MUDIA JOURNAL

1951[1]

KAY CLAY

Shortly before I flew down to Aden for my Christmas leave Richard wrote and suggested that we should spend part of it staying in a fort in the Western  Aden Protectorate.  He explained in his letter that whereas the Eastern Protectorate, with Mukalla as its chief town, was a well-developed state with quite a considerable cultural development, the Western part of the Protectorate was relatively primitive and inhabited by a number of warring tribes  - until very recently and unhealthy spot for Europeans to visit unless they were well protected by a strong bodyguard.

“It won’t be luxury travelling”, he wrote, “but it should be very interesting.”

My imagination was taxed enough already in foggy Milan to visualise hot and sunny Aden, for which, while shivering in woollen jumpers and a fur coat, I should have to pack the thinnest of summer frocks.  I wrote back that I should love to do anything he arranged, so long as I was with him, and thought no more about it.

When I arrived he explained more in detail.  It was an opportunity not to be missed, he said.  Very few people were allowed into the Western Protectorate.  We might never get  another chance and it would certainly be worth while.  He had warned me that it might be a little uncomfortable, but what he really wanted to prepare me for was the journey there and back, which would be very hard going.  I had only been twenty-four hours in Aden and I was in no mood to find anything too difficult.  If he had suggested a ride in an amphibious jeep across the Red Sea I would have accepted.  Aden, with its smells and sights, the camel cart, the brightly coloured local dress, the flanking volcanic rocks, the dhows smelling of shark oil and the shark-infested sea, he shops in the Crescent waiting spider-like to tempt all ship’s passengers, on shore for a few hours, to buy mediocre goods and anything but mediocre prices, the English colony itself, so hidebound by status and tradition, all this gave my mind plenty to digest and left no room to deal with imaginary pictures of life in an Arab village.

We spent Christmas Day in traditional style in spite of the weather, feasting off turkey and plum pudding and going to sleep after lunch.  On Christmas evening, unable to eat, we went out and danced and drank and got home at three in the morning.  I fell asleep immediately, and did not wake until I heard a knock at our bedroom door.

            “It’s six-thirty.  There’s Ishmael with the coffee.  We must get up.  Today’s the day we’re going to Mudia.”

Richard sat up with a jerk, barked out “Come in” and then fell back fast asleep again.  But it was not the discreet Ishmael, but pock-marked, coal-black face, dressed in white tropical jacket  and knee-length shorts, coming in with springy treat and his usual cheerful “Good bornin, sar”, spoken with a Jeeves-like mixture of friendliness and tactful respect.  Ishmael would not drive up in his highly polished, new, green limousine until seven, after the rest of the staff had begun. Instead, a frightened pantry boy had been told off to serve us.  “Oh dear,” I said, knowing the pantry boy’s habits, “that means weak coffee this morning.”

The strength of the coffee was very important.  The highly chlorinated salty Aden water made early-morning tea impossible, and coffee was only drinkable if it was strong enough to mask the taste of the water.  Richard drank a cup with plenty of sugar in it.  I managed one sip.  We could neither of us face the plate of green bananas.

The driver was due to arrive for us at eight.  We had decided to make an early start for Mudia, even if it meant sacrificing some sleep, in order to get as much driving done in daylight as possible.  We had a hurried shower and dressed quickly.  Richard had been warned to put on his naval shirt with tabs, and to wear a cap to prevent any trouble with the customs in the Fadhli Sultan’s territory.  I dressed in navy blue slacks and a blouse and cardigan, having been told that it was only hot in Aden and could be quite cold where we were going.  The advice was ill-taken in both cases.  We were neither of us suitably dressed; Richard had to borrow clothes and I, being unable to borrow since I was the only European woman there, had to suffer.  What to take with us was the next problem.  Richard decided on a toothbrush and razor first, and then added a change of shirt and shorts, and a warm jacket and pullover.  I put in a rather highly coloured utility dress, one or two cardigans and a gabardine costume, a change of underclothes and a make-up bag.  By the time we had finished our brief packing, I was perspiring heavily and began to long for the cool air which we were to find outside. 

            We had more coffee.  I managed two sips this time and Richard two cups.  We each ate a slice of pawpaw, with lime juice and salt and pepper.  A cigarette, a final word of instruction from Richard about work in the office while he was away, and it was already eight o’clock.  Richard’s flat had a balcony running along one side of it which is used as both dining room and sitting room.  It faces a big square containing the town football ground, and there is constant traffic of taxis and cars and jeeps and camel carts around it.  We spent the next two hours heralding the noise of all motor vehicles within hearing distance by a ‘here it is’ before the Land Rover finally arrived.  I tried to stifle both a desire to yawn and a feeling of cross regret at having lost sleep unnecessarily.  When it did arrive, neither of us was ready.  Richard had gone across to the office, I was doing my hair again, and Ishmael, who should have carried our bags down, had gone out.

            The next half hour was spent in a dangerous search for petrol.  Since December 26^th was Bank Holiday, most of the petrol stations were shut.  Our driver, a wild man from the Western Protectorate, lean, brown, with finely-chiselled features and a worried frown, d rove us impetuously up and down streets to the period of other cars, goats, sheep, pedestrians and ourselves.  The camels, being large, would probably have won in any encounter.  We picked up an empty can with a whole in it in one place, filled it with petrol at another, drove some distance with the petrol spurting lavishly out of the hold, had the hole soldered up at yet another place, and at last started off down the main road out towards the beach.  All this time Richard and I had sat in childlike bewilderment, abandoning ourselves to our fate.  We knew no Arabic, the driver and his satellite in the back knew no English.  I sat back with a sigh of relief and an affectionate smile at Richard and at that moment the driver decided to hold and urgent discussion with the boy in the back.  Europeans may have cultivated the faculty of talking through the back of their heads, it seems that Arab drivers have not.  To talk one must look at the person to whom one is speaking.  We were on the wrong side of the road and within a few feet of a head-on collision before the driver responded to a touch on the arm from Richard, looked around, saw the oncoming car, and jerked the wheel over to safety.

We turned off the tarmac road on to a sandy track leading to the sea, and left Aden behind us, brown and rocky and dazzling in the heat.  It had been high tide at eight, and now a broad sweep of deceptively smooth sand stretched for miles ahead of us.  We began our drive towards the small town of Shukra, about seventy miles away, to the east of Aden along the coast in the territory belonging to the sultan of Fadhli.  We drove, keeping the sea on our right and the sand dunes and desert on our left.  It was not a comfortable drive.  The first few miles were punctuated every few yards by invisible ridges which caught the Land rover amidships and threw us forward with a lurch against the windscreen.  then came a patch which broke the monotony of the automatic bumping, and gave us a number of surprises.  We drove boldly over a Daytona-like stretch, though not quite at racing-car speed – we scarcely even managed top gear for more than a hundred yards – and then suddenly one of two things happened.  Either we would be faced with a steep drop down a bank into the bed of a waddy, and when this happened the driver got out, ran a hundred yards or so testing the firmness of the sane with elastic, barefooted leaps into which he put as much  weight as possible, crushed down the side of the bank to give us a smoother run and then drove us at full speed into and across the waddy in a dash to reach the good firm sand on the other side; or we would be lulled by the smoothness into believing that all the beach was firm and suddenly find ourselves caught in a well of loose sand, with the engine roaring and the wheels whirring, quite unable to go backwards or forwards.  It was on such occasions that the camaraderie of the desert showed itself.  From nowhere, from deserted sand dunes and a completely empty beach, a handful of men in foutahs – the native coloured skirts – wioth rifles slung over their shoulders and the tails of their turbans waving, would come running up,  ready to lend a shoulder and shove us out again.  When they had dislodged us, they clustered around the car talking.

“Ought we to tip them?” I asked Richard

“I don’t know” he answered “I haven’t heard the word ‘baksheesh’ and they might  get offended.”

We left it to the driver and he, with a curt sentence or two, which we hoped was of thanks, drove on.  Perhaps it was a general system of mutual aid.  We stopped twice while the driver ran to help a lorry in difficulties.  But I noticed that he rewarded himself with water for our boiling radiator, a fair-sized tip when one considers the scarcity of it in that arid country.

            Herons and pelicans watched us roar by, from the water’s edge. Hundreds of small, twinkling, sharp-beaked birds scattered in flight as we drove along.  And as we drew nearer to Shukra the sand lost its smoothness and became pimpled over with worm-casts like rough cast on the side of a house.  Where the worm-casts were thickest, there we found the crabs, myriads of land-crabs clouding the sand and sidling off rapidly as we approached, in angular disdain, like ballet dancers minoing [or mincing? P 9) on their points.

We had planned to meet our host, Archie Wilson, for lunch at Shukra but by the time we got there it was well past lunch and he had already eaten.

            “Come in, come in, do” he said, after we had been introduced, “my Somali boy, Ali, has got lunch all ready for you.  I hope you will forgive my having eaten.  It was rather late and I began to think you must have changed your minds about coming.”

            He took me first of all to wash my hands, for which I was very grateful since I was covered with dust, and besides, had not been successful in getting the driver to stop discreetly for me on the way.  A canvas basin, a large drum of water, soap and a towel, and a hole in the floor dropping straight down on to the beach were what I found.  I did not know it then, but the fact that the bathroom had a roof over it was something of a luxury.  When I found my way back to the sitting room I noticed that Archie had changed out of trousers into a foutah.  Richard told me afterwards that Archie had explained he had put on trousers to be polite but that when he saw what I was like he had not hesitated in getting out of them for the more comfortable foutah.  Whether or not he meant that as a compliment I do not know.

            It was my first visit to an Arab house and I was very impressed by the coolness of it.  The sitting room was a large whitewashed room, with windows looking straight out over the beach. Arab rooms have windows in most of the walls, with small square outlets cut above them, so that you can vary your ventilation if there is wind, and if need be, shut all the windows to keep out the sand, and ventilate through the small outlets.

            Ali gave us a wonderful vegetarian lunch of Heinz spaghetti, fried eggs and tomatoes and fruit, especially  chosen for me, and the first proof of Archie’s excellence as a host.  When we had finished, Richard and I left Archie while he made last-minute arrangements about the next stage of our journey, and wandered out to take some photos and look at the town.  All the houses were sand-coloured and box-like, with small windows and often crenelated roof tops.  They were surrounded by high walls, and we could see women and children peering out through the doors in them shy of us but wanting to see what the curious white people looked like.  Some of the smallest children were running about on the beach, dark eyed, black skinned and curly haired, and with practically no clothes on.  When we tried to photograph them they all ran away, except the very smallest of all who couldn’t manage it, and fell flat on his tummy on the sand, staring at us with an aggressive, rather cross expression when we pointed the camera at him.  Archie joined us and took us to see the school which is being built there.  A small, unpretentious building of four classrooms, each with one window, one blackboard built in the wall, and one roughly built cupboard.  The size of the rooms had been regulated by the ceilings, which are made of large beans if ilb, a hard red wood, the only wood available locally, with the intervening spaces filled in with mud and the dried twigs of the ilb placed at right angles to the beams.  Larger ceilings would require pillars to support them and these the educational officer, who had designed the school,  quite rightly refused to have, saying that you could not have some poor child losing all its schooling by having to sit behind a pillar and see nothing.  We shook hands with the builder and all his workmen and smiled our compliments, since we could not speak them.

            “Let’s go,” said Archie, “we’ve got a long journey ahead of us.”

            Archie is tall and thin and aristocratic-looking.  He wears a monocle and smokes a pipe and has a complete disregard for final g’s and vowel lengths in his speech.  I learnt later that he has an equal disregard for his own physical safety.  He is conservative and traditional to the fingertips, but so intellectually honest that he is forced to admit the right of other people to hold a different point of view from his own.  His forbears, immediate and remote, have all had a hand in making the British Empire what it was, and, in Archie’s opinion, no longer is but still should be.  For an adult I am ridiculously shy about new acquaintances and for quite a few miles before reaching Shukra I had been hoping that Archie would fail to be there.  My nervous doubts were dissipated as soon as I met him. He is the good –mannered man par excellence: he has tact, courtesy, amusing conversation and a charming lack of that modern failing: the probing, inquisitive, direct question.  He took over the driving and we sat in front beside him.

            “Let me know whenever you want to stop,” he said.  “We are in no hurry and the going’s hard.  Whenever you want to rest just say so.”

The going was hard.  We turned out backs on to the sea and Shukra and struck out inland towards a formidable group of volcanic mountains.  The road until recently had been nothing but a narrow camel track.  Now, graced with the dignified title of road, it was wider, but that was about all one could say for it.  Its surface was still interestingly rugged.  Archie drove splendidly, knowing just when to accelerate and lurch ahead, and when to slow down for bumps.  We had gone many miles before he revealed, or we guessed, that the brakes had gone.  The first few miles reminded me of driving up the foot of Etna, The road and the surrounding land was strewn with lumps of lava of all sizes: dust, pebbles, small stones, chunks, huge boulders.  Slabs of lava paved the road itself where the sand had been blown off or worn away.  After some miles I gave up making mental comparisons.  Etna was a child’s plaything compared with these extinct volcanic giants, thrown up and hardened in some mighty eruption hundreds of thousands of years ago.  It was not a question of boulders or crags or even slopes of lava.  Vast mountains had been poured there and had presented unchanging entities of black, impenetrable rock ever since.  One mass, as large as Etna itself, looked like a gigantic Christmas pudding on which the brandy sauce had set as it trickled down; in between the trickles huge caves had formed.  Bones found in some of the caves prove that they were once at ground level, so Archie told us.  Now they are several hundred feet up.

            We came upon a waddy, green with succulent plants, and glistening with what appeared at a distance to be moist soil.  But when we came closer the glistening proved to be shining lava caught by the sunlight, and there was no moisture at all.

            “There’s no water there.” Said Archie, “The succulents thrive on the little rain they get once a year and all the digging in the world won’t yield you a drop.”  It seemed ironic:  such greenness and such drought.  A few goats were grazing there but their owner carried water in a large skin bottle on his camel’s back.

            When we reached the highest point in the track across the range, we stopped and got out to look back through the gap at the sea far away in the distance.  Shukra had disappeared and there was nothing to be seen except sky, very blue, sea, white-fringed with waves, and forbidding black barriers of mountainous rocks.

“That’s where we go,” said Archie, pointing ahead of us down the other side of the pass into the sandy plain.  “You’d better pull your turbans across your faces.  It’s going to be dusty now.” 

And dusty it was.  We drove along dusty tracks into which the wheels of the Land Rover sank  so deep that the ridge of dust in between scraped the undercarriage.  It gave us all the sensations of skidding, minus the danger, for there was nothing you could run into except more dust.

            We shut the sidescreens and opened the windscreen at the bottom and the dust got in our mouths.  We then shut the windscreen and opened the sidescreens and it got in our ears and hair.  Every now and again we bucked over a six-foot ridge of solid dust, churning it between the wheels and then nose-diving down.  As we drove along I noticed sculptured mounds of dust, man-high, and fantastically shaped, dotted all over the desert.

            “Ant-hills”, said Archie briefly

We stopped at a giant waddy for a nip of whisky from our flasks.  Ilb and acacia-like trees growing shoulder-high on banks of crevassed dust, with all their roots exposed.  And then we drove on and on, past mud-coloured villages where stray dogs, lean and angry, came out and barked at us; past flocks of black-faced sheep with fat tails, past camels laden with fodder, past scampering she-goats and their young.  Vultures hovered over everything, and when the sun went down and we plunged on through whirling dust, bats fluttered backwards and forwards in the light of the head-lamps.

We reached Mudia at nine in the evening.  Archie’s black-turbaned tribal guards were there to salute us.

            “My fort,” said Archie taking his pipe out of his mouth, and pulling off his white head-cloth.  “The guards are waiting for you to take the salute, old man” he said to Richard.  Formalities over, we went in through the doorway cut in the thick outer walls of the dar.  To our right, stone stairs led up to Archie’s room and bathroom, built over the guard-room.  To our left were the kitchen with guest-room cum office, and the wireless room, and a balcony, reached, like Archie’s room, by an outer stone staircase of rough steps.  The Dar itself towered in the middle and housed Archie’s A.P.O., Ahmad, Education officer for Dathina state, and one of his assistants, a young boy of fifteen.  On the remaining corner of the square walls surrounding the Dar was the lavatory, white-washed, as I afterwards learned, especially for my benefit, with the mud-ceiling and roughcast walls I had seen in the school-rooms at Shukra, and with the luxury of concrete foot-slabs on either side of the hole.

            Our room was small and square and newly whitewashed, with a mud floor, two windows in each of the walls north and south, two niches cut, in which to stand oil lamps, one large single bed, one map of the Western Protectorate (very inaccurate, as I afterwards learnt from Archie). One chair and whole stacks of the Aden Gazette.  Through the windows on the south side we could see right across the plain to ranges of mountains, of which one was shaped exactly like the Matterhorn.  Through those in the north we were visible to anyone who cared to go by with washing to hang yup at the other end of the balcony, or work to do in the wireless room.

            The bathroom outside Archie’s room was open to the sky with an eight-foot wall on three sides and the wall of Archie’s room on the fourth.  It was completely visible from the turreted windows of Ahmad’s room, but when I confessed my fears of being overlooked, while washing stripped all over:  “Ahmad’s a gentleman,” protested Archie.  When I went to wash before our evening meal I found a canvas bath, larger than the one at Shukra, a small shaving mirror over a basin and a niche in the wall, a large drum of water, an aluminium jug with which to scoop it out, a wooden crate on which there was Archie’s toothbrush and paste in a chipped enamel mug, his cut-throat razor and a soap box.  Towels were hung over a piece of string tied across one corner.  The wall separating the bathroom from Archie’s room contained a communicating window which Archie had politely shut.  The door was of slatted wood, with large gaps between the slats.  Everything indicated a bachelor establishment.

“I’m afraid it’s very primitive,” apologised Archie, “but I told Richard to warn you.  My wife and I had a charming house on the other side of the village.  I’ll show it to you tomorrow.  But the scoundrel who owned it turned us out because we refused to pay the exorbitant rent he demanded.  Kitty went home with the children and I moved in here.  I hope you won’t find it too uncomfortable.”

            So far the major discomfort had been flies while washing.  I had stripped to the waist in order to soap off some of the dust and the flies settled stickily in the soap wherever my hand was not operating.

            We went to bed early that night after another excellent meal, with a very warming amount of whisky afterwards.  It was cool enough for us to need a blanket.  We slept well with the oil lamp turned down low.

Dec  27^th.

            Richard woke up in the morning covered with bites.  We suspected sandflies, as there was building going on outside, below the window.  We washed summarily in the open air bathroom, shook a quantity of dust out of our clothes and even more out of our shoes and went across for breakfast.  Ali’s idea of breakfast was decidedly English:  fried sausages and bacon, fried egg and fried bread, coffee, toast and Cooper’s Oxford Marmalade.  After breakfast Archie lit a pipe and then told Ahmad that he was ready for anyone wishing to see him.  Archie was not expected back until the following day, so there was only one caller instead of the usual stream.  He was a lean man, about five foot seven or eight inches in height, with an intelligent, handsome but untrustworthy-looking face; his long, oiled, black hair was piled up in a top knot on his head with an indigo-coloured strip of material tied around it.  His chest was bare and stained almost black with indigo.  He was wearing a blue-black skirt, the local indigo-coloured foutah, held in place by a dark leather cartridge belt, of decidedly business-like proportions.  An even more deadly-looking rifle was slung over his shoulder.  He had come to ask a favour of Archie:  permission to build a fort in the middle of the souq, the local market place, which is part of his territory.  Archie knew that he wanted to do this, believed it to be a bad thing since it would intimidate other tribes coming there to sell, and would give the man too much life-and-death power.  He had already decided to refuse him.  The parley was carried with many smiles and apparent friendliness, with Ahmad assisting as interpreter where necessary.  Archie’s Arabic is fluent but the various dialects sometimes make it difficult for him.

            Archie allowed the tribal leader to have his say and then told him that not only would he not give him the permission that if ever he found him attempting to build the fort against his orders – the sentence was finished with a throat-slitting gesture of finger drawn across throat, a threat which sent the Arab tribesmen into fits of genuine laughter.  We then all shook hands and the visitor left, smiling happily and broadly.  I wondered what was in his mind?  Defiance when Archie was away on leave? Perhaps.

            “Come along with me to the souq,” said Archie, Jumping up, “you can get an idea of the size of the local market and see where this damned scoundrel hopes to build.”

There was no doubt that Archie is well-liked and trusted in Mudia.  As we drove along the dusty tracks through the village, past the big ilb beneath which the carpenters work, across the large square in front of the school, past the place where the local lord of the manor, Aden-educated, was building a second house for additional relatives, past the magnificent garden where he was sinking a well in order to begin a new venture, the cultivation of oranges and lemons – wherever we went men and children rushed out to greet us with very genuine smiles of good-will on their faces.

            The souk was about half an hour’s drive away, out in the middle of the valley.  There were no buildings of any kind.  Nothing but men and cattle and goods set down in the middle of the dusty desert, in the full glare of the sun.  The brilliant green millet growing in the distance, the low-growing succulent scrub, the dark shadows on the mountains gave a degree of coolness, but the souk itself was hot and smelly, and very, very, dusty.

            We hadn’t struck a very good day.  Cattle, spices, cereals, a quantity of very rough basket work, some very cheap, gaudy jewellery, cheap cotton cloth, and that was about all.  The size of the market varies greatly since most of those who go to it are tribesmen from tribes many miles away who may have had to walk for two days or more to reach it, and who consequently will probably not go every week.  We wandered around, getting progressively stained with indigo from the many hand-shakes with tribesmen who knew Archie.  The would-be fort builder was there too.  I wondered how he had reached the souk so quickly.  Perhaps camels are as fast as jeeps over the bumpy desert tracks.  Whenever I tried to take a photo of anything –camels with their knees tied together, handsome little goats-herds with kids I their arms, the spice vendor with his flat baskets of ginger and rice, groups of tribesmen with enviably luxuriant crops of hair – as soon as I opened the camera crowds surged round me and completely hid what I was trying to take.  Whenever that happened Ahmad plunged into the crowd, arms waving, and scattered them, and I took the photo hastily without real aim before the next crowd had time to gather.

One or two baskets looked attractive enough to buy, though the workmanship was rough and the cracks were thick with dust.  They were not unlike Sardinian basket ware, though they were much coarser and their patterns, instead of being picked out in bright reds and greens and oranges, were mostly in blue and purple.

            I had hoped to find some silver jewellery, but there was none.  Ever since the Jews left the country two years ago there has been practically none available, as they were the principal silversmiths.

            “Let’s go back via the school, Ahmad,” said Archie “Commander and Mrs Clay can make a tour of inspection and then write rude comments in the visitors’ book.”

Ahmad looked a little doubtful.  Perhaps he was afraid that we really might disfigure his book with unkind comments.  I tried to explain that I was something of a schoolmistress too and that we only came to admire, not to criticize, but he did not seem reassured.

The school was on the side of the square opposite to the dar and was an impressive building resembling the one at Shukra, but with slightly bigger rooms and a beautiful arched alcove running along the entrance side of it, like one side of a cloister.  There were small Arab boys of all ages from three or four to eleven or twelve, grouped in four classes of about twenty to thirty boys in each.  One class was studying the Koran, another Arab history, another arithmetic, and the lowest form was learning how to write.  We were introduced to the teachers in turn.  They were all pupil teachers – one as old as sixteen, the others younger.  The teacher in the history class and the teacher in the Divinity class were self-possessed and went on    confidently teaching in front of us.  The Arithmetic teacher called out a small sturdy boy and got him to recite a poem in Arabic.  Though he spoke a different language, the small boy might have been any bright boy of any class anywhere.  His voice took on the false shrill note and overemphatic, declamatory tone of all children forced to show off as exhibits.

            The small creatures learning to write their alphabet were lovely to see:  there were nearly forty of them squatting on the floor at tiny low desks, tongues out, concentrating hard.  When we came in they stopped writing and stared at us with  enormous innocent eyes.  Many of them were very beautiful and most of them looked extremely well-nourished.  Their teacher, aged twelve, was terror-struck by our intrusion and quite unable to go on.  He stammered a word or two and we left the room quickly, feeling sorry for him.  The room at the end was for handicrafts and contained a number of imaginative clay models and paintings and paper cut-outs.  The standard was high, especially in the modelling.  There was one terrifying portrait-head of a very evil-looking man, and a fine recumbent cat, with an exaggeratedly feline expression on its face, of smug gloating.

We thanked Ahmad and wrote politely in the visitors’ book and then left.  As we stepped outside into the dazzling sunlight we were met by a blue-black figure: the would-be fort builder, back from the Souk.  His smiling persistence won my admiration and I asked Richard to photograph me shaking hands with him.  The tribesman was delighted and clasped my hand warmly, leaving a generous layer of indigo behind.

            Outside the Dar there was a large crowd of men waiting to see ‘Archie.  He had to select half a dozen men as new recruits for the Tribal guards.  The Tribal Guards bear the same relationship to the Government Guards as the County Police do to Scotland Yard.  They are recruited locally from the various tribes, a handful from each to prevent ill-feeling.  They deal with all the smaller problems of law and order, and act as a display of force wherever it is needed.  For anything really serious the Government Guards, with longer years of service, more careful training and better equipment, are called in. Six men were needed.  Some seventy had turned up, having heard in some mysterious way of the vacancies which only been announced two days before.  Many of them had made a two-day journey on the off-chance of being chosen.  “Gives them something to do,” said Archie, “they have to make the time pass somehow.”

They squatted in the dust in the glaring sunlight, blobs of vivid colour.  Some were dressed in the conventional indigo foutah, and their stiffened, brightly-polished, indigo head-band reflected the sun like a mirror.  Others were dressed in coloured foutahs, in shades ranging through all the colours of the spectrum.  They seemed to have no sensitivity about the matching of colours – a special clash of a variety of reds was one of the favourites toilettes.  A Government Guard gave an order and they immediately ranged themselves in a semi-circle, standing shoulder to shoulder and giggling like a class of schoolgirls.  Archie walked stiffly out, dressed in long white drill trousers and white shirt, and white Arab headdress.  He examined each man’s papers and consulted with Ahmad.  No paper testified to less than good.

            “Means nothing at all,” said Archie, “the previous employer’s way of saying that the man’s a scoundrel.  Can’t trust anybody with less than excellent.”  Those without papers are rejected instantly and sent packing, not without some protestation. Finally a short list of twenty is decided on and the lucky twenty are led inside the fort to be questioned more closely.  Being a woman I was not allowed to attend the proceedings, but I managed to spy on them secretly through the bars of a window in Archie’s sitting room.  It was amusing to see the behaviour of the rejected applicants.  They flung arms round each others’ necks, sparred, tickled each other in the ribs, and indulged generally in schoolboyish horseplay, all with a wide grin of apparent happiness on their faces, as though they were relieved at being unsuccessful.  A few walked off hand in hand, smiling affectionately at one another.  Across the dusty desert tracks, late arrivals could be seen straggling up.  When they heard the news from those who had not been selected, they turned round with them and philosophically went away again.

            Archie came up to the sitting room a quarter of an hour later.  Six reliable men from three different tribes had been chosen.  The best candidate of all had, alas, to be rejected, as he was the son of a slave.  He3 was a magnificent young man, tall, strong, dignified, obviously intelligent and responsible.  But because he was the son of a slave he would never be able to command respect in the others.  He went away in tears.

            “We’ve earned our drinks this morning.  What’s yours?” enquired Archie.

            Archie had arranged a tea party for me that afternoon with the ladies in the household of the wealthy experimenter in orange-and-lemon-cultivation.  It was strictly a purdah party.  The two ladies from the Danish mission had also been invited, as interpreters for me.  I was driven there at half past four in the Land Rover and led in by a toothless female servant and a bevy of small children.  The ground floors of Arab houses have a completely unfinished appearance.  The rough stone walls, the mud floors, the complete lack of any furnishings, and often of any systematic cleaning, reminds me of English basement cellars.

            The ladies were waiting to greet me on the first floor at the top of some stone stairs.  I was introduced first to Ali’s sister.  She was about thirty-five, and had an authoritative air as though she governed the household.  She was pretty and plump and lively, with black, well-oiled hair, covered by a loose, hand-woven net in black and red, in texture not unlike the fawn and blue dishcloths we use in England for washing up.  Her face was without make-up, but there was delicate tattooing on her forehead and between her eyebrows.  Her dress, by Western standards, was completely shapeless – a broad strip of bright blue satin, sewn down the sides, with holes for the neck and arms.  It was gathered in at the waist by a heavy silver belt from which dangled the keys of the household in a large bunch.  She wore beautiful silver ear-rings, like small bird-cages, and her feet were, of course, bare.  In shaking hands, or rather in having my hand stroked and patted by her, I felt I was being introduced to the Middle Ages.  I was greeted, and patted too, by Ali’s wife, younger, with sad, cow like eyes and a very large, attractive mouth.  She was shortly expecting a baby and her face had a patient beautiful expression.  They took me into their sitting room, which was also Ali’s sister’s bedroom – and there, perhaps as a concession to me as a European, or perhaps as a result of Ali’s Aden upbringing, I was given a wicker chair to sit in.  There were three chairs and two beds in the room and that was all.  The walls were bare, the floors were bare, there were no tables.  The ladies from the Danish mission sat in the other two chairs.  All the rest of the party of women and children who had followed us in, clustered round, standing or sitting on the floor, or squatting on the beds.  Since I speak no Arabic, all the conversation had to be carried out through Miss Nielsen, and I tried to convey my happiness and being with them by smiling broadly.  We drank tea, heavily sweetened, ate chocolate cake made by Ali’s sister according to a recipe supplied by Miss Nielsen, discussed and praised the children, of whom there were several.  The eldest little boy, Ali’s sister’s only child, had been ill – a tubercular germ was suspected.  Now he was better but was still very pale and heavy-eyed and fractious.  Miss Nielsen told me that he was spoilt on account of his illness.  Only the sister and little boy ate with us. Miss Nielsen explained that it would not be considered polite for the others to do so.  They slipped away one by one and then quietly came back again. I hoped that they were slipping off for a cup of tea in secret.  They asked questions about where I came from, whether I was married, how many children I had.  The idea of my working was too difficult to explain to them and I was obliged to let them consider me a lady of leisure.  Every now and again I felt a soft hand on my face, on my knee, stroking my back, feeling my arm.  It was one of the children creeping up to see if I was real or perhaps to feel the texture of my skin and clothes.  The children were lovely to look at, with very large eyes, beautiful dark olive skins and very well-formed bodies.  The little girls’ hair was thickly oiled and twisted into innumerable cork-screw curls starting right from the tops of their heads, an elaborate coiffeur which must have taken a lot of time to prepare.

            “They have plenty of time to spare” said Miss Nielsen, and added that they always washed their hair once a fortnight, which surprised me since the oil gave it a dirty look of longer standing.  The little girls had a lively air of freedom about them which those who had reached puberty seemed to lose.  The seclusion of purdah must be very hard to bear at first, after having been allowed to wander about freely in the outside world.

After tea we talked clothes, in true female fashion.  The latest way of wearing the fishnet bead veil was discussed and the lopped-up style on the top of the head – a very becoming style – was declared old-fashioned.  It was time to go.  I was distressed by the language difficulty and my smile became a positive Cheshire-cat grin in an effort to convey my gratitude.  I was taken as far as the threshold by Ali’s sister, clasping me tightly round the waist.  We shook hands affectionately and she disappeared abruptly, afraid, I imagined, of being seen from the road outside.

            I asked Miss Nielsen more about their lives. “What do they do all day?” I asked.  “How do they manage to make the time pass, with no reading, no going out, none of the social round of Western women?” “Oh they have plenty to do” said Miss Nielsen a little severely, “they cook and wash clothes, make their dresses, gossip, dance among themselves.  Some of the younger ones are even beginning to learn to read and write now.”

“Tell me,” I added “what do they wear under their dresses? What kind of corsets and brassieres do they have, and petticoats and so on?”

“Nothing at all, absolutely nothing at all,” said Miss Nielsen, “though I have persuaded some of the more enlightened ones to wear knickers.”

Dec 28^th.

            Ali called us at 6.30 with some tea.  We jumped out of bed and looked out of the window.  The air was so clear that the mountains many miles away seemed just outside the window.  The sun crept slowly up behind them and its first rays spread out and coloured the jagged, volcanic outlines first purple, then red, then pink, and finally golden.  Once the golden rays had touched them, the sky caught my attention by contrast and seemed startlingly blue.  Black mountains, golden-fringed blue sky, emerald green millet and mud-coloured villages.  The clarity of the colours of the early morning was unforgettable and soon passed when the heat began to shimmer.  I remembered what somebody had said to me before I left Milan:

“Aden’s a dull place, abysmally dull – but I’d go there again just for the colours.  There’s nothing to beat ‘em.”

We sat down to breakfast at eight and Archie insisted on my breaking my long-established habit of taking nothing but a cup of coffee.

“Don’t know what time we shall be back,” he said “probably not till late afternoon.  We’re only taking fruit and a few sweets with us.  You’ll be starving by then if you don’t eat now.” I ate a fried egg and tinned tomato and a piece of toast, and started off feeling rather over-heated.  There were four of us in the Land Rover: Archie, who was driving, Richard and I in front with him, and Ahmad Ali in the back.  We were followed by a truck with an escort of Tribal Guards.  I had grown accustomed by now to the bucking, rocking, lunging motion over the road and scarcely noticed it, having learnt to sway and lurch and cling on to the rail at the right moments.  The dust was less easy to accept, and I  muffled my headcloth round my mouth and nose, and breathed hotly into it.  It brought back the day when the children were very small and I went resolutely about the business of looking after them with a white cotton mask tied over my face, whenever I had a cold.  Now the discomfort was less because my nose wasn’t in constant need of blowing, though it tickled a great deal.

            Archie explained to us that funds had been allocated to him for road-building, and that he had been trying to make up the surface of the road from Mudia to Lahmar, the place we were to visit and where he was hoping to build a fort.  He had had difficulty in getting the work on the road done, and we went over several stretches which seemed to have been completely neglected. “Can’t get ‘em to do the bits in between the villages,” he protested, “afraid they’ll be shot as soon as they get out into the open.  Can’t really blame the poor devils.  Road’s no use to them.  Camel tracks all they want.”    

The first stop was at a fort about ten miles beyond Mudia occupied by Government guards.  It was very clean and cool, and stood just outside the village, together with the new school, a neat, small, white-washed building, recently built, and with handsome carved wooden shutters in the windows.  The guards had prepared tea for us, a particular brand of thick powdered tea with plenty of milk and sugar already added, which was to become more than familiar to me as the day went on.  It was poured boiling hot out of a kettle into oriental cups without handles.

The courtyard in the centre of the fort contained a few bushes on a raised mound and looked refreshingly green and cool.  Richard tried to photograph Archie and me sitting at the top of the steps outside the guard room, but the result when developed later was not very brilliant.  The wall was too white and the sun too bright so that sky and wall merged into each other.  The top half of me in white blouse and white turban was invisible and so was the bottom half of Archie in white trousers – a curious photo of two interestingly mutilated individuals.  The shrubs, which we had hoped would add beauty to the photo, covered the whole foreground with a black blob.  The other shots of the same scene were equally unsuccessful.  Shot no 2 showed Archie on his way towards the steps to join me.  Here it was not the sunlight but the bushes which truncated him, and his pipe showed disproportionately prominent.  Shot no 3 was a fine snap of the bottom of a Tribal guard bending over a large drum of water placed beside the bushes.  As we were not yet aware of the shortcomings of our efforts at photography, we used up two rolls, twenty-four photos, during the day.  It was not till later we realised that Arabian sunlight needs special treatment.

Ahmad Ali had arranged for the builder of the Archie’s new fort to join us here and we sat round in the guard room chatting and waiting for him to arrive.  The guard room led to a sun roof, and every few minutes Archie or Richard or Ali or one of the Guards went out on to the roof or climbed up a ladder to the turret above, to scan the horizon and see if the builder was in sight.  I so often feel disappointed when I arrive at a place and find that it is unlike what I had imagined/  here in the fort my heart thumped with excitement at finding fantasy becoming reality:  Bluebeard and sister Anna with the builder in the place of Bluebeard.  We all shaded our eyes and looked in vain.  The builder was nowhere to be seen, neither with the naked eye nor through Richard’s binoculars.

Archie decided to go on ahead and leave Ahmad to bring the builder in the truck.  The land Rover had to go more slowly and, with any luck, the truck would catch us up.  As we walked out to get into the Land Rover, we met a young man in khaki shirt and shorts, white-skinned, fair-haired, who was chatting in fluent Arabic with the guards. Archie explained that he was Mancini, a young National-service man, of Italian origin, but London born and bred, an East Ender with a genuine cockney accent.  He had been evacuated during the war and had received practically no schooling, had been drafted out to Aden, given the job of overhauling wireless sets for the political officers in the Protectorate, and in eight months had picked up more colloquial Arabic than most people can achieve in years. He had taken to the Arab way of life completely, wandering around on his own, refusing his canned rations, and preferring to sleep and eat and talk with the Arabs.  He had applied to be allowed to transfer to the Colonial service and remain out there.

“I don’t want to go home,” he said, “it’s better out here.  You feel freer.”

“You have a wonderful accent in Arabic,” I said

“Only wish I had in English,” he replied laughing.

He seemed a perfect example in support of the theory which I hold, that frequently people are born in the wrong country and have a deeper natural affinity with some other country.  The lucky few in the course of their life find the country which is their spiritual home.  Perhaps Mancini was one of them

Once more we ploughed our way hotly and bumpily over furrowed sand and dust and solid lava.  Once more we jolted our backs against the seat and our foreheads against the windscreen.  The heat was increasing, and I rolled up my navy serge slacks to my knees in an effort to kee  cool.  It was little use.  Where the thick roll clung around my knees and the sweat began to drip and I felt the seat of my trousers sticking hotly to the canvas-covered cushion.  Incidentally, the canvas-covered cushion was an added thorn in my heat-pricked flesh.  Every time the Land Rover jolted, the seat slipped forward and unless I immediately slid it back I had to choose between sitting on the edge of the cushion with my knees knocking the dashboard, or letting the cushion slip from underneath me and sitting on hard metal.  Archie entertained us by pointing out flora and fauna.  Dala roses growing thick-fleshed and bright pink on trees out of the barren mountain face, a solitary aloe tree, an occasional snake slithering out of our way, the inevitable kite hovering overhead, loaded camels and their drivers, at a standstill by the roadside, saluting us with dignity as we drove by.  We pulled up at a short distance from the fort to which we were heading, to wait for the truck to catch up with us.

“Damn that fellah,” said Archie. “No idea of time.  Should have been at the Dar waiting for us.  Lost half the day already.” And turning to me, with his considerable charm he added: “Hope you don’t mind waiting, Kay, Can’t do without the fellah.  Must show him what he’s got to do.”

I protested I did not mind at all and got out of the jeep to ease my legs and try and dry off the seat of my trousers.  We shaded our eyes with our hands and looked back along the road.

“Any signs?” asked Archie, busy with his pipe.

“No, nothing yet,” we replied.

Richard and I lit cigarettes and we all smoked in silence.  There was no noise except for the sizzling of the engine, as it began to cool down, and an occasional bark from a dog in the distance.  Heat shimmered over everything, blurring sand and scrub, and making even the immovable mountains sway as we gazed.  One of two wisps of white cotton cloud floated above the biggest ridge.  The rest of the sky was unbroken, brilliant blue, so dazzling that my eyes watered behind dark glasses when I looked up.

Richard and Archie climbed up a dust mound to get a clearer view. “I think I can see something right over there”, said Richard.  “Where?” queried Archie doubtfully.  “Can’t see a thing myself.” “Perhaps I’m wrong” said Richard good-temperedly.  They lapsed into silence and I got back into the car, hoping that it might be cooler in the shade of the canvas roof.

“There”, said Richard suddenly,  “over there! I can see something moving.”

“Imagination, old man” said Archie cryptically, and disbelievingly.  I strained my eyes to see but saw nothing except quivering heat and dust.  None of us spoke for a few moments.  “It is moving,” Richard called out, “look over there.  Can’t you see the dust?” 

And now we all saw.  Far away, back in the direction of the fort which we had left an hour earlier, a tall spout of dust could be seen moving along.

“Dust devil,” said Archie.

But this time Richard was not to be dissuaded.  “I don’t think it is,” he said.  “It’s flatter and doesn’t seem to be whirling.  Looks to me like the kind of dust a truck would stir up behind it.” We shaded our eyes and watched the faint, smoke-like wisp in the distance.  “By Jove, I believe you’re right,” said Archie with relief, “It’s moving this way.”  A quarter of an hour later the truck drew up;.  Ahmad got out smiling good-temperedly.  “He was late” was all he said.

We looked at the builder in the seat beside the driver – he was a sallow, sombre-faced man with an indigo-coloured turban, a white shirt, a purple coloured foutah, and a tick, grey, machine-made, Western type pullover – a cartridge belt and gambia and rifle were worn over the top of it.  In spite of the heat he looked drawn and pale and almost cold, as if he were shivering.

“Come along,” said Archie, “we’re late.  As we drove along towards the fort Archie told us what his aim was.  He pointed out to us the barrenness of the land round.

“Want to get them to grow millet here too,” he said.  But millet could only be grown if peaceful relations existed between the tribes.  The Jaadini tribe on the south back of the Waddy Lahmar was at present outside the boundary of Dathina state, but Archie hoped eventually to persuade it to take advantage of an advice and protection treaty. The first step had been taken in the building of the road through the territory.  Where there had previously been a camel track there now ran what I was beginning to nickname in my own mind a Protectorate road:  the usual alternating sand and boulder-sized stone surface.  Hitherto the tribal leader had levied a toll on all strangers from outside who used the camel route.  Archie hoped during our visit to persuade him to accept a sum in shillings, the equivalent of what he would normally receive in a year from the road.

“Anxious to keep the prestige that levying the tax gives him.  Doesn’t need the money,” said Archie, “fabulously rich without.  But we’ll never get peaceful millet-growing conditions unless the road is free to everybody.”  The fort, when built, would give protection, prevent intimidation; and check any abuse of authority about access to the waddy.

We reached our destination at midday, after driving crazily across the dusty plain, trying to keep up with the truck.  With its higher undercarriage and longer wheel base, it could plunge along the deeply-furrowed track far more rapidly that the Land Rover, and we arrived five minutes after it to find Ahmad and the builder waiting with the tribal guards and the workmen to greet us.  They all saluted us and shook hands, bowing slightly as they did so.  Their handshakes were more vehement than any I had previously experienced, and each time I had difficulty in keeping my arm from swinging violently at right angles to me. Handshakes over, we climbed up the small hill on which the fort was to be built.  It was a perfectly selected site, a small eminence overlooking the plain in all directions, commanding the road, the waddy and the Rabizi tribal land on the north side of the waddy as well as the Jaadini land itself.  The tribal guards had erected a tent encampment on the summit, over the foundations of the fort.  Three feet or so of square walls were already standing.  Ahmad told Archie that the tribal guard wished to offer us lunch.  It was an unexpected and very generous offer and Archie, knowing  what it would cost the guards wished he had been able to prevent it by arriving much earlier.  Archie and Richard were invited inside the tent.  Out hosts’ neglect of the ‘ladies first’ principle was entirely understandable.  Their own women folk do not appear in public at all, or if they do, they are heavily veiled.  I was, besides, a rare specimen in those parts: the first white woman to be seen there ever, as far as Archie knew.

I had to stoop down to get into the tent: it was a low awning stretched over the three foot, unmortared, stone wall of the fort.  I took off my sandals before stepping in, and walked barefoot across the matting to the other side.  As I did so a whole carpet of flies rose from the matting, and buzzed around me.  The four walls were lined with cotton-covered sides and leather-covered cushions.  I sat down in one corner on the cushions in the required fashion, with my legs crossed and the soles of my feet pointing downwards.  Archie and Richard sat on my right along the same side, with Richard in the central place of honour.  Cups of tea were poured out as an aperitif for us from the customary kettle  (government issue, I wondered?) and as usual it was strong, boiling hot and heavily laced with milk and sugar.  For the flies it was a huge treat, and they poised greedily in a black ring round the rim of my cup.  A particularly polite Government guard, one of the bodyguard, brought over in the truck, sat and fanned it energetically for me whenever my fingers were not on the cup, but the flies sat unmoved;  the sticky tea was too tempting.  I gulped the mixture down quickly, scalding my throat, in the way one takes medicine, just to have done with it.  But when I was not looking, the mixture was supplied as before, and I was faced with a second cupful.  I slipped it across surreptitiously to Richard, a copious tea drinker, whose cup was empty and substituted it for mine.  It was a ruse which failed. His empty cup in front of me was then filled up, and I was back to where I started from – a cup of hot, thick, stewed tea.  There was nothing for it but to leave it.

The light in the tent was dim, and shot with brilliant patches of sunlight, through the cracks and the opening.  The meal was brought in – first the huge, flat, griddle cakes, chepattis, usually made of local wholemeal flour and very good to eat, but now made of white government flour in our honour and tasting rather insipid.  They are like huge pancakes, and the guard picked them up one by one carelessly in his fingers and slapped them down on the rectangular mats that had been placed in front of us.  Then three bowls were brought in steaming, one large and two small.  The large one contained boiled goat piled high of every conceivable cut.  Both Archie and Richard were served first, to everything, and each time Archie ostentatiously handed whatever he had been given across to me.

“Teach ‘em how to behave to the ladies,” he said.  A carefully tied bundle of ropey intestines was placed in front of Richard, as the chief delicacy for the chief guest.  I dared him a look to imitate Archie and pass them on to me! I selected as small a portion with as little meat on it as I could find.  To explain that I am a vegetarian would have been impossible even through the excellent interpretership of Ahmad Ali.  The two small bowls contained a thick sauce with odds and ends in it, rather like the tomato meat sauce the Italians add to their spaghetti: it had a vague curry flavour and was very good.  I dipped my bread in it and made a reasonable show of eating and toyed with the meat.  I found it difficult to tear it off the bone with my right hand only.  Arab etiquette requires one not to touch one’s food with one’s left hand.  The attentive government guard on my left noticed my scanty portion, whipped out his knife, and cut off huge slices of goat to place in front of me.  When no one was looking I managed to slip some of them to Richard, and the rest I put back into the bowl at a convenient moment, when the guard was not looking.  While the meal was being eaten we did not talk.  A tribal guard stood in front of us, waving a towel at the flies and occasionally, with misplaced enthusiasm, flicking it in our faces, at which we all laughed, he the loudest of all.  After the meal, coffee with ginger was served for those who liked it and tea for the rest.  I chose the coffee and liked it.  It tasted very little of coffee and rather strongly of ginger.

More tea was brought in for those who had not had enough, and then Archie was asked if he would see the tribal leader with his right-hand man. “Bring ’em  in,” said Archie.  I had been told that the tribe was a very wealthy one and that its leader was one of the richest men for miles around.  I had expected magnificence.  What I saw was a wizened-looking tiny old man, black all over, dressed in the briefest of indigo foutahs, and with his greasy black hair tied back with string.  To European eyes he looked like a beggar.  In age he might have been anything from seventy to a good one hundred and fifty.  His followers claimed that he was, in fact, well over a hundred.  It was not until he squatted down and accepted the offer of a smoke, that I noticed that he was completely blind.  Smoking in those parts is communal, from a kind of hookah which is handed round.  You apply the pipe to a hold in the side of the bowl and inhale.  The head of the Jaadini fumbled for the hole and had to have his hand guided to it.

Archie’s introductory speech was persuasive propaganda.  He looked forward, he said, to an era of peace and prosperity for the tribe.  They had seen that peaceful conditions had brought improvements in the Dathina area (he waved his hand expressively in the direction of Mudia); whole fields of healthy millet had sprung up where previously no one had dared to plough and sow.  Now, with the fine road through their own territory, and the protection they would get from the fort, they, too, could enjoy prosperity on a  scale they had never reached before.  Moreover, when Major X came back from his leave, the British agent for the W.A.P., then he could promise them unlimited protection and advice for the asking.  Archie’s few tactful, restrained and admirably chosen words were translated rapidly by Ahmad, whose face on such occasions became mask-like and registered nothing.  When one considered the independence and initiative characteristic of him normal, his anonymity as interpreter was a master-piece of self-withdrawal, though a flicker, now and again, suggested a certain pruning and vetting of his material.

“Tell him, too” added Archie, “that Major X is coming back in a week and that he will never allow him to levy a toll on the road – and that’s all got to stop.” When Ahmad had finished, it was the old man’s turn.  He spoke in a plaintive monotone, eyes gazing into nothingness, and his speech lasted a long time.  I could not understand what he said, but I watched the steadiness of his expression and the authoritative air of his small body.  And as I watched, he ceased to look like a beggar and became a leader, a man used to making decisions, of life and of death, a man who must have seen all sides of life and witnessed much violence – someone whose position had been achieved and maintained by a subtle combination of craft and ruthlessness and force.  When he had finished, there was a pause, and the hookah was handed to him by a tribal guard who, this time, guided the stem of the pipe for him to the hole.

“What’s he say?” asked Archie, who had understood some, but not all, of the old man’s speech.  “He says, in effect”, replied Ahmad, with unexpected brevity, “that his business is with you and not with Major X, and that he wishes to continue the toll.” “The devil he does,” said Archie explosively. “Tell him he damn well can’t, and that I am only acting for Major X, and that this road has damn well got to be free for everybody.”

A tactful translation of these words by Ahmad was a signal for a general discussion.  The old man’s aides-de-camp added their bit, the shivering builder in his grey pullover had something to say too, and now even Ahmad needed a tribal guard as interpreter, as several dialects were involved.  The old man’s flesh quivered and flapped slightly in its pouchy folds as he talked.  His chief aide-de-camp, whose hair was so long and piled in such convolutions on his head that he looked like some astonishing Pantomime dame gone astray, gave coy, sideling glances at everybody and spoke shyly at the old man, instead of generally to the assembly.  By this time it was nearly three o’clock and we had been sitting there for some two and a half hours.  My legs were numb and I had been unable to be alone for a single moment since breakfast.

“We’ll leave them to talk this over,” said Archie, jumping up. “You stay, Ahmad, and see what happens.  We’ll go down and see the water and stretch our legs a bit.  Come along, you two,” he said to Richard and me.  I felt immensely grateful, and interpreted this as another example of Archie’s tact.

The only way to the waddy was by a steep rock face sloping abruptly down.  To the guards, both government and tribal, it was nothing.  They walked down, barefoot, as though they were walking downstairs.  To me, in my rather loose sandals, it was a problem.  I tried to pick my way as hastily as I could, to avoid holding up the party, but we had not got very far down before I found myself poised with one foothold of rock, one foot swinging in space, one hand clutching at a root for support and a big drop below me.  One of the government guards, small, wiry, with a strong but expressionless face, gave me his hand and showed me the way down.  A trio of tribal guards walked slowly down just below me to catch me as I fell – or so I hoped.

The water flowed wonderfully cool and clear in the river bed.  It was dappled in places with shoals of very tiny fish, minnow-sized, basking in the sun just below the surface.  “Cause of all the trouble in these parts,” said Archie, “source of all the scraps and fighting.”  It was a series of intermittent pools separated by a gravel bank, the first water I had seen since I left the shore at Shukra, six foot of water flowing quietly through dry and dusty desert, the only source of water for miles around, the most previous of all substances: the key to life for everyone there.  How understandable the tribal battles became, if you considered the struggle they had for this basic element of life.

“If you care to walk on,” said the ever-tactful Archie, “we’ll wait here for you.” I surveyed the rocks ahead of me and saw one which looked large enough to hide me from view, but as I made towards it, two stout tribal guards detached themselves from the rest, faithfully determined to stand bodyguard.  I turned and gave Archie a beseeching look, he barked a word or two of command and I went on alone.  When I returned I found, instead of the peaceful group I had left, a battle raging –not, as I was afraid, battle against the Rabizi tribe from the opposite shore, but against a thin, colourless snake, three or four feet long.; he had been found nestling in the rocks, coiled up near the water’s edge, and was now being despatched with well-aimed stones.  The change on the faces of the steady-looking guards was curious: they had become boys at play, and were shouting with excitement.  The snake, once dead, was held dangling at arm’s length by one of the guards, and Richard took a photo of him standing stiffly and proudly upright.

“Let’s get back and see what’s happened,” said Archie.  Normally a downward path over steeply-sloping, uneven ground is more difficult to negotiate than an upward climb – but when I looked up to where the fort was, I doubted if I would ever get there.  The rocky surface had footholds, plenty of them, but like the finest blackberries, they were always just out of reach.  I started off behind Archie, determined somehow to achieve the impossible, and within two minutes had got into a position from which I could neither step forward, nor upward, nor backward without, as I imagined, plunging to my death down below.  I have no doubt that it was not really so critical:  my fear of slopes both up and down was tricking me into exaggerating the situation.  But I was very relieved when the guard, who had brought me down, jumped agilely to my side, took my hand and, in quicker time than I would have believed possible, almost literally hauled me up to the top.  He leapt and sprang and heaved and never put a foot wrong.  He somehow arranged for there always to be exactly the right foothold, at exactly the right distance for me. Any apprehension I might have felt was quelled by the firm hold of his hand which betokened enough strength in his arm to check me if I fell.  The others came up more slowly and probably with greater dignity.  I stood at the top waiting for them, knees sagging, breath coming in short gasps, sweat pouring off me, dizzy in the head, yet with a great sense of pride in my fondly-imagined mountain goat propensities.

When we got back to the fort the meeting had just broken up. “Well?” queried Archie, as Ahmad walked up to him.  “They have agreed,” replied Ahmad. 

We went back into the fly-ridden tent for more tea and the final ceremony of financial compensation: a silver token of mutual good will.  Archie had brought a small bag of silver shillings to be divided up proportionately among the head of the tribe, his right-hand man and the builder.  While the silver was slowly being counted and re-counted by Ahmad and one of the guards, we drank tea and ginger coffee and cooled ourselves in the breeze blowing through the tent.  I watched the blind old man smoking his hookah.  His face betrayed nothing, neither pleasure nor regret, and he appeared not to hear the clink of coins.  Then the money had been divided into four neat piles it was handed surreptitiously to each man in turn, the rest of the audience putting on an admirable act of indifference and ignorance as to what was going on.  This ceremony over, Archie prepared himself to make a closing speech, but just before he began the old tribal leader leaned forward and spoke to Ahmad, whereupon Ahmad got up and went over to him.  A whispered conversation was held, and, to my surprise, I saw the money being returned to Ahmad.

“What’s happening?” I asked Ahmad, “does he feel it isn’t enough?” “No,” replied Ahmad “he has asked me to keep the money for him.  He is afraid his friends will rob him of it.”  A few brief words of goodwill and encouragement from Archie and the meeting was over. We shook hands all round and went out into the hot sun once more.

The drive back was without incident.  The sun set very beautifully over the Arabian Matterhorn which we could see ahead of us as we lurched across the plain.  At a village two miles or so from Mudia we stopped to call on a locust-man. 

“He’s a lonely chap,” said Archie, “name of Smith.  Sits around here waiting for news of locusts.  When they come he dashes off in his Land Rover, wipes them out and comes back here again. Rather a blank period for them now through.  Spends most of his time twiddling his thumbs.  He wants to make some money.  Two years here and he’ll have enough to buy a house.”

Smith had his tent pitched on the outskirts of the village on a bit of level ground.  His Land Rover was jacked up and in the process of having its undercarriage painted.  His tent was small and stretched over a canvas ground sheet.  There was no doubt that he was pleased to see us. 

“How do you do,” he said, getting up from his canvas chair. ”Hope we’re not disturbing you,” said Archie, politely.

 “Not at all,” said Smith, “glad  to be interrupted.  Just in the middle of my two hours’ Italian study.  It’s a great treat for me to have company.  May I offer you this chair?” he added, turning to me, “it’s the only one I have, so I’m afraid I can’t ask the rest of you to sit down.  One of everything, that’s my line.  One chair, one table, one bed, one cup, one fork, one knife, one spoon, one mosquito net, one tent.”  I sat down in the canvas chair.

“Will you have a lime juice in the one glass?” he asked, “it’s all I can offer you.  I don’t drink when I am on my own.”  Smith was glad to talk.  He seldom saw anyone unless he went over to chat to Archie at Mudia.  He told us how he had arranged his day.  “Most important to have a timetable,” he said, “often spend days here with nothing to do.  Must make two years pass somehow.” 

He explained that he always kept his watch two hours’ fast.  “One candle and one oil lamp can be rather dismal,” he said, “so I like to go to bed almost as soon as it gets dark.  But it seems uncivilised to go to bed at seven-thirty.  So I put my watch on two hours and go to bed at nine-thirty or ten.  It’s better walking up in the morning too.  The early hours are the coolest but I hate getting up early.  Eight is a far more reasonable time to read on my watch than six o’clock.”

His day was split up into the automatic routine of household duties, cooking, cleaning, official correspondence if any, jeep repairs, mending, and studying Italian and reading.  “The only thing I really do miss,” he said, “is Hansard. I’d be happier if I could get Hansard regularly.”

On our return that evening Archie found a telegram awaiting him, asking him to apprehend a certain tribesman from farther inland, who was wanted for murder.  It was the second telegram of its kind since I had arrived in Mudia.  Tribal murders were literally a daily occurrence. “You may not have realised it, Kay,” said Archie, “but you’ve shaken hands with at least three murderers since you’ve been here.  The burly scoundrel I introduced you to yesterday shot his enemy while he was asleep, and then stuck his head up in the village square.  The man in the next village, who shook hands with us under the carpenters’ ilb, shot the baby of a rival of his while it was in its mother’s arms, as she stood outside her house.  And the shifty devil who wants to build a fort in the souk has more than a few murders to his credit.”

December 29^th

The next morning we woke at six-thirty as we had to make an early start if we were to reach Aden that evening.  We neither of us wanted to go back: life at Mudia was far more stimulating and interesting than the sophisticated daily round in Aden.  But Richard’s leave was up and I would have to fly back very shortly to Italy to resume my work with the Council.  I wished we had been able to see more of the school.  It had struck a modern note in a primitive background and it was not possible to judge its impact after only one visit.  The interesting moment to see it, though, would come much later, a decade or so later on, when the generation now squatting on the floor, tongue out, learning its alphabet, had grown up.  I consoled myself by thinking that perhaps I should be able to come back then, in ten years’ time.  I would have liked, too, to see a lot more of the ladies in purdah, and learn a little colloquial Arabic so that I could speak to them myself. They had offered me a programme of dances if only I could stay a few days longer.  I went to say good-bye to them at eight a.m. Ahmad had arranged for me to borrow one of their dresses to wear at a New Year’s Eve fancy dress Ball, and I was to go and try it on before leaving.  We fetched Miss Nielsen from her surgery and arrived at about five past eight.  The same wizened old servant let us in, grinning excitedly, and one by one all the ladies and girls and children I had seen at the tea party joined us.  Their enthusiasm about my visit seemed as great as it had been the first time, though they were obviously less prepared for it.  Ali’s sister greeted me with hands wet from the wash-tub and her hair screwed back in a greasy knot.  The children were sleepy-eyed, snotty-nosed, with untidy hair, and wearing only the briefest of grubby shirts.  The little boy, who had been ill, was whimpering, and the beautiful young mother-to-be looked bedraggled and pale and sad.  But as soon as they saw me they clapped their hands and smiled and nodded.  Ali’s sister put her arm around my waist and led me upstairs.  And there a strange lethargy overcame us. We talked about the weather and smiled at each other, Miss Nielsen fondled the children and enquired after the health of the family.  I had no idea of how long Archie had expected me to be there and began to get worried at the delay.

“Do you think you can possibly ask them about the dress?” I asked Miss Nielsen. 

“I will try” she replied, “but we can’t hurry them too much.  These visits of yours will provide gossip for months and they want to make the most of them.”

There was a little more talk and then one of the younger girls was sent off to fetch something.  She came back with a sack-like bright red silk dress violently decorated with appliqued patterns of reds and purples.  It was not at all clean but looked very splendid from a distance.  We looked at it and praised it, then Ali’s sister sent off another child to fetch a second dress, very much like the first.  Several more dresses, all like each other and all shapeless and voluminous, arrived one by one and were examined and praised.  Finally a beautifully-decorated black satin one was brought along.  The pattern on it round the neck and the hem and the arm holes was worked in lozenge-shaped pieces of material in reds and greens and orange.  It tried it on over my dress.  It wold have fitted over my winter coat, it was so large.  A length of very wide material folded over and sewn down the sides, with holes left for the arms and a hole cut for the head – it was exactly like the dresses I used to make for my dolls or the Indian suit I once tried to make for my younger brother.

“How do I keep it in round the waist?” I asked Miss Nielsen

“With a belt of silver,” she replied, “but you could use a scarf.”

But Ali’s sister had noticed my gathering the dress in at the waist and had guessed what I wanted.  She detached a key from the heavy bunch at her waist and sent one of the older women off.  We chatted and smiled politely for a few minutes and then the woman returned, surrounded by little girls all peeping at me from behind her.  She brought with her a massive silver belt, made up of a dozen or more square sections which were fitted together by running a string through slots at the top and bottom of each section.  Further ornamented pieces were attached to the bottom of each one so that they dangled and jingled as they knocked together.  It tried it round my waist but it would not meet.

“Heavens”, I thought to myself, “I must have put on a lot of weight in Aden if my waist is larger than Mrs. Ali’s!”

But Miss Nielsen reassured me by explaining; “They are going to add more pieces to it – it was last worn by one of the little girls.”

My costume was assembled bit by bit.  After the belt was made up and in place, a pair of silver bangles was fetched and tried on, and then a beautiful silver necklace.  By the time I had them all on, I began to feel literally weighed down by it all.  Finally, they put a red and black net over my hair and the dress was complete.  I could not see myself, as there was no mirror, but the effect on the audience of women and children was flattering.  They danced all round me, laughing and clapping their hands with excitement and patting me gently wherever they could reach.  The idea of a European woman dressed up in their clothes intrigued them immensely.

I asked Miss Nielsen to thank them very very much for the loan of it, and arranged to return it to them by Ahmad who was coming into Aden with us and could bring it back on January 1^st.  We sat down and chatted once more for a few moments and then said good-bye.  It was impossible to get rid of the feeling of a schoolgirl party in the dormitory.  We were all girls together and whether we were dressed in our best, as we were the first time we met, or in our working overalls, it made no difference.  In a society in which women are segregated for ever, with only rare visits from men, they do not stand on ceremony with each other.  Once more we shook hands and beamed happily at each other, and once more Ali’s sister darted away as we reached the door.  As I stood on the doorstep, looking to see if the Land Rover was outside, I felt a small hand running itself up and down my leg.  I glanced down and there was the tiniest girl of the household smiling shyly up at me.  I patted her head and she ran  friskily away, grinning with pleasure.  When I got back to the dar, instead of seeing irritation on Archie’s face at the delay, he seemed surprised.

“You’ve been quick, Kay,” he said

Archie was coming with us as far as Zara, where we had all been invited to an early lunch.

“You’ve had a scrap Arab lunch, Kay.  Now you can have a slap-up one in a real palace,” he said.   He and Richard and I and the driver got into the Land Rover.  Ahmad, Mancini and a handful of guards followed us in the truck.  The Sultan’s palace was one of four built on the top of a rocky hill, springing up unexpectedly in the plain at the foot of the mountain barrier.  We turned off the road to Shukra and drove inland for a few miles to reach it.  The site chosen for the four palaces was both breathtakingly beautiful and staggeringly strategic.  To reach the top palace, where we were invited for lunch, we lunged our way up a terrifying path of rock and granite, barely wide enough for the Land Rover and with a sheer drop on to the plain on one side of it.  The building of this narrow road was a credit to the Sultan’s engineer; so too, was the building of the palaces, perched commandingly on the hill.  My attention in driving up the sharp incline was not so much on the beauties ahead of me, however, as on the possibility of the clutch slipping and the gear not engaging.  Missing the gears with no brake on that gradient would have required more than ordinary skill to negotiate.  But it was worth all the danger when we got to the top.  As we stepped out of the Land Rover the Sultan’s bodyguard, in short khaki drill suits, stood stiffly to attention in two rows lining the Palace steps.

“Come and take the salute, old man, and get it over.” Archie said to Richard.  Taking the salute then, and at other times on our trip, amused me by its exclusively masculine emphasis.  The solemn tilt of the jaw, the stiff attitude, the martial do-or-fie expression made me feel I had wandered into a men’s club by mistake.  Men only was now clearly written on all their faces, so I hung back by the car, pulled loose the legs of my trousers which had stuck to me with the heat, tidied up my turban and waited self-effacingly.  The salute over, I was re-admitted to the confraternity and we shook hands all round.  The Sultan was away but the Sultan’s brother welcomed us.  He was a charmingly intelligent-looking, small man, of about twenty-six, with quick bright eyes and a friendly, almost feminine, smile.  His dress, in honour of our visit, put the rest of us, even Ahmad, in the shade.  His foutah was a plaid pattern of bright red and green, his shirt, hanging loose over the top, was of spotless cream silk, his turban the finest purple satin, with gold embroidery.  Round his waist was a particularly elaborate leather cartridge belt and his gambia was of beaten gold – or so it appeared to be.  Even the canvas cross strap -        -over his shoulder was finely worked in different coloured wools.  We were shown into a long cool room with four windows, giving a magnificent view southwards, right over the plain.  On my best behaviour in such royal surroundings, I slipped off my sandals before entering the room.  I then found, to my discomfort, that no one else did, and that our host was wearing neat gym shoes.  We sat comfortably in deck chairs, sipping very sweet orangeade, while Archie and Ahmad and the Sultan’s brother chatted.  It was obvious that Archie was looked on as an old and very reliable friend.

A second supply of orangeade was offered us by a servant dressed in shabby khaki with a rough, white turban on his head.  The western idea of displaying one’s wealth by dressing one’s servants well had apparently not reached this part of Arabia.  It was obvious that the Sultan and his brother kept their servants very much in their place:  they all withdrew from the presence, walking backward very hesitantly, as though expecting a reprimand.  While we were sipping the orangeade, the Sultan’s secretary came in and was introduced to us.  He was a thin, sallow young man, with an expression of tense alertness on his face.  He had a withdrawn, apprehensive look about him which reminded me of the builder at Lahmar.

Archie leant over and whispered to me: “He killed a man in the next state.  There’s a price on his head and if he ever goes there, he’s a dead man.” I looked at the secretary again.  He had nervous, shifty gestures and his eyes were always on the doorway.

We were taken to see the rest of the palace.  By western standards the interior did not live up to its status.  The floors and walls were rough and painted in gaudy colours.  The stone staircases were chipped and not very clean.  The bedrooms were clean but bare, and contained only an iron bedstead with a white cover over it; they were magnificently situated with views across the plain.  The finest part of the palace was its two balconies running north and south, so that one could sit out in the open and in the share at any time of day, and gaze at one of the most beautiful views to be seen anywhere.

The meal offered us was very palatable but somewhat westernised.  There were plates to eat off, and knives and forks, and even bowls of tinned pears as dessert.  The chepattis, made of wholemeal flour, and the rice and the various little dishes were excellent.  The Sultan’s brother kept inviting us to eat more.  Archie and Richard ate as much as they could but it was Mancini who won the admiration of us all, especially the Sultan’s brother.  He ate enthusiastically and hugely and noisily, in true Arab style, piling what appeared to be an almost half a kid on his chapatti, and cleaning the bone within a few moments.  He belched, he covered his face and right hand with meat and sauce, he flicked large quantities of rice into his mouth, with one jerk of the fingers.  In fact, he so endeared himself to the Sultan’s brother that the conversation narrowed down to a dialogue between the two of them or a most lively and almost affectionate kind.

We washed our hands, as at the beginning of the meal, with warm water poured over them by an obsequious servant, into a basic held by another; and then dried them with a towel held by a third servant.  Back in the sitting room, we drank ginger coffee or tea, according to our choice, and then Archie asked Ahmad to explain to the brother what we wanted from the Sultan -  a contribution of five percent a year towards education and medical services.  When we said good-bye, we all received invitations to come back and stay there whenever we liked.

I had expected the Sultan’s palace to be more magnificent and more oriental, but a misplaced, western element of doubtful taste had crept in, presumably because of the Sultan’s frequent visits to Aden.  Gym shoes and deck chairs clash with dust devils and volcanic mountains and silent barefooted slaves.  One impression of our lunch at the palace I shall never forget:  the sight of a very young boy in a coarse, short, rust-coloured foutah, standing outside the doorway of the room while we were drinking orangeade.  He was leaning casually and very gracefully against a yellow-washed stone wall, with an expression of lazy, dream-like interest on his face.  The yellow wall, the rust-coloured foutah, the dark brown skin and black hair set off the purity of his features, the slender cheeks, straight, perfectly-proportioned nose and large, innocent, confident eyes.  When an older servant chivvied him away, he flicked into life, lost his soulful look and ran off giggling.

We said good-bye to Archie, who was going back to Mudia, but would be down to stay with us in Aden in two or three days’ time, and climbed into the Land Rover with Ahmad and Mancini in the back and the sulky driver of our journey out at the wheel.

The drive back, though as bumpy as ever, seemed to go far more quickly, I suppose because we were sorry to be leaving that part of the Protectorate.  We saw our last giant ant-hill, stopped for a cigarette at the waddy, climbed slowly up to the top of the volcanic pass and rapidly down towards Shukra with the sea ahead of us.  Our aim was to reach Shukra and drive along the beach to Aden before the tide came in too far, but when we reached Shukra the driver refused to go over the sand, though the tide appeared to be no higher than on the journey out.  We stopped to shake the dust off ourselves and get a drink of water, and while Richard and I were upstairs in the cool room where we first met Archie, the driver decided to take down the canvas hood of the Land Rover.  We did not quite understand what caused him to make that decision:  perhaps he had felt too hot driving and wished to get the air now that the sun was down, or perhaps he simply thought it would make the journey pleasanter for us all.  Whatever it was, he found it was not a popular move.  First Mancini and Ahmad protested and then Richard and I did, too, when we came down; and Ali, to his great annoyance, had to replace all the steel slats and put back the hood.  He was so cross that for several miles after we started off again, he exuded bad temper.  Occasionally he grunted and snorted with anger and when he did both, Mancini and Ahmad tried to pull his leg and jolly him out of his mood.  It was no use – his face remained surly and bad-tempered like a small boy’s, and he refused to speak.  Then suddenly, as we were driving along, across the hills of sand away to our right, we saw a small ibex staring at us with its big eyes.

“Look, Ali! An ibex” What a meal he would make! A pity you can’t go bang bang and shoot him dead and have him for your dinner.”  It was childish humour but it served.  A grin spread slowly over Ali’s face and then, unexpectedly, he burst out laughing.  He laughed so much that he had to pull up and wipe the  t ears out of his eyes.  But the storm had blown over.  From that moment he was cheerful and amusing and helpful.

Since Ali would not risk the beach we drove inland over the sand dunes, deciding to try and go as far as the Political Officer’s house in Abiyan and ask him if we could rest there until the tide went out.  We reached there after the usual, hard, bumpy driving, with one interruption, at about eight o’clock.  The interruption was due to a party of five Indians who had set off in an old Land Rover for the interior and had broken down a few miles sort of Shukra.  They appeared, all of them, to be completely ignorant of the mechanics of an engine and were grateful out of all proportion when Richard, with the aid of a small piece of wire, was able to keep the engine running on an exceptionally high flow of petrol, which would consume about five times the usual amount but would at any rate get them to Shukra, where they could get it mended.  We had the feeling that their ignorance might lead them to continue running it as it was adjusted, without bothering to have it repaired, which would inevitably leave them stranded without petrol at some isolated spot far from all help.  “Indians!” said Ali, with great scorn, as he got into the Land Rover, after they had driven off with enthusiastic shouts of thanks.

We fell out of the car at the political officer’s house, very dusty, very stiff, very hungry and very sleepy.  The P.O and his wife and little girl greeted us kindly and politely but with a wan lack of enthusiasm. We were their fifth party of unexpected guests arriving for rest and something to eat in the last forty-eight hours, and they had a large party of people coming out the next day from Aden.  The larder, which had already been over-strained, could produce nothing extra.  Mancini chose to eat with Ahmad and Ali.  Richard and I were offered an equal share of the family meal – our hosts’ excuse being that they were too tired to eat anyhow – so we each sat down to half an egg, a little salad, and a portion of Christmas pudding, backed by a drop of whisky out of the almost empty bottle.  We were very grateful, and restrained our appetites as much  as we could, but we got up from the table still feeling very hungry and only hoping that our hosts weren’t feeling equally so.

We started off again at midnight, plunging our way down to the beach through deep gulleys of sea water, which splashed and soaked up through the floor boards.  And then we began the last lap and perhaps the most beautiful one, of the whole journey: the sea rolling in gently and breaking unexpectedly beneath our wheels as we clung to the harder sand near its edge, myriads of phantom-like land crabs sidling colourlessly and rapidly in grey clouds away from our path, shadowy sand dunes on our right, a calm, starry sky overhead and on our left, poised over a margin of the sea, the Southern Cross, leaning slightly towards us as though giving us its blessing, and seeming to keep step with us as we drove along.

We reached the flat in Aden in the early hours of the morning and were greeted with barks of joy by Peter, who came hurtling down the stairs to meet us.

Postscript on the fort at Lahmar.

            Archie stayed two days with us.  On the third day he received a wire to tell him that the fort had been attacked by the tribe on the north bank, that the builder and two other tribesmen had been killed and that the fort had been pulled to bits.  None of the raiders had been caught.

            “What will you do?” I asked Archie.

            “Go back and put the fear of God into them,” said Archie “and start building the fort again.  Can’t have them thinking they can frighten us.”