The Prophet's Camel Bell Read online

  Hakim came for tea. How handsome he was, hawk-nosed and deep-eyed, wearing his Somali robe and an embroidered cap like a white tarboosh. With him came Nuur, dressed with scrupulous neatness in khaki trousers and white shirt, and carrying a folder which contained some of his paintings, birds and twisting trees and flowers that looked as though they had been delicately transplanted from some Persian tapestry.

  I felt I must discover everything about Somali beliefs, customs, traditions. I assumed that these young men, who were teachers, would be delighted to tell me. What did the Somali bride-price actually involve? Did men love their wives or merely regard them as possessions? Could a woman divorce her husband for infidelity? Did Somalis believe in magic? Did the clitoridec-tomy make it impossible for Somali women to enjoy sex? When a man was enjoined by the Qoran to marry his deceased brother’s wife, how did he feel about that? Hakim and Nuur smiled and said they did not know. All at once the brash tone of my voice was conveyed to my own ears, and I was appalled.

  Hakim told me about faal, the way in which the future could be foretold by the counting of beads of the tusbahh, the Muslim rosary. It never occurred to me to attempt to glimpse the future myself, in another way, by asking Hakim what he hoped would happen here in his lifetime. Independence seemed a long way off then, but longer away to me, probably, than to Hakim. He implied as much when he offered to teach me a few verses of Somaliyey Tosey, the song of the Somali Youth League, which was becoming a popular national song.

  Somalia, awake!

  Unite the warring tribes.

  Give help unto the poor

  And strength unto the weak.

  If one of your camels is stolen,

  To save it you risk your lives.

  But for our whole lost land

  No man even raises a stick.

  The tribes were at constant loggerheads with one another, but they were unanimous in their resentment at being governed by infidels. When independence came, it would be men like Hakim who would be the leaders. There were not many educated Somalis in the Protectorate, men who had some knowledge of the world outside their own land. When Hakim set foot on that path, it would not be a straight nor an easy one, for he was divided between two ways of thought. One day we chanced to talk with him about insanity. A common Somali belief, he told us, was that insanity is caused by the possession of a person by evil djinn.

  “Sometimes,” he said with a smile, “a mad person is told by an elder to slaughter a white sheep and wash in its blood, to drive forth the bad djinn.”

  I, too, smiled, and was astounded when the young Somali turned to Jack with a slightly puzzled frown.

  “Can you tell me,” Hakim asked, “what does science think of these djinn?”

  But the events of the future, like the drought in the Guban and the Haud, were still only far-off murmurs to me. The reality was the peace I felt at Sheikh, and the interest in all things new and strange, customs and costumes and the country itself with its weird candelabra trees or the lizard I saw sunning itself on a rock, its head a piercing yellow, its body an iridescent teal-blue, its legs a greenish gold.

  Minor adventures provided just enough excitement. We drove to Berbera to get petrol. When we returned, the hills were black and tigerish, crouched above the plain. We wound our way through Sheikh Pass, and as we looked at the narrow road and the sheer drop, we felt apprehensive, for behind the Land-Rover was hooked a trailer loaded with drums of petrol. The fifty miles seemed five hundred. As we climbed and twisted, our old driver Abdi smiled sardonically and told us gruesome tales of the lorries that had gone over the edge.

  “Were many people killed?” we asked, as he related the most recent calamity, for the trade-trucks were always covered with people who swarmed all over the top like ants on a sugar-bowl.

  “Oh no,” Abdi replied, surprised. “Nobody get kill. They jump.”

  They became accomplished jumpers, it seemed. The trade-truck drivers had a gay recklessness about them, more verve than mechanical know-how. If their lorries broke down, they always managed to fix them up with a bit of string or a piece of wire. At the top of Sheikh Pass we crawled past a truck which was plastered at the front with handfuls of ripe dates to plug a leaky radiator, and Jack, who had a feeling for machinery, at first stared in cold disapproval and then burst into incredulous laughter.

  The sweeping out of houses was not done by Somalis. This menial work was carried out by Midgans, an outcast tribe. They had a separate language, and long ago they were the hunters of the country, using their poisoned arrows on the elephants that used to roam here, much in the same way as the pygmies further south still did. The Midgans did most of the leatherwork, sandal making and suchlike, and were often attached to Somali rers, or tribal groups, as servants. Once they were slaves of the Somalis. They were still looked upon disdainfully and regarded as inferior, despite the fact that the Midgans had always been more skilled in crafts than the Somalis. The supposedly dim-witted Midgan was a favourite figure in Somali jokes.

  One of these Midgan jokes concerned a family who journeyed out at night to fill their water vessels at a well. With them they carried a baby. When the vessels were filled, they discovered they could not possibly carry the baby and the heavy water jars at the same time. They decided to leave the child and return for him later. But where, in all that unvarying desert country, could they leave him in a place sufficiently well marked for them to be sure of finding it again? Finally they thought of a wonderful idea, and went off happily, having left the baby right underneath the moon.

  Another outcast tribe was the Yibir, who were magicians and sorcerers. These were an ancient people, tracing their ancestry far back into pre-Islamic times. When a Somali child was born, the parents gave a gift to the local Yibir, for if they did not, the child would be followed by bad luck all his days. After receiving the gift, the Yibir in return would give an amulet to the child, which was worn always, a protection against the evils that are seen and the evils that are unseen.

  The Qoran, usually referred to by Somalis simply as the Kitab – The Book, warned against sorcery and against “the mischief of women who blow on knots” to make magic spells. Somalis, I discovered, were reluctant to speak of such matters. Mohamed and Hersi, our quick-thinking and stutter-tongued interpreter, denied all knowledge of anything pertaining to the black arts.

  Would a man go to a Yibir to have him make faal to predict the future? Mohamed’s face assumed a total blankness at my question.

  “I never no hear such thing, memsahib, never at all.” Apparently shocked to the marrow, he raised both hands to heaven as though seeking divine confirmation for his words. “Only Allah know what will happen. Man, he don’t know.”

  Hersi’s answers, on the other hand, were always lengthy and ornate. He spoke slowly and with great emphasis, making every speech sound like a sermon.

  “Memsahib, I wish to telling you – this Yibir matter is not for our highly considerations. We have no use for bloody these people. We are Muslims, memsahib, Muslims. These Yibir matters, they are going against our religion – absolutely.”

  The same answers applied to prostitution or any other subject which might be thought questionable. No such practices went on in Somaliland. Their virtue, as self-declared, was remarkable. They belonged to a nation of paragons. I was somewhat irritated at their pretence, and then amused. But finally I perceived that it was no more than I deserved. People are not oyster shells, to be pried at.

  Hakim, the sphinx-eyed, when I no longer bludgeoned him with questions, offered to tell me more about the outcast tribes. The Yibers were still widely consulted, despite the necessarily concealed nature of magic among people so strongly Muslim. Some of the old warlocks still made clay figures and stuck thorns in them, in order to injure those whose effigy had been pierced. But the Yibers also knew of herbs with genuine powers of healing. A common belief was that no one had ever seen the grave of a Yibir.

  “When they die,” Hakim said, “they vanish.”
<
br />   The third outcast tribe was the Tomal, the workers in metal, who made spears and knives. One of the Tomal came around with his assortment of hardware for sale, and Mohamed and I looked over the weapons carefully. I decided to buy a torri, a sharply pointed knife in a leather case. Mohamed badly wanted a knife also, but he had a problem.

  “All this knife –” he said, fingering them, “too long. Must be police will see I am wearing this one. Then – wallahi! – big trouble.”

  He ordered a shorter knife from the Tomal, one that the police would not be able to see.

  I persisted in my attempts to learn Somali, but found it slow going. A constant difficulty was that most Somalis, when I spoke to them in what I thought was Somali, appeared to have the impression that I was speaking English or another totally unknown tongue. The old watchman, Hussein, was convinced that I need learn only one Somali word.

  “Rob – rain,” he said to me. “Somali call rain rob.”

  I prepared a few Somali sentences carefully in advance and delivered them like a campaigning politician, ringingly. But Hussein was unimpressed.

  “Rob – rain,” he repeated.

  I recalled hearing some of the sahibs and memsahibs speaking very loudly to Somalis, as though a greater volume of sound would be bound to pierce the language barrier. Now, some of the Somalis, humouring me in my determination to learn their language, raised their voices and bellowed manfully, shaking their heads in bewilderment when still I did not comprehend their words.

  While in Hargeisa and Berbera, at the morning tea parties and the evening gatherings at the Club, numerous expatriates still persisted in the belief that the Somalis were of an inferior mentality because they did not speak English as well as the English did.

  Jack prepared to go off on trek into the Haud.

  “I’d rather you stayed here,” he said. “I want to travel with as few people as possible, and as little equipment. I have to make a rapid preliminary survey along the Ethiopian border. Mohamed can stay here, and I’ll take Ismail with me.”

  We had decided to let Mohamed be cook, and had hired Ismail as houseboy. Ismail was young, but he had worked in domestic service for a long time and had a fantastically strong sense of what was fitting. This insistence upon formality seemed to protect his own status. No Somali wanted to work for an Englishman who did not know the proper thing to do – this was Ismail’s attitude. For trek, everything had to be correct – sheets, pillowcases, two pairs of pyjamas, six handkerchiefs. All these had been ordained ages ago, apparently, by some higher power.

  We were sitting in the livingroom after dinner. In the kitchen, Mohamed and Ismail were packing the cooking utensils for the journey next morning. Suddenly – chaos. Loud and furious shouting. Wild accusations. Pained denials. We rushed out to the kitchen and found a domestic war in progress. Ismail was sitting on the floor, surrounded by every pot and pan we possessed. Mohamed was screeching like a madman.

  “Ismail, he take all my pans. How I can do my work? He is shaitan, a devil!”

  Ismail sat there unmoving as a statue, clutching the aluminium ware as though it were his hope of heaven. He shrieked back at Mohamed.

  “How we go on safari if we never got nothing?”

  Jack tried to calm the pair. No use. Finally he lost all patience and shouted louder than either of them.

  “Stop this nonsense! Cut it out right this minute! My God, I wish I could just go off quietly to the Haud by myself, without all this damn silly fuss.”

  They gazed at him in astonishment. What on earth could he be annoyed about? This argument was perfectly normal procedure. Jack succeeded at last in wrenching some of the utensils from Ismail, and pacified him by telling him he would be able to get any really essential pieces of extra equipment when they stopped at Hargeisa. Ismail instantly reeled off a lengthy list of things essential for safari – pans, spoons, another charcoal burner, egg-beater, china cups, glasses, soup-strainer.

  “All sahibs have soup on trek,” Ismail said, over and over again.

  Several weeks later, when Jack had returned from the trip, he told me of the sequel to this evening. At Awareh, he found he had forgotten his shaving mirror. Ismail remedied the oversight by borrowing one from an English major stationed there.

  “I never told him you forget,” Ismail said triumphantly. “I tell him yours get broken on the way.”

  Alone at Sheikh, I never felt afraid in our isolated house, for I had a kind of faith that nothing could harm me here. The other bungalows, however, were about a mile away across the valley. Mohamed’s quarters were down the road at a distance from our house, and although old Hussein occasionally plodded past the windows in the evening, as he made his watchman’s rounds, there was usually no one within hailing distance.

  “Some very bad thief staying in Sheikh now,” Mohamed informed me one morning.

  They were well-known thieves, it appeared, and the knowledge of their presence quickly spread.

  “You’d really be better to have a watchdog there with you,” John, the schoolmaster, said to me. “Would you like to borrow Slippers?”

  Slippers was a good-natured black dog of undeterminable breed, and I was glad to have him with me. The only trouble was that he refused to stay. Each day he went back to his old home across the valley, and each evening John patiently fetched him back again. Then John became ill with malaria and was unable to bring Slippers back. At dusk I set out to fetch him, although it seemed to me rather odd to be wandering around at night by myself in order to find the watchdog that was supposed to be protecting me.

  The sky was a dark shadowy blue when I started out, and the clouds scudded across the moon, making it look as though it were hurtling through the sky. This was my first solitary nocturnal trip, and when I started back with the dog, the darkness was complete and the moon was hidden. The valley was full of thorn trees and bushes, and there had recently been rumours of lions in the vicinity.

  Then the moon came out from behind the clouds and lighted the whole valley. The stars were clearer than I had ever seen them. The only sounds were the faint dry rustling of the trees and the scraping of my sandals on the stones. The mountains could be seen in the starlight, looking blacker than the sky. I felt the splendour of the night, and fear seemed trivial.

  But when the alien noise came, fear returned with a rush. A scratching in the bushes, the sound of breathing, a low cough. I stood absolutely still, certain that the next instant I would be face to face with a lion. Then I heard a tiny voice which seemed to be coming out of a bush.

  “Good morning!”

  It was a small Somali boy, and this was the extent of his English. He emerged and gravely put out his hand for me to shake. I did so, and replied “Good morning” to him. Perhaps he had imagined I was a lion, too. We smiled and went our separate ways, having reassured one another in the darkness of the valley.

  Each morning Ali Ma’alish’s wife climbed our hillside to bring the allotted two donkey-loads of water, our day’s ration. Soon after dawn I would hear the clonking and rattling of the old paraffin tins which were used for water containers, and the sloshing sound of the precious liquid being emptied into our buckets. Ali was the school gardener, and Ma’alish was a nickname, an Arabic word which meant “never mind” or “it doesn’t matter a damn,” applied to him because he habitually shrugged off all events in this manner. If the ants devoured the two puny cucumbers he had been cherishing, he said “ma’alish,” and if the news arrived that the Ogaden had raided the camps of the Dolbahanta, his comment would be exactly the same.

  Ali’s wife always carried her baby on her hip in a sling tied around his bottom, so that his back was bent like a half moon. His legs stuck out of his queer cradle and occasionally landed an outraged kick at his mother’s spine. He was about nine months old and was named Ibrahim. He had a fat firm little body, and skin a soft cocoa colour. Usually he wore only a string of white and silver beads around his neck, and looked like a water-baby clad in a necklace of sh
ells. I decided to take his picture one day, as he sat on the ground, so placidly, sifting the dust through his fingers. I brought out my camera, but Ibrahim’s mother hastily picked him up and covered his nakedness with her headscarf. No Muslim man, however small, her reproachful glance seemed to say, could possibly be peered at through the camera’s eye when insufficiently clothed. Was not modesty next to piety?

  Modesty of women, of course, was even more essential. European women, as far as I could gather, were not really regarded as women at all but rather as some kind of hybrid creatures who could, on markedly rare occasions, conceive and give birth to their young by some unusual means, possibly parthenogenesis. This view was confirmed by the odd way in which European women dressed. Bad enough that they shamelessly displayed their legs, but when they sauntered around in trousers – the Somalis could only snicker at it; their imaginations boggled at the thought of what sort of hermaphroditic features the shocking garments must conceal. I was wandering around in the garden one morning, wearing slacks, when some Somali women paused on the road to gawk at me. I could understand enough Somali by that time to catch their remarks.

  “Look, Dahab! Is it a man or a woman?”

  “Allah knows. Some strange beast –”

  I went back into the bungalow and put on a skirt. Never again did I wear slacks in Somaliland, not even in the desert evenings when the mosquitoes were thick as porridge, not even in the mornings when the hordes of glue-footed flies descended.

  “Two she come to see you,” Mohamed said.

  The visitors were the wives of two of the local elders. Both were extremely young. Zahara was small and slender, with lovely features which showed to advantage only when her mouth was closed, for she had very bad teeth. Her robes were blue and maroon, and in the long folds of her skirts her little daughter, a shy three-year-old, tried to hide.

  Hawa, the other, seemed more a girl than a woman, a tall and awkward girl, dressed in robes of blue and white, with a pale blue headscarf. She wore lightly musical gold bangles on wrists that seemed gauche, as though her long slim hands were an inconvenience, appendages that would not yet move gracefully to her bidding. She had no children, which might partly account for her lack of ease. When I told her I had none yet, either, she seemed to loosen a little. We said to one another the traditional prayer.