The Prophet's Camel Bell (3 page)

Jack, with his usual calm logic, decided that nothing constructive could be done about the cabin, so he crawled into his bunk and went to sleep immediately. As a result, the next morning he felt fine, ready for anything, while I felt queasy and jangled.

“In this part of the world,” he said, recalling the years he had spent in India during the war, “you have to learn that if you can't change something, you might as well not worry about it.”

He was right, but it was many months before the time came when I could curl up on the seat of the Land-Rover and quietly conserve myself in sleep, when the road had somehow got lost in the desert and we had no idea where we were. That night on the Gulf of Aden I could not have conceived of a time when the bunks of the
Velho
would have seemed like the silken beds of a sultan's palace.

The vessel's mate had a lean intense face and a flaming beard. His eyes must surely have been penetrating, but they were always concealed behind sunglasses. He stalked silently around the boat not exchanging a word with anyone. Maybe he communicated with the captain, but we never observed them speaking together. The captain was an elderly Scot who had worked in the East for many years. He was dressed meticulously, a contrast to his grubby craft. What had brought him here, to skipper this pint-sized wreck from Aden to Berbera
and back to Aden, eternally, under the blazing sun? We would never know. When I talked with him, he spoke of only one thing – his last leave in Scotland. I imagined he must have returned from there only recently.

“Oh no,” he replied, when I asked him. “That was seven years ago, lass.”

The wireless operator was a young Egyptian, a Coptic Christian. He led a lonely life in Aden, for he belonged in neither the Christian nor the Muslim communities there. He was fond of jazz, and homesick for Cairo. When we were a short way off from Aden, he laughed ironically.

“I can hear them now,” he said, “but they can't hear me.”

His wireless set with its spark-gap transmitter was so antiquated that he could communicate only when the vessel was within a mile or so of shore. As soon as we decently could, without appearing too obvious about it, we went up to have a look at the lifeboats. There did not seem to be very many of them.

Among the Europeans on board were two Army sergeants, reluctantly returning from leave.

“This your first time out?” one of them said, gloomily gloating. “You'll hate it. Nothing there but a bloody great chunk of desert. It's got the highest European suicide rate of any colony – know that? Good few blokes living very solitary there in outstations, that's the reason. They go round the bend.”

Another fellow passenger was a civilian, a member of the administration. He told us, confidentially, to watch out for the Public Works Department.

“It's really gone beyond a joke,” he said sorrowfully, “the way those
P.W.D.
fellows look after their own people first. They corner all the best furniture and the most workable plumbing. Shocking.”

When he learned that Jack would be associated with the
P.W.D.
, his manner became slightly withdrawn for a time, but he later grew friendly once more and told us how much better the trip from Aden to Berbera was than the return voyage.

“Going back to Aden,” he said, “the boat's full of camels. They ride with the Somalis, down on the third-class deck. They bawl and groan the whole time, and the stench is terrible.”

The Somalis crowding the third-class section slept out on the decks that night. They were tall gaunt men, most of them, their features a cross between negroid and Arabian. They wore tunic-like robes called
lunghis
, knotted around their waists and reaching just below their knees. The cotton materials of their robes were of every shade and variety – splendid plaids, striped or plain, green and magenta and mauve. Around their heads were loosely constructed turbans, pink, white, blue. The few Somali women on board seemed a contrast to the brash, assertive men. They had soft features and enormous liquid brown eyes, and many of them had lighter skins than the men. The young unmarried women wore long robes of many colours, but the married ones were clad in black and red. All wore headscarves that billowed out behind them in the breeze. The women walked so shyly, so lightly, with downcast eyes, that I imagined they must be very meek and gentle creatures.

Beautiful a great many of them certainly were, and gentle they certainly could be when it pleased them. But meek – meek as Antigone, meek as Medea. I did not then know Safia, or Shugri and her mother, or proud Saqa, or the old woman of Balleh Gedid.

Berbera from the water looked beckoning. The sea was calm and turquoise, and the level shoreline was yellow sand. A few
palms and pepper trees grew around the town, and the houses appeared pure white, their blemishes concealed by distance. The sharp thin minaret of a mosque rose above the squat dwellings. Beyond the town the blue-brown hills looked softer, less treacherous than they really were. Berbera had no harbour, so we anchored off shore and a government launch came out. Jack went ashore to discover what arrangements, if any, had been made for us, and I stayed on the
Velho
to guard our belongings. After a while Jack returned, accompanied by a Somali boy.

His name was Mohamed, and he looked about eighteen, a boy of unprepossessing appearance, clad in a purple robe and a clean white shirt, and sporting a small black moustache that looked incongruous on his youthful face. He was to be our houseboy. I felt, uneasily, that he had been hired too quickly. We didn't know the first thing about him. He might be the most cunning crook in Berbera, for all we knew.

“The
P.W.D.
foreman knows him,” Jack reassured me, “and thinks he's probably okay. I've only taken him on trial. He'll do for the moment.”

It still seemed absurd to me. I could not see why we needed anyone so soon. With dwindling patience, Jack tried to explain.

“This isn't Winnipeg or London. You don't tote your own luggage here. It just isn't done. Maybe we don't agree with the system, but there it is. Another thing – he'll be useful in the shops. If you buy anything by yourself, before you know what's what, you'll likely get cheated by the local merchants.”

Mohamed's function in the situation, apparently, was to look after our interest, and that day he put on a wonderful display of enthusiasm, for he obviously was anxious to have the job. He carried suitcases, conveyed Jack's instructions to
the Somali coolies, cautioned me as I climbed down into the waiting launch.

“Memsahib – must be you step carefully-carefully –”

The whole performance amused and distressed me. I could not face the prospect of being called “Memsahib,” a word which seemed to have connotations of white man's burden, paternalism, everything I did not believe in. Furthermore, I was not sure I would be able to cope with servants. We had a series of “hired girls” when I was a child in a prairie town, but they could not have been called servants – they would have been mortally offended at the term. Mohamed's deference embarrassed me. I need not have worried, however, for he was not humble in that detestable way, nor was any Somali I ever met. But I had no way of knowing that at the time.

Mohamed, employed so hastily and on a temporary basis, was the first person I met and spoke with in Somaliland. It would have surprised me then to know that many months later he would also be the last person we saw when we left.

The launch set out for Berbera, and I held onto my broad-brimmed straw hat and felt the warm salt spray on my arms. Perched on the prow was a Somali coolie, and as the boat rode high, caught in a sudden swell of waves, I saw his face against the sky. It was a face I could not read at all, a well-shaped brown face that seemed expressionless, as though whatever lay behind his eyes would be kept carefully concealed.

I wondered if his was the face of Africa.

S
ir Richard Burton, surely the strangest and most compulsive traveller of them all, had an extremely low opinion of Somalis. In his view they were stupid, dirty, and most damning of all, poor Muslims. As he had thought all along that they would be. Before he ever began the journey which he later described in
First Footsteps in East Africa
, his bias had been firmly set. As a scholar in Arabic literature and philosophy, and as a man who had found his true and inner home in the deserts and the bizarre cities of Arabia, Burton disliked the Somalis on sight, chiefly, I believe, because they happened not to be Arabs.

Every traveller sets foot on shore with some bias. Not being a scholar in Arabic literature or anything else, I had no specific pre-conceived ideas of what the Somalis would be like, or ought to be like. My bias lay in another direction. I believed that the overwhelming majority of Englishmen in colonies could properly be classified as imperialists, and my feeling about imperialism was very simple – I was against it. I had been born and had grown up in a country that once was a colony, a country which many people believed still to be
suffering from a colonial outlook, and like most Canadians I took umbrage swiftly at a certain type of English who felt they had a divinely bestowed superiority over the lesser breeds without the law. My generation remembered the last of the “remittance men,” languid younger sons of country families, men who could not have fixed a car nor driven a tractor to save their souls and who looked with gentlemanly amusement on those who could, men who had believed they were coming to the northern wilds and who in our prairie and mountain towns never once found occasion to change their minds.

The first Englishman I met in Somaliland was Alf. In his middle thirties, he was a lean sharp-faced man, slightly stoop-shouldered, with a straggling moustache and a rather anxious look, pessimistically anxious, as though he were certain that his was the foot destined to skid on the banana peel over which thousands had passed in safety. He was a
P.W.D.
foreman and a bachelor, and he offered to put us up for the night.

“Of course, the telegram you sent from Aden only got here an hour or so ago,” he said morosely, in his strong midlands accent. “That's why no one went out to the
Velho
to meet you. It never fails. It's the only thing you can really depend on, here – nothing ever happens in the way it's meant to.”

He lived alone in a high barn-like structure of truly antique appearance, a two-storey house with enormous windows and heavy wooden shutters. Somali knives and spears were tacked up on the walls, but apart from these meagre decorations the dwelling had a bare and almost unlived-in look. Geckos, tiny lizards transparent as gelatine, raced restlessly across the ceiling, displaying their palpitating vitals and their spines, staring with cold eyes on the humans below.

“What'll you have to drink?” Alf asked.

In England we had been able to afford only the occasional
bottle of cider, and we had smoked Weights or Woodbines, half the price and half the size. Now, seeing Alf's amply stocked liquor cabinet and the open tins of full-size cigarettes sitting casually around on small tables, we had the feeling that whatever the drawbacks of this country it would not be entirely without its advantages.

Alf had been here for twenty-one months without leave, and that was a long time in Berbera, too long, especially during the
kharif
, the hot wind of the monsoon season. Telling us about himself and his work, he would suddenly begin to stammer a little and his words would peter out, as though he had forgotten what he was going to say. Sometimes he did not hear us when we spoke.

“Sorry,” he would say, with a bewildered frown, “I'm afraid I missed that.”

Wandering around the house after dinner, before we all settled down again to talk, he sang in a hoarse tenor, and talked to himself quite naturally and unaffectedly, telling himself he ought not to smoke so much or that he must remember to tell Jama to get cracking on the Police Land-Rover.

Alf was a plain and practical man. He liked to see things done properly. Mostly, here, they were not done properly, and it was always hard to see whose fault it was. He had become saddened and discouraged by what he called the Somalis' “obstructionism.” He wanted to show them how to look after machinery, how to build and repair roads. Why wouldn't they let him? He did not know. He knew only that he had to keep on with his job and try not to let things get in too much of a mess. He was not bitter, only overworked and frequently mystified by the fact that the Somalis did not take the work as seriously as he did. But he was careful not to group Somalis together. When he spoke of his staff, he
grew keen once more – Ali was a promising mechanic, and you wouldn't find a better driver than Farah.

But there were so many difficulties. Equipment was always breaking down, and the spares took months to arrive from England. There was never sufficient money in the department's allocation to get enough new equipment. And there was always trouble with the gangs of labourers. Often it was impossible to see what their current grievance was, for everybody talked at once. The Somalis were the damnedest talkers, he said – they'd argue all night if they could find any one to listen.

How to explain such a person? It is easy enough to label someone from a distance, but how could you possibly think of a man as an imperialist when he told you, sorrowfully and in perplexity, that he tried to start a football team but the Somalis didn't seem to take to the game?

Alf's frayed moustache, his worried eyes and pale untidy hair became a familiar sight to us in the next few months, when we drove from Sheikh to Berbera to get supplies. Gradually I came to believe that if he had ever fully realized how difficult his job was, he would have given up. He had no gift for analysis, however, and perhaps that was just as well, for in trying to turn camel herders into truck drivers, desert tribesmen into town-dwelling mechanics, he was trying to construct a bridge that would cross centuries and oceans in a single span. He went on speaking to them in terms of one culture, and they continued to hear and interpret his words in terms of quite another. Small wonder he was at cross purposes with them half the time.