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

“variety turns”. They travel among the villages, and they are, of course, all male, for no woman ever makes an officially public appearance. The boys wear their hair long, and the rhythmic swinging of its heavy dark mass is a feature of their dancing; a thing that I never saw, for the only professional dancing boy we met with other than in the streets of Basra had had his hair shorn two days before, in preparation for school. In view of the erotic nature of the dancing itself it is perhaps not surprising that these boys are also semi-professional prostitutes, but they marry young, and often bring up their own children in the same tradition.
    Among the villagers themselves, children are encouraged to dance from their earliest years, and at no age does absorption with or great skill in dancing carry any un-masculine connotations. A very good dancer, whether child or adult, is generally very good at everything else, and must, too, possess enormous physical energy, for the dances are long, violent and exhausting, and the audience calls for repeatedencores. They are intolerant of a bad adult performer, but I have seen some sixty or seventy men and boys maintain a feigned absorption for half an hour while a five year old flopped and stumbled his unconvincing way through an interminable impromptu.
     
    It was long after midnight when the singing and dancing were over and we finally settled down to sleep. The gale still roared outside and rustled and rattled the house of reeds and probed under the reed matting on the floor, lifting it in undulating waves like a ground swell at sea. Both Thesiger and I were impatient to leave Ramla, he because of the burden that he placed upon our host, and I because the true marshes were still before us and I felt that we were lingering on the threshold.

Chapter Four
    I N the morning the clouds had gone, but the wind still blew like an express train. Thesiger was not at ease about our departure.
    “We’ve got to go, and that’s all there is to it. This man’s killed half his chickens already, and it may blow like this for days. Trouble is to get where we’re going we have to cross Zikri, which is a lake of more or less open water a dozen miles across. People get drowned there every year, and the boys are scared; the tarada won’t stand much in the way of waves with all this baggage on board.”
    We left at about nine-thirty, and my last sight of the dry land was the mad semaphore of the palm branches and the billowing, fluttering clothing of the group who stood below them to wave us good-bye. Our host of the past two nights accompanied us as a pilot, paddling a little flat hunting canoe that had little more than two inches freeboard and looked as if the first gust of wind must swamp it.
    The defined waterways grew fewer and disappeared, and soon we were amid a maze of crooked alleys in a jungle of trumpeting wind-tormented reed stumps and withered sedge. Gradually the channels grew wider and less distinguishable, until we were moving through open blue lagoons fringed and islanded with giant golden reeds growing dense and twenty feet high. They were as ripe standing corn must appear to a mouse, huge and golden in the sun, with only a tiny fringe of new green growth in the blue water at their feet. As yet there were so many islands that it was easy to find shelter; they were dense and solid-seeming and only their very tops bent under the gale that urged them majestically over the water, for most of these islands are unanchored, and drift slowly about the lagoons as calvedicebergs drift in polar seas. Between them one could glimpse the open water of the lake itself, ruffled and royal blue under the sun, stretching away to where, very far off, the confining reed-beds at the farther side looked like long yellow cliffs of sand. There were no definable edges to the lake; the reed islands only grew fewer, and the lagoons on which they drifted wider and deeper blue, until there were no more