Voyage By Dhow Read Online Free PDF Page B

exterminated.
    Our Zaranik friend was not the only would-be soldier travelling with us. We also carried a Yemeni Bedouin without a penny to his name, but full of hope for the future. This Bedouin had been a shepherd, but his ambition was to become a military man in some country where soldiers wore imposing uniforms and did not have to buy their own rifles. After emigrating from the Yemen, he had worked for a short time as a coolie in Aden. There he had lived in one of the caves in the rocks to keep his expenses down. He had bought himself a shirt and an old black coat with his savings, with the idea of impressing future employees. He still darkened his eyelids, however, with antimony powder and bound his calves and his hair with sprigs of sweet basil.
    One of the most likeable characters on the dhow was Sheikh Said. He was dark-skinned and slender with an expression of fierceness tempered with melancholy, and he spent much of the time standing in the bows staring out to sea, as if brooding over his troubles. When anyone approached him, however, natural courtesy made him cast off his moodiness and silence, and he smiled and held out his hand in greeting. Sheikh Said was from the remote interior of the Hadramawt, a country of blood feuds and civil war. It remained a land of fortified villages and towns, like the medieval Italian states of old, engaging in everlasting wars. These towns were built in fertile valleys and were often—unfortunately for them—within rifle shot of one another. Farmers would travel to their fields through networks of communicating trenches in order not to expose themselves to the eye of a sniper.
    The sheikh spoke of feudal lords who built strong towers at strategic points from which they preyed upon the land. The townships employed mercenary troops and laid siege to each other with a few hundred men, an old cannon and an occasional imported armoured car. It was these conditions, he told us, that had driven him from his country. As a sheikh he was debarred by custom from bearing arms in such conflicts, but he had been involved in a blood feud and then in a war in which he had chosen the losing side. A truce had been negotiated, but Sheikh Said, erring on the side of caution, had decided to emigrate.
    Often to be found with Sheikh Said was an officer of the Ibn Saud’s army who was returning home from a mission in the Hadramawt. He had brought along his bed, consisting of the usual framework and string netting, and lay on this most of the day reading passages from the Koran. Like the sheikh, he was lithe and slender, but his skin was as fair as a Scandinavian’s. He was a man of education, and could write a few words of English. It was with his help, and with painstaking reference to dictionaries and our phrase book, that we were able to carry on halting conversation with our fellow travellers.
VIII
    The more than leisurely progress of the dhow came as a surprise. Occasionally a breeze tightened the sails, but by the end of the first full day at sea we were to learn that we had covered only ten miles, and by the next morning we were in a flat calm. It was a situation accepted almost with jubilation both by the male passengers and several members of the crew. Many of the passengers had brought fishing tackle along, in readiness for forced inactivity, and now they baited their hooks and lowered them into the sea. Within minutes the first catch had been landed. The shores of the Red Sea were devoid of human population, and the fishing boats of Aden needed to go no further than the Gulf. Thus the Red Sea abounded in fish.
    To the fishing enthusiasts who travelled with us only a few kinds were acceptable. Barracudas, which flourished in these waters, were caught at intervals of a few minutes without showing fight. But rock cod and big rays, the other favoured catches, put up a great struggle. These and a few lesser kinds free of suspicion were handed over to the cook, the rest being immediately thrown