Marital love seems almost unknown, but family affection sometimes rises strong in later years, apart from its normal origin in the mutual love of young man and maid, but if the marriage is childless, or circumstances make it uncomfortable, the worst results follow in many cases.
His young wife, as wives often do here, one day decided that to live with her father’s people in the hills would be more agreeable than with her husband by the sea. By and by Ibrahim began begging for leave to go to see her, his appeals that she should return to him having been in vain.
Her replies, as he repeated them to me, were certainly explicit. “I have only got a couple of girls by you. That’s no good, so I don’t want you any more.”
Cases like this give rise to an immense amount of solemn conference between relatives to the nth degree and the village elders[38], in spite of the fact that many women go their own way in any case. The stages were reported to me at intervals, and in the end the woman reappeared of her own accord. Alas, her motive soon became obvious, for she was illegitimately “burdened,” i.e. pregnant. So poor Ibrahim’s joy was turned to anger and perplexity. He dearly loved his two little daughters, the two who were held as “not good enough” by their mother, and wished to keep them while divorcing the mother. My advice being asked (though I am about half the age of complainant) I was in a quandary, since the infants were not old enough to do without a woman’s care and Ibrahim was not prepared with a substitute.
At this point I came home on leave, and on my return three months later I found that Ibrahim had actually become reconciled to his faithless wife; the child of “some young fellow in the hills” had been born a week or so, and the old man rejoiced over him as though he had been his own son.
A week later, and surely the hand of Providence was visible even to fatalists.
“Please come and see Ibrahim’s wife, she is very ill.” Even I could see that the woman was dying, and that nothing could be done for her, but at least I succeeded in saving the child from being fed on “samin,” stinking native butter, which might soon have killed him.
The inconceivable stagnation of life in a desert coast village makes any event a godsend. Illness brings joy to all, even the sufferer seeming to be supported by the knowledge that he is a benefactor to the public. He is invariably surrounded by a deeply interested crowd, and never fails to shew appropriate symptoms.
In case of wounds the men are absolutely stoical, where a white man could not restrain evidence of suffering, and the application of a red hot nail, which is a frequent treatment for most complaints, is borne without a murmur. And so the gentle groaning of the sick is never allowed to become indecorous, but merely serves to prove that the host and patient is conscious of, and means to fulfil, his duty to his guests.
In this case things were very different, the woman was beyond even involuntary groans. The first thing to do was to send a boat for Ibrahim, who was absent on an island ten miles away. His return was delayed a full day by his going another five miles down the coast to the next village, where he spent a month’s wages on new clothes and borrowed all the jewellery he could. With these his dying wife was decked out, as a means of persuading the evil spirit, which had caused her illness, to depart. At home meanwhile drums were being vigorously beaten outside the tent, a few feet away from her unconscious head, in the hope that what suasion could not effect in the mind of the malignant spirit might result from fear.