Water on a Dry Land
By ANNE HUTCHISON
IT rained this week for three days, intermittently but heavily. Two months have passed since the last shower, almost two years since the last heavy fall. Rain is an event in Aden, providing a fresh topic of conversation, entirely changing the rhythm of life, jerking everyone out of accustomed ways and rendering impossible much that is unthinkingly taken for granted. An unwonted caution and circumspection comes over all car- drivers, accustomed to perennially dry roads, and skids rather than the vagaties of wandering goats become the most likely hazards. Fingers fumble awkwardly on the dashboard to turn on the windscreen-wipers, which may have been ignored since the day the car was newly delivered and every knob and switch of the new toy tried out. The wipers work creakily or jam or sweep a fine arc on the bonnet. Except for a few storm-drains where the roads skirt the mountains, no provision is made to deal with surface-water, roads have camber but no gutter or zonduit, and the water lies in muddy pools. To add to the difficulty of driving where pools have already narrowed the way, small Arab boys, who but rarely play in the sea which lies all around them, find splashing in and out of the puddles irresistible. Even the taxi-drivers are a little chastened.
The dhobi's son, his impish grin wider than ever, is splashing with his friends ; no trudging along the roads for him today, his bright fez pushed down over his ears by his heairy bundle, a cotton frock hooked on its hanger to the top fluttering beside rim. The dhobis. with no facilities for drying or even ironing indoors, find it impossible to fulfil the " out at 8 and back at 5 ' schedule, and clean clothes cease to appear automatically in drawer and wardrobe ; and after two days khaki shorts and coloured shirts brighten offices where white is normally impera- tive. - In house and office alike there has been a hurried mobilis- ing of buckets and bowls to collect drips landing inconsiderately on bed or desk or trickling down walls, leaving trails on the whitewash. In a dry land no builder troubles with the difficult task of discovering if buildings are watertight, and few are, • Rain is expensive.
The aerodrome is out of use for several hours, and mail• days are instantly disorganised. But one can set off across the waterlogged isthmus by the Sheikh Othman road certain fot once that it is unnecessary to allow anything up to twenty minutes t for a halt where the road crosses the airstrip and the barrier is so often inexorably down. Should it descend nOw, it would not trap those who have so often sat impatient and impotent within sight of first tee and stables. Except for the occasional sand. storms of July and August, Aden does not expect to have the weather interfere with its recreations, but overnight the browns and fairways of the golf course, the polo field and tennis courts become waterlogged. and disconsolate enthusiasts wonder what to do in the late afternoon. The " I must have my exercise" brigade crowd the squash courts, the damp sand of the children's beach is deserted, the bathing club uninviting under grey skies, In club and mess the Tanks, normally ignored except when we show the sights to visitors from passing ships, become a topic; of conversation. This chain of deep reservoirs, formed by exca- vation and the sub-division by masonry walls of a steep gorge with an extensive catchment area, is credited to the Persians during their occupation of Aden circa 600 A.D. They feature in travellers' accounts of various times, and the silt of centuries' • was finally cleared in 1856-58. The dry rocky hillsides and the puny puddles which occasionally collect arc in ridiculous contrast to the estimated capacity of twenty million gallons, making it hard to credit that they could ever have justified the labour of their construction. They were last full in 1940, and older mi• dents remember 1926 when a cloudburst filled them in a matter of hours ; cascades tumbled down the hillsides, and the overflow from the Tanks rushed down the wadi through the old town in ' Crater to the sea.
The Caronia; on a dollar-earning cruise, docks under grey skies, and her passengers pick their way along muddy streets. Americans from her, whisked off to the Tanks by importunate taxi-drivers, will find the account of them in the guide-book less incredible than most other visitors, and a prolongation and inten- sification of the rainfall might have provided them with a spectacle which few of the European community can claim to have seen. It would have been a pleasing gesture to the finest ship to use the Aden harbour.
But there are compensations. The air is washed clear of dust, and between the showers the distant mountains of the Arabian mainland, generally invisible in haze, stand out clearly. The brightly painted funnels show up vividly above gleaming white upperworks of liners, cargo-boats and tankers as they lie in the • outer anchorage awaiting the pilot's launch. As she steams out towards the Red Sea, the sun shines at last on the Caronia's ' pale green hull and brilliant red-and-black funnel. Behind her Little Aden, usually an arresting flat silhouette of jagged peaks against the sky, becomes three-dimensional in the clear air, across a sea glassy calm except for the ripples of the shoals of fish over which a seagull glides for an easy catch. The peak of Shamsam is hidden in rainclouds. and the lower slopes, generally dull grey-brown, are revealed in unsuspected variations of sepia. buff and terra-cotta. The plants in the gardens take on a vivider and more natural green, and grow prodigiously ; the garden-boy wears a broad smile, for Allah, by sending the rain, has relieved him of the labour of carrying buckets or plying the hose. The nightly spectacle of the sun setting behind Little Aden has its brilliance increased to " more than Oriental splendour."
Overnight the wind sweeps the rain-clouds away, the sun shines again uninterruptedly, appearing to have gained in strength in its enforced sechision, a pungent smell rises from the drying earth.
Sky and sea are blue again, the nearer landscape retains its sparkling clarity of colour, but the distant mountains have with- drawn into the haze. The dhobi arrives daily, the mails come and go to time, the golf-course is drying, the car is washed clean, life resumes its accustomed ways. But it was a pity the Tanks' didn't fill!
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