The Prophet's Camel Bell Read online

  What should I do? Give them a couple of five-grain aspirin? Even if they had money to buy future pills, which they had not, the lunatic audacity of shoving a mild pill at their total situation was more than I could stomach.

  “I have nothing to give you. Nothing.”

  This was the only undeceptive reply I could make. They nodded their heads, unprotestingly. They had not really believed I would give them anything. Women had always lived with pain. Why should it ever be any different? They felt they ought not to have asked. They hid their faces in their cloths for a moment, then spoke determinedly of other things.

  The days went by, and the clouds gathered, but still it did not rain. Ahmed Abdillahi, a young chieftain, visited the camp and offered his assistance.

  “I have heard much about the ballehs,” he said to Jack. “If you want me to go with you across the Haud, and guide you, and speak with the people, I will do it.”

  The first sign that the balleh scheme might be gaining some acceptance. Jack was encouraged and accepted the offer. Ahmed Abdillahi stayed with us for some time, travelling along the border with Jack, everywhere talking with people, arguing, explaining. He looked rather like Robeson must have looked as a young man, very tall and broad, with strong features and muscular arms. He had a poise that seemed never to be shaken. Whatever questions or suspicions were raised by his fellow tribesmen, Ahmed Abdillahi replied in the same deep firm voice, never losing his temper.

  I drove with Jack and the others to Lebesegale. While Jack examined the possibilities of the place as a balleh site, I looked around. It was a tiny settlement, dark brown huts, a few camels, a mud-and-wattle tea shop with roof of flattened paraffin tins. The inhabitants were thin and in rags, haggard with the long Jilal. The water hole, once a large one, had dried to a small pool of muddy liquid which somehow sustained the few people here, but could not have done so if even one more family had arrived.

  Beside me, Hersi trudged. “Nothing here, memsahib. The people are very poor presently times.”

  I nodded. There was certainly nothing much here. Only the bare red Haud soil, hard as stone, and incredibly, these few people, the old man who had come out of the tea shop to greet us, his two young grandsons, the three women with the flock of black-headed sheep. The rest of the villagers had left with most of the camels, to seek water and grazing elsewhere. Then I saw a small round brushwood enclosure within the almost-empty village. I asked Hersi about it.

  “That is the mosque,” he replied.

  I looked again at the thorn boughs that formed the place of worship. It seemed to me that more genuine faith might reside in this brushwood circle than in the jewelled and carved magnificence of the Blue Mosque at Istanbul.

  Driving along the Awareh-Hargeisa road, we saw two burden camels laden with the crescent-shaped hut-frames and the bundled mats. They were halted by the roadside, and as we drew near, we saw one of the beasts slide to its knees, sunken in the apathy of thirst and exhaustion. Beside them, squatting in the sand, was a woman, a young woman, her black headscarf smeared with dust. She must have possessed, once, a tenderly beautiful face. Now her face was drawn and pinched. In her hands she held an empty tin cup. She did not move at all, or ask for water. Despair keeps its own silence. Her brown robe swayed in the wind. She carried a baby slung across one hip. The child’s face was quiet, too, its head lolling in the heavy heat of the sun. We had a little water left in our spare tank, and so we stopped. She did not say a word, but she did something then which I have never been able to forget.

  She held the cup for the child to drink first.

  She was careful not to spill a drop. Afterwards, she brushed a hand lightly across the child’s mouth, then licked her palm so that no moisture would be wasted.

  To her, I must have seemed meaningless, totally unrelated to herself. How could it be otherwise? I had never had to coax the lagging camels on, when they would have preferred to stop and rest and die. But what I felt, as I looked into her face, was undeniable and it was not pity. It was something entirely different, some sense of knowing in myself what her anguish had been and would be, as she watched her child’s life seep away for lack of water to keep it alive. For her, this was the worst the Jilal could bring. In all of life there was nothing worse than this.

  What we could do here was only slightly more than nothing. Maybe she would reach the wells. Maybe she would not. She might with good reason have looked at us with hatred as we began to speed easily away, but she did not. She was past all such emotions. She knew only that she must keep on or she would perish, and her child with her. As we drove away, we saw her rise slowly and call the burden camels. The beasts struggled up and began to follow her.

  Across the great plains of the Haud, the wind swept the sand up into spinning dervishes of dust. The red termite-mounds stood like tall misshapen towers of the dead. On the carrion of camels the vultures screeched and gorged themselves. In the afternoons, the wisps of cloud formed raggedly in the sky.

  “In sha’ Allah,” the Somalis said. “If Allah wills, it will rain.”

  We, too, said the same thing now. What else was there to say? All other words had ceased to have meaning in the Jilal.

  FLOWERING DESERT

  “Very shortly times,” Hersi said, his words more a prayer than a prediction, “you will be hearing the voice of the tug in this land.”

  The tugs were dry river-beds for most of the year, but during the rains they flowed in spate, roaring briefly with their flood, hurling the water down to the sea, carrying it off where it could not be used. Hersi’s expression had a biblical ring to it, almost like the Song of Songs.

  The time of the singing of birds is come,

  And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.

  If the rains ever came, perhaps even the Haud would be like Solomon’s kingdom after the dry winter, when the flowers appeared on the earth and the vines were in blossom. It did not seem possible. The clouds had been gathering and thickening for so many weeks that we had ceased to expect anything of them. The rains would never come.

  But at last they did come, and the violence of them matched the depth of the Jilal drought.

  We had returned from camp and were temporarily based in Hargeisa. One afternoon we set off along the Wadda Gumerad road, Jack and Abdi and myself, on a short trip to a place in the Haud where Jack wanted to examine a possible balleh site. The road consisted only of the wheel marks of trade trucks, and even these had been obscured by the drifting sand. Somehow we took a wrong turning, and found that we were jouncing across the desert with not a trace of a road in sight. The Wadda Gumerad had completely vanished.

  “We get lost, I think, sahib,” Abdi admitted, furious at himself, for usually he could find his way unerringly through any portion of the Haud.

  We were still wondering how to find the road when a sudden wind shuddered across the red sand. The sky turned greyish yellow, and the thunder began to growl. Then we heard a slow plok-plok-plok and saw the first drops of water unbelievably falling and being swallowed by the dust.

  “Rain!” Abdi stopped the Land-Rover and jumped out, turning his face up to the sky. He let the quickening rain course over him – he held out his hands to it.

  “Praise be to Allah, Lord of the worlds!” He spoke the Arabic words aloud, a mighty shout of thanksgiving. As we drove on, he talked excitedly.

  “All thing come fine, this time. Sheep get fat, camel get strong now. You will see. Plenty meat, plenty milk –”

  We, too, were excited, jubilant, thankful. Only gradually did our present situation dawn upon us. The storm was gathering force, and we were still lost. Because we had expected to be back before dinner time, we had brought no food and only one bottle of water. Even our customary spare water tank was empty today. Abdi’s face grew sombre once more. He felt responsible for the fact that we had wandered off the Wadda Gumerad, but he reminded us, as well, that he did warn us not to venture out this afternoon in case the rains chose this day.


  “You’ve been saying the same thing for weeks,” Jack pointed out. “I could hardly wait around forever.”

  We shared the blame. There was no use in thinking about it. We were here, not there – what did it matter why? The rain became denser, and the sound of the thunder grew closer. Then the lightning burst like a gigantic roman candle, and the following thunder was like a cannon fired inside our skulls. The rain was a solid mass of water now, some ocean in the sky tilting and pouring out its contents all at once. The sky was black, illuminated momentarily by the explosive lightning. The deluge beat and battered at the canvas top of the Land-Rover, saturating it. We were chilled and shivering, and we had no idea where we were going. All sense of direction was gone, for around us the desert had been transformed into a sea.

  Thud! We hit a pothole. The muddy water splashed up around us. Abdi put his foot down hard on the accelerator, and the engine roared and strained, but it was no use. The Land-Rover was mired up to the axles. We were stuck like a bug in a pool of glue.

  As suddenly as it began, the rain stopped. But this was only a breathing space. Soon the downpour would start again. In the meantime, Abdi got out and set to work feverishly. Jack joined him, but not hopefully.

  “No stones around here. Nothing to block the wheels with. Well, let’s try branches, Abdi.”

  We gathered flimsy thorn boughs, but these only snapped off or disappeared in the well of mud. I climbed tiredly back into the car. Jack and Abdi continued their efforts, but without success.

  “I don’t see how we can get out of here by ourselves,” Jack said finally. “We’ll just have to wait until a truck comes along.”

  Abdi’s old eyes narrowed.

  “If we wait, sahib,” he said, “we wait one month. No truck pass this way when rain come.”

  Considering the fact that we had no food, this prospect did not seem hopeful. We sat huddled in the car, smoking thoughtfully, racking our brains but not emerging with any useful ideas. Then in the distance we saw a herd moving towards us, the camels looking like dinosaurs as they squelched through the mud, their long necks swaying, bending frequently to drink the water for which they had waited so long. As they drew closer we heard the cry of the herders, their voices guiding the animals and keeping the herd together.

  “Ei! Ei! Ei! Hu-hu-hu-hu-hu!”

  The tribesmen approached and eyed us warily. Abdi spoke with them, and their faces, as they realized our helplessness, took on a kind of avaricious joy. There were eight of them, tall young men with their spears slung across their shoulders. They were not of Abdi’s tribe. In fact, their tribe and Abdi’s had been on exceedingly bad terms during the Jilal. Slyly, one of them poked his head inside the Land-Rover and stared covetously at the rifle. Abdi immediately launched into a long and impassioned speech, his eyes glinting with menace. The tribesmen looked at me questioningly, shuffled their feet on the slimy ground, and drew away slightly from the vehicle. Over his shoulder Abdi hissed at me in English, not taking his eyes off the herders.

  “You never move, memsahib. Stay there with rifle. I tell them we have plenty ammunition, and I say the officer’s woman, she know how to shoot very well.”

  What presence of mind! Jack and I could not resist grinning at one another as we recalled my one unsuccessful attempt to fire the rifle.

  “If they agree to help us,” Jack said, “we’ll not only have to give them what money we have – they’ll expect the cigarettes as well. While they’re busy, see if you can salvage a few, eh?”

  The bargain was struck, and the young men set down their spears and began to work. I remained in the Land-Rover while it was being heaved at. The tribesmen shouted and shoved. The mud splattered like thick brown rain. The placid camels drank and gazed. Surreptitiously I managed to conceal a few cigarettes in my pocket. Finally, with a bellow of triumph, the tribesmen got the vehicle unstuck.

  We paid them gratefully – it was little enough for what they had done for us. The bulk of our cigarettes, however, we parted with much more reluctantly. The tribesmen retrieved their spears and again regarded the rifle longingly. My hand remained firmly on the gun. I could not really take the situation seriously. I could not imagine our being attacked, perhaps murdered for the sake of a rifle. Abdi was wiser. He kept his eyes fixed on the men and never for an instant turned his back.

  They were not all certain that Abdi had spoken truthfully about my excellent marksmanship, but neither were they certain he had not. We were held for an instant, all of us, in a state of suspended animation, no one wanting to be the first to make any kind of move. At last, as though they were able to communicate among themselves without words, they appeared to make the same decision simultaneously. Shrugging, they shouldered their spears, called the camels and went off. Across the plain we could hear their voices for some time, growing thin and reed-like in the wet and silent air.

  “Ei! Ei! Ei! Hu-hu-hu-hu-hu!”

  Night had come, so we left the car, which was now perched on solid ground, and made a fire. We sat around it on a damp hillock, smoking and looking up at the sky, a rich deep blue now that the moon had come out. Around us we heard the cackle of the hyenas. We were desperately cold, and the small fire did little to warm us, but we were glad of this respite. Then the moon and stars went out, and the rain began again.

  “Must be we go on,” Abdi said.

  We trusted him absolutely. He was the one who knew what to do. We climbed back into the car and set off again. At last we managed to find our way back to the Wadda Gumerad, but the road had become a river. We were forced to follow the path pointed by this swift torrent of water, for it became impossible for us to see anything. There could be no darkness anywhere to compare with this darkness, unless in caverns under the sea where the light never reaches. The rain was a black wall of water before our eyes. Abdi hunched forward, glaring at the streaming windscreen as though hoping by sheer force of will to penetrate the dark rain. The Wadda Gumerad was full of small waterfalls, where the flood had gouged chunks out of the road and burrowed channels into the clay. The Land-Rover moved slowly, straining against the mud and rain, against the wild wind. It seemed a marvel that we were able to move at all.

  Two days before, men and animals were dying of thirst here. Now some of them would drown. Every year, Abdi told us, a few sheep and goats, a few children, were swept away by the tugs when they flowed in spate. This must be the ultimate irony, surely – to drown in the desert.

  Then we were on a vast plain, no trees or bushes anywhere. Our car was the highest object for miles, and all around us the lightning pierced down in pink shafts, a bright shocking pink that illuminated the entire plain in its flare, showing us the flat and open land, revealing to us our own faces. It was so close that we could not see how it could avoid striking us.

  “You all right?” Jack enquired, not really a question – a reassurance, rather.

  Yes, I told him. Quite all right. Probably I would have said so in any case, but as I spoke the words I realized with surprise that they were true. I would not have chosen to be anywhere else. If anything happened, at least it would happen to both of us at the same time. Perhaps some of the Muslim fatalism was rubbing off on me. We could not wish ourselves out of here, so there was no use in worrying about it. We would get out if we could – In sha’ Allah.

  The car bogged down again, and we decided to stay where we were until dawn. After an hour or so, the rain stopped and the lightning mercifully withdrew. The canvas of our roof was sodden and dripping, and all around us we could hear the voice of the tug, just as Hersi promised we would. When he spoke of it, however, we did not imagine we would be listening from this vantage point. The moaning of the tug was low and ominous, and we could feel the water sweeping and pushing against our uncertain fortress. But we were too tired to wonder whether the car would hold against the flood or not. Abdi crawled into the back, Jack and I settled ourselves in the front, and soon all three of us had fallen into a deep exhausted sleep.

  In the
morning, the situation had altered. The flood had abated, and we could see stones close by with which we could block the wheels. Externally, things had improved. Internally, they had worsened. We were stiff and cramped, damp, hungry, and without cigarettes. We were also extremely thirsty, for our one bottle of water had long since gone. We would not perish of thirst with all this rain, but we would have to be thirstier than we were at the moment, before we would drink mud. I glanced at myself in the Land-Rover mirror and immediately looked away again. I was covered with clay and grime, my clothes filthy and dishevelled. I had never felt more demoralized and miserable in my life. Last night we were keyed up, tense, ready for anything, but now that feeling was gone. We were depressed, wondering how long it would take us to get back to Hargeisa, or if we would get back at all. The thought of slogging through the mud again filled us with weariness.

  We read these thoughts in each other’s faces, but we did not express them. We had developed, all at once, a reluctance to say anything discouraging. It was better not to talk at all. We began to gather stones, and finally got the Land-Rover out of the gumbo and into action once more. We struggled along the Wadda Gumerad, feeling the road slippery and treacherous underneath us. We had only gone without food and water for twenty-four hours. Compared to the tribesmen in the Jilal drought, this was nothing. But it was quite enough. My mouth tasted of bile, and I began to feel the nausea of emptiness.

  “We try to pass Wadda Beris way,” Abdi said.

  “All right.” We were in his hands. We had faith that he would do the best thing possible. We travelled quietly, talking very little, trying to reconcile ourselves to the idea of another day without food, wondering how soon we would have to drink the water from the dank puddles along the road.

  But luck was with us. The rain held off, and in the afternoon we sighted Wadda Beris, the brown rain-soaked huts and the clay-and-wattle tea shop of Haji Elmi, the old man who had once shown Jack the tattered letter received twenty years before from the Englishman who had hunted in Somaliland long ago. And here was Haji Elmi himself.