Yemen- The Unknown Arabia

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  The canyon soon opened up, but in one dimension only – downwards. At the same time the cliffs above us edged closer together, threatening. Boulders underfoot grew larger, and the only sound was of our boots scraping to get a grip on their smooth surface. The cliffs shut out the sky and finally closed on us like a sphincter. We had to double up and edge through a tunnel where the sides of the wadi had collapsed, all but blocking it.

  Then the gorge opened up a little and we sat down to rest. Debbie pointed to a tree on a boulder, gripping the rock with roots like a spider crab’s legs: it could have had nothing to live on but air and dew, and it was flourishing. But the light, the little of it that penetrated, was fading with tropical swiftness. High above us, the cliffs were rapidly caramelizing.

  ‘Don’t you think we’d better find somewhere to sleep while we can still see?’ Debbie said.

  I remembered the tahish. This was definitely tahish country. ‘Yes. But not here.’

  We had maybe ten minutes of light. Soon the gorge opened up a little more and the sides were no longer perpendicular. We were standing on a small beach of white sand in the lee of an enormous flat-topped boulder.

  ‘This is the spot,’ said Debbie. She began to unload her rucksack on the sand.

  I was horrified. ‘Hey, are you crazy? This place is going to be slithering with snakes!’ In the half light, every twig was taking on terrifying reptilian capabilities. ‘Let’s go up on to that boulder.’

  ‘You can if you want. I’m staying here,’ she said, unfolding her aluminium foil groundsheet. ‘I’m not sleeping on a rock when there’s all this nice sand around.’

  ‘Well, I’m the one who’s got to take your body back to your grieving parents.’

  ‘Well, if you’re that worried … But tomorrow, I choose.’

  The top of the boulder was flat: it was not horizontal. We chased the tuna tin, then the candles, as they rolled away. The candles wouldn’t stay lit anyway, so we ate our kidam and tuna in the dark. After supper I stood on the edge of the boulder, gripping it with my bare toes, and peed; there was a long gap before I heard it hit the sand. I swayed. There was nothing else to do, so we lit some mosquito coils, using the Imam’s chauffeur’s penknife and the empty tuna tin as supports, and lay down. Debbie crackled on her groundsheet.

  It was too early for sleep so we played Botticelli.

  ‘Are you’, I asked, ages later, ‘a Danish astronomer with a nasal prosthesis?’ Debbie had failed on Bartók, but she had got Bacon, Byron and Blondie.

  ‘No, I’m not … B … B …’ She yawned.

  ‘Want a clue? It was a golden nasal prosthesis.’

  A minute later I heard her regular breathing and looked at my watch. Asleep at half past seven. I gazed up at the stars. Framed by the valley sides, their brightness seemed intensified, artificial, like a planetarium. I counted half a dozen shooting stars, and remembered from my research on the valley that in the year 1385 a stone two cubits long had fallen here from the sky. The sliding village, the falling stone – otherwise, the historians were silent on Surdud. I fell asleep wondering what the odds were against being hit by a meteorite.

  It was not yet dawn when I woke up, but we needed to get an early start so I made breakfast, opening the kidam bag and feeling for a couple of cheese triangles. I glanced at my watch. It was eleven p.m.

  Looking over to where Debbie was, I realized with a surge of panic that she was not there. The tahish hadn’t left so much as a corner of her groundsheet. Or perhaps she had moved down on to her beach, where I would find her in the throes of death, writhing with asps. I dislodged the tuna tin, and the noise was answered by a moan and a rustle from below.

  ‘Debbie! What are you doing down there?’

  ‘Down where?’

  I felt around for the torch. It too had gone. Then I realized what had happened. Because of the angle, we had slid down the smooth rock. Debbie, on her shiny foil, had gone further. At this rate she would have been over the edge before the sun was up. We found a part of the rock that was not so steeply inclined, but neither of us got any more sleep that night.

  That was how it seemed. But what I was jolted out of was sleep, or something like it. The sky had turned violet and the stars were fading; there were twitters from all around, first isolated then joining together. Then I heard what must have woken me – a harsh, high-pitched scream echoing from the cliffs above, then another, then frenzied chattering. Debbie was awake too and we looked at each other, then up at where the sound was coming from. There was a clatter of tumbling scree, more jabbering, a glimpse of something half man, half dog.

  ‘Baboons,’ Debbie whispered. The sounds continued, but although we carried on scanning the high places we saw nothing. After a while all was quiet.

  The distance from densely cultivated al-Ahjir was short, but we had passed into a secret and unfrequented place. Elsewhere baboons are often captured and killed, but this was their territory and we were interlopers. The sun was coming up, the birds had taken over with a seamless counterpoint of warbling, but we felt we were still being watched from the cliffs by Papio hamadryas arabicus.

  I remembered the baboon I had met in a San’a street. It was blocking the way, teeth bared. I picked up a stone. So did the baboon. We stood glaring at each other until a group of men came calling, ‘Sa’id! Sa’id!’, and it scampered off down a side alley. Pet baboons are always called Sa’id, which means ‘happy’. They are usually catatonically depressed or in a snarling rage.

  We had breakfast and left the rock, light-headed after so little sleep. I needed a caffeine jolt but had to make do with a few gulps of water: there was no indication of when, or if, we would find any, so we had to ration ourselves. Almost on cue and totally unexpected came the sound, mechanical and rhythmic, of a water pump. But as we went on it resolved itself into something different. The sides of the gorge were narrowing again and amplifying the noise like the horn of an old gramophone – not a pump, but water itself, trickling and gurgling. Rounding a corner we saw a stream, only a small one from a side wadi but suddenly growing – from where? – as it met the main watercourse. It could only have come from underground. We washed the sleep from our eyes and filled empty bottles, scattering tiny fish.

  The stream stayed with us along the gorge and we had to walk through it. It was a delicious feeling, the cold water swilling around the inside of your boots, until you stepped in a deeper part and they filled up with abrasive grit. For the next couple of hours there was relief, then grit, then a stop to undo laces and empty it out, then relief and the cycle starting again. By mid-morning we had two types of stops – boot-stops and bag-stops. Most of the bag-stops were mine, as my sixty-year-old rucksack had no shoulder padding. Every long walk I do I resolve to get another, but have never found a replacement for its bleached and mildew-spotted canvas among the garish hi-tech creations in the shops.

  Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the stream vanished.

  ‘So,’ said Debbie, ‘that was Surdud.’

  We had been looking forward to not carrying heavy water bottles. Now we would have to limit ourselves to sips and lug the stuff to Khamis Bani Sa’d. The sun was getting higher and we sweated down the canyon. During a boot-stop we examined the map and realized we had lost 3,000 feet in height since leaving the truck the day before, which explained the heat: in linear terms there were still three-quarters of the way to go.

  Rounding another sharp twist in the gorge, we were heading into the sun and didn’t see the woman until we were within speaking distance. She was coming towards us, picking her way nimbly through the stones.

  ‘Al-salam alaykum!’ said Debbie, cheerfully.

  The woman, old and unveiled, appraised us with pursed lips. Her face was blotched with areas of lost pigmentation.* She didn’t answer.

  I was worried. If you meet an old woman in a lonely place and she does not respond to your greeting, she may be a witch. I wondered whether to exclaim, ‘I take refuge with God from witches!’
It would cover all eventualities: if she were a witch she would presumably disappear in a puff of smoke; if not, she would get the point that it is rude not to respond to greetings.

  ‘Wa alaykum al-salam,’ the woman said, just in time. ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Britain.’

  ‘And where do you think you’re going?’ she asked, with sudden and unaccountable anger. We pointed down-wadi. ‘Ha! So you’re going to spend the festival in Britain!’ She folded her arms and looked at us as if we were crazy. ‘Well, you’d better hurry up or you won’t get there.’

  ‘Actually … we’re going to Tihamah.’

  ‘That’s what I mean. You’d better hurry. The festival’s today. Or is it tomorrow. Do you know?’

  ‘Well, in San’a they said it’s probably tomorrow.’

  ‘Ha! You don’t know!’ She shook her head in pity. ‘Well I don’t know either. Hmm … you’re going to spend the festival in your wife’s village … what’s it called? Britain?’

  There was clearly no point in explaining.

  ‘So what’s the matter with you, boy? Why don’t you ride?’

  I shrugged feebly, gestured to the boulders, the towering cliffs, the burning sun.

  The woman turned full on me. ‘Shame on you,’ she shouted, ‘starving your wife like this!’ She strode off, round the bend.

  Debbie and I were left looking at each other, wondering where she was going. A full minute later, Debbie asked, ‘What did she say you were doing to me?’

  ‘She said I was starving you. Tija’ja’. Well, that’s the dialect meaning. In Classical Arabic I think it means “to make a camel kneel so you can cut its throat”.’

  The gorge kept expanding and contracting like a gut in spasm. At times, there were glimpses far up into the ranges of al-Haymah on the left and al-Tawilah on the right, shoulders and crests looming above like the silhouettes of prehistoric beasts. The sky was clear, except for a few shreds of cloud which had snagged on the higher peaks; the sun glinted off the windows of houses perched on what looked like the least accessible ridges. I wondered, as I always did in the High Yemen, how men could be deluded into thinking themselves eagles.

  Suddenly it would all be cut off, this other, higher world. The wadi sides would close together, shutting out the sun and confining us in secrecy. Translucent ferns, aliens from temperate places, clung where water dripped down the cliff walls, often where moisture showed itself as little more than a stain. And that was the strange thing. All around was the evidence of erosion, cliffs undercut, niches hollowed out of the rock by eddies, some with a whitish mineral deposit where water had lain and evaporated slowly – like the empty fonts and stoops of a redundant church. Gloom and damp and silence all added to the ecclesiastical atmosphere. It was gothic; not the rational gothic of medieval times, nor the stick-on gothick of Strawberry Hill, but the vegetable gothic of Gaudí, growing, slowly, by subtraction. But when? Here erosion was not a gradual process; these rocks had been subjected to sudden and gigantic forces of water and gravity, the same gravity which was taking us, increasingly painfully, down Surdud.

  There was a third type of stop, the map-stop. We knew where we were going but not how far we’d gone; time had little bearing on distance. Triangulating by the sun, the direction of contours, and by elimination, we could at least find where we weren’t. Where we were was more conjectural. There were a few scattered habitations marked, not more than half a mile away; but by totting up the contours we realized that the half-mile was both horizontal and vertical, and that the houses were the ones we had seen catching the sun.

  It was during a map-stop that we heard an enormous bang. It echoed for perhaps seven seconds, a diapason reverberation on the scale of Notre Dame. And, strangely, there was something in the sound that took me back in time a long way.

  Shortly after, a man appeared round a twist in the gorge. He greeted us and came to squat down nearby, his deeply cracked bare feet gripping the rock. His face was that of an old man but no grey showed in the hair escaping from his headcloth. I looked at his gun and wondered how his slight frame coped with the recoil, then remembered that in the school corps we had probably been no more than fifteen when we shot the same .303s. ‘Can I have a look?’

  He handed me the rifle. Its butt, smooth and patinated, bore a stamp.

  ‘Do you know how old this is?’ I asked.

  ‘Old.’ He looked at me. ‘As old as you.’

  I shook my head. ‘It’s as old as my father.’ I pointed to the stamp, a crowned GR and 1916. ‘Seventy-six years. This is the mark of our Queen’s grandfather, George ibn Edward.’

  ‘George Bush?’

  ‘No, much older. But they’re still the best guns – much better than the ali.’

  The man nodded. The ali is the AK47, the standard weapon of contemporary Yemen, but guns like these, simple as they are, are admired in the same way as old daggers.

  ‘I just missed a wabr. They move like demons,’ he said.

  ‘Why did you want to kill it?’

  ‘For the festival.’

  ‘So a wabr is lawful meat?’

  ‘Yes. The meat’s good, but you must shoot it in the head. If you get it anywhere else it pisses inside itself and you can’t eat it.’

  Debbie asked what a wabr was. I explained that it was a rock hyrax, a rodent-like creature which is apparently a biological relative of the rhinoceros and the elephant. I had never heard of hyraxes being eaten but knew that their dung is sometimes mixed with warm water and used by rheumatism sufferers as a poultice. They are timid animals, but if cornered are said to fly at their attacker’s genitalia.

  I handed back the gun. Alongside the AK47, American automatics are to be seen, and the occasional aristocratic hunting rifle. Even in urban San’a many households have something in case of emergency, perhaps an old tommy-gun gathering dust in a storeroom; a story goes that many weapons were impounded there in the Seventies during a lunar eclipse, when the San’anis took to the streets to shoot at where the moon should have been. I wondered how this venerable weapon had got here – by way of Lawrence and the Arab Revolt, via the Somme or Vimy Ridge, or as part of a consignment bought cheap by a dodgy Aden trader. The man shouldered the rifle. He said he had to be going to see about preparations for the festival and took his leave, off to hunt the hyrax.

  We pressed on for a while, then, more as an excuse to stop than from any desire to eat, sat down to have lunch under an acacia. The kidam were running low so, reluctantly, we went on to the festival cakes. They were dissolving into a mass of crumbs, and ants had got into the bag. We picked out some of the more intact fragments and dusted them off. They had a cloying texture, like plaster of Paris. Pudding was a boiled sweet. I read a couple of chapters of a biography of Vita Sackville-West I had brought and lay back.

  Debbie was keen to be off. I envied her less aesthetically pleasing but ergonomically advanced rucksack, and grumbled like a camel being loaded as the hard canvas bit into my shoulders. I tried using spare socks as padding but they shed themselves after a few hundred yards. A nail was coming up through the heel of my right boot. Walking in this dry and stony place was ceasing to be a pleasure, and I looked at the patches of shade, longing to give in and curl up again with Vita; there was something of her in Debbie, I thought, striding out like Diana the Huntress. She disappeared round a corner. Then I heard her calling, too far off to know whether it was in distress or excitement. Rucksack bumping, limping to avoid the nail, I stumbled off at a trot and caught up. Debbie was splashing about in a stream. The water had reappeared.

  Not long after, we saw signs of cultivation, the first since al-Ahjir. A few tiny fields had been terraced into the side of the wadi, way up out of reach of flash floods; they were long abandoned and, like deserted lazy-beds in the Scottish Highlands haunted by memories of the Clearances, there was an air of sadness about them. Soon after this came the first inhabited spot. It would never have appeared as such to the aerial photographers who made our
map – the house, more of a byre, was the concave underside of a cottage-sized boulder, smoke-blackened and, even from the far side of the stream, smelling richly of cattle. A woman and a small child stood watching us. The woman replied to Debbie’s greeting but waved us away as there was no man around.

  We walked on, invigorated by the presence of running water, the late afternoon drop in temperature and the thought that we had passed back into the world of people, leaving behind the beautiful but disturbingly empty upper reaches of Surdud. The way had been tiring but not what you would call difficult. From now on it would be plain sailing. In regularly spaced villages curious but kindly people would invite us to decent meals.

  ‘Whayyy!’ The voice came from above us, on the left. ‘Whaaah! Where are you going?’ A man skipped down the mountainside towards us. He had the same small frame as the hyrax hunter, and carried an axe with a tiny head and a long rough haft.

  ‘Down the wadi,’ we said.

  ‘You can’t. Come and stay with us, then you can go on through al-Haymah to the motor road.’

  ‘Is that your place back there, with the cattle?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, but we don’t live there. Our house is up above.’

  ‘How far?’

  ‘Two hours. Three for you,’ he added, glancing at our sticks. ‘We’ll be there not long after sunset.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you, but we ought to press on. You see, we’re walking to Tihamah.’

  The man smiled. ‘You can’t.’

  On walks I was always meeting people whose parents’ generation had thought nothing of going on a three-day march to buy a pound of sugar but who, within a few years of the first car coming, had been softened into total reliance on mechanical transport. Pansies. Namby-pambies. Thesiger was right: the motor car had spelt the death of Arab virility. ‘But’, I said petulantly, ‘we’ve walked all the way from the head of al-Ahjir.’