Al-Hajarayn, up above us on the cliff, is the site of Dammun. Here the sixth-century poet-prince Imru al-Qays was banished by his father for excessive drunkenness and fornication. Imru al-Qays’s tribe, Kindah, had emigrated long before, and their rise to power in northern Arabia had spun a web of jealousies that resulted in the killing of his father by a rival clan. When the news was brought to Dammun, the prince headed north to lay his father’s ghost.
Imru al-Qays the poet was already well known, and his lovesick lingerings at abandoned campsites were quoted all over Arabia. Pursuing the blood feud, he now became the most famous Hadrami traveller, a picaresque and melancholy figure, forced out of his secluded ancestral valley into the harsh world of Byzantine-Sasanian superpower politics. He became known as al-Malik al-Dillil, the Wandering King, and posthumously as Dhu al-Quruh, He of the Sores – in reference to his Nessus-like death, caused by a poisoned shirt presented to him by the Byzantine Emperor after he had flirted with an imperial princess. The Prophet, when asked who was the best of poets, said: ‘Imru al-Qays will lead the poets on their way to Hell.’ *
Imru al-Qays never succeeded in avenging his father’s death. Nor did he return to Dammun. Perhaps the fate of the Wandering King, deprived of honour, land and family, is a warning that binds the furthest-flung Hadrami to his place of origin.
I said goodbye to the beeherds and carried on along the pebbly track. A short asphalted pass lifts you on to the jawl, where the road surface ends as abruptly as it began. I stopped, walked to the edge of the canyon, and looked down. Daw’an was a sunken world, Lyonesse seen through crystal water. Up here, sounds were amplified by the valley sides: a child shouting ‘Shoot! Shoot!’, the thump of a ball being kicked, a donkey bursting its lungs in an ecstasy of sobbing brays, a dog snarling. A few paces back from the edge you could hear nothing, see nothing. Daw’an had disappeared.
It was a long way to the next stretch of tarmac on the al-Mukalla road. The light faded, more slowly on the uplands than in the wadi. Rock darkened from camel to tan to oak-gall like a sepia photograph in a bath of developer, leaving the motor track as the faintest scribble across the jawl.
Hours later, a light appeared on the horizon. It turned out to be a truck-stop. I squatted at the edge of the bare room and ate a tray of rice and a hunk of mindi, kid half roasted, half smoked over the embers of a lidded fire pit. In the corner of the room a video of American tag-team wrestling was playing; the few customers were too busy with their food to notice. Here too there was a reserve. People kept to their own personal space and the only sounds were the recorded grunts of blond giants trying to pulverize each other.
Three hours into my first qat chew in a Hadrami house, I was beginning to think the Hadramis really were a lugubrious lot. There had been none of the playful banter that begins a San’a chew. Salim, our host, who had been brought up in Kenya and was now a trader in Say’un, insisted on speaking a grandiloquent version of Arabic, mostly on the fecundation of date palms. His son, who was in his late teens, sat looking uncomfortable in the middle of the room and speaking only when spoken to.
Now should have been the Hour of Solomon, but I was feeling tetchy and liverish. Until Unification, qat had been banned in Hadramawt; the Hadramis still hadn’t got into the rhythm of it. A couple of neighbours turned up and talked politics. Salim did not take part in the conversation but sat glancing at his watch. I wondered if we were outstaying our welcome. Suddenly, he bounded up and disappeared. The sunset call to prayer sounded, the others left, and Salim re-entered the room – cheek empty – and began praying.
When he had finished he threw me some qat and started chewing again. After a polite pause I said, ‘Why don’t you carry on chewing and pray the sunset and evening prayers together?’ Immediately, I regretted the question. ‘Uh, that’s what they do in San’a …’
‘I am perfectly cognizant with the phenomenon. The people of San’a, of course, are notoriously lax in the performance of their obligations. “The best time to pray a prayer is when it is called,”’ he intoned sonorously. ‘To let what is no more than a pastime interfere with one’s duty as a Muslim is, frankly, inexcusable. I have even heard it said that there are some who pray without expelling the qat from their mouths, on the pretext that it does not necessarily affect the articulation. To me …’
The can of worms was open. I had to stop them wriggling out. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned it. After all, I’m not even a Muslim.’
‘You are not, indeed, a Muslim. But you are a complete San’ani.’
He was grinning. I laughed in relief. The ice, at last, had been broken. As we chatted, Salim’s Arabic became less ferociously inflected.
I was keen to find out what Salim knew about one of the geographical curiosities of Hadramawt – the Well of Barhut, a sulphurous and supposedly bottomless pit to the north of the Wadi. ‘Have you been to Barhut?’ I asked. ‘I read somewhere that it’s where the souls of the infidels end up.’
‘Yes, and they say there is a terrible smell of decomposition, and groans in the night. I haven’t been there myself. It’s a long way, far off the road that leads to the tomb of the Prophet Hud – peace upon him! But I can tell you the story of the well.’ He drew himself up.
‘When God created our Father Adam, He commanded the angels to prostrate themselves before him. At first they complained and said, “How can we do this, when he is made from clay and we from light?” But God said, “When Adam is expelled from the Garden, then I shall test him with trials and you shall have your recompense. Now do as I command!”
‘So the angels prostrated themselves before Adam – all except Iblis, who was to fall – and events took their turn until Adam was expelled from the Garden, and God began to test Man with trials, as you know. When the angels saw the afflictions Man was suffering, they said, “These are nothing. Any one of us could undergo the sufferings of Man and come out unscathed.” “Then,” said God, “let it be so. Choose the two strongest ones of your number. I will give them the form of men during the day, and at night they will revert to being angels.” So the angels chose two from their number, named Harut and Marut, and God did as He had said.
‘Harut and Marut, during their daylight hours as men, soon became respected by all humans on account of their wisdom, and people began to come to them to plead cases. One of those who sought their judgement was a woman named Zahra. She was a beautiful woman, and she fell in love with both Harut and Marut. Of course, being angels, they were exceedingly good-looking themselves. Zahra tried to soften the angels with words; naturally, they resisted her. Moreover, they were shocked to discover that she was married. When she suggested that they kill her husband, the angels were ready to give up being men and return to God’s presence for good. “But,” they said, “it is easy for us to resist the woman’s words and close our ears to the whisperings of Satan.”
‘One day, Zahra invited Harut and Marut to her house and brought them wine. “This is the easiest of Man’s trials to resist,” said the angels, “but let us try a little, so that we shall know what to avoid in future. Only a little.” Soon, though, they were drunk, and it took only a sign from Zahra for them to kill her husband and sleep with her.
‘When God saw this, He called the two angels into His presence and said, “You have sinned and have truly tasted Man’s afflictions. I give you a choice: earthly punishment, or that of the world to come.” Harut and Marut chose earthly punishment and God cast them into the Well of Barhut, named after a jinni of the Prophet Sulayman – peace upon him! – who had dug it. The well was full of snakes and scorpions, and there the two fallen angels are even now. Zahra, who had stolen from them the trick of flight, escaped to the heavens and was turned into a star. And there the story ends.’
I took my leave just before the evening prayer and walked out into the night. It was dead quiet. Rain had fallen, and the earth gave off a rich tobacco-like odour. The air was clear, and the stars were joining Venus, Zahra. I thought of the ending o
f Salim’s story. It all seemed to fit until the bit about Zahra. Why should the woman, this arch-temptress, have become a heavenly body?
Then I realized. The story must be ancient, dating back to the beginning of Islam when the old pagan cults still had a following. Here in Hadramawt, cut off from the rest of Yemen, Christianity, Judaism and the local monotheistic religion of al-Rahman had made few inroads into the ancient astral beliefs in which Venus was a prominent member of the pantheon. The Barhut story was both an attack on a pagan deity, recast as an evil seductress, and a didactic against alcohol, adultery and murder. But perhaps even stranger was that so uncanonical a tale should have been told by someone so apparently orthodox. It seemed to be another case of the Hadrami split personality.
I picked my way along narrow unlit streets, squelching through mud. Palms dripped behind high walls. Say’un is a garden city, rus in urbe to Tarim’s Venice of dust. In Say’un, I was staying with a Sudanese-American couple, he a Nubian from Dongola and she from the Mid West. Awad and Linda spent most of their time sifting through nineteenth-century land deeds in a turret of the Kathiri Sultan’s palace, a magnificent building like a Carème centrepiece. Its brilliant white plaster threatens snow-blindness. Their own house was a banqalah – a ‘bungalow’ – among the palms; despite the suggestion of colonial or English-suburban images, here the word means a guest-house. It was small but very grand, all blinding white lime-plaster like the Sultan’s palace; the upper floor was one large room surrounded by a loggia, the undersides of the arches picked out in the distinctive Hadrami eau-de-Nil. Downstairs was a tiny room in royal blue with a plunge pool, deliciously cold and swirling like a Jacuzzi when the pump was started to water the palm grove. The pool is exactly the same as those found in grand Georgian town-houses. One of the last Kathiri rulers was so smitten by the banqalah that he requisitioned it.
Linda had spent the afternoon, a Starkian one, with some nouveau-poor unmarried sharifahs (sayyid ladies) in Tarim. No sayyid husbands could be found for them, and marriage into the lower orders was unthinkable; so they spent their straitened spinsterhood in a complex of palaces joined by upper-floor bridges. They hardly ever left their houses.*
Just how frustrating strict endogamy can be is shown by the Hadrami reaction to news of the 1962 Revolution in San’a. While many Hadrami sayyids were unnerved, one observer reports that some spinsters of the al-Attas family in Huraydah greeted the expected collapse of the status quo with whoops of excitement: ‘We can get married now!’ In the event the old order has hardly changed, Marxist attempts to force marriages across social boundaries having met with implacable opposition, and the old proverb holds good: ‘The luck of a sharifah is blind. If she keeps chickens, the kites come and eat them. If she hangs out the washing, the sky clouds over. And if she loses her husband, she’ll never find another.’ The belief even used to be current that a non-sayyid who married a sharifah would be struck by leprosy.
We talked until late about the curious split personality of Hadramawt – parochialism and emigration, stagnation and progress, orthodoxy and heterodoxy – and decided that the polarities would never be reconciled. I went to bed and slept the sleep of the dead, as one does in Hadramawt (except in the Well of Barhut), not realizing until the morning that I was sharing my bed with a baby scorpion.
I set off early the next day to visit a prophet.
The night before, we had come up with a theory: it was precisely because the Hadramis had been conditioned to present a dour and monumental façade – like their houses – that they needed to let off steam occasionally – hence the festivities connected with Hud, the Prophet of God. Hud, who according to the genealogists was the great-grandson of Sam, is not merely a divinely sent messenger; he is also the father of Qahtan. I felt it only proper to pay my respects to the reputed progenitor of all the southern Arabs.
East of Tarim something changes. You cannot say it is the landscape, although the valley narrows slightly. The wadi’s name is different – al-Masilah, the Watercourse – but the same water flows in it. What is different is that civilization, in the sense of ancient urban culture, has been left behind. Down the great length of al-Masilah there are a few communities, at first quite sizeable, like Aynat, but in no way urban. For the rest of al-Masilah’s 150 miles there is nothing bigger than a hamlet. East of the point where the wadi meets the coast there are some more fair-sized settlements – Sayhut, Qishn, al-Ghaydah – but they are only overblown villages. Crossing the border into Omani territory, Salalah is a creation of the past two decades; before, it was a collection of small dwellings huddled round a fort. From Salalah all along the southern coast of Arabia there are no major settlements. Only when you turn the corner into the Gulf do you find places with any pretension to being urban; but even Muscat is tiny, a lapis-lazuli palace and a few other houses locked in the jaws of a bay between Portuguese forts, followed by a string of suburbs with no urban heart. Round the tortuous Musandam Peninsula and into the inner Gulf, all the emirates and shaykhdoms that cling to the shore are the recent and monstrous spawn of Western politicking and the Western thirst for oil. It is only at the head of the Gulf that, with al-Basrah and Baghdad, you come again to an ancient urban society. To fill the void, the Arabs built cities of the imagination, the cities of Ad and Thamud which were wiped off the earth for their corruption. Hud was the prophet who foresaw the destruction of Ad, and when urban Hadramis visit him they are reminded of what could happen to them. Leaving Tarim, they are venturing into the margins of an uncivilized world.
Some way past Tarim we turned off the road and headed for a small but dramatic outcrop like an island in the flood course. This was Hisn al-Urr, a castle of great antiquity probably constructed by Imru al-Qays’s people, Kindah. Such a site was no doubt in use long before, and long after; the massive walls are still intact. We clambered up and Jay, my travelling companion from San’a, posed in nearly immaculate memsahib white, parasol raised, on the summit of a bastion. The silence was overwhelming.
Suddenly the silence was broken, by a faint rhythm that turned into a clatter then a din. A helicopter came from the east, from nowhere. It circled once and was off up a side wadi that first amplified, then swallowed the noise. The silence ebbed back, stronger after its negation.
Unexpectedly, the road improved after al-Urr. Recent patching has made it one of the better ones in the Hadramawt interior, which wasn’t saying much. We had just missed the pilgrimage itself, but were benefiting from the annual maintenance of the track to Hud, paid for by the contributions of the pious.
Finally the tomb appeared under the southern escarpment, a gleaming ensemble of dome and prayer hall surrounded by a town. We dipped down across the watercourse, surprisingly deep, and stopped the car at the top of the far bank. Not only the tomb complex but the town itself were freshly plastered, the biscuit-coloured walls of houses finished off with brilliant waterproof nurah. And yet the place lacked the element which would have made it truly urban: people. It was empty, totally empty. The town is only inhabited for a few days around the pilgrimage, and wealthier Hadrami families maintain houses here for just this brief season. We had expected some delapidation, some evidence of the decline of the Hud ziyarah – the ‘visit’, or pilgrimage – during Marxist days, but there was none. It was as if a jinni had been commanded to build a city but had stopped short of populating it.
If at Hisn al-Urr the silence had been overwhelming, here it was unearthly. I realized that during our first stop there had in fact been sounds, a barely audible wild-track made by the wind and the little sandfalls caused by scuttling lizards. Since the appearance of the helicopter Jay and I had hardly spoken. Now, we tiptoed around. To make a sound would have been blasphemy. And yet, at our feet, was the evidence of mayhem, a litter of packaging from biscuits, cheese spread, fruit juice and, above all, from toys of a warlike and noisy nature: ‘Pump Action Shotgun with Dart – for ages 3 and up’, ‘Cap Gun Hero’, ‘Dynamic Cap Gun’, and ‘Mystery Action Wind-Up Helicopter�
��. Clearly the fairground aspect of the pilgrimage was still alive: Hud could still pull crowds.* I sat on a wall and wondered why.
Yemen is littered with the tombs of holy men and prophets, many of them visited at annual festivals. But none enjoys anything like the popularity of Hud; none is honoured by having an entire town built purely to accommodate pilgrims. The motives behind this extraordinary display of reverence had to be connected with Hud himself.
Hud and the Adites make several appearances in the Qur’an. The essence of the story is that the post-diluvian age of innocence had become increasingly flawed. The Adites, who were given wealth such as the world had never seen, refused to thank God for His blessings. Worse, they worshipped idols and tried to imitate Paradise by building fabulous cities like Iram of the Columns. The Prophet Hud warned them against such blasphemy, but was ignored. God therefore destroyed the Adites with a violent wind, a sandstorm of apocalyptic proportions.
Yemen- The Unknown Arabia Page 20