Euhesperides Notebook One
Opening pages of Chapter One ‘Stock Still’
Chapter One
Stock still
The panicked ewes were bleating for their lambs. They were corralled in a fenced-off quarter of the military barracks. Carabinieri untrained in the business of slaughtering sheep were wielding their combat knives with ferocious intent. The young bedouin watching covered his eyes and wept.
At the order of Benito Mussolini, ruler of the new Roman Empire, Italian ground forces were pushing south from Tripoli. They were reaching the oasis of Ain Zara. As they ranged like scavengers across the Jeffara Plain, they seized the livestock of the bedouin herders who pastured their animals there, doing so according to their ancestral rights. These ancient rights had long been respected under the hegemony of the Ottoman Empire in return for taxes paid; but, with that hegemony now yielded to the jurisdiction of an Italian state ambitious for empire, indigenous rights were disregarded and dishonoured. Bedouin rights were being expunged by a rapacious lust for territory.
The assault had been sudden, on a scale the bedouin could not have prepared for. Being nomads in a desert, they had no equivalent means of defence against a modern military machine. Bewildered and struck by terror, they were helpless and in awe. They watched the brutal theft of their livestock seemingly with little effective retaliation. Donkeys, mules, horses and camels, wild or domesticated, were drafted as carriers of ordnance for the invading troops deployed for the purpose of ‘penetrating’ Libya, taking her by force. By means of stealth and power, the trajectories of empire were reaching south towards Fezzan, expecting to do so peacefully, ‘peacefully’ implying expected surrender.
Karim, whose name means ‘generous’, had been guarding his modest flock from wild dogs. It was early in the night when the Italian Savari had comeriding into the pasture. The thunder of their horse’s hooves had heralded their arrival droning like an afreet. Wilder and more cunning than any pack of wild dogs, they had routed and kettled his scattered sheep into their malevolent fold and driven them away. Shaken and disbelieving of what he had seen with his own eyes, Karim had followed the bandits at a safe distance witnessing the droving of his flock to the military barracks, where, in the chaos of many commingled herds, the lambs were parted from their panicked mothers, and slaughtered en masse. On seeing his sheep suffer this ungodly butchering, he had stood stock still. Still in his shivering skin, but trembling in the sinews that held him taut, while his mind was arrested in dread. He was struck immobile like the stump of a felled tree.
Nita Nicholson 
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