Complete Works of Nevil Shute, page 368
I went on living at the radio operators’ chummery and in the sergeants’ mess.
I got to know some of the young officers quite well, however. When they went on leave I could often give them a free ride to India or to Egypt if they didn’t mind sitting on their luggage with the load in an unheated and unsoundproofed cabin, and I was always glad to help them in this way, as they helped me. A lot of them had nothing much to do, and they were keen on aeroplanes. I did far more flying at Bahrein in those post-war years than ever the R.A.F. did, and these boys used to come down to the hangar sometimes and just sit around and watch. Some of them got to know as much of what was going on in my crowd as I did myself, or a bit more.
Flight Lieutenant Allen came into my office once for something or other — I forget what it was. As he turned to go he grinned and said, “How’s old Harpic getting on?”
“Who do you call Harpic?” I enquired. It was a new one to me.
“Sorry,” he said. “Mr. Shaklin. Your chief engineer.”
“Doing all right,” I replied. “Why do you call him that?”
“He’s clean round the bend.”
“He’s a bloody good engineer,” I said. “He’s brisking up the other boys. I’m getting the maintenance properly done now that I’ve given up trying to run everything myself.”
“He talks religion to them all the time.”
“Well, what of it?” I said. “Do some of you young muggers good if you thought about your immortal souls a bit.”
“You can’t maintain aircraft with the Koran in one hand and a spanner in the other. Or can you?”
“Course you can,” I said. “He’s doing it. Who told you, anyway?” Because I knew that anything of that sort that was going on in my hangar went on in Arabic. I was starting to understand a bit of Arabic myself by that time, but I was pretty sure that Flight Lieutenant Allen didn’t know a word.
“The barman in the mess was telling us. It’s getting talked about all over the town. They say that if you want religion you can go and listen to the Imam in the mosque or you can go and listen to old Harpic in the hangar.”
I grinned. “Do you a bit of good to go to either.” He went away, and I sat on at the bare table that I used as a desk, listening to the typewriter in the next room, slightly uneasy. Connie was getting talked about, it seemed. I should know more of what was going on.
I knew it happened mostly in the afternoon, in the last hour of work before they knocked off for the afternoon prayer. I went down to the hangar that afternoon and got into the cockpit of the Fox-Moth with a pencil and a note-book; I had intended for some time to fit a blind flying panel in the instrument board and I wanted to scheme it out. But that wasn’t really the reason that I went.
Standing beside the Fox was the first Airtruck, and Connie was doing a top overhaul on the port engine. He had a working platform rigged up by the engine of a couple of planks on trestles, and he was up on this thing with a ground engineer and one of the Arab boys. Most of the rest of the staff seemed to have arranged their work to get within earshot; they were all doing something, but they were listening at the same time. Up on his platform working on the engine Connie was talking to them.
He was speaking partly in English and partly in Arabic, which he could already speak much better than I could. “We are a peculiar people,” he was saying, “we who care for aeroplanes. For common men it is enough to pray five times in each day, as the Imam dictates and as is ordained in the Koran. But we are different, we engineers. We are called to a higher task than common men, and Allah will require much more from us than that.” He paused, and said to the man working with him, “Got a five-sixteenth box there? Thanks. Now hold it, just like that.”
They worked on for a time in silence. “You have heard from the Imam of the journey that the Prophet of God made, when he was roused from sleep by the angel Gabriel who mounted him upon the horse with eagle’s wings, Al Borak. You know how he passed by the Three Temptations and traversed the Seven Heavens till he came to the House of Adoration and the Presence of God. God then gave to the Prophet the main doctrines of the Faith, and ordained that prayers should be said by the faithful each day.” He paused, and slipped the nuts collected in his hand into an old cigarette tin. “Now, draw her off gently. Wait a minute — the gasket’s sticking on this side.” They disengaged the cylinder head, and passed it down carefully from hand to hand to the ground.
Connie straightened up. “How many times were prayers to be said each day?”
There was a momentary silence. Then two or three said at once, “Fifty times.” And someone added, “ — Teacher.” I noted that for thinking over later on. This thing was going deeper than I knew about.
“That is correct,” said Connie. “Fifty times. I see you all don’t know this story, or you have forgotten it, and yet of all men you should know it. Do you not know that when the Prophet descended from the Presence he met Moses?” One or two of the men nodded. “Moses asked how many times God had required the people to pray, and Mahomet said, fifty times. And Moses told him that it was impracticable, that he had tried it with the Children of Israel and he had never succeeded in getting anybody to pray fifty times a day. He said that the Prophet should go back to God and humbly beg that this number of prayers each day should be reduced. Mahomet did so, and on coming from the Presence he met Moses again, and told him that the number was reduced to forty prayers a day. ‘That is still too much,’ said Moses. ‘The people will not pray so many times. You must go back and ask Him to reduce it further.’” He paused. “Let’s have that No. 2 cranked cylinder head spanner.”
Presently he went on, “Urged by Moses, it is written that the Prophet went back and back to God until the number of prayers was reduced to five each day. And still Moses said, ‘Do you think you can exact five prayers a day from your people? By Allah, I have been through this with the Children of Israel, and it cannot be done. Go back and ask Him to reduce it yet again.’ But the Prophet said, ‘No, I will not go back. I have asked His indulgence already until I am ashamed. My people are not Israelites, and they shall worship Him five times a day.’ That is the reason why every Believer has to say his prayers to God five times each day.”
He spoke again to the other engineer about the cranked spanners, and then decided to loosen a part of the induction manifold to get at the nuts. He went on, “That is the story that you know and have been taught as true Believers, only some of you seem to have forgotten it. But you will see that five prayers is the minimum; the number was brought down to be within the power of the unlettered, common man — a camel driver, or a shepherd. But we are not like that, we engineers. We are men of understanding and of education, on whom is laid responsibility that men may travel in these aeroplanes as safely as if they were sitting by the well in the cool of the evening. We are not men like camel drivers or shepherds, and God will demand much more from us than from them. From men like us, the full tally of fifty prayers a day will be demanded. Five of them must be made in public or in private, according to the way you know, but this is the bare minimum for all men. From men like you another forty-five prayers are demanded. I will tell you about them.”
They detached a part of the induction manifold and passed it down to the ground, and started to slack off the nuts of the next cylinder head. “Forty-five prayers a day may seem a lot to you,” he said in Arabic. “They did to Moses. Yet forty-five more prayers a day was the commandment of God, and God is All-Seeing, and All-Knowing, and All-Merciful; He would not command that you should do more than you can perform. Men who work as you do upon aeroplanes can pray to God forty-five times a day quite easily, and I will tell you how.”
He straightened up upon the trestle and looked down on them, spanner in hand. He was wearing a soiled khaki shirt and khaki shorts; he wore old oil-stained shoes with socks rolled round about his ankles. Beads of sweat were making little glistening streaks upon his face in the heat of the hangar, and the shirt clung to his back in dark, wet patches. His hands and forearms were stained and streaked with oil from the engine, mixed with sweat.
“I inspect some of the work you do upon these engines and these aeroplanes,” he said. “God, the All-Seeing and All-Knowing, He inspects it all. You come to me and say, ‘I have replaced this manifold and the job is finished.’ I come to look at it to see if there is any fault, and I see everything in place. I look at the nuts, and I see the locking wires correctly turned the right way to prevent the nuts unscrewing, and that is all that I can see. I cannot see if the nuts are screwed only finger-tight; I cannot see if you have put a lever on the spanner and strained them up so tight that the bolts are just about to fail in tension. These things are hidden from me, but nothing is hidden from the All-Seeing Eye of God.”
He paused. “God, the All-Knowing, knows if you have done well or ill,” he said quietly. “If you ask Him humbly in prayer to tell you, He will tell you if you have done well or ill; in that way you will have a chance to do the job again, and try to do it better. Or you can come to me and say, Help me to do this work, because I cannot do it right. God is All-Merciful, and He will not hold bad work against you if He sees you striving to do right. So I say this to you.”
He paused again. “With every piece of work you do, with every nut you tighten down, with every filter that you clean or every tappet that you set, pause at each stage and turn to Mecca, and fold your hands, and humbly ask the All-Seeing God to put into your heart the knowledge whether the work that you have done has been good or ill. Then you are to stand for half a minute with your eyes cast down, thinking of God and of the job, and God will put into your heart the knowledge of good or ill. So if the work is good you may proceed in peace, and if it is ill you may do it over again, or come to me and I will help you to do well before God.”
He turned back to the engine. “If you do this,” he said, “you will soon find that you are praying to God forty-five times a day or more, as He directed the Prophet in the first instance. Moses and Mahomet were quite right to get the tally reduced, because the people of that day were nomads and camel drivers. But you are educated men doing the most skilled work in all the world, and so much closer to God. God will require more of you than of common men; you are worth more than many camel drivers, because men look to you to see how good work should be done. And now I tell you, good work can be done only with the help and power of the All-Knowing God.”
It was only then that I noticed what young Tarik was doing. He had got out a penny exercise book, bought in the souk or stolen from a school, and he was writing busily in it with a pencil, using the workbench as a desk. He was obviously having difficulty in keeping up and I would have given a good deal for a look at the book; I didn’t know that Tarik could write. But equally obviously, he was doing his best to write down everything that Connie said. I wondered when I saw him how long he had been doing it.
It was five o’clock presently, and time for the men to knock off. Those who were Moslems, which meant most of the men working in the hangar, went out to the little patch of ground beside the hangar and turned to Mecca and commenced their afternoon Rakats. I had noticed a couple of days before that they had fallen into the habit of doing this together in a little crowd or congregation, and I was surprised to see some of the Arab servants from the R.A.F. camp join them. One of these I thought I recognised as the barman in the officers’ mess, though I had only seen him once or twice and I couldn’t be sure.
Connie did not join them in their devotional postures. He went with them and knelt in prayer a little way apart from them, facing to Mecca as they did, but kneeling all the time. I guessed that this was because he was not a Moslem, and for the first time I wondered what he was.
I must say, I was rather impressed. In aircraft work of the somewhat pioneering sort that I was doing you have to be adaptable. When a new situation arises without precedent, you have to go to first principles and make the precedent yourself, and this religious turn that my maintenance crew were taking was just one of those things. I had chosen to staff my enterprise entirely with Asiatics. Having done that with my eyes open, I could not expect to run the non-essential parts of my business wholly in the European way; there must be tolerance on my part, and I must adapt my way of doing things to suit their ways of life. You can run a workshop in the Western style with time clocks and job cards and rate-fixers and premium bonus schemes, but to make a success of that you’ve got to have some people from the West to work in it, and I myself was the only one in the party. Or, you can run it in the Eastern way, and that’s not necessarily a bad, or inefficient, or a slovenly way. Connie had introduced into my shop a form of discipline that was quite new to me, but the proof of the pudding, after all, was in the eating, and I was coming to the conclusion that the results were pretty good. The aeroplanes were being well maintained.
Dwight Schafter had commented on that when I had met him in the hospital in Batavia; he had said that Asiatic engineers who worked with Connie became confident and responsible people. My own experience was tending in the same direction and I began to watch the work that went on very closely. I must say I was very pleased indeed, so pleased that I mentioned it to Gujar Singh one day to get his views.
Gujar and I had flown the Carrier to a place called El Hazil in the Arabian desert about halfway between Kuweit and Egypt, with a load of machinery for the pipe line. El Hazil at that time was little more than a sand airstrip, three wooden huts, and half a dozen tents, with a Bedouin encampment in the middle distance. It was nearly dark when the unloading was finished and there was some stuff to go back to Bahrein that was coming in to the strip in the morning, so we stayed there for the night, sleeping on camp beds in the cabin of the aircraft, as we often did.
We had supper with the engineers in their mess hut, and strolled over to the aircraft presently, smoking in the cool of the night. It was very quiet in the desert; the dark blue sky was sown with millions of bright stars. I said to Gujar, “How do you think things are going in the hangar now?”
He said, “I think very well.”
I nodded. “I think so, too.” We walked on for a few paces. “I think Shak Lin is very good with them,” I said at last. I had fallen into the habit of using his Asiatic name when speaking to an Asiatic. “I’m just a little worried about all this religion. I suppose that’s quite all right?”
He smiled. “I do not think you have anything to worry about. I think it is a very good thing.”
I hesitated. “One of the R.A.F. officers — Flight Lieutenant Allen — was saying the other day that he’s getting talked about, in the souk. Do you think that’s true?”
He said, “There is talk in the souk about him.”
“Not going to make any trouble, is it?” I had in mind vague stories of religious riots and that sort of thing.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “You know that he is great friends with the Imam?”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Oh yes,” he told me. “They have long talks together, very frequently.”
That was something, anyway; if the Imam knew what was going on in the hangar it was unlikely that there would be trouble with the orthodox Moslems. “What is he, Gujar?” I asked. “Is he a Moslem?”
He smiled. “He is not a Moslem. When I met him first I thought he was a Buddhist, at Damrey Phong. Now I don’t know what he is.”
I glanced at him. “I saw you praying with him there before the Buddha. I thought you were a Sikh.”
He laughed. “I saw you, too, Mr. Cutter. I thought you were a Christian.”
“Oh, well...” And then I stopped, a bit embarrassed. I was about to say that that was different, and then it seemed to me to be a bit silly to say that. I didn’t know what to say. It was infinitely quiet and blue and peaceful in the desert night.
“Perhaps,” said my chief pilot presently, “he is just an ordinary man like you and I, who has the power to make men see the advantage of turning to God. As you have power to make men see the advantage of sending new tracks for a bulldozer by air.”
It seemed a funny sort of way to look at things. “Maybe,” I said vaguely. “The part that concerns me, of course, is the maintenance, and I’m bound to say I think that’s going a lot better since he came.”
“I think it will do so,” Gujar said. We strolled on together for a while in silence. Presently he said, “People get into such bad habits when they start to learn the techniques of the West.”
“Bad habits?” I said.
He struggled to express himself in English. “I am not trying to be rude. You English and Americans have your own way of life, which is different to ours. I know you have your own codes of behaviour which are based upon the Christian religion, and very good they are. But you are not religious people, as we understand it in the Asiatic countries. Few of you pray to God in public or in private even once a week.” He paused. “But God, and prayer to God, is necessary to us.”
“When one of our boys starts to learn an English or American technique like the maintenance of aircraft,” he said, “he learns from men who are materialistic in their way of life. He learns that science is the ruling force in the world, that every effect has a certain cause. Only when men are old and wise can they begin to see the Power of God even behind these things of science, and our young men are neither old nor wise. They see that railways run and ships steam and aeroplanes fly without the help of God. So they abandon God and turn to science, and then, because religion is necessary to us, they are bewildered.”
He smiled. “I know what English pilots say about Asiatic ground engineers,” he said. “I myself prefer to fly an aircraft serviced by a British engineer. With God taken from their way of life, our engineers become slovenly and irresponsible; they need a British or an American foreman who can check their work all the time if the aircraft are to be safe to fly. I think that Shak Lin understands this very well. He is showing your men that God is with them in the hangar, and making them turn to God for help in doing their work well. He is giving back to them the thing that has been taken from their lives. I think that you may find that in a year’s time your ground engineers are as good or better than any English engineer.” He laughed. “If that happens, you will have a maintenance staff that is unique in Asia, in more ways than one.”
