Yemen- The Unknown Arabia

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  After the village of Suq al-Ribat, where we bought qat, the road climbed ever more steeply. On either side, near-vertical slopes were covered with a dense layer of creeper-hung trees, a rare survival of the aboriginal forest which once cloaked the entire range. Rising out of these was the lighter green of inhabited places, pyramidal peaks and dizzyingly steep flanks of mountain. The landscape, seen through a moving frame of windscreen, looked as fanciful as a Chinese watercolour.

  Raymah, like much of Yemen, is an upside-down place. In other mountainous countries, people tend to live in the valleys; here in Yemen they seem to choose the most inaccessible ridges and summits for their dwellings, places only fit for eagles. Why? Is it for defence, or because of the climate? Or for the view? Or is it just contrariness of nature that makes them build on seemingly impossible peaks, where calling on the neighbours means a trek of hours along goat paths, and qat sessions are arranged by walkie-talkie?

  The defensive argument is strong. Power-hungry outsiders have always lusted after Yemen’s strategic location, for whoever controls its western seaboard controls the entrance to the Red Sea. Time and again, invaders have occupied the coast, where it is easy to land large forces, but have left their backs open to attack by the mountain people. Even the Ottomans, with their advanced weaponry, only effectively held the cities and were for ever busy resisting assaults led from mountain strongholds like Shaharah. They were given little freedom of movement by a tough landscape and a tough people. A sixteenth-century Turkish commander summed up his problems when he said, ‘Never have we seen our army founder as it did in Yemen – every force we sent dissolved like salt.’ Three hundred years later, another Turkish general commented on the mountain tribesmen of al-Haymah that he could take the whole of Europe with a force of a thousand such fighters. Things hardly changed when the Egyptians brought air-power into the anti-Royalist conflict of the 1960s: mobility in the air means nothing if ground forces cannot follow it up.

  Retreating to the mountains in time of war is, then, understandable; but to live there permanently, expending so much effort against gravity – why? Perhaps a walk along Raymah would answer the question.

  A mizmar tape is hypnotic by the third hearing, and the qat was beginning to take effect when the top came into view. For the last section of the road the driver even used four-wheel drive – to avoid doing so seems to be a point of honour among Yemeni drivers. About three hours after leaving al-Mansuriyyah, we arrived in al-Jabi, the metropolis of Raymah, entering it from beneath the walls of its fort. From here, if you are up early enough, you can see across Tihamah to the sea and, some say, to Africa.

  I finished my chew at the lukanda, a corrugated iron flop-house, watching American all-star wrestling on Saudi TV. The picture was soon blotted out by snow on the airwaves, and I went for a stroll in the keen evening air. Stopping for cigarettes, I was impressed by the range of goods in the shop. Mini stereo speakers sat next to air rifles, depilatory cream jostled against tins of lychees.

  The shopkeeper was an ex-resident of Jeddah who had left Saudi Arabia before the Gulf crisis in 1990. The Saudis kicked out his less fortunate compatriots, like our host in Wadi Surdud, who were still there when Kuwait was invaded. Up until then they had enjoyed a special status which allowed them to work without finding a Saudi ‘guarantor’. By their reaction to Yemen’s stance on the Kuwait crisis – that all possible efforts should be made to find an Arab solution before calling in non-Arab forces – the Saudis had deprived themselves of a huge part of their service sector and had reduced hundreds of thousands of their Arab brothers and sisters to penury. Many of them reached Yemen with only the possessions they could carry, leaving behind their sole source of livelihood. By early 1991 perhaps a quarter of the cars on Yemen’s roads belonged to these refugees in their own land, and reception camps were crowded and insanitary. The economic backlash has been severe, with huge losses in hard currency income and in aid from the Gulf States and elsewhere, and a massive fall in the value of the riyal. Other poorer Arab states – those which supported the US-led force – were silently paid off by having their debts rescinded. Yemen, however, remains a little-publicized victim of the Gulf crisis, a martyr to conscience in a world of realpolitik.

  Back at the lukanda most of the other guests were asleep under the neon striplights, cocooned in tartan blankets like Henry Moore’s sleepers in the Underground. I climbed up a ladder to a broad shelf at the back of the room and fell asleep thinking of the walk that lay ahead.

  Nothing in the world, I thought as I started out along the track, sets you up for a walk as well as a plate of steaming fried liver at six in the morning at 7,000 feet. To the left, a small plateau ended in a row of houses and then nothing; to the right there was just nothing, or rather a huge vertical drop ending in a sea of vapour rising from Tihamah. A couple of crowded trucks passed, heading towards al-Jabi.

  Shortly after, the motor track began a huge arc round the outer flank of the mountain and I struck off on a well-trodden footpath to cut off the corner. For a while the going was easy; then the path crossed a rock face and became little more than a crack with a long plunge to the left. I picked my way gingerly, sending little avalanches over the edge. A group of young children squeezed past me and skipped along on their way to school in the town, oblivious of the drop.

  As the path levelled out I saw that a change had taken place. Away from the seaward-facing slopes the terraces had a different look – they were either bare or, where there were crops, growth was stunted. The contrast was stark, the result of a sudden climatic variation: a detailed weather map of the western mountains would be made up of a patchwork of micro-climates, each dependent on the exact topographical aspect of its location. Raymah weather is certainly strange: I have seen snow in the month of June.

  In one of the bare fields an old man was taking a rest from ploughing while his donkey munched alfalfa. The bundle of fodder stood out against the khaki earth like an exclamation mark. The man beckoned me over and poured some qishr, husk coffee, into a tin can; the bite of ginger was instantly refreshing. I asked him, as one does, about the rain.

  ‘In Kusmah,’ he said, ‘they’ve had some good downpours, but here … well, it has spat a few times this year. We have to get our water from the spring down there,’ he pointed to a patch of green, probably a thousand feet below, ‘and that’s almost dry. We had some water engineers here, but if there’s no rain in the first place there’s nothing for them to engineer.’

  It was hard to know what to say. It would have been cold comfort to point out that this was merely another in a series of droughts which, punctuating Yemeni history, have killed thousands. At least, with all the imported wheat around, people would not die as they did just the other side of the Red Sea. ‘Can’t you drill a well?’

  The man laughed. ‘The shaykh was trying to collect money, but how can we come up with … oh, a million or more? We were thinking of getting the boy from Ta’izz – do you know the one? He can see water through rock. “Drill here,” he says. “There’s grey rock, then black rock, then water at 400 feet.” And he’s always right, praise God. But you still have to get the machine in and drill.’ He crumbled a lump of earth in his fingers. The wind blew it away before it hit the ground.

  ‘May God bless you with rain,’ I said, getting up to leave.

  ‘Amen,’ he replied.

  I waved to him before I rounded the mountain. As he raised his arm, the sun caught the brilliant white of his zannah, and I thought of the enormous effort that had been expended in washing it.

  Back on the motor track, each step raised a puff of dust as fine as talcum powder. Rocks underfoot were polished smooth by spinning tyres. I stopped in the meagre shade of an overhang, where drill holes showed that the cliff had been dynamited away. My throat was dry and I wondered where I could get water. Then, around a corner, I saw a car parked on the shoulder of the mountain and quickened my pace.

  The car was a Layla Alawi, the latest model of Land
cruiser which the Yemenis named after a curvaceous Egyptian actress (she was furious). It would have a cooling compartment between the front seats, packed with drinks. A man stood next to it, looking at the view.

  I greeted him and was granted a lacklustre reply from the back of his head. He turned in a studied way and, for a moment, I was taken aback by his appearance. Over an immaculate zannah with buttoned Mao collar he was – even in the heat of the sun – wearing a black sheepskin-lined greatcoat, not the usual countryman’s baggy version but cut with a swagger. It was the sort of coat a White Russian prince would wear. In his belt, behind a vastly expensive jambiyah, was a chrome-plated Smith and Wesson with ivory grips. A perfectly trimmed moustache swooped down to sharp points on either side of his chin. He looked like Lee Van Cleef after a successful night at the poker table.

  ‘Er … Have you got any water?’

  The man paused to think. ‘No.’

  ‘Is there anywhere I can get some?’

  He was looking at my ancient, fly- and mildew-spotted rucksack. ‘No.’

  For a time I surveyed the view. I had never met anything like such a stony response in Yemen. Well, I would engage him in conversation. ‘Not much rain, is there.’

  He clicked a Yes.

  Silence.

  ‘Are you from al-Jabi?’

  He clicked a No.

  ‘Kusmah?’

  A shake of the head.

  ‘So … where are you from?’

  ‘Bani Abu al-Dayf,’ he said, with a pained sigh.

  An unusual name. Rendered literally, The Sons of the Father of the Guest. I couldn’t resist. ‘Ah, you must have been called that because of your hospitality to passing strangers.’

  He burst out laughing. The pose was gone. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but I really haven’t got any water.’

  We said goodbye. Someone I met on the road later knew the man with the Layla Alawi and said that he’d made a killing in Riyadh, running a juice bar.

  It was lunchtime. The two or three villages I passed showed no signs of activity. They sat on outcrops, ringed by dense barriers of prickly pears. These, although they are found all over the country, are not native to Yemen, as their Arabic name – ‘Turkish figs’ – suggests. (In Greece they are called ‘Frankish figs’ and the scientific name, Opuntia ficus-indica, proposes yet another origin; in fact, they came from the Americas.) But they are welcome invaders, for their fruit is wonderfully refreshing.

  I turned on to another footpath. By now the humidity boiling off Tihamah had risen enough to cut out the harshest rays of the sun. Another vista opened, and another micro-climatic region. This time it was moist, and there were even some mushrooms. It was tempting to lie down, surrounded by rising cloud and the scent of thyme; but Kusmah, the day’s destination, was still a long way off.

  Back on the path, a boy overtook me. I caught up with him and kept pace for a while. Then, suddenly he stopped and gazed intently to his right. I couldn’t see what was holding his attention until he picked up a stone and flung it. Something tumbled over the little terrace wall. A long, thin tail twitched. A chameleon. It tried to get up but he threw another rock which caught it in the middle and it lay still, its visible eye revolving feebly. I like to think that it may have changed colour, gone through its palette in a chromatic swan-song, but we pushed on. I soon realized I could not keep up with the boy, who was about ten, and told him to go ahead. Later, I met him coming back from the market below Kusmah. It was still half an hour away but he had been there, done some shopping, and was on his way home. I began to feel that the old woman in the taxi to al-Jabi might have had a point.

  In the market I was collared by a voluble and slightly crazy old man who gave me a run-down on the US election campaign. He lost me when he got on to the relative importance of the various primaries. The sun was going down, the mist was coming up, and I abandoned him in Iowa. My knees were crying out for the horizontal, but I set out for the final pull up to Kusmah. At first I tried to keep up with the last in a string of donkeys carrying sacks up from the market. As it climbed, it farted rhythmically inches from my nose and it was a double relief to get to a level stretch of path.* Kusmah is built on a ridge at the south-western end of the Raymah massif. From below it has an imposing presence; when you get there it is a pretty ordinary large village, with one irregularly cobbled street lined with shops, all selling the same things. Gaps between the buildings open on to distant views over the Kusmah midden and the prickly pears that thrive on it. I made for the single eating house and ordered a plate of beans as the sunset prayer was called. With a cough, a generator cranked into action and the striplights flickered on. The clink of tea glasses, the hiss of the paraffin stove, the thud of the generator – all were sounds of arrival in a mountain town. The breath of donkeys hung in the air outside.

  There were two people in Kusmah I was keen not to bump into. The first was the self-styled umdah, or mayor. On an earlier visit I had spent a couple of hours in his house at the top end of the ridge, and the entire time had been taken up with his prostate trouble. I was willing to forgo a further session on the mayor’s leaky plumbing. As I sipped my tea, the other major annoyance of Kusmah stalked past in his striped pyjamas, stately in a pained sort of way. I quickly stared into my beans. After my previous escape from the umdah I was passing the school when this man, graduate of a university in the Nile Delta and Kusmah’s principal pedagogue, had shot – if that’s the right word for a fat, middle-aged Egyptian – out of his religious instruction class and dragged me in. I was a choice and appropriate piece of what the theorists of teaching call realia, educational objets trouvés.

  Fifty pairs of eyes were on me.

  ‘What is your name, sir?’ the Egyptian asked in English.

  ‘Tim.’

  ‘No! “My name is Tim.” ’

  ‘Oh, yes. Sorry. My name is Tim.’

  ‘And where are you from, Professor Tim?’ He rolled his r’s like a big car purring.

  The interrogation continued in English. The children, of course, understood nothing. Nor were they supposed to: they were a primary class, and English instruction is only given in middle and secondary schools. After establishing my basic credentials of nationality, marital status, religion and so on, he changed into Arabic.

  ‘Come here, Ali.’

  A small boy in the front row jumped up. Teacher’s pet, I thought. The Egyptian put one arm round each of us – with some difficulty because of the vast difference in height – and stood beaming. The room was in suspense.

  ‘Now. How many eyes has Professor Tim got?’ he asked the class.

  ‘Two!’ they shouted.

  ‘And how many eyes has Professor Ali got?’

  ‘Two!’

  ‘How many ears has Professor Tim got?’

  ‘Two!’

  ‘And Professor Ali?’

  ‘TWO!’

  ‘How many … noses has Professor Tim got?’

  ‘One!’ There were a few ‘twos’ from the back of the class.

  The questioning went on until we had covered all mentionable parts of the body. Our respective religions were then re-established. ‘So, although Professor Tim is a Christian and Professor Ali is a Muslim, God has created them the same in all respects.’

  ‘But he’s taller!’

  ‘Silence! This’, said the Egyptian, finally releasing us, ‘is proof of the oneness of His creation.’

  A bell rang and the pupils charged out. I admired the teacher’s exposition of so elemental a truth, and told him so. ‘Naturally’, he said, ‘we must use such methods here. The people are so very … simple.’

  I said that, to me, the pupils seemed very bright, that school education to them was something new and that, moreover, it was appreciated far more than in the West. And in Egypt, I nearly added. I could have done – he wasn’t listening anyway. But then I didn’t pay attention to his tirade against life in Kusmah compared with the pleasures of Tantah. For an Arab returning to the cradle
of his race – and getting paid vast sums of money relative to his potential earnings at home – it all seemed ungrateful.

  Well-meaning people in Yemeni villages have often billeted me on a teacher with whom, they suppose, I will have much in common. With Egyptians the reverse is true. It is different, though, when the teacher is Sudanese. Although their spindly Nilotic forms – Giacometti men clad in robes of purest white – are more suited to the wide savannah than to the mountains, all the Sudanese I have met seem to have an affinity for Yemen and its people. And when they get together the Sudanese party, unlike the lugubrious Egyptians and their homesickness encounter groups.

  I looked up from my beans, paid and left. Outside, I glimpsed the teacher’s broad back nearing the end of the street, the turning-point of his solitary paseo, and for a moment I felt sorry for him. But I went quickly to the funduq, found a room to myself and, undisturbed except for a tiny girl who appeared cat-like round the door and asked me if I was an Egyptian, read for a while then fell asleep.

  Kusmah is on the watershed, and another climatic border. From here to al-Hadiyah, my final destination, was a hard day’s walk. There was no motor track, but there was at least the prospect of well-made footpaths.

  The path zigzagged down the flank of the mountain. It was heavily scented and slippery with dew. I passed a party of women on their way to collect fodder for their cattle: many of the mountain women keep at least one cow, which gives them a degree of economic independence. The money they make will usually be turned into gold, and these women were well off – their heavy chokers and large pendants, swinging against flared dresses of Japanese synthetic brocade, caught the sun as it rose over the mountain tops. People looked prosperous, and it was good to see houses being built in every village.

  The track crossed a dry stream bed then turned to follow the side of a mountain mass set at right angles to that of Kusmah. Villages clung to the steep slope all the way along it and from now on the path was beautifully built, of large stone blocks fitted together in a careful jigsaw pattern. Fresh donkey dung everywhere showed that this was a principal highway.