The Prophet's Camel Bell (2 page)

For many men and women, princes and commoners from the distant forests and from the river lands as far away as the Niger, Somaliland was the end of a bitter journey and the beginning of a lifetime of bondage, for there the Arab slave routes had emerged at the sea, and from there the dhow-loads of slaves had once been shipped across the Gulf of Aden to be sold in the flesh markets of Arabia. In that same land, early this century, Mohamed Abdullah Hassan, the so-called Mad Mullah of Somaliland, had fought the British for years and was defeated only when at last his forts were bombed.

We read of these events, and pondered them. But they could not tell us what we would find there now.

At last the
Tigre
steamed into Rotterdam. About time, too. We were disgruntled and irritable after a week of having been snubbed by hotel clerks who had rapidly discovered our penury. We tramped on board dully, expecting nothing. To our amazement, we found we were the only passengers, and there, spread out before us, was our accommodation – the owner's suite, an unbelievably spacious three rooms, full of polished brass and green plush and shiny mahogany, and best of all, paid for by the Crown Agents. When we had recovered from the initial shock, we set ourselves to adjust to our altered status.

“We mustn't act surprised,” Jack said with a grin, as he
sprawled luxuriously on the Edwardian velour sofa. “The idea is that we take it all completely for granted.”

But I could not get over the wonder of it, especially the fact that we had our own bathroom. In our year in London, we had lived in a bed-sittingroom and shared a bathroom with so many others that the nightly bath schedule was like a railway timetable.

The
Tigre
was our home for a month, and we developed a high regard for Norwegians. As passengers, we must have been a nuisance to them, but they never resorted to mere cold politeness. They were warmly friendly, and gave us the run of the ship. We were invited up to the bridge, and allowed to peer through the Captain's binoculars. We chatted with Johan, the wireless operator, about modern American writers, feeling ashamed that we knew nothing of modern Norwegian writers. Hemingway was his favourite – there was a writer a man could understand.

At night sometimes we went up to the bridge and talked with the second mate while he was on watch. He was a burly, laughing man, who had sailed in the West Indies a great deal. Once he did not see his wife for ten years, he told us. In Montreal, on one occasion, he and a companion smuggled two girls aboard. The men had adjoining cabins, and suddenly through the wall had come an enquiring voice.

“Marie, are you doing any wrong in there?”

“No, Germaine,” was the virtuous reply, “I'm not.”

“Well, then,” called Germaine, “pray forgiveness for me.”

These French-Canadian girls, the second mate said. His laughter went booming out over the dark sea.

We were on the
Tigre
for Christmas. The Norwegians celebrated mainly on Christmas Eve, when there was a mammoth dinner and gifts all around. Jack was given a bottle
of Scotch, while I received a little marzipan pig with a verse attached to it.

That evening we sang carols in Norwegian, with the aid of
aqua vite
and songbooks, although the only word Jack and I could understand was “halleluja.” Johan, who had discovered that Jack's people came from the Shetland Islands, originally settled by Norsemen, leaped to his feet and proposed a toast.

“ To our ancestors and yours – the vikings!”

“
Skol!
” shouted everyone. It was a fine Christmas.

At Genoa the ship stopped for several days, and we walked on the hills and saw the harsh port town softened by distance, the pink and yellow walls looking clean and pastel although in fact they were dirty and garish, the harbour with the big rusty freighters packed in prow to stern, and the tugboats skimming around like frantic water-beetles. At the Staglieno cemetery, where marble angels loomed like spirits of vengeance among the green-black cypress trees and where the poor rented graves for seven years, we met two Englishmen who said they wondered if they had not been foolish after all to visit sunny Italy in mid-winter. The day was piercingly cold and we were needled by a sharp unceasing wind. We walked along with them to find a place where we could get shelter and a warm drink. The Englishmen had surely read somewhere how the English are expected to behave in foreign lands, for they were loyally true. They ordered tea.

“But first –” one of them said anxiously to the proprietor, “tell me, please – can you really make it properly?”

The Mediterranean, that time of year, was truly the
wine-dark sea. High up on the
Tigre
, whipped by the icy winds, we watched the wild hills of Sicily pass by. At night we saw a far-off red glow in the black sky, Mount Etna in eruption. And sometimes in the darkness we saw a phosphorescence, plankton perhaps, frothing up suddenly in the waves and seeming to run along the surface of the water like sheet lightning. I wrote in my notebook – “for the first time, I can believe we are in southern waters.”

Port Said, and my first view of the mysterious East was a CocaCola sign in Arabic. But the dhows were there, too, with their curved prows and triangular sails, shabby little fishing dhows with the nets slung to dry between the masts, and big trading dhows from the ports of the Red Sea and as far away as the Persian Gulf, coming here with their cargoes of dates and millet or marvellously patterned carpets woven in Basra or Sheraz, perhaps, by weavers who learned their craft as children and were said to go blind young over their looms.

We went ashore and walked the crowded and intricate streets where stained mud buildings stood side by side with slick stuccoed apartment blocks in florid pinks and greens. Rows of ragged palms fringed the roads where horse-drawn carriages unbelievably rattled along like old engravings come to life. And the people – merchants waddling slow and easy in long striped robes and maroon fezzes, nimble limping beggars who trailed the tourists, girl children with precociously knowing eyes, self-styled guides who hovered around us like the city's flies, wizened and hunched labourers wearing only a twist of rag around skinny hips, boys in flapping cotton pyjamas, business men in draped suits and shiny tan shoes, police in sand-coloured breaches and black jack-boots, thin stooped Egyptian women all in black and wearing the thick
veil of
purdah
, westernized Egyptian girls with long black hair and short white skirts and high rhinestoned heels, the conjuring gully-gully men who would clench an empty fist and then open it and presto – there was a live chick.

Bustling up to us came a plump and jazzy character, gabardine-suited, looking like a smaller edition of King Farouk in sunglasses and Panama hat. Port Said was a city of thieves, he informed us. He personally would see to it that we were protected from these undesirables. He called himself Billy the Kid, and told us he could get us anything we wanted for a reasonable price – binoculars, cameras, watches. We thanked him, but declined. He pattered along beside us for a while, and finally departed for greener pastures, singing “Rum And Coca-Cola.” We heard, echoing back to us, a voice jaunty as a sparrow.

“Working for the Yankee dollah!”

In the course of the afternoon, we shed many of his kind. We were a little pleased with ourselves. To avoid the clutches of the sharks and sharpers – that is not such an easy thing. We wandered through bazaars hung with cotton carpets horribly embellished with scarlet pyramids, blue camels, tigers yellow as egg-yolk. We looked at crocodile handbags, some plainly imitation and some possibly genuine, and all manner of cheap jewellery and souvenirs. Then, in a back-street shop apparently unvisited by tourists, we saw inlaid cigarette boxes. The inlay was ivory, the man told us. We were not deceived. We knew it was not ivory but bone. We liked the patterns, however, so we dickered over price and finally bought. We carried that cigarette box around with us for years, and ultimately in its old age it became a crayon box for our children. When it was left outside in the rain, not long ago, a small illusion was shattered. The inlay was not even bone – it was lacquered paper.

Who would ever suspect that the air would be so cold going through the Suez Canal? We put on all the sweaters we owned, wrapped ourselves in coats, and from the
Tigre
decks we watched the nearby shore where camels were squashing stoically through the beige sand. The water was a deep blue, so strong a colour it looked as though it had been dyed, and the sky, filled with particles of dust, was an astonishing violet. Villages of square clay houses slipped past us, and tattered children, and black cattle, and women in
purdah
.

The bleak stretches of the Sinai desert, then, and the distant peak of Mount Sinai where Moses received the stone tablets of the Law. And I recalled what I had chanced to read only a short time before.

Jack had foresightedly brought
War and Peace
, and in Rotterdam he had settled down to read it. But I had gone ill-provided with reading material and had paced the hotel room until I discovered in a dressing-table drawer the ubiquitous Gideons Bible and read for the first time in my life the five books of Moses. Of all the books which I might have chosen to read just then, few would have been more to the point, for the Children of Israel were people of the desert, as the Somalis were, and fragments from those books were to return to me again and again.
And there was no water for the people to drink – and the people thirsted
. Or, when we were to wonder how the tribesmen could possibly live and maintain hope through the season of drought –
In the wilderness, where thou hast seen how that the Lord thy God bare thee, as a man doth bear his son, in all the way that ye went
. Or the verse that remained with me most of all, when at last and for the first time I was myself a stranger in a strange land, and was sometimes given hostile words and was also given, once, food and shelter in a time of actual need, by tribesmen who had little enough for
themselves –
Thou shalt not oppress a stranger, for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt
.

Aden at night. The shore lights seemed frail and wavering in the black vastness of sky and water. This was the parting of the ways, for here we would leave the familiar, the clean and well-ventilated world of the
Tigre
, and move into something entirely different. From now on, we were committed to a land and a life about which we knew nothing.

We leaned over the railing and watched as our crates of books and dishes, our trunks of clothing, were carried off the
Tigre
and onto the small launch wobbling in the water below. Everything was carried on the heads or the backs of coolies. One very tall labourer, clad only in a loincloth, bent himself and braced his broad bare feet while the others heaved onto his back our largest trunk. His legs were so thin and reed-like, his sweating and trembling body so emaciated, that he looked as though he must buckle and break under the load. No one seemed concerned. The only anxiety was that the trunk might slip off and plunge into the harbour. Goods were more expensive than men, here. There were millions like him, in every city throughout the East, men with names and meanings, but working namelessly and with no more meaning than any other beast of burden. It occurred to me that Markham's lines were more applicable here now than in Europe.

The
Velho
, which had been chugging from Aden to
Berbera and back again for more years than anyone knew, was a ship inhabited by ghosts. The presence of Englishmen long dead clung around the saloon, where the bolted-down tables were once glossily veneered but were now chipped, their surfaces ringed with the wet glasses of innumerable greetings and partings. Behind the bar, a gilt and curlicewed mirror reflected leadenly the bottles of gin, orange squash, Rose's lime juice. The air reeked heavily of tobacco smoke, curried soup, foul dishwater. The brass bar-rail was worn with decades of boots, men leaning there lazily, joyously, on their way to Aden and then home on leave, or heavily, tensely, on their way back to Somaliland again. In some cases, it would have been the other way around, men who went on leave only because it was compulsory, men who could hardly wait to leave London behind and get back to an exile that had become beloved. They were all there that evening, as we sipped our gin-and-lime and reflected on the place and those who had passed this way before us.

A firm of Bombay merchants owned the
Velho
, which had room for nine first-class passengers, eight second-class and an indefinitely large number of third. She was the flagship of the fleet, our fellow passengers informed us. Her sister ship, the
Africa
, was not so grand. We found our first-class cabin something of a contrast to our suite on the
Tigre
. The room was approximately the size of a matchbox, and the Indian clerk who had accompanied us on board had advised us to cram as much of our baggage as possible into the cabin with us.

“Otherwise, sar, you might enquire after it next morning quite in vain, oh my goodness yes.”

The mattresses on the narrow, rough-plank bunks were straw, and of an indescribable skimpiness. The grey hue of the sheets suggested that they had been used for the last dozen
voyages or so. I had an unpleasant suspicion that we were not the only living creatures in this cabin. I would have preferred to encounter the bar-room ghosts in any visible form rather than the host of winged and many-legged things which my imagination assured me were ready to attack from every crack in the timbering, every straw in my palliasse. The rustlings and faint scratchings went on all night, and I remained stiff as bronze, open-eyed.