Page 35 - The Tigris Expedition

The Tigris Expedition

there were beautiful women. He himself had four wives. All along
the walls there was approving laughter at his virility.
The marsh women arc indeed beautiful. That is probably why
they were never permitted to cat with us or even to serve the tea.
They were wrapped in black from head to bare feet, and as black
shadows they glided by between the reed screens, feeding their
chicken or baking flat bread clapped vertically on to the inner walls
of cylindrical clay ovens open at the top. Their profiles were sharp
and fine like their men’s. Their sparkling eyes and white teeth shone
like stars if one got a glimpse of them before they shyly turned their
heads or pulled the black cloth over their noses. Like the men, they
were fabulous paddlers and punters. I saw women alone, punting
huge balams loaded with mats while herding a flock of swimming
buffaloes. But only when they were tiny little girls or old crones
could they stand with boys and grown men and laugh and wave at
us as we slid by their abodes in our canoe.
A surprising number of the people were red-haired. Especially
among the bareheaded little girls red hair seemed almost as com­
mon as black. Among the Madans in the ancient boat-building
village of Huwair I had seen more red-haired people than in any
town in Europe, so many that it could not be due to foreign
intermixture, especially since the death penalty for unchaste
behaviour or adultery is still the unwritten law among the marsh-
men. Hagi could confirm that during the British administration few
foreign soldiers had ventured into the marshes and none to visit
Arab women.
Hagi was well aware of the fact that we in the cities would not
survive without a culture that was dependent upon automobiles
and electricity. But he was not at all sure that his people would
be made happier by projects to bring electricity cables into the
marshes and bricks for building houses. When people are happy
they smile, he said. Nobody had smiled at him in the streets of
Baghdad.
‘There are too many people in a city,’ I explained. ‘One cannot
smile at everybody there.’
But Hagi had also walked in streets where there were few people
and had seen no difference there. I could not protest. It could not be
mere coincidence that the marsh people came out of their houses
waving to us with broad smiles as we paddled by, their children
racing to the water’s edge with happy shouts and laughter. A
faint smile from us and the whole assembly laughed happily
back. Not so, I had to admit, when we walked in the poorer
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