“No feud? No blood-money?”
“The Sultan would pay that, but in fact it doesn’t happen. There hasn’t been anything to go into the marshes for, until recently. The Arabs don’t even water their camels here if they can help it, because the water’s so full of diseases. There’s probably every known form of bilharzia down there, and quite a few unknown ones. I’m always astonished that they manage to produce specimens as magnificent as Dyal and Kwan—the singing boys and the musicians are all weedy little runts.”
“The women are tiny too,” said Anne. “But why didn’t you get them to teach you? That might have persuaded you that you ought to do something about those people, instead of just sitting here.”
Morris shrugged, stuck his lower lip out, pulled at it, retracted it. Dinah, who had been peering into his face to see whether he would carry on grooming her, imitated his grimace but made it ludicrous by the extreme size and elasticity of her own lips. The girl laughed and became a social caller again.
“I don’t know,” said Morris seriously. “I didn’t think of it. I suppose I ought to learn the women’s language, which is a bit different, supposing they’d teach it to me. But as for doing anything, I don’t know. I mean, all I know is that it’s not up to me to make moral decisions about other people’s lives. Of course I agree that some of the things that happen down there seem unspeakably vile—there’s a lot worse than I’ve told you—but . . . well, take these blokes . . .”
He nodded towards the eunuch in the corner, now nibbling cheerfully at his second cheroot.
“I’ve never seen any of them looking at all unhappy. Admittedly I can’t even bring myself to think what it was like when they were . . . you know . . . done, but now they seem perfectly content. And Kwan always talked about life in the marshes as if it were a lost paradise. Last year, when the boys were singing the Testament at the flood-going feast I saw his face streaming with tears . . .”
“But all you really know is what one man has told you. One man.”
“I suppose so. But there’s something else. I was telling you about the language—well, in fact the whole verbal culture is as rich and sophisticated as anything I’ve come across—certainly anything that exists among illiterate people. It’s not just the language, it’s the way they use it. I’ve never heard anything to touch the songs, which range all the way from little blessings for the birth of a calf to great chanted epics. Those are perfectly marvellous. You get a basic story, but inside it you get dramatic sections, and love lyrics, and witches’ spells—there’s a lot of witchcraft in the marshes—but it isn’t a hotch-potch, it’s shaped and coherent, quite fit to stand up beside anything I’ve read in Western literature. Anyway, I’m quite certain that as soon as you started tampering with the culture, bringing in outside influences, pop music (I mean, look what’s been happening in Java, for instance) Cairo radio, Bible societies, all that, you’d kill the culture dead in a generation and the language in two. Look, half the world these days seems to tear its hair out and beat its breast if a rather dull species of bird is in danger of extinction. It seems to me much more terrible to risk the death of a language.”
The unaccustomed energy of Morris’s speech seemed to unsettle Dinah. She shrugged herself free of his inattentive hands, slid off the side of the chair and loped over to her toy-store. Knowing her as well as he did Morris could see that this was only one of her typically devious feints. She had decided that Anne was not a hungry predator and was therefore worth investigating, stealthily, from the flank.
“Is that Bruce’s line too?”
“Bruce?”
“Your Sultan. I always call my blokes Bruce. It keeps them in their place. In fact I know an Anatolian village where they now think Bruce is the English for ‘darling’.”
“Oh . . . er . . . I didn’t know.”
“Why should you?”
“Um. Well, if you ask him he just takes the line that he has an hereditary obligation, and that’s that. He takes it seriously, anyway. I mean, there’s much more comfortable places he could live, but he stays here ten months of the year.”
“I know. The women spend most of their time grumbling and discussing what they’re going to buy next time they go to Paris. How rich is he?”
“I don’t know. Enormously, but I don’t know how enormously. He told me he couldn’t afford to buy a Concorde. It wasn’t the capital expenditure, it was the upkeep. But that’s his sort of joke.”
“Did you see the emerald he gave Simoko when she left?”
“Simoko?”
“That’s a funny thing about this place. It’s just one building, but there’s such a lot going on in it that people only a few rooms away haven’t any idea about the dramas happening in your bit. Simoko was one of the air hostesses—the plain one, too sweet—and she and Bruce had a passionate five days; they kept at it just as if the world was ending, and when the plane came to fly the Japs out he gave her an emerald as big as my thumbnail. You could have bought a Phantom with it. It was rather funny—the other women weren’t at all jealous, even the real wives. In fact they loved it—something to gossip about. But if Bruce can afford that sort of thing, why doesn’t he do something for the marshmen? I bet there isn’t a school or a clinic anywhere. What about his hereditary obligation?”
Out of the corner of his eye Morris could see Dinah beginning her flank attack, pushing a couple of building-bricks with deceptive aimlessness across the floor. He kept his gaze on Anne so as not to spoil the fun, and saw that her indignation was again simmering up to a full revolutionary boil-over.
“There are clinics and schools for the Arabs,” he said quickly. “There’s a young Parsee doctor who goes round the tents in a very up-to-date mobile unit, and the Sultan flies in teachers during the winter, when there’s steady grazing up in the hills which means that the kids stay all in one place for a bit. But he won’t let anyone touch the marshmen—I don’t think he’d be very pleased if he knew how far I’d got with the language.”
“It seems bloody selfish to me.”
“Ung. Well, I expect you realise that most of his money comes from the oil company. Apparently their geologists decided that the richest fields were probably under the marshes, but he wouldn’t let them drill there. He still won’t.”
Dinah had left her bricks and was creeping in behind Anne’s left shoulder.
“The Sultan’s manner is very deceptive,” said Morris. “He really is very superficially Westernised. His Oxford accent and his slang and the gadgets in the palace are all a sort of parody of our civilisation—at least half-deliberate—a way of having what he wants of us and rejecting our values at the same time. Anyway, I’m not sure he isn’t right about the marshmen. We’re all rushing along, faster and faster, like water in a river before a cataract, dragging the developing nations along with us. It might be important that there are a few totally undeveloped peoples, so undeveloped that they don’t get involved when we go over the edge. It really isn’t an untenable attitude, but if you adopt it you’ve got to go the whole hog. Those Jarawa I was talking about aren’t the only tribe in the Andamans, but all the others have made vague contact with the rest of the world and either been assimilated or died out—dying out’s more usual in fact. The Indian government won’t let anyone go near the Jarawa, not even anthropologists—that isn’t because they’re enlightened, it’s because the Andamans are an important naval base. But the result is that they’re still totally isolated—different—themselves, and it is just possible that the future of mankind might lie with them. Or with the marshmen here.”
She was about to retort, but was distracted. During the last sentences of Morris’s harangue Dinah’s face had emerged above the tatty chintz of the arm of Anne’s chair, the ludicrous arch of her brows expressing wonder and surprise as her brown clear eyes gazed first at the glossy black hair, then at the soft-skinned cheek, and last at the lacy promontory of the bosom. Suddenly her dark arm snaked forward and two fingers probed at the white curve. Anne barely recoiled. She looked down and laughed kindly.