PEOPLE OF THE REEDS (223 pp.)—Gavin Maxwell—Harper ($4.50).
ARABESQUE AND HONEYCOMB (224 pp.) —Sacheverell Sifwe/l—Random House ($6).
“The best book,” says the Talmud, “is the world.” The good travel book mirrors two worlds, the one the traveler visits, and the one he brings with him. These double worlds are fascinatingly mirrored in two new travel books about the exotic lands of Iran and Iraq.
Nomads of the Waters. For Gavin Maxwell, a former British army major, travel in southern Iraq meant travail. He was all but eaten by fleas, broke his nose firing off a skindiver’s spear gun, and was charged by a wild boar to within three feet of his life. His consolation may have been that the primitive Arab tribesmen he visited were in just as bad a fix.
The Ma’dan live on bits of marshland and floating islands near the juncture of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Wild boars charging out of the reeds have blinded or scarred half the adult Ma’dan males; another enemy is the arbid water snake, whose bite kills in 20 minutes. Despite these hazards, the Arabs placidly use the reeds to plait straw mats (for export) and to build the Quonset-like huts in which they live. In their way, the Ma’dan enjoy life, particularly food. Their table manners are covered by the proverb, “Eat like a camel and be the first to finish.” For Author Maxwell, this was not as simple as it sounded. To the Arabs, the left hand is ritually unclean and must not be used for eating; Neophyte Maxwell made “many a slip ‘twixt the right fist and the lip, and sometimes “feasted” on a grain or two of rice. But he managed to pick up just about all the grains of local color, ranging from the fact that a blood feud can be settled at a cost of seven women (the equivalent of 21 buffaloes or about £500) to the intelligence that the penalty for a Ma’dan maiden who loses her virginity is death (“Her brothers will cut her throat”).
To Author Maxwell, the harsh Ma’dan way of life justified itself in manly grace and dignity of spirit. He once saw a tribesman flash his five-pronged spear 45 ft. from a moving canoe and impale a 9-by-3-in. fish. Such feats may soon be legend, for the government plans to drain the marshlands, and in a few years the proud Ma’di “will be driving a lorry if he is lucky, [or] pimping in the back streets of Basra.” With a fine writing hand, Author Maxwell gives a fond last salute to these progress-doomed nomads of the waters.
Sinbad on the Prowl. On the map. Sacheverell Sit well’s book, with its Iranian setting, is a borderline twin to Gavin Maxwell’s. But in a subtler geography, it is continents apart. Where Author Maxwell soaks up the perishable life of a rugged people. Veteran Travel Writer Sitwell (Portugal and Madeira, Spain) sifts impressions of imperishable works of art. He is an unabashed esthete who believes that travel is ideally the soul’s refreshment among masterpieces. His book is a litany of the beauties of Islam, mainly its mosques and shrines.
The litany begins in Persia (Sitwell refuses to call it Iran) with the gold and blue mosques of Meshed and Isfahan: “It is a physical architecture calling almost for sexual admiration, but is it preeminently feminine? Where all the women go veiled, are the blue domes of Persia so many abstract emblems of femininity?”
Persepolis. the Persian Versailles, was too grandiose for thoughts of sex, its great stairway “making one feel as insignificant in the face of time as the humble lizard that darts to hide in the crevices of that cyclopaean wall.” The storied gardens of Shiraz were a disappointment, but the taxis were flower-decked, and Author Sitwell caught a nocturnal glimpse of the annual migration of the Gashgai tribe, 400,000 men, women and children moving 7,000,000 head of cattle to summer pasture 15,000 ft. above sea level. Jerusalem’s Mosque of Omar was “more beautiful than St. Mark’s in Venice.” The glories of Istanbul burst over Author Sitwell as he caught his first sight of its Imperial Mosques, bestriding the seven-hilled skyline ”like huge kettledrums with something menacing and martial in their air, and in that moment [Istanbul] is alone and tremendous . . . more of a capital than any other city, more than London, or than Rome or Paris.”
Back at his Beirut travel base of operations. Author Sitwell was driven half mad by the continual playing of Scheherazade over the hotel’s loudspeaker system. But he had no complaints about “the tourist service that had arranged most of his tour, appropriately named the Sinbad Travel Agents.
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