'THIM DAYS IS GONE' [‎108r] (215/248)

109
Jn!h!i/ ere K t r° ‘ ndi 9 enous Arab Tribes, the 'AwTzim and the
Rush a id a nho lived along the coast in mean, mud-built villaoes
and eked out an existence on fish and an exiguous supply of
inferior dates They were not highly regarded in the pecking
order of Arab tribes, since they were sedentary and owned
practically no camels. But at that time of year there were
several of the a s i 1 or noble Arab tribes camped in the desert
such as the Ajmah and the Beni KhaTlid from the South, the Beni
Harb from the Hejaz on the far side of Arabia, and Mutair from
There were also the Muntafiq who were Shia' and cultivated
crops along the rivers and lake shores of Southern Iraq. They
were not, strictly speaking, nomads and owned no camels but
brought their large flocks of sheep to graze the spring grass in
e Kuwait desert, where they sheared the sheep and sold the wool
in the large wool-market of Kuwait. In April they would return
c? kk? Q h , a u rvest their ^ops and put the sheep to graze on the
stubble for the summer.
The camels and sheep would put on reserves of fat in the spring:
the camels in their humps (which grew vast) and the sheep on
thenr tails In the summer the camels had to be concentrated on
the few wells and their humps vanished by the autumn, as did the
tails of the sheep.
The only possible chance the indigenous Arab had of earning money
was from the sea and this entailed gruelling hardship and a not
i nconsiderab1e amount of danger.
First there was the pearl diving. The pearling fleet would set
off in mid-June and return in September, and during that period
the divers would make about ten dives a day, weighted by a stone
and with a clip on their noses something like a clothes-peq
h e y would go down anything up to ten fathoms, stuff as many
oysters as they could into a bag and come up shivering even when
the temperature at the surface was insufferably hot. They could
eat only very little because a full meal induced nausea, and they
finished the season utterly emaciated. The oysters would be
opened on the deck in the evenings and the tawTshes would chuq up
in their motor boats to bargain with the captain for the day's
hau! By the time the captain had taken his double share, and
the financier who had backed the enterprise his much larger
share, the diver seldom arrived home with enough cash to last him
through to the next diving season. He then had to borrow from
the captain of his pear 1ing-bo at or the financier to survive,
with the result that the divers were perennially in debt and
their debts were inherited by their sons. To call it a hard’life
would be a gross under-statement .
However there was the^occasional qood-luck story which made it
all worth-while. Hilal Almutairi was a penniless bedawi youth