The Prophet's Camel Bell Read online

  “In sha’ Allah – if God wills it, you will have a son.”

  She had been married only a year. Her husband was a man old enough to be her grandfather. What her chances were of bearing the children she wanted so much, I did not know. I wondered how a girl her age, which could not have been more than fifteen or sixteen, felt about being married to an old man. I had no way of knowing that, either, but the look of resignation in her eyes said that her life was a bitter one. When she walked through the town, if her glance caught a group of the young men, she must forever look away from the one she would have chosen if the choice had been hers.

  I had brought with me from England a number of tubes of textile paint, and had done potato-block prints on unbleached cotton for our curtains. Zahara and Hawa fingered my curtains with interest, for the bold and simple designs caught their eyes. I explained to them how the work was done, and they were enchanted. It seemed enticingly easy to them. Their own embroidery, the stylized birds and flowers which they put on pillows or coverlets, took a long time to finish. Touched by their eagerness, I offered to teach them how to do block-printing. I would buy some more cotton, I told them, and let them know when to come for lessons.

  Shortly afterwards, I talked with the wife of the Director of Education. She had spent several years in convincing the local elders that some kind of education was desirable for Somali women, but not the highly theoretical education which at this stage of the country’s development would inevitably separate a woman from her people and turn her into a prostitute. She had a class of Somali girls now, the first in the country to be educated.

  “When they were nomads, the sanitation problem didn’t exist. They packed up their huts and left all the debris behind. But in a settled community such as Sheikh, new ways have to be learned.”

  She was teaching them how to care for their houses and children in this different kind of community. In her class, the girls worked with materials they would find available to them when they left school and got married.

  I went home and put away my imported paints, and no more was said on the subject.

  Jack returned from the Haud. He was sunburned and smelled attractively of sun and wind. But when he walked into the house, his khaki bush-jacket and his old grey fedora thick with red dust, I saw how tired he looked.

  “Didn’t it go well?”

  “Oh yes,” he said. “I got the data I needed. But it was pretty grim.”

  And then he told me. I could hardly believe it. In the Haud he had met Somalis who were dying of thirst. He had a spare tank of water in the Land-Rover, but no containers with him in the car, so he put the hosepipe directly into people’s mouths and let them drink that way. It was, as he pointed out, merely a spit in the ocean. All along the road were the bodies of camels that had died before they could reach the wells. Most of the nomads were on their way back to Hargeisa, the nearest watering spot. Jack had been troubled at the apparent improvidence of the Somalis.

  “I know they couldn’t do very much in the situation, but even the slight precautions they could have taken simply weren’t done. I met one family beginning a hundred-and-fifty-mile trek across the desert, and only twenty miles away from the Awareh wells they were already out of water, or hadn’t taken any with them.”

  Hersi had tried to explain.

  “You see, sahib,” he had said, “it is no greatly use for them to taking water. If Allah wanting them to reach the Hargeisa wells, they get there. If not, they die.”

  To us, this point of view was at first incomprehensible. Our lives had placed us in very few situations in which we had been virtually powerless. The Muslim fatalism was essentially foreign to us for other reasons as well. Our roots were closer to Luther’s “Here stand I; I can do no other” or Brigham Young’s “Trust in the Lord but keep your powder dry.” Individualism and self-reliance had been woven into us all our lives. The total subservience of the individual judgement went against our deepest grain.

  But Islam means “submission to God.” Gradually we began to see why Islam is a religion of the desert. Even had the tribesmen taken full water vessels with them on their trek, it would have made little difference in the long run. Some would still have died on the way and some would have reached the wells. The Somali tribes had always been dependent upon moving from place to place, seeking grazing for their herds and flocks, dependent upon brackish pools of water hundreds of miles apart. When they had watered their animals and filled themselves with water, they moved on to grazing grounds where there were no wells. This was the inevitable pattern of their lives.

  A cruel saying of the Arabs used to be that Allah had created the Arabs, and then He had created all other peoples, and then He had created the Somalis, and then He had laughed. This country’s irony began to be apparent to us – a forceful and imaginative people in a land that had no resources. We recalled the comments of some Europeans in Hargeisa and Berbera – the Somalis were stiff-necked, recalcitrant, difficult, hard. Yes, they were hard. They had need to be. And yet they maintained their faith – or were maintained by it.

  A few days after Jack returned from Awareh, Hakim came to see us.

  “Oil will be found some day in Somaliland,” he said with confidence. “You wait and see.”

  Why was he so certain, we wondered.

  “Because,” he said, “Allah, who is merciful, could not have been so merciless as to create a country with nothing of wealth in it.”

  Jack’s reports from the Haud were such a contrast to our life at Sheikh that I found them difficult to grasp. Even the nomads dying in the desert were distant and insubstantial. I spoke the words – how terrible that people should die of thirst. But the imagination is depressingly limited. I had not seen them die, and so I did not really know at all.

  My gentle introduction to this land was drawing to a close. At the peak of the dry Jilal season, we left Sheikh and went out south into the Haud. At the time we planned to return from camp fairly often, but as it happened we returned only once.

  We came back to Sheikh after the rains, when all things had been renewed. New grass sprouted from every rock crevice, and the mountains were covered with a haze of green. The fern-like boughs of the pepper trees were pale green with unfolding leaves.

  The cactus plants had put forth yellow waxen blossoms, and on the hills all kinds of wild flowers grew. The wilted aloes had filled with moisture and become succulently firm again, rosettes of broad pointed leaves mottled green and brown, edged with rust-coloured barbs like a shark’s teeth, and in the centre a thin stalk culminating in a scarlet flower, really a cluster of innumerable tiny flowers. Weird insects emerged – a crimson beetle patterned in gold and black, looking like a small heraldic shield, and another that looked like a piece of Italian mosaic, a delicate turquoise with pastel markings in coral. Near the stony river-bed the green pigeons had returned to the gnarled fig tree.

  Early one morning we began to climb Malol, the highest mountain around Sheikh. The path was covered with fissured rocks and piles of rock rubble, and the climbing was hard. We did not reach the top of Malol, but when the afternoon heat was at its height we came to a hidden valley. Clambering through a narrow rock pass, we came upon it suddenly, a green place where the grass was thick and soft, hair-like, and where mauve flowers grew.

  This valley was full of clumps of euphorbia, the candelabra trees, the milk of which was poisonous. Their trunks were creased and dark, almost like oak, but instead of branches they bore a collection of thick stalks, green and smooth, uplifted like long tapers. The trees were curiously filled with shadows. Vines had threaded themselves through the stalks and hung down like lace around the heavy candelabra. The loose heaps of rock and shale that littered the ground could almost have been the decayed remains of some temple or court that died ages ago, before any Somali voices came to break the silence once more. That Somalis had been here was proven by the little brushwood zareba, which seemed out of place, as though a nomad’s hut had found itself by mista
ke in the garden of a sultan. The clouds were swept along by the wind, and their moving shadows gave flecks of shade to the hills. Further into the heart of the mountains we could see Sheikh Pass. Far away and lower down was the settlement, the bungalows and the sheikh’s white tomb, all miniature at a distance. Around us, the swallows darted and the cream-winged butterflies trembled lightly on the flowers. The only sounds were the whirring of the insects and the stirring of the wind.

  We rested for an hour or so in the valley of the candelabra, among the forgotten enchantments. Then we went back, down the steep slopes, back to our house. When we got there, the dusk had come and the lamps were already lighted. We went to sleep that night to the sound of the wind that was never still. We would know other winds, some of them blowing like flame, whirling the dust-devils across the desert, moaning like the voices of the uneasy dead. But the wind at Sheikh, however deep its voice, never seemed to carry any threat.

  We did not go back again to our house in the clouds. But we carried the memory of its peace with us as a talisman.

  JILAL

  Praise be to Allah, Lord of the worlds.

  The compassionate, the merciful.

  In the plains of the Haud, no rain had fallen for a year. No green anywhere, none, not a leaf, not a blade of grass. In stretches where the wind-flattened grass remained, it had been bleached to bone-white. The earth was red, a dark burning red that stung the eyes. The sun was everywhere; there was no escaping its piercing light. The termite mounds, some of them three times the height of a man, rose like grotesque towers, making part of the plain seem like a vast city of insects where the minute knife-mouthed abor reigned supreme. In other places the thorn trees stood, grey and brittle, and on the ground lay littered the broken skeletal branches that had been snapped off by the wind. The clumps of aloes were shrivelled, all their moisture sucked out by the sun. The antelope and gazelle – the swan-necked gerenuk, the small white-tailed dero, the light brown aul – most of these had gone further south in search of water. Only the people and their herds did not attempt to escape the Jilal season.

  They shuttled between the northern wells of Hargeisa, Odweina, Burao, and the wells of the south, Bohotleh, Las Anod, Awareh. The two lines of wells were several hundred miles apart. Only dry grazing could be found now, and even this was not plentiful, so the tribes had to seek it continually for their herds. The camels moved along the road in a faltering line, the lean exhausted ones returning to the northern wells, the scarcely less lean ones coming back out into the Haud. The beasts’ humps were shrunken, and hung flabbily on their bony backs. They moved silently, ploddingly, and the men beside them walked silently, not speaking. What was there to say? They knew that if they stopped, they would not be able to rise again.

  When we passed them in the Land-Rover, travelling as far in a day as they could go in a week, sometimes they held out their water vessels of clay or dinted tin. If we had any water left in our spare tank we stopped. If not, we drove on. There was not much difference between the occasions when we stopped and those when we did not stop. A cupful of water might take them another half-day’s journey, but that was all.

  The Jilal was a good season for the vultures. They swarmed and shrieked around the dead camels that had succumbed to the drought. They stuffed themselves with carrion until they were too full to fly. Their bloated black bodies would run a little, try to take off, fall back again to earth. Their beaks and the dirty white ruff of feathers around their necks were crusted with red. Their snake-like necks craned interminably and their eyes searched for more dead flesh. Sometimes they could not wait for a camel to die before they descended, picking first at the greatest delicacy, the still-seeing eyes.

  By the roadside were the graves of people who had not reached the wells. So little stone existed here that grey acacia branches and piles of brushwood were used for the marking of graves. People were buried in a shelf jutting from the pit, in the hope that this might protect the bodies from the hyenas. The body was faced towards Mecca; the prayers were spoken and the tribe moved on for no one dared linger to mourn the dead.

  At the wheel of the Land-Rover, Abdi’s hands tightened whenever we stopped or did not stop beside the stumbling herdsmen. His face was set and rigid. His wife and younger children were out here in the Haud, with his tribe. Hersi’s family was out here, too, his wife Saqa and his two young daughters. His myopic and enquiring eyes expressed now only resignation.

  “Allah has placed a hard situation on His people. But if He is willing us to live, we will live.”

  At dusk, when the evening prayers were said, Hersi led the others in the low-voiced chanting. The Arabic words seemed to be suspended momentarily in the still air.

  Bismillahi’rahhmani’rrahheem –

  In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful –

  How could they? Like Job, they could find it within themselves to say – Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him. We had to accept faith’s intense reality for them. They lived in the palm of God’s hand. If His hand crushed them, so be it. Only in this way, in this land, was the heart saved from breaking. They were not a passive people. They struggled against terrifying odds to get through to the wells. But always in their minds must have been the feeling that if Allah intended them to make it, nothing would prevail against them, and if He did not intend them to go on living, no effort of theirs would be any use. This fatalism did not weaken them. On the contrary, it prevented them from wasting themselves in fury and desperation.

  But for myself, it did not apply, this faith, perhaps because I had never needed it the way they did. I viewed it from the outside. As far as I was concerned, God was deaf. If we did not hear the sound of each other’s voices, no one else would.

  The situation at the Awareh wells was said to be “very tense.” The tribes in the Protectorate were not allowed to own rifles, but a certain number were smuggled in. The Ogaden who dwelt in the protected area of Ethiopia were said to obtain arms from the Ethiopians. Most of the tribes in British Somaliland belonged to the large tribal group of Ishaak, whereas the Ogaden belonged to the tribes of Darod. Feeling had always run high between the two, but now the ancient animosity was greatly enlarged by the fact that the Ogaden were selling water at the Awareh wells for ten rupees a drum. If the incoming Ishaak tribes did not have the money, they and their herds died. The government feared a full-scale tribal war. In the manner of this country, there were any number of additional factors – tribal and personal jealousies too complicated for us to penetrate. But the main factor in the warring of the tribes could be expressed in one word. Biyu. Water. Each day the clouds drifted in shreds across the sky. But no rain fell.

  “In sha’ Allah,” the Somalis repeated, eyeing the clouds. “If God wills it.”

  One day Hersi showed me an abor, the insect which made the towering earth mounds on the plains. They used only the red soil and their saliva, he told me, and they worked only at night. The creature was half the size of my smallest fingernail, and its mouth was equipped with a blade, for I put it on my hand and although I could feel nothing, in an instant there was a little slash and the blood was oozing out. Hersi removed the bug and turned to more serious matters.

  “Memsahib – will you asking the sahib if he allowing us to go hunting evening times? We have no meat in bloody this place, and the men saying they cannot working without some little strength in their stomachs. Abdi is very good shot. I think maybe he is succeeding for some gerenuk or dero.”

  Just before dusk we set out in the Land-Rover, Abdi and Jack and myself in front, Hersi and one of the labourers in the back. The canvas top of the car was down, and as we bumped across the desert, over hillocks and clumps of grass, Jack on wild impulse stood and took a pot shot at a fox. Astonishingly, from the moving vehicle, he hit it. Hurrah – fantastic jubilation! The Somalis shouted themselves hoarse. A good omen – now, obviously, we would get a gerenuk.

  Although so few gazelle remained in the Haud, we sighted one almo
st immediately. We were all terribly excited. Abdi seemed to be trying to drive softly, crouched over the wheel in deep concentration, as though he could coax the vehicle to make less noise.

  The gerenuk, like a shadow, slipped from the tangle of thorn bushes. We saw its beautifully arched neck, and as it leapt it seemed to be held there for an instant against the pale sky, an image of perfect proportion. I was struck, hypnotized almost, by the unbelievable grace of it. Not so the Somalis. They were too meat-hungry to consider anything else.

  “Shoot, sahib!” Abdi hissed urgently, halting the LandRover.

  With this weight of responsibility heavy on him, Jack fired. He missed. The gerenuk darted away.

  “Hell and damnation! Well, let’s go after it, Abdi.”

  Off we went again. Even I was infected now with the spirit of the hunt, and would have seen the creature destroyed for the sheer triumph of scoring, even apart from the need for meat. Miraculously, we sighted it again. This time Jack handed the rifle to Abdi.

  “Here. You try.”

  Abdi, who was by no means a young man, jumped lightly out of the Land-Rover and began to stalk the gerenuk. We waited, hardly breathing. At last he fired. The gerenuk, untouched, bounded away and was lost in the gathering twilight.

  Abdi swore under his breath as he started driving once more, but Hersi was philosophical.

  “Allah is not intending we should have meat this day.”

  On the way back to camp, Abdi all at once swerved and headed off in another direction. When we asked him where he was going, he refused to reply. Finally we found ourselves in a Somali encampment, a few brown grass huts, a camel or two, a boy herding the sheep into the brushwood enclosure for the night. Abdi jerked the car to a halt, climbed out grimly and launched into a long harangue with an old man who appeared from one of the huts.