Page 35 - The Tigris Expedition
P. 35

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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