a Friday again. And after that day, the cakes rose beautifully, just as Mohamed had known they would.

——

We drove out at twilight across the great plain, looking for
gerenuk
and
dero
, for we had a lot of men in camp now and they needed meat. All at once we saw an appealing sight – a huge she-ostrich, very fussily maternal, with no less than eighteen young ones, all traipsing solemnly behind her, single file. She craned her neck and looked back to inspect her little troop – yes, they were all there, and safe. We drew up the Land-Rover and waited quietly until they had marched past. Young ostriches were often snatched by hyenas, but a mother ostrich would stand up to a hyena and could deal it such a powerful blow with her feet that it would go off yelping across the desert. In Hargeisa, a neighbour of ours had a pet baby ostrich which was cared for by the stable boy, a tall Somali youth whose nickname was Aul and who was as graceful as the deer of that name. When we went back to our house for an occasional week-end, we saw Aul every morning leaping lightly into the ostrich's pen.

“
Gorayo! Is ka warran!
” He greeted it always in the same way. “Ostrich! Give news of yourself!”

But the small ostrich, who was exceedingly dowdy and draggle-feathered, did not utter a sound.

One day in the Haud we found an ostrich's nest, with its two layers of gigantic eggs carefully covered with sand. The Somalis were overjoyed, as they loved to eat the eggs, one of which would make an omelette sufficient for several hungry men. We took one of the eggs for ourselves, and Jack blew it out so that we could keep the shell. To do so, he had to drill into it with a hand-drill, for it was of the consistency of thick bone china. When we had it cleaned out, and on display in our truck-home, the Somalis began to make optimistic remarks.

“I think you get small boy now, memsahib,” Mohamed said confidently.

What was this? What did he mean? Hersi obligingly explained.

“Soon you will be conceiving,” he said gravely. “This ostrich egg is very helpful for such considerations.”

This was the same Hersi who did not believe in magic. The ostrich egg, it appeared, was a powerful fertility charm. The Somalis had been concerned for some time about my childless state, and they knew quite well that I was concerned about it, too. They regarded the ostrich egg hopefully – aid had arrived. Only Abdi did not have sufficient faith in this object. Perhaps he felt that, being
Ingrese
, I would require double the usual quantity of helpful magic.

“Lion fat,” he informed us. “I think you needing this thing. If woman eating fat from the
libahh
, soon she get child.”

When he was out hunting
gerenuk
, he searched in the thickets and thorn bushes, but alas for my unborn children, he found no lion. Occasionally we heard their voices, rumbling and coughing in the night, and once or twice we saw pug-marks in the morning sand, but the beasts remained cannily hidden.

One day Abdi found something else, however, almost as good. Although of no magical use, this catch was a triumph. He returned to camp with the Land-Rover horn blaring, his victory music, and everyone dashed out to see. Springily as a boy, the old warrior leaped out and showed us what he had brought back – two cheetah.

It was against the law to shoot cheetah, and Abdi knew this as well as anyone. But he had seen four of them under a
qoda
tree. Old marksman that he was, he had been quite unable to resist the temptation. He shrugged and threw up his hands
– how could anyone fail to comprehend his predicament?

“I never no think,” he said. “I see them – one, two three, four
harimaad
. Quickly quickly, I taking rifle – bam! bam! I get two. You think sahib coming angry?”

“No, I don't think so, Abdi.”