Chapter 31

TAMARIDA OR HADIBO

Certainly Tamarida is a pretty place, with its river, its lagoon, and its palms, its whitewashed houses and whitewashed mosques, and with its fine view of the Haghier range immediately behind it. The mosques are new, and offer but little in the way of architectural beauty, for the fanatical Wahhabi from Nejd swept over the island in 1801, and in their religious zeal destroyed the places of worship; and the extensive cemeteries still bear testimony to the ravages of these iconoclasts, with their ruined tombs and overturned headstones.

We encamped on the further side of a good-sized stream or little river, having it between us and the town of Tamarida or Hadibo; and this was really a protection to us at night, for the inhabitants of that neighbourhood are terribly afraid of certain jinni or ghinni, which abide in the stream, and will not go near it at night. Indeed, we remarked that it was considered by Hashi and Mahmoud, the two Somali servants, a wise precaution to draw all the water and bring up the washing, which was drying, in good time of an afternoon.

They had heard such fearful stories that they were very much afraid of being bewitched while in the island, though I doubt whether I and my camera were not nearly as alarming.

They had heard how a Sokotran man had turned a woman of Maskat into a seal and forced her to swim over to Sokotra in that shape. We were told that this story is perfectly true!

This evil reputation of the islanders is very persistent. Marco Polo says: 'The Sokotrans are enchanters, as great as any in the world, though excommunicated by their prelates therefor; and raise winds to bring back such ships as have wronged them, till they obtain satisfaction.'

It is only just to say we had no need to fear such honest and friendly people.

Sultan Salem of Sokotra, the nephew of old Sultan Ali of Kishin, the monarch of the Mahri tribe, whom we had visited two years before on the south coast of Arabia, governed the island as his uncle's deputy. He had a castle at Tamarida of very poor and dilapidated appearance, which he rarely inhabited, preferring to live in the hills near Garriah, or at his miserable house at Haula, some eight miles along the coast from Tamarida. Haula is as ungainly a spot as it is possible to conceive--without water, without wood, and invaded by sand--quite the ugliest place we saw on the island, its only recommendation being that during the north-east monsoons the few dhows which visit the island anchor there, since it affords some sort of shelter from the winds in that direction, and Sultan Salem has a keen eye to business.

His Majesty came to visit us, shortly after our arrival at Tamarida, from his country residence, and favoured us with an audience in the courtyard of his palace, with all the great men of the island seated around him. He was a man of fifty, with a handsome but somewhat sinister face; he was girt as to his head with a many-coloured _kefieh_, and as to his waist with a girdle supporting a finely inlaid Maskat dagger and a sword. His body was enveloped in a clean white robe, and his feet were bare.

His conversation, both then and when he returned our visit at our camp, on which occasion he received a few presents, was solely about the price of camels and how many we should need. He did not ask us one other question. He talked little Arabic, being of the Mahri tribe.

We gave him an Enfield carbine of 1863.

On the plain behind Tamarida there is a conical hill about 200 feet high called Hasan, which has been fortified as an Acropolis, and was provided with cemented tanks. These ruins have also been called Portuguese, but they looked to us more Arabic in character.

When one has seen the very elaborate forts erected by the Portuguese on the coasts of the Persian Gulf and East Africa one feels pretty confident in asserting that they took no steps to settle themselves permanently in Sokotra; in fact, their occupation of it only extended over a period of four years, and the probability is that, finding it harbourless, and worth little for their purposes of a depôt on the road to India, they never thought it worth their while to build any permanent edifices.

In the neighbourhood there is a hill where the English are said to have encamped, and where there are traces of a more ancient civilisation, probably Portuguese. There are walls of small stones, cased with cement, and, inside them, a tank with conduits.

Opposite to this hill, and across the stream, is a ruined village, only one house of which is still inhabited; it has circular walls and a circular paddock adjoining it for cattle.

It is, perhaps, annoying to have to add another to the list of the many tongues spoken in the world, but I think there is no room for doubt that Sokoteri must be added to that already distracting catalogue.

Though Sokotra has been under Mahri rule probably since before our era--for Arrian tells us that in his day the island of Dioscorida, as it was then called, was under the rule of the king of the Arabian frankincense country, and the best days of that country were long before Arrian's time--nevertheless, the inhabitants have kept their language quite distinct both from Mahri and from Arabic. Of course it is naturally strongly impregnated with words from both these tongues; but the fundamental words of the language are distinct, and in a trilingual parallel list of close on 300 words, which my husband took down in the presence of Mahri, Sokoteri and Arabic speaking people on the island, we found distinctly more in the language derived from an Arab than from a Mahri source.

In subtlety of sound Sokoteri is painfully rich, and we had the greatest difficulty in transcribing the words. They corkscrew their tongues, they gurgle in their throats, and bring sounds from most alarming depths, but luckily they do not click. They have no word for a dog, for there is not a dog on the island; neither for a horse nor a lion, for the same reason; they seemed surprised at the idea that there might be such words in their language; but for all the animals, trees, and articles commonly found there they have words as distinct from the Arabic and Mahri as cheese is from _fromage_.

At Tamarida we annexed a respectable man called Ammar as interpreter. He was familiar with all the languages spoken in the island, and daily, when the camp was all pitched and arranged, my husband used to produce a long list of Arabic words, and Ammar used to sit on his heels and tell the Mahri and Sokoteri equivalents, the words, however, being for the most part shouted out in chorus by numerous bystanders. I have since added the English, and the vocabulary will be found in an appendix.

It was most difficult to get an answer as to anything abstract.

For instance, 'clothes' would be asked, and Ammar, after inquiring if white clothes were meant, or blue, or black, or red, and being answered 'any clothes,' would give a list of garments of various shapes.

'Age' was a question that caused a great awkwardness, I am sorry to say.

'Well,' answered Ammar, 'it might be anything--seven, fifteen, seventy--anything!'

After the greatest invention and planning on our part, we unhappily thought to put the question in this form:

'How do you say "What is your age?"'

'_My_ age,' said Ammar, '_mine_--well'--with evident annoyance and great hesitation--'I'm thirty-five--_not_ old--not _old_ at all.'

He is really quite fifty.

On such occasions there had to be a tremendous conversation with the bystanders.

I will not say more of the language than that instead of our little word _I_ the Sokoteri is _hemukomòn_ and the Mahri _evomúhshom_.

I wish we could speak confidently about the origin of the so-called Bedouin, the pastoral inhabitants of the island, who live in the valleys and heights of Mount Haghier, and wander over the surface of the island with their flocks and herds.

It has been often asserted that these Bedouin are troglodytes, or cave-dwellers pure and simple, but I do not think this is substantially correct. None of them, as far as we could ascertain, dwell always or by preference in caves; but all of them own stone-built tenements, however humble, in some warm and secluded valley, and they only abandon these to dwell in caves when driven to the higher regions in search of pasturage for their flocks during the dry season, which lasts from November till the south-west monsoon bursts in the beginning of June.

Whilst we were on the island the season was exceptionally dry, and most of the villages in the valleys were entirely abandoned for the mountain caves.

The Bedou is decidedly a handsome individual, lithe of limb like his goats, and with a _café-au-lait_-coloured skin; he has a sharp profile, excellent teeth; he often wears a stubbly black beard and has beautifully pencilled eyebrows, and, though differing entirely in language, in physique and type he closely resembles the Bedouin found in the Mahri and Gara mountains. Furthermore, the mode of life is the same--dwelling in caves when necessary, but having permanent abodes on the lower lands; and they have several other striking points in common. Greetings take place between the Arabian Bedouin and the Sokotran Bedouin in similar fashion, by touching each cheek and then rubbing the nose. We found the Bedouin of Mount Haghier fond of dancing and playing their _teherane_, and also peculiarly lax in their religious observances; and though ostensibly conforming to Mohammedan practice, they observe next to none of their precepts; and it is precisely the same with the Bedouin whom we met in the Gara mountains. There is certainly nothing African about the Sokotran Bedouin; therefore I am inclined to consider them as a branch of that aboriginal race which inhabited Arabia, with a language of its own; and when Arabia is philologically understood and its various races investigated, I expect we shall hear of several new languages spoken by different branches of this aboriginal race, and then, perhaps, a parallel will be found to the proudly isolated tongue of this remote island.

The Bedou houses are round, and surrounded by a round wall in which the flocks are penned at night; flat-roofed and covered with soil, and inside they are as destitute of interest as it is possible to conceive--a few mats on which the family sleep, a few jars in which they store their butter, and a skin churn in which they make the same. The plan of those houses that are oblong is that of two circles united by a bit of wall at one side, the door being at the other. In one house into which my husband penetrated he found a bundle hanging from the ceiling, which he discovered to be a baby by the exposure of one of its little feet.

Everything is poor and pastoral. The Bedouin have hardly any clothes to cover themselves with, nothing to keep them warm when the weather is damp, save a home-spun sheet, and they have no ideas beyond those connected with their flocks. The closest intimacy exists between a Bedou and his goats and his cows; the animals understand and obey certain calls with absolute accuracy, and you generally see a Sokotran shepherdess walking before her flock, and not after it. The owners stroke and caress their little cows until they are as tame as dogs.

The cows in Sokotra are far more numerous than one would expect, and there is excellent pasturage for them; they are a very pretty little breed, smaller than our Alderney, without the hump, and with the long dewlap; they are fat and plump, and excellent milkers.

The Bedou does very little in the way of cultivation, but when grass is scarce, and consequently milk, he turns his attention to the sowing of jowari in little round fields dotted about the valleys, with a wall round to keep the goats off. In each of these he digs a well, and waters his crop before sunrise and after sunset; the field is divided into little compartments by stones, the better to retain the soil and water; and sometimes you will see a Bedou papa with his wife and son sitting and tilling these _bijou_ fields with pointed bits of wood, for other tools are unknown to them.

We hired our camels for our journey eastwards from the Arab merchants who live at Tamarida or Hadibo; they are the sole camel proprietors in the island, as the Bedouin own nothing but their flocks; and excellent animals these camels are, too, the strongest and tallest we had seen. Of our camel-men, some were Bedouin and some were negroes, and we found them on the whole honest and obliging, though with the usual keen eye for a possible bakshish, which is not uncommon elsewhere.

The eastern end of Sokotra is similar in character to the western, being a low continuation of the spurs of Haghier, intersected with valleys, and with a plateau stretching right away to Ras Momi about 1,500 feet above the sea-level. This plateau is a perfect paradise for shepherds, with much rich grass all over it; but it is badly watered, and water has to be fetched from the deep pools which are found in all its valleys at the driest season of the year, and in the rainy season these become impassable torrents, sweeping trees and rocks before them; and the hillsides up to the edge of the bare dolomitic pinnacles of the Haghier range are thickly clothed with vegetation.

Three considerable streams run from southward of Mount Haghier, fertilising three splendid valleys, until the waters, as the sea is approached, lose themselves in the sand. To the north there are many more streams, and inasmuch as the sea is considerably nearer, they all reach it, or, rather, the silted-up lagoons already alluded to.

By the side of these streams innumerable palm-groves grow--in fact, dates form the staple food of the islanders. And out of the date-tree they get branches for their hedges, stems for their roofs; the leaf provides them with their sleeping-mats, and, when beaten on stones, with fibre, with which they are exceedingly clever in making ropes. Our camel-men were always at it, and produced, with the assistance of fingers and toes, the most excellent rope at the shortest possible notice. They also make strong girdles with this fibre, which the slaves, who are employed in fertilising the palm-trees, bind round their bodies and the trees so as to facilitate their ascent, and provide them with a firm seat when the point of operation is reached. They weave, too, baskets, or, rather, stiff sacks, in which to hang their luggage on either side of the camel.

A Sokotran camel-man is a most dexterous packer. He must first obliterate his camel's hump by placing against it three or four thick felt mats or _nummuds_, and on this raised surface he builds all his luggage, carefully secured in his baskets, with the result that we never, during any of our expeditions with camels, had so little damage done to our property, even though the roads were so mountainous and the box-bushes were constantly rubbing against the loads. The camels are very fine specimens of their race, standing considerably higher than the Arabian animal, and when mounted on the top of our luggage, above the hump thus unnaturally raised, we felt at first disagreeably elevated.

Whilst on the subject of camels and camel-trappings, I may add that each owner has his own mark painted and branded on his own property. Some of these marks consist purely of Himyaritic letters, whilst others are variants, which would naturally arise from copying a very old-world alphabetic original. I take these marks to be preserved by the steady conservatism of the Oriental; we copied many of them, and the result looks like a partial reproduction of the old Sabæan alphabet, and they may be seen in an appendix.

Scattered over Sokotra there are numerous villages, each being a little cluster of from five to ten round or oblong houses and round cattle-pens. I was informed by a competent authority on the island that there are four hundred of these pastoral villages between Ras Kalenzia and Ras Momi, a distance of some seventy odd miles as the crow flies; and from the frequency with which we came across them during our marches up only a limited number of Sokotra's many valleys, I should think the number is not over-estimated. If this is so, the population of the island must be considerably over the estimate given, and must approach twelve or thirteen thousand souls; but owing to the migratory nature of the inhabitants, and their life half spent in houses and half in caves, any exact census would be exceedingly hard to obtain. The east of the island is, however, decidedly more populous than the west, as the water supply is better. We were constantly passing the little round-housed villages, with their palm-groves and their flocks.