The Prophet's Camel Bell Read online

  It was the sombre, almost macabre sense of mortality that ran through so many Somali love poems – take what today offers, for who can tell if there will be a tomorrow?

  Your body is to Age and Death betrothed,

  And some day all its richness they will share –

  Or,

  Turn not away in scorn.

  Some day a grave will prove

  The frailty of your face,

  And worms its grace enjoy.

  Let me enjoy you now –

  Turn not away in scorn.

  Some of the figures of speech in Somali love poetry might appear odd and even ludicrous to a European, for it was quite common for a poet to compare himself to a sick camel, when he was suffering from an unreturned love, or to boast that he was like the finest camel in his herd – strong, lithe, swift. But in order to appreciate what such comparisons meant to a Somali, it was necessary to understand what his camels meant to him. Camels were the mainstay of Somali life. They provided the tribesman with meat and milk, his staple foods, and they packed his goods across the desert. Their endurance in the drought was what saved him. Without his camels he would have been lost. They were not simply anonymous domestic animals to him. They were his livelihood, his wealth, his pride. He always knew each of his animals by name and could discern the footprints of each in the sand. He tended his camels not only with care but with affection. There were dozens of words in Somali to describe every kind and condition of camel. It was no wonder that camels figured so largely in Somali poetry, even in love poetry, for they were as close to the Somali’s heart as his own family.

  Like a camel sick to the bone,

  Weakened and withering in strength,

  I, from love of you, Oh Dudi,

  grow wasted and gaunt.

  When a poet expressed his love in this way, one could be quite certain that, in North American parlance, he had been hit where he lived.

  Another face of love was found in Elmi Bonderii’s famous poem Qaraami (Passionate), in which he described not only Baar’s beauty but her domestic accomplishments as well, and ended with these lines:

  When you behold my lovely, incomparable Baar,

  Your own wives, in your eyes, will all be old.

  Alas, alas, for ye who hear my song!

  Elmi Bonderii (Elmi the Borderman) was said to have died of love. He fell in love with a young girl named Hodan Abdillahi, but as he was not wealthy, she was married instead to Mohamed Shabel (Mohamed the Leopard). Elmi cherished his hopeless affection for five years.

  “Then,” Hersi said, “he died of love. Absolutely nothing else.”

  No one found this surprising at all. Love was a serious matter, a delight which could turn to disaster. But no Englishman ever died of love – of this fact the Somalis were quite positive. It seemed doubtful to them that the Ingrese had much need of love at all. Most Englishmen here were physically heavier than Somalis, owing to a better diet, and had greater muscular strength, although not as much endurance, for few Englishmen could have survived the hardships of the Jilal. This greater physical strength the Somalis attributed to sexual abstinence. Also, most English families had only one or two children, or else appeared to have none at all, for their school-age children were in England. Many Somalis therefore believed that sex was something practised only infrequently by the English, who were indifferent where love was concerned, and probably inept as well.

  We were very much entertained by the discovery of this widespread belief, until we found that it was also, perforce, applied to ourselves. This revelation placed it in a slightly different light. When finally Hersi agreed to recite some of his own belwo, he told us he would not do so before because he did not think we would be capable of understanding or appreciating love poems.

  “You Ingrese,” he said delicately, “are not so highly acknowledgements as us in these considerations.”

  The month of Ramadan was not yet over when the kharif began. The summer monsoon came up from the south-west, over the Ethiopian mountains and across the plains of Somaliland, gathering heat as it travelled. The wind blew cool at night in the Haud, but by the time it reached the coast, the sands and the rocks would have imparted to it something of their heat and its breath would be like fire day and night.

  The kharif would blow until autumn, filling the days with dust-devils and the nights with its moaning. On the great plains, the camel herders’ eyes would be sore with blown sand. In the stations, tarpaulins would be whisked from lorries and secret files from office desks. Officers on trek, having a sundowner outside their tents, would find their glasses of gin and lime blown off the camp table. Young Englishmen in outstations would wonder why they had not gone into commerce in London, as they lay awake at night listening to a wind whose sound was like the distracted wailing of hysterical women. In the stifling town of Berbera, wooden shutters on the old government houses would clatter all night, and hot wind would rush in to half-strangle the angrily wakeful occupants. On the Gulf of Aden the dhow traffic would slacken off, and the dhow men who ventured out would pray mightily to Allah to spare their fragile craft. The wind would be everywhere. It would ring in the ears, clog the nostrils, drive breath from the throat. When it had spent itself it would suddenly collapse, leaving the country to the hot season.

  The kharif battered all night against our truck, making the canvas roof sound like the beating of giant wings. One night I imagined I had been wakened by the thudding of the canvas, until I glanced up and saw that it was something else that had roused me from sleep. There, outlined against the net at the end of the truck, was a large dark shape. I was frightened, but not unduly so, for I was groggy and not fully awake. I nudged Jack and told him that something was trying to get into our caravan. He heard me only dimly through his sleep and thought I meant my old enemy, the black moth.

  “Shine your torch on it,” he mumbled, “and it’ll go away.”

  I groped for my flashlight, but by the time I had switched it on, the shape had disappeared. I turned over and went back to sleep. In the morning I was wakened by Jack’s shocked yell.

  “My God! Everything’s been taken!”

  Thieves had ransacked our truck-home, taking the typewriter, Jack’s theodolite, the briefcase containing all his papers, the drawing instruments, slide-rule, our radio and innumerable smaller objects. It was not only the value of the haul that distressed us. Many of Jack’s instruments could not be replaced in a hurry, and he could not work without them.

  One of the thieves had dropped his spear, possibly when I wakened and shouted, and the Somalis in our camp picked it up and examined it with great interest. Mohamed, Hersi, Abdi, Arabetto and others – all lamented loudly.

  “Never in my life I seeing such bloody thieving as contained in bloody this place –”

  “Oh-oh – too bad, sahib, too too bad!”

  Underneath, they were actually delighted with the excitement of the event. They darted hither and yon like swallows, gabbling at the top of their voices. I, too, could not help feeling the same secret excitement. The Somalis had hopes of tracing the thieves by the dropped spear, the shaft of which was splintered at the end – enough, they said, to make it clearly recognizable.

  Jack, Abdi and Hersi set off in the Land-Rover for Selahleh, the nearest Somali settlement. At camp the rest of us waited nervously, unable to settle down to any work. The slow hours passed. At last in the distance we heard the furious honking of the Land-Rover horn – Abdi’s invariable signal of a successful hunt. They roared into camp like three triumphant generals after a battle. With them they carried the typewriter, theodolite, briefcase and all the rest of the loot.

  What happened? What happened? We could not wait to hear. Everyone shouted at once. Finally, piecemeal, the story emerged. They drove, they told us, to the tea shop at Selahleh and asked if anyone could identify the spear. The tea-shop owner disclaimed any knowledge of the weapon and refused to discuss the matter. At that moment a young Eidagalla man came into the tea sho
p. He took one look at the spear and nodded his head.

  “Every man around here knows the owner of that spear,” he said.

  Where were the thieves, then? The tea-shop owner maintained a stubborn silence. At this point Hersi and Abdi applied their strongest methods. Glorying in the situation, they threatened the tea-shop man and the entire village of Selahleh with annihilation if the culprits were not yielded up. Abdi paced the room, waving the rifle and glaring in his fiercest manner while Hersi gesticulated, shrilled and bellowed, outlining in vivid detail the fate that awaited the inhabitants of this unfortunate settlement. The whole Army would descend, Hersi cried passionately, and would raze Selahleh to the ground. Camels would be looted. Huts would be burned. Nothing would remain. The desert would cover their dwelling-places and the hyenas would gnaw their bones.

  His English version of it, to me, was only a pale imitation. In Somali, it would have been magnificent. He must have made it sound like the destruction of Sennacherib. The teashop owner began to have second thoughts, and finally his resolve to protect his fellow tribesmen, or perhaps to share in their haul, crumbled completely. He shrugged and signalled to his waiting kinsmen, who trooped out and returned a few minutes later with one of the thieves.

  “Here is the man. He is yours.”

  The thief sweated and shook. His accomplice had fled, he said, but he agreed to take Jack to the place where the stuff was cached, provided Jack would promise not to go to the police. Jack’s sense of British justice at that point was not nearly so strong as his desire to recover his theodolite and the invaluable papers which represented months of work. He readily agreed. They drove out across the Haud, and there, in a deserted zareba, they found everything hidden. Recalling it, Jack laughed.

  “You won’t believe this,” he said, “but I swear it’s true. After he showed us the zareba, the first thing he did was to ask me for a cigarette. I was so surprised that I gave it to him. I figured that any man who had that much brass neck deserved one.”

  The thief had revealed his disappointment in the theodolite. It was in a large wooden box, and when he stole it he thought it was a chest full of gold.

  As we listened to the story, Mohamed brought around mugs of tea.

  “No Ramadan today!”

  They would make up the day of fasting later. Such days as this did not occur often. This was a victory, to be celebrated fittingly, with healths drunk in scalding tea and the story, embellished and embroidered, recounted again and again.

  We discovered, a few days later, that people in nearby Somali camps were very upset about the theft, as they considered it a blot on their honour. Some of the Eidagalla pointed out that the thieves were members of the Arap tribe, and there were murmurings in the area to the effect that no one would feel safe until “spears have been raised against the Arap.” Thus are tribal wars touched off. Fortunately the muttering died down after a while, and no spears were raised.

  But the tale lived on, and was told many times around the fire at night, and lost nothing in the telling. For all we know, fifty years from now the Eidagalla in the Haud may be chanting a gabei called The Thief of Selahleh which tells how Abdi the warrior and Hersi the orator outwitted the enemy and vanquished him utterly, although by that time it will have been forgotten what was stolen and from whom. And so perhaps the theodolite case may be transformed, after all, into some rare carved chest laden with golden coins and necklaces like the sun.

  PLACE OF EXILE

  At last the long-expected news – the tractors and scrapers for the job would be arriving soon. Berbera had no port facilities for unloading such heavy equipment, so the machines were being sent to Djibouti in French Somaliland. We set off for Djibouti to collect them.

  Guś and Sheila and Musa travelled with us. Guś wanted to do some language research among the Esa people of Borama district and also among the Djibouti Somalis. When we arrived at Borama, however, a message was waiting – the ship had been delayed.

  “I might have known something like this would happen,” Jack said bitterly. “We may as well stay here until we hear from the shipping agent.”

  His patience was almost at an end. He had been waiting for this equipment for months, and now was beginning to wonder if it would somehow elude him for ever.

  Guś and Musa decided to push on to Djibouti alone, while Sheila remained with us at Borama. They went on foot, hoping to catch a passing trade-truck. When they had departed, we were a dismal trio. The resthouse was bare and cheerless, and we had nothing to do. Jack was depressed, feeling he would never get started on the actual construction of the ballehs, the sites of which had been chosen and the plans completed for some time. Sheila was worried about Guś, who had set out with enthusiasm but hardly any money.

  “What if they can’t get a lift? They can’t possibly walk –”

  Already in her mind’s eye she saw him lying dead of sunstroke or dehydration on the scorching sands of the Guban. I would have felt exactly the same if it had been my husband who had gone, but as it was not, I had no doubt that Guś and Musa would make the trek in perfect safety. What I did feel, however, was a sharp sense of disappointment over their departure, for I had hoped we might continue at Borama the work begun at Sheikh, that of translating some of the Somali poems. Pessimistically, I felt they would arrive back at Borama just as we were leaving.

  But one evening Guś and Musa returned. They were in poor condition, having been forced to walk a good part of the way back. Although they travelled at night when the sand was cooler, they had worn out their sandals and had almost worn out the soles of their feet as well. Plied with tea, food and questions, they made a rapid recovery and recounted some of their experiences.

  “We were lucky to get a ride to Djibouti with that English doctor,” Musa said, “but when we got started, we found he was taking along a young officer of the Somaliland Scouts, as well. Now this officer is a real sahib – you understand what I mean? We are driving along the road, you see, and an old man is crossing and does not get out of the way quickly, so the doctor slows down. The Army man says ‘Shall I get out and shoot him?’ A joke, yes, but as I am Somali, like the old man, I am not greatly amused. Next we stop at a well, where many Somalis are drawing their drinking water. Our officer gets out and washes his hands in the well. Now, you know, to Muslims this is a very offensive thing. Guś and the doctor try to explain, but no. What does he care? The people at the well begin to threaten, and finally we manage to drag him away. When we reach Djibouti, the doctor goes off to the hospital. Guś and I go to the town. The Army man goes somewhere – I don’t know or care, and I think I will never see him again. But such good fortune is not to be. Later, we are walking along the shore when we see the doctor. He is very angry, and we soon see why. The Army man has got drunk and has taken the doctor’s car away. He has left it on the beach while he went swimming. The tide has come up, and now the car is stuck. We help the doctor to get it out – what a business, wading in the sea, the water up to our knees. At last we get it going, and then the Army man comes floating in like a big fish, and says he does not see why the doctor is making such a fuss. The doctor then says some things which I shall not repeat to you. Next, we all go back to town. The doctor asks us to look after his car while he finishes his business. This we do, but the officer, who is still not very sober, stays also. The sellers in the marketplace begin to crowd around, offering melons for sale. These melons are not worth one rupee each, you understand, but I think if the officer wants to spend a whole rupee on a melon, why should I say anything? He becomes rather confused, and takes one melon, then another, then another and another – one rupee, one rupee, one rupee. Never have I seen such spending. He cannot stop – more melons, more rupees. I almost say ‘Here is my head – one rupee’.”

  Musa’s piratical moustache quivered with his deep laughter. To him, the poetic justice of this one episode was worth the whole wretched trip.

  Now that Guś and Musa were back, we settled down to work on the poe
try. It was a three-way process. Musa knew a great many gabei and belwo, and had a wide knowledge of the background and style of Somali poetry, but while his command of English was fluent, he had to discuss the subtler connotations of the words with Guś in Somali. Guś and I then discussed the lines in English, and I took notes on the literal meanings, the implications of words, the references to Somali traditions or customs. I would then be able to work on this material later, and attempt to put it into some form approximating a poem, while preserving as much as possible of the meaning and spirit of the original.

  I had never before found Musa easy to talk with. I had been impressed by him – who would not be? He looked like a young sultan. But I had never felt at ease with him. For one thing, he was not accustomed to women who talked as much as I did, and sensing some constraint or disapproval in him, I tended to agree with him too often, mistakenly hoping to set the matter right in this way but in fact only making it more difficult for both of us. Now, one evening, discussing a long gabei by Salaan Arrabey, who was reckoned to be one of the best Somali poets, I was all at once aware of how easily we were talking and arguing. Tomorrow, probably, we would once again feel ill-at-ease with one another. But for a while, discussing this gabei which interested both of us greatly, the awkwardness was forgotten.

  There were so many poems which could have been done, and we had such a limited time that we were able only to skim a little of the surface. Still, it was something. When Jack and I left Borama, I had a sheaf of notes to work on, several gabei and perhaps a dozen belwo.

  ——

  Near Borama were the ruins of an ancient city, or perhaps several cities built on the same site. One might have been pre-Islamic, although nothing much seemed to be known about it. The more recent one, we were told, was believed to be about a thousand years old. It had been built originally by Arab traders, and why it was deserted was a mystery. In his book Somaliland, Drake-Brockman suggested that these ruined cities, which were to be found in several places in this country, were abandoned by the Arabs when they found the ivory and ostrich-feather trade was falling off, or when they discovered that the local Galla people would bring their goods to the coast and sell just as cheaply there. To what extent this theory would be supported nowadays by archaeologists, I do not know. Many of the walls of this particular city still stood, and where they had crumbled it appeared to be due to time and to the crowding in of foliage rather than any sudden devastation.