A Reed Shaken by the Wind by Gavin Maxwell Read Free Book Online Page B

out a torch, confirmed that the gun was not there and did so. I could not explain to him what had happened, for my Arabic vocabulary was at that time limited to some dozen words, but I was able to say that the gun wasn’t there. Sabeti launched on a low chatter of reproof that was as plain in sense as if he had spoken in English, and ended by throwing back his own blanket to show his legs scissored round my gun as though he were climbing a rope. I felt as foolish as he intended.
    Our waking, too, was like many that followed it during the next two months. First, when one was still heavy with sleep, the insistent barking of dogs, outside but only a few feet from one’s head, would invade unconsciousness, thenthe sounds of the household busying themselves beyond the dividing reed platform with preparations for the day. One could ignore the sound of the dogs, I found, but the sound of articulate human speech, even if the words were not understood, would not allow sleep. There would be the curiously defined and intimate ringing sound of a metal mortar pounding roasted coffee beans in a metal pestle, and on the floor near at hand the protesting groans and stretching of our awakening canoe boys. This would usually be punctuated with dull thuds, as Thesiger, with scoutmasterish jocularity, belaboured their heads with a small pillow, hard and heavy-seeming as a sandbag; a treatment that he affected to believe painless. Washing was of ritual simplicity, a splash of cold water poured on one’s hands from the unvarying long-spouted copper water jug as one squatted outside the door; we shaved every three or four days or when we were to be the guests of some sheikh. Blankets were folded and stowed and the fire lit at the coffee hearth in the middle of the floor, and we sat cross-legged round it to drink the tiny glasses of sweet tea and eat the thin bread that more prosperous households produce for their guests’ breakfast. All Arab bread is unrecognisable by the European connotation of the word; for it is without yeast, greyish and pliable sheets of dough whose surface the flame of a mud oven has irregularly blackened. In the marshes the normal everyday bread, some half an inch thick is made by plastering the sheet of dough to the walls of an acorn-shaped mud oven, open at the top and with the fire burning in the middle of it, so that the flame licks the dough. The thin bread, however, which is something of a luxury and a dainty, is made by pouring a cream-like mixture of flour and water on to a large inverted smooth-bottomed plate supported on three clay bricks over the fire. A second plate, like the lid of a large saucepan, is placed over the bread, which can be peeled off after about a minute, golden coloured and very like a large pancake. Unlike the normalbread, which would be considered inedible by most Europeans, the thin bread is appetising both in appearance and in taste.
    Immediately after breakfast Thesiger’s surgery began, and since the gale was still roaring out of an empty blue sky outside, tearing up dust-storms from the dry mud of the island and filling the whole air with fluttering golden fragments of reed, it took place in the house. My admiration for Thesiger’s assurance grew with every moment; there was surely no practitioner in England who would have attempted to treat the variety of complaints with which he was confronted. He had won his reputation among the marsh people by years of this work; rapid hit or miss diagnosis that grew gradually more accurate with prolonged experience, followed by the profligate use of the latest costly anti-biotic drugs that rendered the diagnosis of secondary importance.
    The marshmen are riddled with diseases, many of them appalling to look at, and it is probably to their high mortality that they owe their continued existence, for this watery waste could never have supported an expanding population. Many of these diseases are acutely infectious, and when I left the marshes I left