A Winter in Arabia Read online

  Copyright

  First published in paperback in the United States in 2002 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected]

  Copyright © 1940 by Freya Stark

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN 978-1-46830-234-9

  The notes for this diary were written during a winter in South Arabia, made possible by the generosity of Viscount Wakefield of Hythe, of the Royal Geographical Society, of the Ashmolean Museum, and of Mr. Louis Clarke, of the Cambridge University Museum of Archœology and Ethnology.

  The scientific and more serious records of this venture are to be found elsewhere: this is but a record of actions and reactions that might occur in any small Arabian town unused to Europeans and of a journey from Hureidha to the sea.

  Map of the Hadhramaut

  CONTENTS

  Copyright

  Map

  Foreword by Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, K.C.M.G., C.B.E., D.S.O

  Chapters

  I. From the Air

  II. Mukalla Revisited

  III. Transport and the Cook

  IV. The Towns of The Kathiri

  THE DIARY

  THE JOURNEY

  V. The Journey Begins

  VI. Wadi ’Amd

  VII. Sickness in ’Amd

  VIII. Robin

  IX. The High Jol

  X. The Drawings of Rahbe

  XI. Across the Watershed

  XII. Arrival in ’Azzan

  XIII. Naqb Al Hajr

  XIV. Jebel Kadur

  XV. The Sultan’s Caravan

  XVI. The Site of Cana

  XVII. A Dhow to Aden

  Appendix I. Arabic Plants

  Appendix II

  Index

  ALEXANDER’S PATH

  WILFRED THESIGER

  FOREWORD

  By Sir Kinahan Cornwallis,

  K.C.M.G., C.B.E., D.S.O.

  MISS FREYA STARK’S DIARY OF HER EXPEDITION TO ARABIA will afford interest and amusement to many, but it also points a lesson which no traveller in Eastern countries can afford to neglect. With two Englishwomen and unaccompanied by a police escort she set forth into country which, it is true, she had visited before, but which had never been brought under regular administration. The peace of the Ingrams had only recently replaced long years of inter-tribal warfare, and though the Shaikhs remembered her, they and their people were inclined to look upon the visitors and their unusual occupation with suspicion. Here was a situation which, if mishandled, might have led to failure if nothing worse; but Miss Stark is an experienced traveller who has a genuine interest in the Arabs, and her patent friendliness was able to bring success to the expedition and, no doubt, to leave behind pleasant memories which will last.

  For several years I had experience of Miss Stark when I was in the Ministry of the Interior in Iraq. The movements of ladies in some of the wilder parts of the country without permission was quite rightly restricted, and unauthorized visits to Persia were strictly forbidden. Miss Stark made light of such bureaucratic red tape; she saved our hair from premature greyness by just going and telling us all about it on her return. She exercised, in fact, on us the same qualities as she showed to the Arabs, and soon built up for herself a privileged position.

  The lesson is obvious. The Arab, like most of us, is essentially human; treat him, as he should be treated, as a friend and an equal and you get the best out of him; if you are aloof or superior or patronizing, you will get what you deserve. He is more than ordinarily sensitive and quick to imagine a slight, but he responds in like degree to friendliness and kindness. The value of personal contacts and friendships has been proved over and over again in the Middle East, and the evil effects of aloofness and indifference are clear for all to see. The average Englishman is not blessed with an exaggerated sense of imagination in his dealings with other races, but it is to be hoped that all who read Miss Stark’s pages will learn the difference between the right way and the wrong, and profit thereby.

  Chapter I

  FROM THE AIR

  “They shall behold a land of far distances.”

  (Isaiah.)

  ON THE LAST DAY IN THE FIRST WEEK OF NOVEMBER, 1937, WE flew eastward from Aden, in a cool air filled with early sunlight, a honey light over the sandy shore.

  We flew with the Indian Ocean on our right, puckered in motionless ripples, and upon it the broad white roadway of the sun. Seen from so high, the triple, lazy, lace-like edge of waves crept slowly; they did not turn all at once, but unrolled from end to end in a spiral motion, as it were the heart of a shell unwinding. Our aeroplane hung over the azure world with silver wings.

  We moved eastward even as the great globe below imperceptibly moved, and were gaining on its circular horizon. Sharks far down were dimly visible, so limpid was the water; small black boats, pointed at either end, were out with their fishermen near the shore; a village or two, earth-coloured huts unnoticeable but for the fields around them, took shelter here and there from wind and sand. On our right the unfurrowed ocean, marked like a damascened blade; on our left the gaunt, leopard-coloured lands, equally lonely; and above, or rather around us, joyous, vivid, and infinite, the skyey spaces loud with our engine, which, like many a mechanical mind, listens to its own voice alone in the silence of creation.

  Beyond Shuqra, an ancient flood of lava pours to the sea. Heavy as dough, it rolls into deep water; craters with ruined edges are scattered among its folds. Northward, beyond its bleak and pock-marked slope, stands the high level of Kaur, a wall unbroken. The lava stream is past; the shore flattens out again for many miles; we quiver over the bay of the Fish-eaters, whose coasts, if we could see them close, are scattered with empty heaps of shells where their descendants still enjoy an ocean meal. The mountains again approach. A white table-land of limestone meets black volcanic ridges; sand drifts over all the landscape; it piles itself in blinding dunes where the great Meifa’a wadi sweeps to sea; it makes pale foot-hill ranges of its own, and covers with its shifting carpet the ancient floor of lavas. Here somewhere the frankincense road, the Arabian highway, came to the sea and found a crater-built harbour where the volcanic headlands lie, since there is no other commodity for shipping along the shallow strips of shore. We look down eagerly, for we mean later to investigate these inlets. Bal Haf is there, three small square towers on an infinitesimal, hook-like bay facing west. The lava-ridge runs in snouts beyond it; an empty crater, round and perfect, stands like a buttress and forms another inlet. I marvel to see no trace of ruins here, and only find out the reason months later, as I ride along the coast: there is no water.

  But a great bay opens beyond, an amphitheatre of volcanoes and drift-sand, and in it another crater-buttress at the water’s edge with markings like walls upon it, and the little square town of Bir Ali. Here, I later came to think, is the town of Cana: but now, as we fly over, we can take our choice of craters; one of them sticks out to sea like the horns of a crescent moon black in eclipse. Two islands, one black, one white with the droppings of gulls, lie in water misty with sunlight; they are the landmarks for Cana, given by that good mariner who wrote the Periplus nearly two thousand years ago.

  And now we have passed Ras
Kelb and Ras Burum, the fire-twisted ridges are past. Mukalla is in the distance, gathered at the foot of its hill; and our aeroplane, slowing obliquely, sinks to the landing-ground of Fuwa. Jusuf, who presides over landings, is there to meet us, a Buddha figure suddenly active: the young American who has come to look for oil is there, in a new Dodge, that races us over the sand. The sea makes a gay splashing, as if its solitary fields too were meant to be a playground: a million bubbles shine in the sun at the breaking edge of waves, tossed like lace frills on a petticoat; crabs, innumerable as water drops, slide from before our approaching car; until we come to fishermen, who walk barefoot along the hard wet shore and carry on a yoke their baskets of fish—we come to the camel park near the estuary which now lies full of water; through the pointed stone arch of the gateway, by the guardhouse where Yafe’i mercenaries play at dice; to the home of the Resident Adviser.

  Chapter II

  MUKALLA REVISITED

  “What little town by river or sea-shore,

  Or mountain built, with peaceful citadel. …”

  (KEATS “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”)

  HAROLD AND DOREEN INGRAMS WERE A NEW INSTITUTION IN Mukalla.

  When the Italians brought their civilization to Abyssinia, the preoccupied glance of Whitehall, lighting for a moment on those vast shores which fringe the Indian Ocean, noticed that some of them were coloured pink and were, therefore, presumably British. Only presumably, for many maps had omitted to tint them, owing to the absent-minded reticence of Government at the time when the South Arabian treaties were signed. The treaties, however, existed, scattered over various dates that began before 1886. The Hadhramis were anxious for more active protection and restive under what we like to call non-interference and they are apt to think of as neglect. The British Empire decided, out of its immense resources, to grant one man, and discovered Harold and Doreen in Aden. The Italians at that time looked upon our eastern possessions as cheeks turned towards them for perpetual slapping and were annoyed to see Mr. Ingrams in the middle of a landscape which they were beginning to consider as their own. Rumour has it that they paid a visit to the Foreign Office and asked to see the map. Luckily the one on the desk happened to be a pink one: Mr. Ingrams had an indubitable right to be there; and when we reached Mukalla we found him and his wife settled in a white house behind the Sultan’s palace, carrying on the business of some thousand miles of country with the help of their own infinite ardour, and half a dozen native clerks.

  This country of the Hadhramaut had been to Harold for many years a secret goal of dreams, since first he learned of it from a servant in Zanzibar. He had left Zanzibar and gone to Mauritius, when the offer of work in Aden again brought the Hadhramaut near. And now his dream had become reality, he was alone in the land, striving after its prosperity and peace with a slenderness of resources incredible to anyone unacquainted with our particular methods of empire; and he looked with a mixture of kindness and apprehension on our feminine invasion, a nuisance inferior only to oil.

  I am not of those who blame officials for looking upon me with misgiving. Far from it. If they are right in nine cases how should they know, by the mere look of us, that we are that exceptional coincidence, the tenth? And who shall say that in nine cases they are wrong?

  “If nine be bad and one be good,

  There’s yet one good in ten, quoth she,

  There’s yet one good in ten.”

  One quotes Shakespeare and leaves them to discriminate. My companions, both better educated than I am, rightly took themselves more seriously. They were rather prone to that female superstition which, in a circular world, thinks of Education as “Higher,” regardless of the Antipodes just below and the fact that so many people get on well without it. British officials—those easy-going people—they explained to me, are knotted with unsuspected anti-feminist complexes. In this case however we were bound by ties of kindness to co-operate as far as possible with officialdom and Aden. They had welcomed and helped us; they had opened a door which might easily have remained closed—all that they asked was that we follow their advice in a country they knew, and that we give as little trouble as our nature and occupations permitted.

  With this in mind, I spent long hours learning from Harold and Doreen and the office papers what had recently been happening among the tribes, the intrigues of our neighbours across the straits, and who in general were enemies or friends. The little room one sat in was cool, open on all four sides, with a lattice-work of coloured glass fitted casually here and there, and such armchairs decayed from former splendour as Mukalla had been able to provide. Doreen would come in from the office where she combined the functions of Treasurer, Private, Political, and Oriental Secretary, and Chief Typist; she would give a passing look to her adopted daughter sitting over its mug of milk in the morning sunshine. This baby, Zahra, had a mop of small yellow curls apparently produced by mere washing from the unpromising oily black locks of the Arab child. In her small and engaging person she represented Education for Women in the Hadhramaut of to-morrow; a delicate future lies before her.

  “I am not averse to women’s education,” a liberal sayyid1 told me later in Tarim: “so long as it is not excessive. If it is carried on to the age of nine and then stops, I do not think it can do any harm?” He looked at me anxiously, afraid that perhaps his modern tendencies were carrying him too far.

  From an office below, teeming with every sort of tribesman, a tired Harold would emerge at intervals and, with his blue-eyed expression, which must have given him a misleading and seraphic appearance as a small boy in the choir, would recount the latest cases of murder and brigandage in his lands. They were singularly few, for he had persuaded most of the headmen and Sultans to sign a three years’ truce and give to the cause of peace an opportunity denied to it in Europe. This truce made our journey unadventurous and easy; it was known all over the country as the Ingrams or the English Peace: but being a fragile creature and of such tender years, the fear of disturbing or damaging it in any way tended to limit our plans more than the wars of the bad old days, when a casualty more or less could make no odds.

  The scientists spent their time in search of prehistoric tools on banks east of Mukalla where they alone could read in letters unknown to others the history of the past. It is one of the greatest allurements of Asia that its nakedness is so clothed with the shreds of departed splendour; like a face lined with age, its joys and its sorrows are furrowed upon it, not so much in human ruins as in the very structure of the continent itself. Its vestiges of fertility, irrevocably lost, make it a world not only dead, but ruined. This must be so, of course, everywhere in some degree; but here the time is vaster, the contrast greater, and the drama of nature more obviously identical with the tragedy of man.

  For this I envy the Geologist. She can see simultaneously before her the past and the present. To her the fan-shaped terraces of gravel, opaque in sunlight, are still tumultuous rivers in whose heart the pebbles have been rolled from prehistoric highlands. Their banks and uplifted estuaries carry, in petrified evidence, plants and shells and creatures that once animated them. Like a staircase receding, the geologic ages climb back into Time; and on their very lowest steps, poignant as toys found on forgotten shelves of childhood, lie the earliest tools of men.

  Three of these terraces have been washed near Mukalla from their ancient heights towards the Indian Ocean, and lie in ruins, their flatness gnawed into broken ridges, behind the sand-dunes of the modern shore. The oldest and highest is Pliocene, where human footsteps, if they passed, have left no traces: but on the middle terrace, where still the beduin build their hearthstones and their cairns for burial and for shade, one can pick up flints brown, black or amber, notched into triangular blunt instruments or sharp flat-pointed blades. The Archæologist, with a precision which would have surprised their former owners, called them Levalloisian. With unhesitating fingers she picked their different kinds from promiscuous heaps we brought her. As by some Ariadne-thread invisible to o
thers, these two were able to trace their way through the labyrinths of time, moving at large among these vast compelling facts with awe-inspiring ease.

  The present, too, was pleasant in Mukalla, and especially the never-ending delight of its shore. Acres of small flat silver fish with blue backs, laid out in rows like bedded plants, were strewn there in the sun: they dry for six days and are then stacked in heaps for the camels to feed on. They are caught in a circular net of small meshes, about 1 cm. square, thrown by a man who stands submerged to the waist beyond the breaking waves. Each morning the huris came full sail, their bodies low on the water, filled with fish to the brim. They looked as if they meant to ram the shore; but the square sail dropped, the lovely movement was suddenly arrested, and the crew came wading out of the sea with fish bulging in nets on their shoulders.

  And in the evening the American car would carry us towards the sunset, when a rising tide slowly devoured the sands. Between rows of breakers the shallow wave water shone pink and brilliant as its cold smooth shells. Amethyst mountain ranges ran out to their wild capes. Grey cranes with ragged wings rose in slow flight above the tossing water. On the shore some black quick-moving figure of beduin stirred among the rushes like an incarnation of the night. And once, as we came back in the dusk, four small humped cows impeded us: they wandered unattended to the water’s edge, dipped their noses in the breaking waves, and appeared to be drinking the sea.

  Chapter III

  TRANSPORT AND THE COOK

  “Le monde inconnu nous enveloppe, c’est tout ce qui est hors de nous.”

  (ANATOLE FRANCE. Le Petit Pierre.)