I HAVE DONE SOME queer fishing in strange places, but that next day’s fishing and hunting was the strangest yet.
Early in the morning Abou Taleb wakened us with the breakfast tray, and as soon as I was dressed I went outside into the cold air. Assour was there, proudly holding out my fishing equipment. It consisted of a branch of some sort of oasis shrub, about four feet long. To the end of this was tied about six feet of ordinary white string, and on the end of that a hook. Not since I fished for minnows in the creek on my great aunt’s farm, and then rushed madly to the rain barrel with them, have I carried such an outfit. But Assour’s pride was so great that I could express only admiration and surprise. I did, however, inquire about bait, but he waved that aside with a gesture.
“The fishermen they have somethings,” he said.
So we started on the camels as usual. But half way there the flu took a fresh grip on the Head and he turned back.
“You go alog,” he said.
“What are you going to do?”
“I dod’t dow, and I dod’t give a dab,” he said, and turned Missouri firmly around.
So I went on, with my escort, and after three miles or so we saw a fisherman on the bank, and a felucca in the water. I do not know exactly what I had expected a felucca to be; something like Cleopatra’s barge, perhaps, with a canopy to shield me from the sun and sturdy rowers in brilliant striped garments. And there may be such feluccas. But this was not one.
It was made of rough planks, huge and heavy, and sat high out of the water. No paint, no sail, no canopy. The fishermen sat on high boards, with their feet on branches thrust across below, for the boat was not floored. And their oars, twelve to fourteen feet long, were nothing but clumsily cut pieces of wood, without blades, but square and heavy at the rower’s end to counterbalance their extreme length.
Scanty and incredible rags covered the two poor wretches who took me out, a father and a son. Their exposed torsos were thin and undernourished, their faces drawn. No wonder Baedeker speaks of these Bedouins who so strangely have taken to the water as poor fishermen. There, within call of them almost, was the rich and mighty oasis of the Fayum, but none of its prosperity reaches them. They are considered bad people: treacherous, even murderous, but it seemed to me to be the wickedness of desperation.
Under their feet, in the bottom of the boat, were their fish creels, bags made of the reeds that grow along the lake marshes, strongly plaited. And in one of them lay a few very small fish, the morning’s catch. The largest I saw was not more than seven inches. In the bow was their day’s food, a small supply of dates.
It being impossible to bring the unwieldy vessel to the shore, I was seized with the bright idea of taking Dahabeah into the water. With a roar, however, she leaped the other way, and there was considerable activity on that sandy bank before she became pacified sufficiently to kneel. In the end, I was carried in a most undignified manner on Smeda’s back.
Assour followed. And for the first time I noticed that he carried the blunderbuss.
“We get ducks,” he said. “Plenty ducks here. You will see. Assour is good shooter.”
Rather, he shouted it, for a peculiar din which had ceased on our arrival now resumed again. It sounded like the combination of a steam riveter and a Chinese gong, and I was not long in tracing its origin.
Moving up and down the lake were four other fishing feluccas. Two men rowed them, one to each oar, while a third produced this incredible racket with a piece of iron. Our own boat having one also, I was able to examine this instrument of torture. It consisted of a bar of iron about two and a half feet long, with a hole in each end; into each hole was inserted an iron ring, and by placing it across the thwart of the boat and alternately banging it on the inside and the out, the resulting noises were as sharp and as rapid as machine gun fire. Conversation during the process was impossible.
I had stepped back three thousand years, I felt, into some ceremonial of driving away the fish demon, or some hobgoblin of the East. But the explanation was quite simple after all. The fishermen had spread a sort of gill net, and by this process were driving the fish toward it. Maybe it works; I do not know. My own idea would be that those fish not too stunned to move at all would make tracks for the far end of the lake, and quietness.
Certainly I caught no fish. In vain I dangled my five feet of string, baited with a piece of fish intestine—to fool the fish into thinking it was a worm, probably; in vain I changed the bait to fish fins and then to fish eyes. And beside me on the high bow Assour loaded the blunderbuss, and then pointing it at me examined the breech, while I held my breath and prayed.
It was freezing cold. Over my woolen dress and sweater I wore a heavy coat; Assour was bundled to the eyes. But those poor half-naked wretches sat there in their cotton rags, satisfied only to rest on their oars, to exchange doubtless sarcastic remarks on my fishing, and to look with longing eyes on the blunderbuss. The old man wanted to do the shooting. He said in effect that if Assour was a good shooter he was a better, and he called Allah to witness that he would get us more ducks than we could eat.
Assour accepted, finally. The gun had a kick like an ostrich’s leg, and he knew it. He handed it over, and I drew in my line and prepared to go duck hunting.
Now my previous knowledge of duck shooting had been something like this: One rose at 3:30 A.M. and, while shivering, drank a cup of coffee. Then one put on all the woolens one had along, and a pair of rubber boots and a mackintosh, and with the precaution of a burglar climbing into a bedroom window rowed or waded to the blind and there stood or sat, hardly breathing, for an indefinite period, the only sound the scraping of goose-flesh and the chattering of teeth.
But not so now. Our fisherman tucked up his white cotton rags and let himself over the side. There were ducks a hundred yards away. He waded toward them, and they flew away. He came back to the boat, and we rowed after them. He got over the side once more, and the same performance was repeated.
After we had done this five or six times I suggested to Assour that he fire at them while they were in the air, but the fisherman objected that they flew too fast. His idea was apparently to get close enough to brain them with the butt of the gun. And knowing that gun I hardly blamed him. But at last I persuaded him to make the attempt. And after using forty shells he got two. One, however, we picked up wounded from the lake, and I am inclined to believe it belonged to an Englishman who was shooting in the marshes at the same time.
Taking our bag we then turned shoreward, and my progress away from the water on Dahabeah was nothing less than a flight. Only once did she stop on the way back to camp, and that was suddenly, in order to scratch her stomach with her left hind foot, an experience much resembling an earthquake only perhaps more violent.
We had one of the ducks for dinner that night, and our aristocracy among the men, Assour, Smeda, Mohammed and Abou Taleb, shared the other. Or rather, only three of them, for Abou Taleb refused it. The good Moslem eats only meat killed by the cutting of the throat, and our ducks had been shot.
“Then you are not a good Mohammedan, Smeda?” I said to him later.
“But I cut throat,” said Smeda, cheerfully, making a gesture with his forefinger to his neck. “Maybe duck not all dead, so I cut throat. All right then. Very good.”