A mass of legend has grown around the story. One sub-plot says that before the final catastrophe, the Adites were attacked by a plague of ants. The Adites were giants, and the ants were accordingly scaled up, ‘the size of dogs,’ one commentator says, ‘each one big enough to unseat a rider from his horse and tear him limb from limb.’ The cliffs of Hadramawt were built by the Adites as platforms on which they would sit to keep out of the insects’ reach. Hud himself was a giant, which accounts in popular belief for the long stone ‘tail’ extending up the slope behind his tomb. Different writers give different measurements for the tail’s length. Like the stone circles in Britain which are said to be uncountable, Hud seems to be immeasurable.*
Another local tradition says that after the destruction of Ad, Hud was chased by some of the remnants of the Adites and cornered at a dead end, the wadi wall under which I was sitting. (The camel races held at pilgrimage time may be a commemoration of the chase.) The moment his pursuers caught up with him, the ground opened and swallowed him and his camel – all but the camel’s hump. This was petrified into the huge trapezoidal boulder built into the roof of the prayer hall. Appropriately for a people so attached to their land, their ancestor had been ingested by it.
It was tempting to see the Qur’anic story of Ad’s destruction in a sandstorm as an account of the climatic change that altered Arabia between five and seven thousand years ago. It was tempting, too, to see the connection between Hud and the camel as a folk-memory of how the South Arabians were able to overcome the problem of transport in a harsh, dry climate.* And it was even more tempting to think of the Qahtanis as incomers: many of the early historians describe them as muta’arribah, ‘Arabianized’, while the Adites are the aboriginal arab. But if Hud, as the Qur’an states, was himself an Adite, how could his son have been an incomer?
Archaeology has confirmed the existence of many of the alleged descendants of Qahtan – Saba, Himyar, Kahlan, Hamdan and so on – at least as groups, if not as individuals. Genealogy – the arrangement of these names in relation to one another and to earlier peoples – tends to be treated with extreme scepticism by modern historians. But it should never be dismissed: as a contemporary Yemeni historian and archaeologist has said, ‘While it may not be the voice of history, it is the echo of that voice.’
Whatever their relationship to the present-day Yemenis, a prehistoric people existed. In the sands between Hadramawt and Marib, and further east into Omani territory, they left traces of their passing in the form of thousands of finely worked stone arrowheads. These can be picked up around the shallow depressions which were once waterholes, where hunter-gatherers would shoot the rich herds of game that disappeared with desertification. Until someone stumbles across one of those gem-studded cities, it is these arrowheads that are the true memorials of Ad.
My visit to Hud had begun as a personal pilgrimage. I was going to pay my respects to the ancestor – at least in a symbolic sense – of the people to whom I had grown so close. My own ancestors were lost in a welter of Celts, a muddle of Angles; Hud was, for me, almost an adoptive grandfather figure. But the more I considered the few tantalizing facts about him given by the Qur’an, and the body of fable with which the Yemenis had fleshed him out, the further Hud the father of Qahtan receded into the mists – no, the impenetrable fog – of time.
The sun, and the whiteness of the buildings, seemed more intense. Jay had wandered off to explore the ghost-town. In front of me was a sort of triumphal staircase, its two wings joining above the prayer hall then rising like the climactic approach to the piano nobile of a Palladian mansion. I climbed slowly. The only sound was the throb of blood in my inner ear, which beat faster as I neared the top of the staircase. Everything was saturated with light; blinded, I had to feel my way past the pillars that supported the dome.
At last, I was at the holiest spot in Yemen.
When my eyes adjusted to the shade, I saw that the tomb was empty. There was no grave; not even a cenotaph. Just a few gim-crack incense-burners and empty ‘Chef’ ghee tins on a shelf, and a cleft in the rock where, they say, the ground failed to close completely. The lips of the cleft were smooth and slightly damp.
A seventh-century visitor said: ‘And there we saw two rocks next to one another, with a space in between big enough for someone thin to squeeze through. So I squeezed through. And there I saw a man upon a couch, very brown, with a long face and a thick beard. He had dried out on his couch. I felt part of his body and found it to be firm and uncorrupted. At his head I saw an inscription in Arabic: “I am Hud who believed in God. I sorrowed for the impiety of Ad and their refusal of God’s command.” ’
I had come in search of a corporeal Hud. It was a long way to his resting place here in the margins of Yemen, but the last stage, via the crack in the rock, was the longest. Hud the Prophet is there in the Qur’an. Hud the Progenitor, the grandfather of Yemen, is harder to reach; squeezing through to him would need a lot of faith.
The idea of a single ancestor is almost certainly a simplification; but if by personifying their origins in Hud and Qahtan the Yemenis have rationalized their own history, they have done no more than most other peoples. And while the roots of the family tree may be more complex, they are – for the moment – as deeply hidden as Hud.
East of Hud along al-Masilah there is another change, this time in the place names. The list of settlements, as given by Ingrams, runs: Qoz Adubi, Taburkum, Marakhai, Bat-ha, Dhahoma, Buzun, Semarma. Still physically in Arabia, you have fallen off the Arabic map, a map on which the toponyms are comfortingly familiar as far away as the north of Syria or the Atlantic coast of Morocco. It is like driving out of Newtown in the Welsh borders and suddenly seeing a sign for Llanwyddelan. A parallel with Welsh, or Gaelic, or Provençal, is not far-fetched. Here is a remnant of the days before what we know as Arabic took over Southern Arabia, still a Semitic language but one more closely related to that of the ancient epigraphic texts, pushed into a backwater of the peninsula. It is not that the Mahris who live here are a race distinct from other Yemenis; rather, being so isolated from contact with the North Arabian world where Arabic came from, they have held on to the old speech by a quirk of geography.
The Mahris also preserved until recently some characteristics of ancient South Arabian social organization, like the alternative matrilineal descent system. In this, for example, a child born out of wedlock was brought up by his maternal uncle: no stigma attached to him, and he enjoyed full rights in his mother’s clan. Other customs throw light on practices criticized by early Islam. Until recently, for instance, the women of Mahri Dhofar used to knot pieces of twine while heaping anathemas on the tribe’s enemies – an illustration of what the Qur’an refers to as ‘the women who blow upon knots’.*
In the whole vast expanse of more or less empty country where Hadramawt Governorate ends and al-Mahrah begins, al-Masilah is the prominent topographical feature. It is that rare thing in the Arabian Peninsula, a real river with hidden fishy pools, overhung with trees. The desiccated right angles of Wadi Hadramawt have been replaced by a softer landscape where you can lie on grass – grass! – and dangle your toes in a burbling stream that smells faintly musty, like last Christmas’s brazil nuts.
Down near the seaward end of al-Masilah, on featureless heights above a bend in the river, is the grave of another giant, Mawla al-Ayn. Unlike Hud, al-Ayn does not appear in the Islamic canon.
We bumped up a rough track and climbed out of the pick-up. The tomb was a barrow about eighteen feet long, and the ground around it was scattered with objects – a pierced lead seal, an ancient .303 cartridge case, a little package of sewn cloth – all half-embedded in the dust. The barrow itself was adorned with a few very rusted tin cans and an old hinge. My companions stood next to one another at the foot of the grave and recited the Fatihah – the opening chapter of the Qur’an – as one does when visiting the departed. Then they bent down, scrabbled up some dust from between the rocks of the tomb, and rubbed it into their h
air and headscarves. One of them gave me some dust and told me to do the same. ‘Barakah,’ he said, ‘a blessing.’
Later, in a teahouse in Sayhut, I asked a venerable-looking man, the sort who would know about such things, about Mawla al-Ayn. He could not add anything to what I had already been told, but suggested that I visit Ba Abduh of Qishn, the local authority on walis. ‘And on the way you could visit Asma al-Gharibah – she is a waliyyah, a holy woman. They say she was out at sea in a boat when she suddenly felt she was going to die. She told the crew and instructed them to throw her body into the waves. The men were shocked – she was a great waliyyah and should be given an honourable burial. But Asma said, “Do not be afraid. My body will find its own grave.” And it was as she said. Her body found its way to Itab, between here and Qishn. People still visit the spot by boat, and they leave coffee, sugar, flour and ghee there in case travellers pass by who are hungry or lost. And the strange thing is that by her grave a well of sweet water rises from the sea, from out of the salt.’
There was no time to visit Ba Abduh of Qishn, but I began to think about the story of the waliyyah and her miraculous well. The name of al-Ayn, the holy giant of al-Masilah, can mean ‘a spring of sweet water’. Further west, between Wadi Hadramawt and the sea, is the tomb of another holy man, Mawla Matar; Matar is an ancient personal name, but it is also ‘rain’. Then, in the Hadrami interior, is a fourth ancient grave, of the Prophet Sadif. Ingrams was told that he was another prophet of Ad, but he makes no appearance in the standard Islamic literature. There is still a tribe of the same name in Hadramawt, but the name of Sadif, the eponymous holy man, is yet another connection with water: sdf (the vowelling is uncertain) is the ancient technical term for a sluice gate controlling irrigation.
The four ancient holy people all share a link with water. The Islamic association of water with divine mercy is strong. Here, though, is a group of saints, clearly revered from ancient times, who seem in themselves to embody what, in a generally poor and parched land, is this most vital aspect of divine bounty.
Johnstone has pointed to a belief among the Mahrah and related groups in earth-spirits, a belief that their Arabic-speaking neighbours do not share, or have lost. It may be that in al-Ayn, Matar, Sadif and Asma al-Gharibah there is a faint and only sketchily Islamized memory of a chthonic cult connected with irrigation, a cult which goes back far beyond monotheism, beyond even the celestial religions of Hadramawt and Saba – to the very dawn of tillage, when the desert had smothered much of Arabia, the last hippopotamus was dust, and the Qahtani family tree was still struggling to take root.
Back in Say’un after the visit to Hud, I noticed a pungent and disagreeable smell. Awad saw me wrinkling my nose. ‘It’s this carpet. We found it in the old animal shed and … well, you can guess the state it was in. So I washed it and it got worse.’
I went and looked at the carpet, a magnificent Tabriz rug that had probably come via the Mecca pilgrimage. It was good enough to date to the time the Sultan requisitioned the house, but it was ripe with the stink of mildew and other odours.
Next day, equipped with brushes and half a dozen packets of soap powder, we set off for Tarim and the irrigation tank outside Qasr al-Qubbah, the Palace of the Dome, the ‘perfect Riviera villa’ where Ingrams stayed in the 1930s. Now it is a hotel, a little over-enthusiastically painted but, unlike most of the Tarim palaces, still in one piece.
I scrubbed away, up to my neck in grey and soapy water. Awad sat on the cement lip of the pool, giving the rug an occasional brush and frowning in concentration so that the lines on his brow echoed those on his cheeks – the deep parallel scars that identify a Nubian’s tribal origin. He was so much at home in Hadramawt that I was convinced he had Hadrami blood. It was not a farfetched idea, since among the conquering armies of Islam there were many Hadramis, and some of them had penetrated as far as Awad’s town of Dongola. But then, Awad is said to look at home in Texas, wearing cowboy boots and a stetson. So much for genealogy.
When the carpet was as clean as it would get, we hung it on an overflow pipe where it glistened in the sunlight filtering through the palms. I joined Awad on the edge of the pool and sat drying off. With the light and shade, and the pink and yellow cupola of Qasr al-Qubbah emerging from a sea of green with the tawny cliffs behind, it was like sitting in a Persian miniature.
The reverie was shattered by a high-pitched buzzing from along the track. It got louder until the source of the sound appeared: two very suntanned Westerners in shorts, riding four-wheeled motor cycles. They slewed round the corner, stopped in a cloud of dust, and dismounted next to us. The first one, who had a grey beard and a body like a grizzly, grunted a ‘Hi’; then, as his eye caught Awad’s tribal scars, a look of childlike wonderment came over his features. ‘Hey, what’s wrong with your face? You … you been in a fight with a tiger or something?’
Awad patiently explained the history and significance of tribal markings. The two quad riders listened with raised eyebrows. Outside the exchange, I considered the elements of the scene: a nearly naked and very white Brit; a ritually cicatrized Nubian who sounded like a Texan; two Texans working for a drilling contractor up on the jawl; a lemon and lime and raspberry mud palace. There was no question that the Americans were the most exotic.
Later, waiting for the Aden plane at al-Mukalla Airport, I was able to observe Homo petrolensis in his natural environment. The airport used to be deserted. Now, daily, it echoed with the voices of half a dozen nationalities, Egyptian, Palestinian, Lebanese, French, British, American. But it didn’t really matter where they came from. They all had the same steak-fed physiques, ballgame voices and expensive wrist accoutrements. Whatever the nationality, oil smooths over national differences and lubricates communication.
These two, though, had been temporarily displaced. I tried to picture where they had just come from. Somewhere, I suppose, up on the jawl where signposts with numbers point into the mist.
The pipeline which carries oil from the Hadramawt fields to the coast, opened in September 1993, arrives at the sea east of Shuhayr. Here, men in boiler suits and hard hats do unfathomable jobs on a desolate bluff, surrounded by a high fence and permanently blazing arc lights. It all looks like one of those evil-empire training camps that get blown up at the end of James Bond films. Most of its inmates are unaware of their place in the continuum of South Arabian trading history of which al-Shihr, a short distance further east, is a reminder.
The once-great city exported, according to a Chinese visitor of the twelfth century, frankincense, ambergris, pearls, opaque glass, rhino horn, ivory, coral, putchuk, myrrh, dragon’s blood, asafoetida, liquid storax, galls and rosewater. Al-Shihr, however, having like Aden ‘a great trade … with the Moors of Malabar and Cambaya’, caught the eye of the early sixteenth-century Portuguese, who raided it several times. At a spot by the shore, the tombs of the Seven Martyrs killed by the Franks in 1522 are still to be seen. They were resurrected in recent years, to become the first entries in the PDRY anti-imperialist role of honour. Ninety years on a Dutchman, van der Broeke, followed the Portuguese. His intentions were more peaceful, and he set up a trade mission and left behind three of his colleagues to learn Arabic by what would now be called the total immersion method. He did not call again until three years later.
But al-Shihr’s fortunes declined. Not long afterwards a Venetian described it, with Johnsonian disdain, as ‘a desert place where both Men and Cattle are forced to live on Fish’. It was overtaken as the main port of Hadramawt by al-Mukalla, although there are still a few memories of its greatness. You enter the town past a whitewashed gateway flanked by little cannon; bereft of its walls, the gate stands shut on a traffic island, a miniature Arc de Triomphe. Inside the town, carved doors and crumbling plaster speak of links with Goa, Lamu and Zanzibar, while a figure of astonishing sculptural ineptitude – it could represent Hiawatha or Hereward the Wake – rises above a fishy miasma to commemorate, presumably, more recent events.
Do
wn on the beach the remains of another part of Arabian maritime tradition can be seen in a few small abandoned craft, the last of the sewn boats. Coir was brought from the Maldives – ruled in the Middle Ages by Yemenis – to bind together the vessels’ planks with enormous cross-stitches. Sewn boats are mentioned in Classical sources, and later writers attempted to explain the reasons behind this method of construction: the medieval scholar al-Mas’udi said that, unlike the Sea of al-Rum (the Mediterranean), the Ethiopian Sea (the Indian Ocean) dissolves nails; the traveller Ibn Battutah thought that sewn vessels withstood collisions better than nailed ones; while the late fifteenth-century Rhinelander Arnold von Harff believed that the Arabian Sea contained magnetic rocks which would suck all iron out of a boat’s timbers. Now, in al-Shihr, the beached hulls are dumps for hundreds of rotting fish heads.
Of all the travellers’ tales emanating from Yemen, one of the strangest collections comes under the entry for al-Shihr in Yaqut’s great geographical encyclopaedia. It concerns the nisnas, whom we have already encountered as a race of men whose faces grow out of their chests, brought to Yemen by the Himyari ruler He of the Frights. Yaqut’s nisnas are different: they have only one of each member – one ear, one eye, one arm, one leg, and so on – and pogo at tremendous speed around the al-Shihr hinterland. One story tells of their stupidity.
Some people of the area went out hunting nisnas and captured one – on the hop, so to speak. They roasted and ate him under a tree where two of his companions were hiding. When one of these said to the other, ‘Look! They’re eating him!’, the hunters heard the voice and netted him as well. ‘You should have kept your mouth shut!’ they laughed, at which the third nisnas blurted out, ‘Well, I haven’t said anything …’ They caught him and butchered him too. Another tale reveals that the nisnas, although stupid, are accomplished versifiers. Some Shihris were joined on a hunt by an outsider, and when they caught a nisnas the victim extemporized a lament for himself:
Yemen- The Unknown Arabia Page 21