The Prophet's Camel Bell Read online

  Later in the day, when the clouds disappeared, the air was dazzlingly clear, like spring water. The Jilal, the dry season, was at its height, but at Sheikh the hills were still speckled with green acacias and pepper trees that grew along the gullies and gorges. Looking out our front door, we saw the line of hills dark against the sky, and flocks of sheep like white dots on the slopes. Across the valley, the sheikh’s tomb, in reality mudbrick and whitewash, shone like pale marble in the sun. Near our house the sheep and goats grazed. The sheep would eat only the coarse stringy grass, but the goats would eat anything. They craned their necks to nibble the leaves from bushes, and we could see why they were called “the scourge of Africa,” for they were like locusts and no plant was immune from their insatiable mouths. The animals were tended by a placid brown-robed woman with a scarlet headscarf. Sometimes she was assisted by a little boy who carried a switch of dried grass which he used to round up the stragglers.

  By day, the only sounds other than the wind were the fragments of bird song, the minor-key chanting of Mohamed and Ismail as they worked, a shrill cry from the herdboy as he leapt over rocks and bushes to trace the sadly bleating lamb or young goat that had become separated from the flock. No telephone or radio, no traffic or crowds.

  We had a plentiful supply of crises, but they were of a mild variety, and even the terrors were not really threatening.

  “It’s an unlucky house that doesn’t have a gecko.” If this common saying was true, our house must have been exceedingly lucky, for whole tribes of geckos dwelt with us. At night they chased each other around the walls, playing hide-and-seek behind our pictures, chittering continually.

  “Chik-chik-chik –”

  My eyes followed them in their peregrinations. I was afraid to look away, certain that if I did, they would immediately be on the back of my chair or struggling in a reptilian panic in my hair. They were quite harmless, but my flesh crawled all the same. In corners, stuck to the walls in clusters, we found their eggs, pink and china-like. When the infant lizards hatched out, it took them a day or so to learn how to cling competently to walls and ceiling. In the meantime, they twitched and wriggled across the floors, creatures no larger than a needle but lively as tadpoles. Mohamed noticed my fear and capitalized upon it. He carried in buckets of hot water for the bath and suddenly shrieked as though he had just discovered a cobra.

  “Memsahib – come quick!”

  Cautiously I approached, and found that several full-grown geckos were stretched out languorously, for coolness, at the bottom of our concrete bathtub. I recoiled, and Mohamed bent double in a paroxysm of silent laughter. Imagine anyone being frightened of a gecko! Helpless with mirth, he staggered out to the cookhouse, and I heard him regaling the yerki, his young helper, with the tale.

  “Wallahi! Memsahib –”

  A spate of Somali, gulped and hilarious. I could not understand the words, but I could imagine them well enough.

  “By God, you never saw anything like it in your life –”

  ——

  On the hills we saw dik-dik, deer scarcely larger than rabbits, with short grey-green hair on their backs and pale rusty hair on their bellies. They merged perfectly with their surroundings of scrub bush and rock, and we were never able to see them until they suddenly darted up like fearful birds at our approach. They were almost too shy and timorous for this world. John, one of the English schoolmasters, told us how his dog once chased a dik-dik.

  “The little thing dropped before the dog touched it. You may not believe it, but I swear it died of fear.”

  To die of fear – there was something pathetic and repulsive in that death.

  Mohamed called us out one morning to see a herd of hairy wild pigs led by a bristling and evil-tusked old boar.

  “Somali bacon,” he said, grinning at his own wit, for no Somali would touch pork in any form, and even the Ingrese, such as ourselves, who ate unclean food, would not eat the diseased and worm-infested wild pigs.

  We sighted a family of baboons, and chased them far across the slopes in an attempt to see them at closer range. They were big grey-furred animals, agile and dog-faced, with hairless crimson buttocks. The young perched comfortably on their mothers’ backs. The males glanced back at us over their shoulders, leered and barked a little, then loped on. When we told John of the encounter, he laughed and frowned.

  “That wasn’t a very bright thing to do, actually. Those fellows will turn on a dog sometimes, if it chases them, and tear it to pieces.”

  If the baboons had turned on us, I could not have said I will now wake up, as one does sometimes in nightmares. How absurd it was to be frightened of geckos, harmless as butterflies, and yet to be totally unafraid of a baboon pack. I began to see that these hills in offering their quiet also required a person to tread carefully.

  To tread carefully with wild creatures is relatively easy. With people, it is not so easy. Jack drove to Burao, and in his absence three Somali elders came to see him. I undertook to explain Jack’s work to them, feeling that although I knew little of the technical aspects, they knew even less. Summoning all possible graciousness, I invited them in and asked Mohamed to bring tea. The three old men sat on the edges of their chairs, their hands clasped around the knobbled canes they carried. Mohamed clattered in with the tea tray and stayed to act as interpreter. He seemed ill at ease, and fidgeted from one foot to another, avoiding both the elders’ eyes and mine, focusing his gaze on a ceiling beam.

  The old men were exceedingly polite. They nodded their heads at everything I said, but made no attempt to ask questions or discuss the matter. One of them observed that never in his entire long life had he known such a fine memsahib.

  For the sake of decency, one always pretends not to be pleased by flattery, but underneath the hopeful question lingers – perhaps he is telling the truth? I ushered them out, finally, poured myself a cup of lukewarm tea and sat down among my snail-embroidered cushions to review the visit. I handled that pretty well, I think; yes, I’m sure I did.

  Mohamed blew in like a wind, agitated.

  “Memsahib – never do so like that, never no more.”

  “What?” I was startled, uncomprehending.

  He sighed deeply, wiped his sweating forehead, and told me in consternation that a woman alone in the house must never invite men in, not even if they happen to be about eighty years old. To do so was a terrible breach of etiquette.

  Further, the elders could certainly not discuss any serious matter with a woman.

  The elders’ flattery, I saw now with painful clarity, was pure tact, directed at what they felt must be my feeling of awful shame at having thoughtlessly committed such a series of errors.

  The next time the elders came to visit, Jack was at home, so all I had to do was to stay well in the background, which was not so easy for me, at that. The elders walked in and settled themselves in the armchairs, with none of their former reluctance.

  Haji Abu Jibril was a heavily built man, big-jowled, with the hennaed beard permitted to those who have made the haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. His embroidered turban was slightly askew. Over his long white robe he wore an incongruous khaki jacket with bulging pockets. His boots were tremendous and unlaced. In one hand he brandished a silver-headed cane. I tried to size him up rapidly, imagining this ready-reckoning process to be feasible. A man of power, I thought, but not to be trusted. Was there not something evasive, almost shifty, about his eyes? So much for my cleverness. In later months I discovered that he was in fact widely regarded as one of the wisest and worthiest elders in the country.

  Haji Yusuf followed close behind, as though in attendance. He was a scrawny and shrewd-looking man, wearing a mauve and beige striped sweater over his skimpy pink robe, a man with a sly face and a habit of winking one eye sagaciously. I tabbed him at once as the lion’s jackal, and this assessment turned out to be not totally wrong.

  The third looked just as an elder should. From the corner where I sat silently, feeling almost as
though I were in purdah, I glanced with complete approval at Haji Adan. He strolled in, neither boastfully nor apologetically, a tall old man with a well-trimmed grey beard and strong handsome features. He had a neat red and yellow turban, a green and spotless robe, a courteous and dignified manner. I trusted him at once, charmed by the suitability of his appearance. He turned out, however, in the following days, to be something of a business shark, and used to send his emissaries to sell me beaded mats and carved wooden spoons at exorbitant prices. I never lost my initial liking for him, though, for he had a quiet sarcasm that appealed to me. He harked back often to the old days and mocked the young men, who did not have, he claimed, the courage of their sires. When we heard rumours of lions in the Sheikh hills, Haji Adan told me scornfully that every time a young man saw a rabbit he thought it was a lion. It was different in his day. We had men then.

  When we finished tea, the elders questioned Jack closely and suspiciously. Mohamed, acting as interpreter, became nervous at the amount of tact necessary to convey one side’s words to the other without offending anyone.

  “We have heard that the Ingrese are going to make ballehs in the Haud,” Haji Abu Jibril said, a balleh being the Somali term of any dug-out pit that would hold rainwater. “What we want to know is – why are they doing this thing?”

  Jack was anxious that they should understand. He explained that the government had undertaken the project because the Somalis needed watering places in the Haud. The elders’ eyes narrowed and their faces crinkled into small cynical smiles. They did not believe a word of it.

  “We have heard,” Haji Adan said, “that the Ingrese plan to build large towns for themselves beside these ballehs, so there will be no room for our people there.”

  How to deal with these three maddening old men? Jack, who was logical himself and sometimes impatient with people who were not, asked them if they could really imagine large numbers of English living permanently in the desert areas of the Haud for no reason at all. They looked at him blankly. They could imagine it quite well. It would be no more insane than anything else the English did. Jack was annoyed, and annoyed at himself for being annoyed. He would not let them see it, not if it killed him. He became exaggeratedly calm. This session of gabbing seemed a waste of time to him. He wanted to get on with the job, not talk pointlessly and in circles. But here, this kind of talk was necessary, and the elders were not in a hurry.

  “The rumours are false,” Jack said. “There will be no European towns beside the ballehs.”

  Haji Yusuf, the sly winking one, insinuated himself to the fore, with a sidelong glance at his master. Haji Abu Jibril’s face remained impassive, but almost imperceptibly he nodded his head. Had they planned their entire approach beforehand? Very likely. We were no match for these accomplished plotters.

  “Some people are saying,” Haji Yusuf suggested, “that the Ingrese plan to make ballehs and then poison the water so all our camels will die.”

  Mohamed, translating that one, was in an agony of apprehension. Who would be angry, and at whom? He looked as though he wished he were a hundred miles away.

  “What interest could the English possibly have in poisoning your camels?” Jack parried.

  Back and forth, back and forth – the talk was like a tennis ball. It seemed never to get anywhere. Indeed, this was probably the elders’ intention. They might or might not have believed the rumours. All they were after, really, in this game of wits, was Jack’s reaction – how did he argue, and what manner of man was he?

  Finally, and surprisingly, as though upon an agreed signal, the elders nodded their heads. All right. The rumours were false, they conceded. But if this was so, why did the government not simply pay Somalis to dig their own ballehs?

  “The ballehs will be made with machines,” Jack said. “No man could make a balleh of that size by hand.”

  They appeared to be satisfied for the moment. They rose and ceremoniously bade us farewell.

  “Nabad gelyo – may you enter peace.”

  “Nabad diino,” we replied. “The peace of faith.”

  But as they went out, we wondered for the first time if it really would be peace. The gist of Jack’s words would be conveyed to nomads all across the Haud. How would they interpret what he had said? Would the meanings become distorted and lost? We had assumed that the Somalis would naturally be pleased at a scheme to provide watering places in the desert. Now we saw that they were by no means convinced that the project was designed to help them.

  We both sensed that this same scene would be reenacted, in different places, time and again. It was not a cheerful prospect.

  A stroke of luck. We met two people with whom we could discuss anything, freely, not worrying what we said. Jack was better than I, at simulating the English reserve, an extreme caution in speech, but it did not come naturally to either of us. Now we could occasionally shed it.

  Guś (whose real name was Bogomil and whose nickname was pronounced “Goosh”) was Polish, a tall man with an expensive and almost oriental face, high cheekbones, faintly slanting eyes. He was a poet in his own language.

  “Of course, it is useless,” he said with deep Slavonic melancholy. “My poetry can’t be published in Poland, and in England who is interested in publishing poems written in Polish?”

  His moods would swing like a pendulum. Suddenly he would be laughing, regaling us with Somali jokes or his own brand of slightly macabre humour. He spoke Somali more fluently than any other European in the colony, for he was here to do research into the Somali language and its phonetics.

  “Listen to this Somali joke about a Midgan. His wife had a miscarriage, and the man was very angry. When his friends asked him why he was so furious, he replied – There! That will teach me not to pour anything into a vessel that’s upside down! ”

  Guś’s wife, Sheila, was an attractive and capable English girl. She did everything with so little fuss that only gradually did it dawn on us that she was probably the only English woman in the colony who did her own cooking.

  “I like cooking,” she said, “so why not?”

  Guś ate compulsively but never gained any weight. During the war, when he was escaping from Poland, he was close to starvation many times. When he finally got to England, he joined the Free Polish Forces, and after the war he went to Oxford. Now Sheila cooked for him with a kind of tenderness, as though she hoped to make up for whatever hardships he had suffered once. She cooked everything on a tiny primus stove, and even ingeniously managed to make cookies, known to her as biscuits, by fixing up an oven of sorts with a saucepan.

  “I don’t really feel I was cut out to be a memsahib,” she admitted.

  This was my exact feeling, too. We were heartened to have discovered one another.

  Guś’s Somali assistant was Musa, a thin and strikingly handsome man with a pirate-like moustache. He was something of an orator, and was a well-known poet in the Somali language. He had a fine and subtle sense of dramatic irony that could overturn an adversary in an argument. In the evenings, we all used to gather and discuss Somali customs, language, poetry.

  “Somali is a difficult and complicated language,” Guś told us, “but very expressive.”

  A language well suited to poetry, I discovered, for so many of its words were of the portmanteau variety, containing a wealth of connotations. One word described a wind that blew across the desert, parching the skin and drying the membranes of the throat. Some words were particularly lyrical, some were acutely specific. A low bush with soft broad leaves and delicate purple flowers was called wahharawallis, which meant “that which makes the little goats jump.” There was a word for anything tasting sweet, even the fresh air. The word expressing a state of well-being meant literally “to have enough water in one’s belly.” A risk or any dangerous situation was saymo, the net of God.

  “Marooro is a plant,” Musa said, “that has an acid taste in the morning but tastes sweet in the evening.”

  Sheila and I, sitting like acolyte
s, listening to his words, possibly in the hope of total enlightenment, had to question that one. So what? What was so expressive about that? Musa grinned wickedly.

  “Well, you see, the Somalis often use the word as a nickname for a woman.”

  One evening an idea came to me. Could some of the Somali poems be put into English?

  “Absolutely not. Impossible.” Musa’s deep decisive voice. He felt protective towards his own literature. No one could do justice to it. He did not want to see the poems mangled in translation. He felt no English person could comprehend them, anyway. They would be wasted on the cold and unemotional English. As he was unacquainted with English poetry, he found it hard to believe that English people ever felt despair or exultance.

  “But listen, Musa –”

  Think of all the English here who had no idea that the Somalis had ever composed poems – think of showing them some of the epic gabei, the lyrical belwo. This was my line of persuasion. Guś saw the possibilities immediately. But Musa had to have time to consider.

  “Well, I don’t know –”

  We dropped it then, not wanting to press the issue. But we would return to it. I knew that I had found what I would like to work at, here. But I could not do it alone. Would I be able to find people who would help me? I was certain that I would. As we walked home across the valley that night, I was filled with enthusiasm.

  “Take it easy,” Jack said, wanting to protect me from disappointment. “It may not work out.”

  “Oh, I know that.”

  But I did not know. What I really knew was that it would work out. Incredibly, and much later than I would have thought, it actually did. What I did not at all suspect, however, was that it would be an “imperialist” who would make the publication of these translations possible.