BOOK REVIEW / Journey through a watery paradise lost: 'A Reed Shaken by the Wind' - Gavin Maxwell: Eland, 8.99 pounds

IN THE spring of 1991, the Shi'a who had risen against Saddam Hussein in the wake of the Gulf War took refuge in the alluvial plains of southern Iraq, among the shallow seasonal marshes and reed islands, that drift round the 1agoons fed by the tributaries of the Euphrates and the Tigris. As the government forces advanced, they took terrible reprisals on the Arabs of the marshes - whom they accused of giving refuge to the fleeing Shi'a. They bombed the floating villages, attacked the reedbeds with defoliants, and, in the name of resettlement, started filling in the marshes.

The men, regarded as supporters of the Shi'a opposition, were gassed or 'disappeared' into Hussein's death camps; napalm was used against women and children; the waters, which provide the Marsh Arabs' sole livelihood, were poisoned. A unique people is on the point of extinction.

It makes the timing of this reissue of Gavin Maxwell's excellent A Reed Shaken by the Wind all the more poignant. Early in the Fifties, Maxwell read an article by Wilfred Thesiger about the months he spent each year among the Marsh Arabs, in their reed huts built like nests on the floating islands. He met Thesiger, who agreed to let him travel with him on what he said was to be his last journey among the Ma'dan of the marshes. A Reed Shaken by the Wind is the story of that journey.

Until Thesiger visited the marshlands they had remained one of the last unexplored territories near civilisation, covering some 12,000 square kilometres, whose inhabitants had little or no contact with the world outside. One of the many strengths of this magical book is the way Maxwell conjures up these strange people, clinging to the edge of life, closer to the elements than it is almost possible to imagine, as well as the marshes themselves, rich in brilliantly coloured birds and flowers and insects. The two men spent several weeks floating in a tarada, a 36-foot canoe along waterways covered in a drifting carpet of white and gold buttercups, staying with the Arabs at night, while Thesiger acted as doctor - he even performed circumcisions - to a people afflicted with every kind of waterborne disease and infection.

A Reed Shaken by the Wind is full of humour, much of it derived from Thesiger's particular brand of austerity. Despite his gloomy warnings, however, Maxwell remained healthy, if agonisingly uncomfortable, with days spent wading in slippery mud or sitting cross- legged in the canoe, while the gales blew fragments of reed into his eyes, and evenings passed in the huts, constantly wet and hungry, and devoured by fleas and lice.

During the journey, Maxwell acquired a young otter; it died, but its successor, provided in a sack by Thesiger as he left for the desert, became the first of the otters that later played such a part in Maxwell's life and books.

The lost life of the marshes, with their passing populations of ducks, hawks, bee-eaters and wild geese, millions of frogs which jabbered ceaselessly, long processions of almost entirely submerged water buffaloes, terrifying water snakes and wild pigs the size of donkeys, with shaggy pale mud-coloured hair, is described with the same pleasure and elegance Maxwell later brought to the otters he grew so devoted to. A Reed Shaken by the Wind is a marvellous book. It remains in the mind for its unforgettable image of this watery world, made all the more unforgettable in that it exists no longer.