The Prophet's Camel Bell (27 page)

“Yes. He is a fine boy, this one.” Then he glanced at me, and there was such a look of comprehension in his eyes that I was very much moved by his words. “I pray Allah send you a small boy, too.”

When Abdi's eyes became sore with dust and wind, I told him I would bathe them with boracic. I waited for a long time outside our tent, and finally Abdi showed up. He had gone to put on his best red shirt and robe before he would appear for treatment. When I had finished swabbing out his
eyes, he spoke the traditional blessing once again, so quietly and gently that I felt it was truly meant.

“Allah send you a son.”

Later that day he spoke to Jack about me.

“Your memsahib – a queen,” he said.

Abdi told Jack that he liked working for him because “you very strong – you always speaking true word – you always working hard” and also because “you never using wine.” This latter statement was not true, but perhaps there was a relative truth about it, for Abdi no doubt had known some
Ingrese
who were heavy drinkers, and he had the true Muslim's fanatical feeling against liquor. Abdi liked me, he said, because I was “always kind.” Both Jack and I felt he had judged us to be better than we were. We would hate to disillusion him – somehow we must try to live up to his opinion of us.

Is there a woman in this world who would not like to be told she is a queen, or a man who would not like to be told he is strong and just? In my diary, I recorded that it was surprising to find the ease with which “one gains their popularity” by showing friendliness and courtesy towards them. The Somalis, I went on to say, speaking generally but referring to Abdi, were good judges of character (naturally, they must be since they appeared to like me) and one of the chief ways in which they judged Europeans was whether or not the Europeans liked them. A later, much later, comment at the end of this paragraph bears in heavy lead pencil one word –
Bosh
. It was not all bosh, however – what I had really indicated by the initial statement was that I myself tended to judge people on whether or not I felt they liked me.

The night we were stranded on the Wadda Gumerad, in the storm, it was Abdi who kept us going. It was he who insisted that we must get the Land-Rover out of the mud and
move on, or we would be lost once and for all. It was he who managed to get the passing tribesmen to help us, and who avoided their mobbing us to get the rifle. He had saved our lives, and we felt with him the bond of that gruelling night. We spoke our thanks, and told him we would like to give something to him, not payment, of course, for one cannot pay for one's life, but as a token. What did he want? A new
lunghi
and shirt, he said. So the trivial gift, a shirt and a length of cotton cloth, was bought and given. It never occurred to us that it might have a different meaning for him than it did for us.

Abdi's face was impassive most of the time, expressionless, difficult to read as a stone graven with ancient hieroglyphs. The exception was when he had been out hunting and was coming back to camp with an
aul
or a
dero
. At such times, he arrived with the Land-Rover horn sounding triumphantly, and his face was exultant.

He had a passion for hunting, not only hunting for meat but for anything. He fixed up looped-wire traps to catch foxes, and he was delighted when we brought steel traps out to camp, for with these he could catch hyenas. He baited the traps with deer entrails, and frequently in the middle of the night we would hear the hyena's shriek, and the cry “
Warabe!
” from all the Somalis. Within seconds everyone would be out, peering at the trapped beast, but from a cautious distance. Abdi was invariably the one who went up to the animal and killed it with a club.

“Bastard!” he would yell (always, strangely, in English). “Where my sheep you kill? You want to sleep? You sleep!”

Bash! And the hyena's skull would be broken. The hyenas were hideous mongrel-looking creatures, with powerful shoulders and teeth, their hair a dirty beige with brown spots, their bellies pale and bloated. In the trap, they snarled
and lunged. Abdi appeared to have no fear of them. Seeing him approach those jaws, we were impressed by his cold nerve and courage. After a while we noticed, however, that he did not merely kill the hyenas. He continued to batter until the head was a red squashed mass. It was the same when he killed the Russell's viper which had been holding the birds captive with its eyes. No one else would go near, for this snake was a deadly one. Abdi walked up to it with his club and beat it to a pulp. When his stock died of thirst, or when his family became ill with malaria, or when his boys could not be sent to school because he did not have enough money, he could only say “It is Allah's will.” But the snake and the hyena – these he could strike.

When Abdi hunted for meat, he adhered absolutely to the Muslim law forbidding the eating of meat which has not died by having its throat slit. Originally, no doubt, this law was devised as a means of preventing people from eating carrion. But now the effect of it was sometimes dreadful to see, for Abdi would never shoot a deer to kill it. He tried only to wound it, and would then pursue it across the desert until he caught it and could cut its throat. Once, when we were out with him, he shot an
aul
in the guts, and it ran about crazily for what seemed an eternity, bleeding thickly, half its stomach shot away. It came close enough for me to see the terror in its eyes. Abdi chased it, laughing proudly all the time. When finally he caught it by the horns, he was careful to say the required prayer as his knife slid into the deer's throat. I felt sickened, and yet I knew it was foolish to feel this way. The
aul
was meat to him – it had been meat to him even before he shot it, and the prospect of meat in this country was always a matter for rejoicing. If I had known starvation, I would not be much concerned, either, about the death throes of a deer.

Abdi began to clash with Mohamed. He resented Mohamed's position in the camp, for he felt that Mohamed had too much influence with us, too great a tendency to cast aspersions on others. If anyone influenced our opinions, Abdi would have preferred it to be himself. Also, he felt that Mohamed was questioning his honour by telling him not to borrow our spoons, for the implication was that he might steal them. On several occasions he became almost berserk, raving and shouting against Mohamed until the fire had burned itself out.

We were caught between the two. All we wanted to do was keep the peace. We could not see why either of them should be making so much fuss about so little. We came to see something of Mohamed's outlook, but Abdi's was more difficult to see, for it was more deeply hidden. To us, the old warrior appeared to be two men. One was gentle, compassionate, courageous, the man who stopped the car rather than run over a bird, the man who sorrowed for his destitute people, the man who would walk calmly up to a poisonous snake. The other was fierce, violent, raging, the man who struck again and again at the dead animal, the man whose anger had to run its course before it faded. The two men seemed in direct opposition. But were they?

When his fury had passed, he was at peace for a while, and then he came to the brushwood hut and talked to me, telling me about a strange bird, the
ghelow
. I had seen this bird only once. It was sleek and mottled brown, with a long neck and a little darting head like a snake's.

“If some man die,” Abdi said, “always, we hear
ghelow
– crying, crying – all night.”

If there had been no moonlight for fifteen nights, or if any bad trouble was threatening the area, the bird sang its dirge until morning. An occult bird, a bird of magical powers.

The old warrior had recently heard the
ghelow
. He spoke sadly, with resignation, as though the coming evil could not be averted. And so it proved.

Abdi made it plain to Jack that he disapproved of my chatting with Arabetto and Mohamed. Sahib and memsahib we were, and must remain so. The rules must be maintained, or chaos might descend upon everyone. He did not accept change of any sort.

“Young men no good,” he told Jack frequently, speaking not only of Mohamed and Arabetto, but of all the young men whose changing views threatened his own.

Sometimes he asked us for things, and sometimes we gave him things he had not asked for. He asked Jack to go on his behalf to
P.W.D.
and get his pay raised, and Jack did so, for the old man worked hard and did his job well. I gave him old shirts of Jack's, to take to his numerous grown sons. He asked about getting some of his relatives hired on the
balleh
staff, and if the man in question seemed all right, Jack agreed. Three of the labourers and one driver were close relatives of Abdi's. Jack's outlook was that if Abdi's relatives in these cases were as good as anyone else, he might as well hire them rather than strangers. Unfortunately, as it turned out, this was not Abdi's interpretation at all.

Arabetto was the next object of Abdi's wrath. Arabetto's casual manner and his easy laughter seemed to infuriate the old man. When he was angry, he accused Arabetto of everything from theft to laziness, calling him a useless Arab, a diseased cur, and other even less acceptable names. Arabetto became, understandably, fed up with being nagged at and insulted all the time, and so he told Jack he would like to get a transfer to another job. Jack did not want to lose either man. He asked Arabetto to wait until the end of the month. We
knew now that the crisis was coming, but we could not bring ourselves to face it yet.

Then Jack had to fire one of the labourers, who had proven no good on the job. It transpired that the man was one of Abdi's relatives.

“We will take that man back,” Abdi said to Jack.

“Oh no, we damn well won't,” Jack replied angrily.

We were disappointed in him. We felt he had let us down, in behaving so unreasonably, in not being what we thought he was. Oddly, his demands on us grew rapidly from this point on. There seemed to be no end to his requests, and we began to feel preyed upon. He asked to have more relatives hired, and Jack refused. He went to visit his tribe, and Jack allowed him to take the Land-Rover and half a drum of water. When Abdi was about to depart, he told Jack he intended to take a full drum of water. Jack told him he must not do so, for we did not have enough water to spare. Abdi said nothing, but later we learned he had told a great many people that the sahib was a
shaitan
, a devil, and an exceedingly stingy one at that.

We had admired and trusted him. We had believed that he liked and trusted us. What was happening now was so painful to us that we tried not to think of it. But it could not be ignored much longer. We received constant complaints from the others, for Abdi seemed to be growing suspicious of everyone and to imagine that all men's hands were against him. Hersi reported a night-long meeting.

“I tell him, ‘Nothing is contained in bloody this place. Only suspicion. Nothing else. Who wanting to hurt you? Nobody. Abdi, dear cousin, you must not trying to run this camp.' For three hours, absolutely, he talking then, and no one understanding a word.”

The
ghelow's
voice had certainly been heard. Now, when
we drove with Abdi in the Land-Rover, he no longer said “God give you a son.” He was silent, and his face was sullen. In a profound disillusionment, I felt he must have despised us all along. In my notebooks I tried to express it, perhaps in order to remove its sting. “You come to a country, and you think that if you regard people as people, everything will be all right. Not so. With the Somalis, the attitude towards the British goes too deep to be broken casually. I feel now that Abdi's sweet talk to us was in the main a method for achieving favours. I think he has always hated us, simply because we are
Ingrese
, and that he could never feel any differently. He judges Europeans on what is given. He would rather be treated shamefully, and left in peace to hate us, as long as he is periodically given handouts of money and clothes, than he would be treated as a man and not given so much. The Somalis are proud, not grovelling, and in their own eyes they are aristocrats and warriors. But they are also terribly poor, their lives hounded by drought and disease. Many of them cannot treat Europeans as people. If we are sahib and memsahib, Abdi can do his job, and be polite, and try with a clear conscience to get as much as possible from us, secure in his basic hatred of us. Why should we be surprised? But we are. And hurt – for we trusted and in a way loved him. We can see now why he dislikes Mohamed and Arabetto so much. They are not so set in the mould. He considers them traitors. Jack cannot reason with him any more. He can only say – if you lose your temper, you lose your job. How strange it is to have to say things like that.”

Abdi's suspicions were ultimately directed against Hersi, who, as interpreter, had Jack's ear, or so Abdi believed. Jack was presented with a petition written by a town scribe at the direction of some of the tractor drivers, and signed by them, thumb-prints from those who could not write, and signatures
in Arabic from the others, for none were literate in English.

“Circumstances uprising from grounds of helplessness,” the petition said, “compelled us to place our grievances before your honour for necessary remedy. Originally, there existed One fire which was burning inside the whole Camp, but it is regretted to point out that the fire in question has become widespread all over the Camp and the Staff. Such fire can only be distinguished from the Top, or the Head, and the Head is the Head of the Department. The cause of that fire which rendered everybody helpless is ignited by the present interpreter, Hersi –”

Abdi's name did not appear on the petition. Jack made extensive enquiries, and the whole camp for several nights was loud with the sounds of argument. The meetings went on until dawn. It finally emerged that Abdi had persuaded the drivers to write the petition. His own relatives, naturally, had supported him, as they were all fearful of losing their jobs, and he had managed to convince the other drivers that they would all be fired unless Hersi was ousted.