The early start for the Wadi turned out to be a waste of time, and it took until mid-afternoon for the taxi to fill up. Did no one ever go there? Or did they all fly? The al-Yemda airline office here in al-Mukalla had been packed with would-be travellers trying to get their names inscribed in hefty ledgers, and by the time I got to the front of the queue the plane was full. In a way I was not disappointed: the calligraphic logos that looped across the walls – Just as a swimmer needs a lifebelt, the air traveller needs Al-Yemda – were not reassuring. Al-Yemda, in these post-Marxist times, could do with the services of a decent copywriter.
I had read Freya Stark’s account of languishing in Hadrami parlours with measles exacerbated, according to her streams of lady visitors, by washing with soap. I had also read Harold Ingrams’s story of how he pacified a region where recent history included all the storybook elements of savagery: slaughters at feasts, massacres by slave-soldiers, decade-long sieges where people made their sandals into soup. Ingrams arrived in Hadramawt to find some two thousand soi-disant independent political entities. (And the French are supposed to have a hard time governing a country which has 246 different types of cheese.)
After some hours of inactivity I opened the book I had brought, The History for Those Who Would Perceive Clearly by Ibn al-Mujawir, at the section on Hadramawt. It was a mistake.
‘In the world of coming-to-be and passing-away, there is not a rougher people than the Hadramis, nor a race that exceeds them in evil and lack of goodness. They continually find fault in each other and will offer little protection to those who seek it from them. The blood of the slaughtered is everywhere … Because of this, Hadramawt is called The Valley of Ill-Fortune.’ He adds that the Hadramis live on nothing but dried sprats, oil and milk, and that they dye their clothes with green vitriol. The women arrange their hair in a crest, like a hoopoe’s.
Worse, ‘All the women of these parts are witches. If a woman wishes to learn the most complete magic ever witnessed, she takes a human and cooks him until he dissolves and his flesh turns to gravy. When the gravy is cold she drinks it all up, thus becoming pregnant. She gives birth seven months later to a monstrous human called an afw. This resembles a cat in length and breadth, but its generative organ is the same size as that of the large afw, the foal of a donkey. The witch takes it around with her wherever she goes and trains it until it has grown big and strong. Then, when it is mature, it copulates with its mother … [here the text is corrupt]. The afw can only see its mother/wife, and is itself visible to none but her.’
Blood, vitriol and priapic-Oedipal familiar spirits. When at last the taxi left, I said farewell to al-Mukalla with a sense of fore-boding.
Hadramawt, for outsiders, was harder to reach even than the mountains of north-western Yemen. For information on its coast Hunter, writing in 1877, refers his readers to Ptolemy. The interior was a blank on the map. Probably the first Westerners to see the Wadi itself were Antonio de Montserrat and Pedro Páez, two Jesuits captured in 1590 near the Kuria Muria Islands while on a mission from Goa to the court of the Negus in Abyssinia. The next European visitor did not arrive for another 250 years, when Adolf von Wrede, a Bavarian baron, succeeded in reaching the branch wadi of Daw’an; there his baggage was stolen and he turned back for the coast. Von Wrede made many astonishing claims; for example, trying to measure the depth of a patch of quicksand, his 60-fathom plumbline sank without trace. Ridiculed, he emigrated to Texas and later appears to have killed himself. He was followed in the 1890s by Theodore and Mabel Bent,* then from the 1930s onwards by a handful of Arabists, explorers and administrators. During the Marxist period Hadramawt saw some joint Yemeni-Soviet archaeological activity and a few tourists, shepherded closely and at great expense.
The other passengers were silent and showed no interest in the passing landscape. No one spoke to me. Perhaps, in Hadramawt, where in this most conservative of societies the Marxist regime had been most oppressive, they hadn’t realized that talking to foreigners had been decriminalized. But then, my fellow travellers hardly spoke to each other. Stranger still, for a people who had colonized everywhere from the Swahili coast to the Philippines, they were not good travellers. As the taxi began to climb the escarpment that overlooks the coastal plain, the man next to me stopped the car to get out and vomit. Shortly afterwards the man on my other side expressed his solidarity, this time into a plastic bag. For the rest of the journey they sat with towels round their heads.
At the top of the pass, a strange landscape unrolled, something like the Yorkshire Moors minus the topsoil. This was the jawl. Just as al-Madinah is enlightened and the Aegean wine-dark, the jawl has its own epithet in the accounts of all who describe it: barren. It is often called a plateau, hardly the right word as the surface is broken by deep ravines; the road has to follow a winding route from one elevated section to another – perhaps the origin of the name, since the root meaning of jawl is to wander or ramble. The scene is like a mountain range in negative, its topography the result of attrition. Wind and rain first etch then gouge the surface, depressions become runnels then valleys then gorges. The few people who live here, in isolated stone houses, seem impervious to the horror vacui that haunts the place. We went on in silence. The sky blackened and came down to meet the horribly potholed road. At intervals, signposts with numbers pointed into the mist. And then, slowly at first but with increasing gradient, the road started to descend, dropping into the underworld of the Wadi.
The first thing to catch the eye after hours on the naked uplands is the green, of palms, of alfalfa, of ilb trees. In the Wadi’s palette, houses are secondary and blend into the dun landscape from which they grow. The light was failing, and by the time we left the side-wadi of al-Ayn and emerged into the main valley, twilight had swallowed the long vistas of buttresses that confine it. The great city of Shibam was a crouching mass darker than the darkness around it.
This glimpse of Hadramawt before nightfall showed that, even if in some ways it is sleepy and insular, one activity continues with irrepressible vitality: building. Everywhere, there are unfinished top floors and herringbone stacks of mud bricks. Many of the older houses and turret-cornered little forts are crumbling – in the last stage of disintegration, the structures look like termite mounds. But new buildings rise all around. It is a cycle of dissolution and rebirth.
The cement block arrived a few years ago, and sometimes there are strange marriages of an ornamental cement porch with a mud house; but the mud brick is still the basic element and the one best suited to Hadramawt’s climate. The method of building is deceptively simple. Large flat bricks of mud and chopped straw, dried in the sun, are mortared and then plastered over with the same ingredients. Houses are given a waterproof icing of lime plaster, itself produced by a laborious process: throughout the Wadi you see little shelters where teams of men whack the stuff with long paddles for hours on end. Stone is hardly used, except in supporting columns built of flat stone cylinders like stacks of film canisters. There are no short cuts in Hadrami building; the more time that is put into its construction, the longer a house will last. An esoteric guarantee of permanence is to have a sheep slaughtered and its blood smeared on the corners of the building.
Inside, Hadrami houses are complex and enigmatic. The sparsely furnished rooms are almost an afterthought to the high, blank-walled corridors and staircases which seem to fill much of the building’s volume. Everything seems designed to bewilder, like a maze for laboratory rats, until you realize that the intention is to prevent the meeting of incompatibles – different sexes, different classes. An illusionist would love Hadrami houses, for in them people can be made to appear or disappear.
From the outside, these buildings are sober to an eye used to the baroque plaster frills of San’ani ornament. Façades are unadorned, decoration limited to the wood of shutters and doors. ‘“Architecture”’, Harold Ingrams wrote, ‘is the one word which describes the quality which makes Hadramawt different from any other country.’ It is an arch
itecture where form, function and mass have won over ornament.
There are exceptions, like the playing-card symbols stencilled in pastel colours over the houses of Daw’an, and the tombs of holy men with their zigzags of green striplights; but it is in Tarim that the mask of sobriety really slips. Alberto Moravia saw San’a as a Venice where dust had replaced water; but then, he hadn’t been to Tarim. Here the palazzos of the merchant sayyids, founded earlier this century on the wealth of the Orient, are sinking into a lagoon of dust. Extraordinary hybrids of colonial, Classical, Mogul and Far Eastern elements, they are – amazingly – executed entirely in mud. Friezes and flutings are picked out in lapis lazuli, topaz and turquoise, and as the colours fade the structures behind them collapse. Only the mosque of al-Mihdar, its minaret rising like a stretched lighthouse from a sea of dusty palms, is pristine. The pleasure-domes of Tarim are too much for the UNESCO people with their arts and crafts faithfulness to materials, and their owners are too busy making money in Saudi Arabia. Unless someone steps in to champion them, the palaces of Tarim will succumb, though gracefully, it must be said.
Earlier this century, Western architectural taste found itself teetering, so to speak, on the cornice of a dilemma: one was told that clean lines, uncluttered volumes, multi-storey living, were good; at the same time, there was a suspicion that buildings constructed according to these criteria might somehow be inhuman, that modernism might turn out to be faddishness. What if Le Corbusier was a charlatan? An innate visual conservatism looked for precedents and found none. Then the pictures of Shibam came out and everyone sighed with relief: skyscrapers had a vernacular pedigree, and a long one. High-rise was OK. It was U to live in a cube.
Shibam, the Manhattan (or Chicago, or, now, almost any other major city in the world) of the Desert, is not in the desert but on a rise in the middle of the Wadi, surrounded by palm groves. Individually the houses are no more remarkable than many others across Yemen; but they stand together and can be framed in an instant by the eye and – more important – by the viewfinder. Shibam, with The Bridge at Shaharah and Dar al-Hajar in Wadi Dahr, has become the ultimate visual cliché of Yemen. It has even appeared in an advertisement for American Express.
Just as the houses of San’a descend from that splendid prototype of Ghumdan, those of Shibam originate in an ancient model best seen in the palace called Shuqur in Shabwah, built when Rome was still an insignificant town. The archaeologists estimate that the palace was around eight storeys high – the same as the tallest houses in Shibam.
Shibam and San’a have much in common. They became prominent at about the same time, both developed the idea of the tower-house, both are situated at central points on trade routes. Today the similarity ends there. San’a is lively, colourful, chaotic; Shibam is hushed. There is little movement in the principal public space, the square behind the main gate. Beyond this on the town’s narrow streets, an outsider feels like an intruder. Eyes watch your every movement – the eyes of goats peering down from first-floor windows, of chickens in hutches hung across the street to keep them safe from predators, other eyes behind lattices. A few children wander around, but otherwise there is little human activity. Innate Hadrami reserve is a factor; so is Marxist conditioning. More important is the depopulating effect of emigration – of those Yemenis who were able to stay on in the Gulf States after 1990, many were Hadramis, for they had been best able to blend in with their adopted countries. But I feared also, entering the city for the first time, that the hush of Shibam was also that of a museum.
On the far side of the flood course, on a bluff beneath the city’s water tank, an assembly was gathering as it does most afternoons at around five. Today they were mostly French, about twenty-five of them, and as the hour approached chatter diminished and was overtaken by a reverent and suspenseful silence. Marsupial pouches disgorged fittings and filters and macros, film packaging was secreted for later disposal. These were not the sort who dropped litter. Nor did the sun disappoint. For a full ten minutes Shibam turned to gold and the air was filled with Oohs and Aahs and the whirring of zooms.
It would be unfair to criticize Shibam for being photogenic; moreover, they were good tourists, closely shepherded and as unobtrusive as one can be in pistachio-coloured leisurewear. There wasn’t even a pair of shorts among them. But I wondered what they saw, what the German corporate bonding group who visited Yemen for three days to see Shibam saw, and suspected it was an artwork, an architectural Mona Lisa, supremely beautiful but ultimately incomprehensible, preserved by UNESCO yet lifeless, far removed from the world of coming-to-be and passing-away. I longed for a used-car lot, a cement factory, for the erosive effects of wind, rain, sewage and raw economics to disfigure the place. It was a matter of respect for the decency of decay. As the poet-king As’ad al-Kamil said:
Nothing can last while the fickle sun
Rises not from where it sets;
Rises limpid, red,
And sets saffron.
The churlish moment passed. Now, at 5.45 p.m., the sky to the west was streaked opalescent pink and cobalt in big vertical stripes. It was nauseating, it was magnifique, and I wished I had a camera too.
In Shibam, I had to deliver a letter to the uncle of a Hadrami living in San’a. Finding the house was not easy, but just when I thought I was irretrievably lost a child materialized and led me to it. I banged on the door and waited. A woman’s voice called from a high lattice: ‘There’s no one at home.’ I said I would give the letter to the child, but the door swung open by itself. The child led me up the staircase and into a room, then dematerialized. I sat there not knowing what to do, and was about to leave when I noticed a movement out of the corner of my eye: a tray with a samovar and a tea glass had appeared in the doorway. I poured myself some tea, drank it, put the letter on the tray, and left.
Next day, I managed to get a seat on the little plane from Say’un to al-Mukalla. The aircraft arced over the Wadi, climbing rapidly to hop over its thousand-foot southern escarpment. Suddenly that green and peopled world was far away, the jawl below like some grey northern sea. It was not difficult to see how Wadi Hadramawt had kept itself apart.
For me, the Hadrami interior remained – like the insides of its houses – aloof and enigmatic. I felt as though I had been wandering around a painting by de Chirico: a place drenched with light but empty of people.
Back on the edge of the ocean I felt a sense of relief. The Wadi walls were confining, more so even than Aden’s volcanic mountains. I wondered if all Hadramis were closet claustrophobes, and if this was what made them travel.
From medieval times onwards Hadramis colonized the East African coast. The exodus to what is now Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines began not much later, probably in the fifteenth century, and it was in the Far East that Hadrami acumen reaped huge profits. Even after the Japanese occupation, the al-Kaff family in Singapore were still worth around £25 million. Today, the world’s reputed richest man, the Sultan of Brunei, is part-Hadrami. Most expatriate Hadramis kept in close contact with their native land, sending their sons home to study and marry. The majority would eventually return for good, some to set up as small traders, the better-off to become gentlemen farmers.
On the Arab of the desert, Jan Morris has written, ‘the Bedouin was every Englishman’s idea of nature’s gentleman. He seemed almost a kind of Englishman himself, translated into another idiom.’ In fact the wealthy Hadrami, supervising his model palm groves, poring over manuscripts in his newly built mansion – paid for by money made overseas – was closer to the image of the eighteenth-century English nabob returned from the East. And, sequestered within fine houses, well-to-do Hadrami ladies lived a life of social intrigue, petty squabbles and boredom that Mrs Gaskell would have recognized. Parochialism and far-flung travel blended to produce something curiously familiar to Freya Stark and the Ingramses.
The effects of emigration were noted by von Wrede, who in 1846 stayed with a shaykh of Wadi Daw’an who had lived in India,
spoke English, and had a copy of Scott’s Napoleon. Daw’an, at the western end of the main valley, contains some of the most prosperous houses in Hadramawt. Cliffs of buildings, some painted in harlequin colours like a Battenburg cake, are banked up the base of the canyon. Its wealth derives partly from overseas, but also from a local product – honey. Daw’ani honey is the most expensive in the world.
Entering Daw’an on a later visit to Hadramawt, I was stung on the chin. By the time I reached al-Hajarayn, perched on a cliff above the flood course, my face was swollen into a qat-chewer’s bulge. Down on a rise in the valley floor was a tent, not a badw house of hair but a heavy canvas thing from an army camp. It was surrounded by quadruped hives – earthenware cylinders raised on metal legs. They might, with a little imagination, have been rounded up and driven along the valley. This, in fact, is almost what does happen, since the beekeepers live a semi-nomadic life, travelling around the valley in search of the best pasture for their swarms.
I penetrated the buzzing cordon warily.
‘What’s wrong with your face?’ asked a man in the doorway of the tent.
‘I was stung.’
‘Stung? Where?’
‘Here, on the chin.’
‘I mean, were you stung here at al-Hajarayn?’
‘Oh, I see … No, back there down the road.’
‘That’s what I mean. My bees wouldn’t sting anyone. They’re the kindest bees in Daw’an. It must have been a foreign bee that stung you. There’s a lot of swarm-smuggling these days.’ Kind bees. Swarm-smuggling. And a curious wicker object by the tent door turned out to be a hornet-trap. The world of Daw’ani apiculture seemed bizarre.
Over lunch in the tent, the beeherds explained that the quality of their honey was the result of the bees’ pasturing only on ilb trees – Zizyphus spina-Christi. There was a lot of cheating, bumping up yields with sugar-water and mixing different grades, but my hosts would have nothing to do with this. Their baghiyyah grade was the finest available – the finest honey in the world. It smelt of butterscotch. It was the single malt, the unalloyed vintage. The price was commensurate: the equivalent of £40 for a good comb at the honey merchant’s in al-Mukalla, and far more by the time it reached the market in Saudi Arabia, where it is believed to firm up sagging sexual potency.* Here at source the prices were cheaper, but still I could only just afford a comb of the inferior winter grade. Even so, testing a fingerful – on the tactile level not unlike eating caviare, bursting through cells to a rich and melting interior – the honey was so strong and fragrant it was hard to imagine it was only the cheap stuff. The Classical geographers mention Arabia Felix as a source of excellent honey, and probably little has changed in production methods since their day, though the queen, or ‘father’ as she is called here, is now kept in a plastic hair-roller instead of the tiny wooden cage used formerly.
Yemen- The Unknown Arabia Page 19