A Reed Shaken by the Wind by Gavin Maxwell

Author:Gavin Maxwell [Gavin Maxwell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780600604
Publisher: Eland Publishing
Published: 2015-11-27T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

W HEN we left Hadam we were still going northwards, and away from the marshlands. We moved at first through partially flooded rice fields, and the only navigable parts of them were the narrow irrigation channels, high-banked with loose clay, and so twisting that it was often impossible for the great length of the tarada to negotiate their acute bends. We walked balanced on these banks; to me it felt a strange unpractised gait, as if an uncertainly toddling baby were to attempt a tight-rope. Like the alleys of a dream town, the water paths led always obliquely away from the direction of our destination, so that again and again we had to manhandle and lift the loaded tarada over mud dams into channels at right angles to our former course. Waist-deep in the brown water the canoe boys would heave and strain until the whole length of the tarada stood poised upon the centre point of a mud ridge; she would sway there like a see-saw until a final effort set the great scimitar prow dipping to the new channel with a smooth rush like a ship launched down a slipway.

Presently the banks of the winding waterways became lower, and the floods beyond them more and more continuous, until at last they died away altogether, submerged beneath a vast pallid sheet of water that lay before us. An horizon line of a hair’s breadth separated the sky from the still water, so that every solid thing inside this great shimmering bubble appeared lapidary, sharply out of key, harder and blacker than ever a black line on white paper could be. Far away on the sunward side, where the sky met the water, a scattered fleet of high-prowed canoes formed etched silhouettes of infinite delicacy. Overhead, long strands of silver cobwebs floated everywhere on the empty blue air; many carrying a fragment of bulrush fluff that lit them, white-tufted, as they travelled in stately procession high over the still water; one long gleaming thread that hung almost stationary far above us seemed to trail from the crescent moon of the same whitened silver.

For more than an hour we paddled over the enamel surface of the great lake. We passed parties of naked Berbera, who fish with nets, strange people of whom Thesiger could tell me little or nothing. Like weavers, gardeners, and, to a lesser extent, pedlars, the Berbera are, by reason of their occupation, looked down upon as of lower caste, and a Ma’dan will not eat with them nor intermarry with them. This is strange, in that the inferiority of the Berbera would appear to lie specifically in their method of fishing; and as this is the only efficient way of taking fish, the superstition has a curious lack of survival value. The ingenuity that the early Ma’dan displayed in the elaborate exploitation of the natural reed growth of the marshes, together with the introduction of water-loving livestock, suggests that the settlers would have been quick, also, to exploit the great possibilities of the fish that throng the marsh waters.

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