TheBanyanTree: Zeta

[Roger Pye]

Very few in my present circle know that forty years ago I spent time in 
the Middle East when I was in the Royal Air Force. Today Aden is part of 
Yemen but in those days it was a Protectorate, a British colony, as it 
had been ever since its 'discovery' as a coaling port in the mid-19th 
century. Sue and I lived in a typically 'modern'  three storey arabian 
house on a typically arabian road in a typically arabian suburb. The 
ground floor was taken up by storerooms and in the two years we lived on 
the top floor we met one person once who lived on the second.

Soon after we married (I had already been in Aden a year and the RAF 
flew her out from England so that could happen) and moved into El Jabali 
Building as it was called we acquired a dog, a cross-labrador/wild dog 
named Zeta who belonged to a sergeant at my unit who had been 
transferred back to UK. Zeta looked more labrador than anything else, 
she was about four years old and she was beautiful. She travelled with 
us in the car, a two-seater sports car, everywhere we went - not that 
that was very far there being only 100 miles of sealed roads in the 
colony. We could leave her in the car with no qualms knowing that she 
was the best security against theft ever for the simple reason that no 
Arab would go near the vehicle, let alone touch it, whilst she was in it.

Albeit young compared with some other religions, Islam is a very strong 
faith which has survived all sorts of trials and tribulations and in the 
doing has extablished strict tenets and taboos. Some tenets are 
uncomplcated - for example, the devout Muslim must kneel, face Mecca and 
pray to Allah seven times a day; Some are taxing to flesh and spirit - 
every year he/she must go without food or drink between sunrise and 
sunset for a month. The one in particular which affected our 
relationship with Zeta  is the Islamic taboo on dogs - the merest touch 
of one required the offender to wash himself seven times to wash away 
the taint. In a place like Aden where the only available clean water was 
artesian, this was not easy to accomplish.

Aden would have to be one of the consistently hottest places in the 
world, minimums being in the high 70s F almost all of the time, and so 
military working hours were restricted. I generally worked from 7am to 
2pm or some such which meant the afternoons were free. On a particular 
afternoon at about 4pm when Sue and I were both home and Zeta had gone 
out to do the necessary there was a knock on the front door. When I 
opened it I saw the little Arab boy who was part of the family that 
lived downstairs. He would have been about eight or nine years old. 
Tears were pouring down his face, his tunic was bloody and in his arms 
he was carrying Zeta, head lolling down, blood dripping from a paw and 
more of it everywhere I looked. Yelling for Sue I grabbed a towel from 
somewhere, put it over Zeta and lifted her up. Then I said 'Thank you' 
to the boy as best I could in Arabic and English, he wiped tears from 
his face, nodded and went downstairs.

Just a few doors away was an SPCA clinic run by an Indian vet and we 
raced down there. Fortunately it was open and very soon Zeta was laid on 
an examination table with this man and his assistant clucking over her. 
"Come back in three hours" he instructed us and ushered us out the door. 
When we went back, Zeta was naturally asleep. "Very bad," the vet said. 
"She has trodden on broken glass. See, there is a hole here." There 
surely was, it went right through the right foreleg just above the paw. 
I could have put a finger straight through. "It is no use bandaging it, 
she would just pull it off. Put this powder into it every few hours, 
keep her warm and quiet, she has lost a lot of blood, if she lives until 
tomorrow she will recover."

Not a word did he say about how he had stitched the blood vessels and 
tendons and tissues back together, or of any inconvenience to him when 
he should have closed two hours before.

Zeta recovered slowly but surely though whilst she was with us she did 
not regain the use of her paw. A few weeks before we were due to return 
to UK in March '63 we handed her over to a sergeant who worked at a 
communications outpost and she went there during the day. There was lots 
of room to move around and the exercise she got brought the paw back to 
normal.

I guess the Muslim world seems strange to most westerners who have been 
brought up in or with a completely different sort of religion. Strange 
or not, I shall never forget the sadness and pleading on that little 
Arab boy's face all those years ago and more and more, now I am involved 
with spiritual healing and the like which has no barriers whatsoever, do 
I think that really there's very little difference between them and us 
and what difference there is, isn't worth thinking about.

Roger