The Prophet's Camel Bell Read online

  Amoud was the name the Somalis had given it. The word means “sand,” and the name was apt, for the city had returned to the mountains and the desert. When it was alive, Amoud must have spread up the hillside, the brown-yellow houses mellow in the sunlight, among the stiff acacias and the candelabra trees. In the marketplace, the donkeys and camels would have been laden with the sacks of aromatic gums and ivory, the bundles of ostrich plumes, and would have set out for the coast, where the goods would be taken by dhow to Arabia. The young Arab traders would have brought back to Amoud their dark-skinned Galla brides, those women from whom came the beginning of the Somali race. The town would have been a babble of noise, shouting and haggling, the scuffing of feet along the rough stone roads, the uproar of camels.

  But now, as we walked through it, Amoud had been dead a long time. The walls were falling away, and the mosque was desecrated by birds and small wild animals. The candelabra trees had grown inside the houses, their bright green tapers looking as though they had been here always. Generations of the galol tree had grown old and fallen, and their boughs were strewn around the ground. Blue flowers the colour of kingfishers grew in the tangled grasses, and the trees cast long shadows on the skeleton of Amoud.

  On the way down the shale-littered hillside, we saw three young Somali girls on their way back to their huts at the foot of the hill. The girls paused and stared at us, calmly, disinterestedly. Looking at them, I felt they had something of the same timeless quality as the hills and the sand. The Arabs came and went, and they left their religion and their sons. The British came and soon would go, too, leaving, for what they were worth, some ideas of an administration different from the tribal patterns, some knowledge of modern medicine, some ability to read and write in a European language. But the bulk of the Somali people were not greatly affected by these things. They still built their round grass huts, and herded the camels, and told tales around the fires at night, and scorned the settled life, just as they did before the Arabs came, a thousand years ago or more. Change had been slow here. Maybe it would quicken its pace soon. Perhaps their own leaders would be able to think what to do with a country that was so largely sand and thorn trees. Within the next few generations, the nomadic tribal ways might splinter and break, and from their breaking a new thing might grow. Or perhaps their leaders would wrangle interminably, unable to discover a way of overcoming the desert. But whatever happened, for a long time the people would go on as they always had, herding their camels between the wells and the grazing, the grazing and the wells.

  Looking at Amoud, and then at the nomads’ huts crouched at the bottom of the hills, I could not help thinking of the western world with its power and its glory, its skyscrapers and its atom bombs, and wondering if these desert men would not after all survive longer than we did, and remain to seed the human race again, after our cities lay as dead as Amoud, the city of the sands.

  At Abdul Qadr, a very small village, the only one between Borama and Zeilah, the hills were completely bald. A heat haze shimmered glassily from the black rock, and the village coiled around the hillside like something out of a science-fiction story, an earth settlement with a precarious foothold on a hot and empty asteroid. When we drew closer, however, we were astonished to see a procession of women and girls coming to meet us, all of them carrying vessels filled with fresh camel milk. Where did they feed their herds? Milk was always a problem for us. Our staff, like all Somalis, craved it, and in the Haud, the best grazing area in the land, even after the Gu rains we had difficulty in obtaining enough. How was it that at Abdul Qadr we found plenty? Mohamed expressed the belief that the Abdul Qadr people left vessels of water in some magic place and when they returned they found the water turned to milk.

  “The dry thorns in this place,” Omar suggested, “give better milk than the finest camel.”

  They were joking, but only half. We were all in agreement – the people of Abdul Qadr must be the personal friends of Allah.

  Our lightheartedness disappeared as we left the hills behind and crawled in convoy, Land-Rover and trucks, out onto the Guban. Our map of Somaliland classified the roads as “Roads, principal; Roads, other; Tracks (motorable in some cases),” but in fact there were no “Roads, principal” in our sense of the words, no smooth highways where driving was easy. Most of the roads were “other,” and a good many of them fell into the third category. When we emerged onto the coastal plain, the track meandered through the sand and frequently disappeared altogether. All we could do was head in the right direction and hope for the best. The Land-Rover bumped over the rough desert, and we were shaken like seeds in a gourd rattle. The heat was so intense that I breathed raspingly, gulping at the air. Whenever we stopped the Land-Rover and got out, the sun was like a hammer blow on my head and the nape of my neck. Headache trammelled like hooves through my skull. We drove on and on and on, seeing around us only the rusty sand and occasional clumps of coarse grass.

  Then I saw, dancing in the air just ahead of us, a dozen pairs of yellow wings. Sun-drugged and dizzied by heat, I nonetheless took particular note, for these birds were the first pleasant sight since we came down onto the Guban. I pointed them out to Jack and Abdi. Look – yellow canaries!

  Jack and Abdi, whose eyes were better than mine, said nothing. I would discover my error soon enough. The dozen pairs of wings became two and three dozen, a multitude, and I saw that the creatures were not little yellow canaries but large yellow locusts. They were in the middle stage of their growth. When they were fully mature, their wings would be scarlet, with a span as wide as a man’s hand. Soon we were driving through a swarm of them. They fluttered blindly in through the Land-Rover windows, and launched themselves like bullets at our heads. They were armoured, their bodies having the horny texture of sea-shells. Their fan-like wings were fantastically strong. We closed the windows hastily, even at the risk of stifling, and managed to rid ourselves of the insects inside the car. Outside, they clattered like rain against the canvas roof. The radiator became clogged with them. The windscreen was so splattered with their dead and oozing bodies that Abdi could hardly see.

  Somaliland was one of the countries in which the Desert Locust Control operated. Bait was set mainly, we had been told, for the young hoppers, in the hope that these might be poisoned before they grew wings. Some day, if sufficient control work could be done, locusts might no longer be a threat throughout the entire East. But that day was a long way off.

  The swarming locusts moved like the surge and flow of a tidal wave. Nothing could stop them. Their wings were a shadow all around us, and they even darkened and obscured the sun. In the land where they passed, no leaf or blade of grass would remain – they would devour everything. They were a plague, a scourge. Burdening the air with their thrusting flight, their terrible wings of gold, they seemed like the giant locusts of the Apocalypse – the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle.

  Stunned by this onslaught, half suffocated in our airless enclosure, we drove grimly on. After an eternity of battering our way through the battalion of wings, we overtook their front ranks and passed them. We flung open the windows and breathed freely at last, and now the scalding breeze across the Guban seemed cool and wonderful.

  At the extreme western edge of the country, close to French Somaliland, Zeilah stood, almost with its feet in the sea. We sighted it from a long way off, and it had the quality of a mirage, a shining city, the mosque minarets white in the sun, and the tomb of the local saint appearing to be a dome of pure and scintillating ice. The yellow sand gleamed all around, and beyond the city one could see the long silver ribbon that was the Gulf of Aden.

  Close by, the view altered. Zeilah was not a city but a small and almost deserted town. The tomb of the Hazrami saint was made of whitewashed mudbrick, stained by rain and goat dung. The shops and houses were decaying, the soiled plaster falling away in shreds and chunks. Many dwellings had been abandoned entirely. The streets were narrow, the houses j
ammed in together, their walls sinking into the sand and their grey bone-dry doors askew. They had a sad and rakish appearance, as of dead bones not decently buried but left exposed to the plain view and curious stare of alien onlookers. Around the flat sunbaked roofs the seabirds screamed. The Somali huts at the edge of the town had a neater appearance than the crumbling shops and tea houses. Made of woven branches and twigs, the huts had a thorny and thatched look. A few children played in the cobbled streets, and sometimes a donkey ambled into the town, bearing water vessels to be filled at the Zeilah wells. Over the whole place clung the reek of the sea, a warm salt smell mingled with seaweed and rotting fish.

  Zeilah was once a great city, although nothing of the opulence it then knew remained here now. It was known to the ancient Greeks, who called it Aualites. According to Drake-Brockman, this coast was known at the beginning of the Christian era as Barbaria, from which the name Berbera may have been derived. Zeilah at that time was one of the most flourishing ports in East Africa. Like Babylon, that mighty city, its trade was in gold and silver, cinnamon, frankincense, pearls, beasts and sheep, and the souls of men. It was a slave port, for many centuries one of the largest. According to legend, Sheikh Ibrahim Abu Zarbay, one of the Hazrami proselytizers who came to this land with Sheikh Ishaak (the “ancestor” from whom the Ishaak tribes traced their descent), preached at Zeilah and was buried here. Zeilah reached its zenith in the sixteenth century with the rule of the Somali king Mohamed Granye, and after his defeat by the Portuguese, the city was for several centuries in the hands of the Arabs, until the country came under the administration of the British.

  Once there was a pearl industry at Zeilah. The pearls were small and pink, highly valued in Arabia and along the Persian Gulf. But the pearl beds were all depleted now.

  We saw the mosque where Sir Richard Burton, in his Arab merchant’s disguise, preached so skilfully. A small mosque, it was, the disintegrating walls repaired with bunched-up thorn twigs. It might not even have been the same mosque. It was the oldest one in Zeilah – that was all we were able to discover. No one here had ever heard of Burton. Perhaps an old man dozing in one of the huts had heard the tale, but he did not emerge to talk with strangers like ourselves.

  The Zeilah people had always been a mixture of races – Somali, Galla, Danakil, Arab. Political and religious prisoners used to be brought here from Arabia, and the town’s name in the original Arabic meant “a place of exile.” The present inhabitants were the last clingers-on, descendants of the Arab traders, the slavers, the pearl-divers. They sauntered the sandy uncluttered streets, seemingly indifferent to their fate. I recalled what an educated Somali friend in Hargeisa had told us about his experiences in Zeilah, when he was here for a time on a government administrative job. The Zeilah people, he said, could talk of nothing except the sea – the hazards of taking a dhow across to Arabia, how to deal with a shark when you were diving, the art of handling a dhow in the mad kharif wind. These things they still knew, but all else seemed to have vanished. They did something which he felt had a subtle horror about it – they chanted songs whose meanings they had forgotten. The words were Galla, or Danakil, mixed with Arabic or archaic Somali, all so blended and changed that they were unrecognizable. They would chant them over and over, the mysterious words and phrases of a dead past, possibly imbued now with a magical significance. Our friend said he could hardly believe it at first, and thought maybe it was only the young people who did not know the meaning of the songs. He asked the elders of the town. They smiled gently and said no, they didn’t know the meaning of the words in the old songs, either. These were just the songs their people had always sung, that was all.

  The town was quiet. The coastal tribes came here for water, but few people lived here permanently any more. When we attempted to find some of the famed Zeilah mats, small circular grass mats beaded in marvellous designs and edged with cowrie shells, we could find no one who made them nowadays. The old skill seemed to be lost. Everything here had been shrunken by time and the sun, grown pale, faded to shadows. It was harder here than it was at Amoud to imagine the way the city must once have been, hard to believe that the caravans had ever poured in here, the camels bellowing and complaining, the wooden bells around the beasts’ necks clanking in the hot briny air. Hard to believe, too, that here the slaves boarded the dhows and said their last farewell to Africa and to everything they knew, or that once the bazaars and streets echoed to the shouts of Mohamed Granye’s armies. All gone now. On one side of Zeilah the still and tepid salt water lay, and on the other, the sands of the Guban stretched away and were lost in the heat haze.

  We resided at the Residency. Heaven only knows how old this place was. Possibly it was built when the British first took over the administration of this country. It was in constant use as long as a district commissioner lived here, but now there was no d.c. at Zeilah and the Residency served only as an occasional resthouse for travellers such as ourselves. Reputed to be the only three-storey dwelling in Somaliland, it was enormous, built of rough stone blocks of brownish coral colour, with grey wooden verandas around the middle tier. Many years ago it might have been luxurious, but now it resembled a mausoleum with a view. It faced onto the sea, so we could sit on the long shuttered veranda and watch the tides come and go, which they did silently, for the water here did not lap or murmur or beat in waves against the shore. The sea was sluggish, eerily quiet. The garden contained only a few dwarfed palm trees, dwelt in at the moment by locusts who chewed clickingly at the leaves all night.

  The inner portion of our apartment consisted of a main room, a bathroom and a wide hall. The builder obviously had some deep obsession with doors, of which there seemed to be hundreds. Sitting inside the main room, a person could not face all these doors at the same time. There was no solid wall for one to get one’s back up against. Always a door was there, behind you. Above us were the empty rooms and the blank windows of the top storey. An open stairway led up, but we never went to look there.

  The floor boards in our apartment were bare and dusty, and cobwebs hung like grey ferns on the walls. The furniture was bizarre – a long table which was oddly covered with green felt, now frayed and stained; a sideboard in which none of the doors or drawers would close; a corner cabinet with swirls of wood at the bottom, elegant in its youth, possibly, but now looking like an aged tart grubbily furbelowed in the finery of another era; a curious little cupboard with two sections, the top portion glassed-in and looking as though it had been designed for false teeth in a tumbler of water at night, the lower shelf looking as though it were meant to harbour a china chamber pot, no doubt one that bore a crest or coat-of-arms in gilt. The slightest noise echoed. When a piece of paper was blown across the floor, it sounded like the rattling of sabres. The bathroom boasted a galvanized tub which had evidently for some time been a favourite nesting place of spiders and scorpions.

  The second tier of the Residency had two apartments. The other was occupied by Ugo, the Italian foreman who was accompanying us to Djibouti and whose special responsibility was Alfie, the great lumbering diesel truck which would be used to transport the tractors back. Alfie was something of a curiosity, for the Italian mechanics in Hargeisa had ingeniously built it out of discarded pieces of Italian wartime trucks. Jack had explained to me what a remarkable creation it was, with its Alfa-Romeo chassis and gearbox, a Fiat engine with its own gearbox (the combination of the two sets of gears giving a great range of speeds), and a Lancia front axle and steering gear. Ugo was sturdy, staunch-hearted and cheerful, and would have been an excellent companion except for the fact that he spoke practically no English and we spoke practically no Italian. On the veranda we chatted with him, after a fashion, over an evening drink.

  “Somaliland – fenomenale,” he said. This was his favourite phrase. He believed that all Somalis were incomprehensible and probably insane, and they in turn believed the same about him. Ugo offered to teach us Italian, but for some reason, possibly the climate, we managed to
pick up only two words, rampicanti and piroscafo, neither of which was much use to us, there being neither vines nor steamships at Zeilah.

  We sat in the darkness, for if we brought a lamp onto the veranda, the locusts would immediately begin an invasion. We finally said goodnight to Ugo, but then we found that we could not bring ourselves to sleep in that huge dusty stifling room with all the doors. We moved our bed out onto the veranda and tried to sleep there. Now that the human voices were quiet, the house could be heard. Everything creaked, like the timbers on an old ship. The doors could not have been oiled in decades. The salt wind had corroded the hinges and locks, and in a sudden gust of wind every door in the place would open and slam shut. Through the veranda the wide-winged bats hovered and swooped, from rafters to eaves, down across our bed and over to a niche in the wall. Small unseen creatures of the night made mild rustlings in the woodwork and around the decrepit furniture. The heat was relentless. We lay wearily open-eyed in our sweat-soaked sheets, and at last, uneasily, we slept.

  We kept our thoughts secret for a while, feeling apologetic and faintly ridiculous at having apparently yielded to the place. Only after several days here did Jack and I discover that we both had the same strong impression that the Residency was occupied by something other than ourselves and the bats, mice and insects. We did not believe in ghosts. Yet here and now, in this place and at this time, we could not even in broad daylight rid ourselves of an overpowering conviction that something existed here which we were unable to explain, some residue of anguish. We did not expect to see a long-dead Englishman walking through one of the many doors. This was no horrific ghost, nor did it threaten us at all. This occupancy was quite different – a sense of mourning, of inexpressible sadness. Whoever it was whose sorrow still clung around this place, he must have been English, we were certain, and young and – what was the right word to describe him? – bewildered.