Yemen- The Unknown Arabia

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  He raised his eyebrows, impressed. ‘I said you can’t go on. Listen.’ He cupped his ear downstream. Water tinkled pleasantly; a breeze had begun to blow up from Tihamah, ruffling its surface. But there was something else. A deeper, bass note, growing louder as the breeze gathered strength.

  ‘You see?’ said the man. ‘The waterfall. Come and stay with us, then go through al-Haymah to the motor road.’

  Debbie and I held a quick conference. We were speaking in English but the man, his head cocked to one side, nodded in agreement whenever I caught his eye. We had come so far. There was no way we would give up Surdud. It was just the usual assumption he was making that, being outsiders, we were puny.

  ‘Is there no way past it?’ I asked.

  ‘No. There’s no way past it. There’s a way down it, but not for you. Come and stay with us.’

  ‘You’re very kind, but we’d like to try.’

  We must be devil-driven. ‘Well … I’ve done it myself. You … you do this …’ he straightened himself up with his arms flat by his sides, ‘then you slide, all in one go. At the bottom the water’s up to here’, he put his hand to his chin, ‘when it’s low.’

  ‘Is it low now?’ asked Debbie.

  ‘Perhaps. But come and stay with us.’

  ‘May God reward your generosity,’ I said, ‘but we’ll try. We’re strong – good climbers and swimmers,’ I added, without much conviction.

  ‘Then God be with you,’ he said, shaking his head. He left us and made for the byre.

  Five minutes later we came to a pool at the head of the waterfall. By now, the noise was a roar, though we still couldn’t see its source. We ditched our rucksacks and waded in: the water was chilly and came up to our waists. It was still, but with the ominous calm of potential energy. Reaching the far side, I stood astride the lip of the cascade. Only the last few inches of the water’s surface seemed to move, then slide over the edge like an endless skein of gunmetal silk before plunging some twenty feet down a chute.

  Debbie joined me. ‘That looks fun! Who’s first?’ She wasn’t being ironical.

  I looked down into the seething cauldron below. It led to a series of smaller cascades. ‘Look, we don’t even know what’s under the surface. There could be rocks – I mean, you could twist an ankle, knock yourself out and drown. And how are we going to get the bags down?’

  ‘So what do you suggest?’

  I scanned the far side of the gorge. ‘We could lever ourselves down that crack and …’

  ‘What crack?’

  I pointed to a fingertip-wide fault in the smooth rock. Debbie said nothing for a long time.

  For half an hour we weighed pros and cons. Debbie was afraid of the climb; I was afraid of the water. The light went and we decided to sleep on it.

  We waded back through the pool, picked up our bags and found a beach of clean white sand. I didn’t argue, and was glad to lie down on the yielding surface after the last tortured night on the rock. We finished the kidam, treating ourselves to some cheese triangles, and before the end of the first round of Botticelli Debbie was asleep. I had discovered how to make a sort of sleeping bag by tying the ends of my sheet into bunches, and lay, hands crossed on chest, like a shrouded effigy on a medieval tomb, waiting for the slither of reptilian flesh. I slept well.

  Another visit to the waterfall in the morning revealed the folly of attempting to go either round it or down it. So we went over the mountain instead.

  Scrambling up rock that crumbled like festival cakes, clutching at roots, sending avalanches of scree over cliffs, we passed one point of no return after another. Eventually we found a goat-track that led down, and knew the danger was over. But the goat-track became a hyrax-track, then ended at the brink of a sheer sixty-foot gully. We climbed all the way back, then up a horribly steep slope to the next shoulder of mountain, only it wasn’t a shoulder but a shoulderblade followed by a chasm. By now we were almost weeping with frustration. There was to be no more up, we decided, and followed the shoulderblade downwards. It bristled with desert roses and prickly tree euphorbias, and the rock was fissured and rotten like the vertebrae of a decaying carcass. We arrived at the bottom speechless, sweating, hands ripped, and realized the awful truth: six hours after we had started, we were back at the pool.

  But something was different. There was no roar, or rather it was much fainter and came from our left.

  ‘We’ve done it!’ shouted Debbie, pointing to the waterfall five hundred yards upstream. It looked insignificant, a milky smear against the rock.

  We tore off our sweat-sodden clothes, hung them in a tree, and lay in the cool water. Massaged by bubbles and fine gravel, the sense of disembodiment was bliss, the knowledge certain that this never was, and never would be, a route down from the highlands. We had solved a very minor historical enigma.

  I read Vita while Debbie embroidered. The panel she was working on was a private, unconventional map, each triangle or zigzag representing a halt in a wadi or on a mountain, or a wait to fix a puncture. I suspected that, Penelope-like, she unpicked it at night, so slowly did it grow. By the time we set off, the afternoon was already dying, the sun raking across the water into our eyes. Looking back, the mountains immediately behind were highlighted while their upper ranges were blue and unfocused, like the vanishing point of a Claude Lorrain landscape where centaurs live.

  We came to a village. It wasn’t on the map. The houses were of two storeys, one room below for the animals, one above for people. They looked like the garden houses you sometimes find in the walled demesne of a manor house, except that they were painted with blue, yellow and red diamonds like a harlequin suit. A dog barked, a donkey brayed, sorghum rustled. A woman’s face popped out of the sorghum stalks, wished us a happy festival and scolded me for maltreating my wife. I gave her a Stan Laurel look of benign idiocy and left her clicking her tongue. ‘Be careful of the sayl!’ she shouted after us.

  The sayl, the flash flood. I looked over my shoulder. Surdud smiled in the warm colours of late afternoon, but the blue distance had lost its innocence. Clouds were massing, stacked over the mountains from which we had come. The shallow brook we were walking through, only a few yards wide, was the outlet for a catchment area of thousands of square miles: it didn’t take much arithmetic to work out the result of even a moderate shower in the highlands. I remembered going up Wadi Sara’, which joins Surdud at Khamis Bani Sa’d, sitting on a load of firewood in the back of a truck, chewing qat and watching the cloud swirling round the peaks ahead. Suddenly the truck shot up the wadi bank with a scream of transmission – luckily I had my foot hooked under the load ropes – and, with a roar, a chest-high wall of water the colour of oxtail soup boiled past us, inches below the rear wheels. That was a sayl, a little one.

  Debbie walked nonchalantly on in the middle of the stream. I kept to the edge. The occasional houses we passed – still not on the map – were built high above the watercourse, which at one point narrowed into a throat. Overhangs and undercuttings became sinister in the fading light. There was no longer any doubt about the forces that had sculpted them. Like the Ancient Mariner I dared not look behind.

  Just when it was getting too dark to see, the valley opened up again and we camped on a raised bank. It had been sliced away like a cake, but we reckoned we were far enough from danger. I lay on my back, worried less by snakes than by the serpent tongues of lightning licking the high peaks. There was no thunder; there were no stars.

  Next day the sky over the mountains was still gravid and threatening. We walked for half an hour before realizing that we were following a motor track: it was so faint, a graffito almost washed away, that it only occasionally showed as a ridge of pebbles separating two barely indented lines. It crossed and recrossed the stream, losing itself in beds of sage which gave off a peppery tang like tomcat’s piss. Stands of tall reeds and the odd talk tree, a kind of acacia, hid little fields, binding the precious soil together. Behind these were bare mountains, now lower and le
ss jagged. From time to time a drab hamerkop flapped past with a whooping cry, or a huge electric-blue dragonfly hovered out of the way. Tall Goliath herons, each with its territory of double-bank fishing rights, stood trying to mesmerize the water. They were as still as garden statues and hardly bothered to lope into the air as we approached.

  Visually it was Arcadia, but the pain of rucksack straps and blisters nagged like toothache. I knew how the ancient tyrants must feel, punished in a nether-world of tantalizing beauty by endlessly repetitive trials. I examined my feet: they were pallid, repulsive, like those troglodyte salamanders that live in permanent darkness. The heat was increasing. When we weren’t walking through water we were crunching across a fine layer of silt at the stream’s edge where it had cracked and curled up into huge cornflakes. More hamlets appeared, shimmering clusters of five or six houses on rocky spurs above us, each a little more prosperous as we got closer to Khamis Bani Sa’d, but the motor track was still as faint, a sporadic line on the palimpsest of the wadi bed. Dogs lay in pools of mud, and when one of them charged at our legs in a frenzy of barks I turned and chucked a stone, ripping the shoulder strap of my rucksack. The dog slouched off, grinning.

  We stopped for lunch under a talh tree. Weaver-bird nests dangled from its branches like hairy fruit. I pictured rock hyraxes flying at them, teeth bared, in training for the day when they were cornered. We forced down the remaining fragments of festival cake. Food was beginning to occupy every corner of our thoughts. We knew that with each step we were nearer the port of al-Hudaydah and baked fish, blackened on the outside, succulently flaky on the inside, eaten with tomato, chilli and goat cheese relish; nearer to fattah of fresh bread soaked in ghee and dark, pungent acacia honey; nearer to mutton, tender as butter, baked slowly with mountain herbs in a clay oven, all washed down by icy Canada Dry Cola; and nearer to shami, the doyen of qat, raced down from the peaks of al-Mahabishah with the dew still on its asparagus-thick stalks, shami, fuel of dreams …

  Somebody was calling us. We waved and passed on but he caught up with us in seconds. ‘Shame on you for not stopping! Come and have lunch with us.’

  Good manners require a refusal. We made the feeblest possible excuses and followed him up a rough track into one of the perched villages. It smelt of smoke and goats. In his one-roomed house, with his wife, parents and young son, we had our first decent meal for four days: spongy luhuh bread, like a big flattened crumpet, dipped into milk and chillis; broth with fenugreek; and boiled goat meat.

  Until the Gulf crisis, Rashad had worked at a laundry in Riyadh. He hadn’t seen his family for three years, which was typical of many rural Yemeni men who worked overseas. Surprisingly, he expressed little rancour over being thrown out – with nearly a million of his countrymen – by the Saudis, and hoped to go back. Just when was in the hand of God.

  They wanted us to stay the night, but we brushed aside warnings that the sayl would carry us away. Rashad thought we might make it to Khamis that day if we hurried, but it was another four hours’ hard walk. There was no chance of meeting traffic on the track: a vehicle might pass by once or twice a year. A greater contrast with Riyadh and its eight-lane highways could not be imagined, but Rashad had taken it all in his stride, as he had the appearance of these two shabby foreigners.

  Again, the afternoon cloud was stacking over the mountains behind us, and people we passed shouted, ‘The sayl! Be careful!’ Debbie said that death by drowning held no fears for her now she had a good meal inside her, and something of her blasé attitude began to rub off: from keeping to the stream’s edges, ready for the life-or-death rush up the bank, I started to follow her course down the middle of the sayl bed. It rained, great gouts the temperature of blood, but we weren’t bothered: the danger was rain in the mountains.

  It was now five o’clock and from what Rashad had told us of sayl timing we knew the threat was past. More worrying was the thought that we had at least another couple of hours before Khamis and would be walking in the dark: even after a real lunch, we were determined to get a ride from there that night, down to al-Hudaydah and its baked fish.

  Rounding a bend we saw something totally unexpected: a man fishing with a rod and line. When we got closer, we saw that the hook was baited with maize.* He confirmed Rashad’s estimate of the time it would take to reach Khamis.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen foreigners up this way,’ said Debbie.

  The man thought. ‘Foreigners? Loads of them. Someone from San’a came here, oh, it must have been five years ago.’

  The light went. Debbie plunged on, I lagged behind, stubbing my toes on rocks and cursing the nail in my boot. Debbie, who like Wilfred Thesiger had spent her early years in the British Embassy in imperial Addis Ababa, seemed to have inexhaustible reserves of stamina, while I wallowed in increasingly frantic self-pity. A dog howled, making me jump, and I remembered a story told by a San’ani friend. A man walking along just such a wadi at just such a moonless hour had stepped on something, a formless, squashy something. Suddenly all the dogs started baying. The man went on. Soon afterwards he developed a tumour in his leg: what he had stepped on was a jinni. I borrowed Debbie’s torch, which she disdained to use, and followed its pathetic stain of light.

  Then I saw familiar shapes looming ahead. ‘We’re nearly there!’ I shouted. ‘See those mountains? They’re opposite Khamis, where Surdud joins Wadi Sara’. I remember them well.’

  Squinting into the gloom, I soon realized I hadn’t remembered them at all – mountains all look much the same at night with no moon and no stars. I saw more familiar shapes but kept my mouth shut. Khamis Bani Sa’d might as well not exist: I would wake up in San’a, the baboon-haunted nave of Surdud forgotten as I was jolted out of this nightmare by the petit mal you experience as a false footstep in the first moments of sleep.

  But we arrived. The sound of dogs and the smell of human habitation told us it was Khamis. We floundered through the confluence of Surdud and Sara’ for another twenty minutes, stepping on squashy things, setting off choruses of barking: the jinn could go to damnation.

  At last we climbed the steep track that led up to the tarmac of the al-Hudaydah road. There, bathed in neon, was a shop, its doors open and beckoning, a fridge humming next to stacked crates of Canada Dry. ‘Debbie!’ I croaked, ‘Let’s celebrate.’ I stumbled over to the shop.

  As I reached for the bottle opener a truck appeared, heading for al-Hudaydah. Debbie flagged it down and called to me. ‘Come on! We might be here all night.’

  I handed back the unopened bottle, the condensation deliciously cool in my palm, picked up my rucksack and staggered to the truck. I hauled my wrecked body over the tailgate. Debbie followed, decorously, and only a little more stiffly than at Shibam. There were half a dozen other passengers in the truck. Mechanically, we answered their questions – where we were from, where we were going, where we had come from.

  ‘Shibam. On foot.’

  There was a pause. ‘Why?’

  ‘We, er, wanted to save money,’ I said. And we had – a little over a pound. Our questioners fell silent. The wind rushed past, undoing my headscarf.

  Peering ahead over the cab roof, I could just see the nick, like a gunsight, in the ridge of rock through which the road passes into the coastal plain of Tihamah. The nick is called Bab al-Naqah, the Gate of the She-Camel, after an unmistakable humped rock by the road. I’ve tried many times but I’ve never made out the She-Camel. Perhaps it is lack of imagination. Or perhaps too much imagination, which turns these igneous outcrops, these last ripped margins of the High Yemen, into a bestiary of stone guardians: herds of camels both dromedary and Bactrian, marine iguanas, spiny anteaters, mastodons, stegasauri, centaurs, griffins, manticores, chimeras, tahishes. Even Britain’s first woman prime minister is there, in profile.

  After Bab al-Naqah the land is flat. In the dark, we couldn’t see Tihamah; but we could smell it. Warmth and humidity released distant and near-subliminal odours of smoke, dung, roadside d
ead dog, jasmine. And somewhere, even here, was the smell of the sea.

  Across this vapour-filled plain came the outsiders – merchants and adventurers, diplomats and soldiers, Ayyubids, Mamluks and Ottomans. It is the proper way to enter Yemen. Today, most people land at San’a Airport and see the place inside out. But not all outsiders came this way. One, al-Hadi, the first Imam, came out of the north. In Sa’dah he founded a line of scholar-warriors who ruled, until only a generation ago, for more than a thousand years.

  4

  Gorgeous and Disorderly

  ‘There is not a people on earth whose power once waxed great, but misfortune swept them away in its flood …’

  Wahb ibn Munabbih (d. AD 732)

  HIGH NOON at Sa’dah qat market. I was on my way in when a man grabbed me by the arm and gestured to a line of cobblers, their corkscrew curls bouncing as they hammered. ‘These’, he said, ‘are Jews.’ There was a pride in his voice. It was like the people of an English village pointing out a pond containing the last examples of a rare species of newt – no one would have thought twice about them had they not been in danger of extinction. The danger is real: the Jews of Yemen used to number perhaps 75,000, scattered across the country. After five decades of emigration, there are now a few thousand at most, living in communities around Sa’dah and Raydah. The last resident Jew of San’a died in 1992. An eccentric, he spent his final years in a packing case.

  In the thick of the qat market, I squatted to inspect a pile of green bundles. A Jew, indistinguishable from the other suq-goers except for his sidelocks, came and squatted next to me. In no time at all the three People of the Book – Muslim, Christian and Jew – were going hammer and tongs at their ancient rivalry: trying to get the best price.

  Wandering around with my qat under my arm, I realized that Sa’dah is a true architect’s city. The noble, tapering forms of the buildings recall Lutyens’s Whitehall Cenotaph but are dictated by materials, not aesthetics. Houses are constructed rather like coil pots, but on a huge scale: a complete course is slapped down and left to dry before the next one, slightly thinner in section, is added. Each course is a seamless band of mud, and the technique gives a sinuous, plastic quality to the buildings. Small towers with loopholes and projections have the appearance of faces – Easter Island faces. Sa’dah buildings are inhabited sculpture, mud at its most glorious.