Tears of the Gods by Kate Lord Brown

Driving along the Corniche the other day, it struck me that it is one of the few places left in the city where you can still see history living side by side with the towering skyscrapers springing up from the desert. The pale turquoise waters still shelter old dhows as they have for centuries, and among them the pearling boats. Pearls from the oyster beds of the Persian Gulf have graced the crowns and tiaras of monarchs to the east and west. These mysterious jewels that the ancient Greeks believed were the tears of the gods formed an important part of the Qatari economy before the discovery of oil in the region.

When Qatar was settled in the 1700s, the pearling industry thrived, and local pearls were particularly prized in India. The 'chow' of a pearl is still calculated based on a system devised by Indian merchants in the sixth century, which considers size, weight and lustre. While cultured pearls still impart glamour and status, the quality of natural pearls is beyond compare - a cultured pearl may have five concentric layers of nacre around a bead, whereas a natural pearl has hundreds.

Men like 73 year old Saad Ismail Al Jassim, one of the oldest surviving pearl divers in Qatar, spent months at sea during the summer, living a perilous life in search of these elusive gems. It was hard work: 'We dived from dawn til dusk,' Al Jassim told me, when I met him in Souq Waqif recently. There were shorter diving seasons, but the boats would go out for the main 'big dive' from June to September. The divers risked malnourishment and dehydration, the effects of pressure from quick, deep dives up to a hundred times a day, and the ever present threat of sharks and sea snakes.

Each boat would have up to twenty divers, and twenty helpers to assist them. The divers would gather oysters using a leather glove, the 'khabt', and a 'dayyeen' oyster basket suspended from their neck. Wearing a simple nose clip, and with their feet weighted by heavy stones they could stay down for up to two minutes at a time, holding their breath, before signalling for their assistant to haul them to the surface. In winter it was too cold for the divers to hold their breath, so the summer season was intense. As Al Jassim says: 'if you want a pearl, take many oysters.' He explained that a lot depends on luck - you may open thousands of oysters and find nothing, then open a dozen and find six pearls. Any gems found were kept with the captain of the boat, until the trader visited to buy what had been found.

'God helps those who help themselves,' Al Jassim says. He became a captain in his twenties, and then a 'tawwash' or trader. He is known as the Pahlwan, or strong man, a testament to his years as a champion body builder (that is a photograph of him in his prime, hung behind the till in his store). His years in the pearling industry were followed by twenty eight years with the Qatari police, where he was a major. Al Jassim still likes nothing more than to go to the sea and dive, but now he uses scuba gear.

Natural pearls had their heyday in the nineteenth century as the great jewellery houses of Europe sought the rare gems. As affordable cultured pearls found favour, the industry declined, and Qatari pearls are now rarer and more valuable than ever. Al Jassim showed a delicate bracelet of natural pearls worth thousands of riyals. But perhaps the old pearl diver is as much of a national treasure as the pearls themselves.


A Pearl Museum is planned for Doha, and a recent exhibition curated by Qatar's Museum Authority and the V&A, London, highlighted the finest natural and cultured pearl jewellery. The exhibition toured Japan, London and Brazil, and a beautifully illustrated book 'Pearls' by Hubert Bari and David Lam explores the culture and value of the pearl. 

God took a handful of the South Wind… by Katherine Roberts



An Arabian horse in the desert. Antoine-Jean Gros, c. 1810 in the public domain

 …and from it formed a horse, saying: "I create thee, O Arabian! To thy forelock I bind victory in battle, on thy back I set a rich spoil, and a treasure in thy loins. I establish thee as one of the glories of the earth. I give thee flight without wings."

These famous words from Bedouin legend bring the horse prancing into time. And since the main reason I write historical fiction is because it contains horses rather than cars, I thought it fitting to write my first post about their place in history.

My personal definition of history is any society that uses horse power. That gives me quite a lot of years to plunder… from the first time someone climbed on a horse’s back (or, even earlier than this, harnessed up a horse to a chariot) right through to World War One, in which horses were still used in battle, as dramatised recently by Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse. I know horses did not vanish entirely after that. The police still use them for crowd control, and you can find working horses in other parts of the world. But you can write a book set in contemporary times without mentioning a single horse, whereas if you tried writing something set in the 18th century without so much as a horse-drawn carriage this would seem rather strange. I actually wonder if there will be horses around in 100 years’ time, or if they will be as much a myth to our descendants as the Bedouin legend is to us. Already, they have vanished from my locality, the riding school I remember as child being replaced by smart barn conversions for second home owners - I find this a bit sad.

So I must plunge back in time to find my horses. And since I am also a fantasy author (I write fantasy for the horses, too!), I’m never happier than when I can mix magic, history and horses in the same story, which I managed to do in several of my Seven Fabulous Wonders books, although by the time I reached the building of the pyramids I had lost the horses. For my next book, I journeyed forward a bit to 300BC and had enormous fun writing “I am the Great Horse”, telling the story of Alexander the Great from the horse’s mouth. There isn’t as much fantasy in the pages of that one as you will find in my other books, but I still managed to squeeze in a magical “horse bond” between Alexander, Bucephalas and his groom Charmeia, also a few amazon warriors, and several ghosts (both human and horse!)

A few years ago, I proposed a novel about the first ridden horse and drew this timeline to show how horses entered history (it's not very neat – I don’t do neat when I am in a creative mood – but if you click on the picture to enlarge it, I hope you can see how it might inspire a story.)

What I find interesting about this sketch is that there are two distinct strands:
1. Historical - where the first horses (a small, tough, wiry breed) lived on the plains of central Asia and were tamed, probably in the Bronze Age, by the ancestors of Genghis Khan.
2. Mythical - where God takes a handful of the South Wind and creates the beautiful Arabian, which (so the story goes) he then gifts to Abraham’s son Ishmael, who has been driven out into the desert to start his own tribe.

The historical strand is based on archaeology, not terribly interesting to a fantasy muse, which might be why that book never got written... it eventually mutated into a book about Genghis Khan, which never got published. But if you want to read a beautiful historical novel about the steppe horses, then try I Rode a Horse of Milk White Jade by by Diane Wilson, a young adult novel set in the time of Kubilai Khan.

The Bedouin legend is much more romantic, and appeals to me as a fantasy author because it has a spiritual/magical basis. I even started writing that book. My publisher didn’t like the idea, however, so it is only half a manuscript at the moment. Should I finish it? Even I can see it would not be an obvious best-seller. On the other hand, it contains my three passions so might make a half decent story… one day.

In the meantime, which strand of my diagram is right? History or myth? The Arabian (and all our modern breeds) have two fewer chromosomes than the wild Przewalski's steppe horse. What happened to those two chromosomes? Did the Przewalski horse mutate at some stage? Was the Arabian the result of selective breeding and environment on the early steppe horse? Or a completely different type of horse altogether, perhaps the horse of the desert mentioned in the Bedouin legend? The Arabian is undoubtedly more beautiful than its northern cousin, and nobody seeing the two side by side could possibly mistake them for the same animal:



Arabian





Przewalski's horse



As with so much historical research, it seems we need to look in more than one place to root out the true origins of the horse. I turned to the Bible, certain I'd find at least a couple on Noah's Ark. But no, horses are not mentioned that far back. Donkeys, yes... but donkeys are a different animal. (A challenge for you: where is the first mention of the horse in the Bible?)

From my reading of Genesis, it would appear that myth and history agree, and somewhere between 2,000BC (the approximate date of Abraham) and 1,500BC could indeed be about right for when the horse first entered into partnership with man and gave us “flight without wings.” Which means my period for historical novels lies anywhere between 2000BC and the First World War… hmmm... better get back to the writing!

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