A Woman in Arabia

Otago Daily Times, Issue 24415, 28 September 1940, Page 4

A Woman in Arabia

Adventuring with Freya Stark

A Winter In Arabia, By Freya Stark. Illustrated. (Murray) 18s 6d.

Miss Stark declares that her latest journey in Arabia, into the heart of the Hadhramaut, was easy and unadventurous. One hastens to explain that she uses the words in a relative sense. For Miss Stark, perhaps, such menaces as Arabs who are in a state of political tension, mosquitoes whose kiss is near-lethal, stray banditti, are a mere annoyance in nassing—or not even that, since she never passed anything but a mosquito without endeavouring to establish friendly relations. For the average woman —and the_ average man—her record of A Winter in Arabia would represent the highlight of all adventuring dreams, provide the substance for an anecdotage that every grandchild could perforce, repeat by heart. But the story that the average traveller brought out of this strange land of desert and rock and primitive skyscrapers would not be the story Miss Stark has written. One European in a million takes the opportunity to visit Arabia, and it is a fair statement that only a fraction of one in a million could write so beautifully and memorably about it. ... The author was accompanied on her expedition by two women, an archaeologist and a geologist. It had as its purpose excavation on the site of the temple of moon god. at Hureidha, where civilised protection could not be provided for the visitors and, indeed, there was no 'civilisation in a Western sense at all. While her companions dug and got into difficulties, Miss Stark moved placidly about cpnversihg with the Arab peoples, taking her brilliant photographs, and assisting her friends when they were in trouble. It was a more repaying journey for her than for them, ]ust as, it proved a pleasanter. The pre-Islamic tribesmen who had gone to the trouble of making elaborate tombs for their leaders had also been busy later in digging them up again, long before the archaeologists arrived 1 though that fact did not remove the ever-present, danger that the restless Islamic masters of the regime iri this day might resent the attentions of the diggers. What Miss Stark had come to collect, however, could be written in a diary and contained in a film pack—a picture of this country that makes it live before the

reader’s eyes, and a personalisation of its inhabitants that makes them our familiars, even when we are content that there should be half a world separating us from their near presence. For one needs to know how to approach these fierce and moody people. “ Oh, you are the people who are always killing each other? ” Miss Stark observes pleasantly'to some sinister callers —“whereupon they smiled delightfully as a man does when accused of being bad and gay.” Or she meets an important tribal leader who has been proudly wearing the same sash—he and his father—for 100 years. Or she is being escorted by Arabs whose leader ostentatiously reclines on piles of rugs and sacking whenever a halt is made, while the others toil. “ Do you never do anything yourself? ” she asks at last. “No,” he replies, “ the women cook.” “And when you are alone, I suppose you die of hunger? ” “ No, then I work.” Or she is talking with an old watch-mender, who is taking the watch of Qasim, her cook, to pieces:

I asked him where he had learned, and he answered: “In Mecca.” “ I learnt,” he said, “ from a sayyid who was able to mend anything in the world, and this not by study, but by the generosity of God.” I could not help congratulating myself that it was Qasim’s watch, and not mine, that he had in his hands. So much for personalities, who fill and enliven the pages of the book. But putting them aside, one derives a rare beauty from Miss Stark’s prose, which is polished and evocative. There is almost a hypnotic qualits about her writing: “We now rode at a swinging pace across the jol and watched the wall of Kadim draw near like a breaking wave, until, at the base of its enormous cliff, we came to pre-Islamic names, scratched in rude large letters on a face of rock, where the track becomes alpine in its steepness.” Her book has a fascination that is met with only occasionally in tales of travel, and that it possesses authority as well need not trouble the most unstudious reader, since authority guides with such grace Miss Stark’s accomplished pen. J. M,