Yemen- The Unknown Arabia

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  We asked how much he charged. Salim tugged his beard, the gesture that means ‘Shame on you!’, and named a price less than the cost of a couple of afternoons’ qat.

  ‘And what about food?’

  He looked us up and down. ‘Can you eat what we eat?’

  I tugged an imaginary beard. Salim chuckled and we said goodbye, until Wednesday evening.

  On our way back to the port we shared maritime experiences. I had pottered around the cliffs of Donegal in a skiff and had spent a pleasant weekend pub-crawling the East Anglian coast on a Cornish crabber. In the East Indies, Kevin had sailed in a Bugis craft of immaculately polished teak with a prow like a stiletto and a cushion-strewn poop. I could picture him, lolling on a burnished throne, a pipe, perhaps, of opium in his hand.

  ‘Don’t expect anything too smart,’ I warned. In the early seventeenth century the Sultan of Suqutra had ‘a handsome Gally and Junk of Suratt’. But that was in the golden age of Arab seafaring. I felt Kevin might be harbouring grand hopes. ‘And the loo will be a tea-chest with a shitty hole, lashed over the back end.’

  Down on the beach once more, we scanned the water. There was no sign of an ocean-going vessel. Perhaps we’d got the day wrong. ‘He did say Tuesday evening, didn’t he?’ Kevin asked.

  ‘No. He said Wednesday evening. But that means the eve of Wednesday, which is Tuesday evening. I checked with him and he said, “Yes, I mean Tuesday.” ’

  ‘You don’t think he meant the eve of Tuesday? If he did, then we’ve missed the boat …’

  A child was standing in the shallows, lazily casting a weighted net into the water again and again. We walked over to him, fearing the worst. ‘Where’s the nakhudhah Salim bin Sayf?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’ He cast the net again. ‘But that’s his sambuq out there.’ The boy pointed to a boat that seemed little bigger than a hawri. The only difference was that it has a single forward-raking mast. The hull was painted red and yellow.

  ‘That’s the one that goes to Suqutra?’

  The boy stopped in mid-cast, looked at us strangely, and nodded.

  The seas around Suqutra are notorious for their unpredictable winds and mountainous swell. I remembered reading an old verse, in a book of cautionary tales for sea captains, which spoke of the perils of navigating between the island and Cape Hafun – the tip of the Horn of Africa:

  Between Suqutra and Hafun’s head,

  Pray your course be never set …

  Somewhere out in the 260 miles of open ocean that separated us from Suqutra, Leviathan was licking his many pairs of lips.

  We tracked down Salim bin Sayf at a wedding party. The whole town was invited and the main street had been turned into a concert-hall. The band sat on a stage in front of a painted backdrop showing an idyllic bay. Not far behind that there was an idyllic bay, not that you could see it in the dark. The music had a hillbilly beat, and young men came to the front in twos and threes to perform a hip- and shoulder-wiggling shuffle.

  Kevin and I watched for a while then strolled back to the beach. The sea was black, but in the glow from the town slender forms of beached hawris could just be made out. Knots of men sat in the sand, chatting and smoking; others had wrapped themselves in sheets and were sleeping. We were joined by a middle-aged man who introduced himself as Muhammad Ba Abbad. Muhammad worked as a surveyor in the Emirates but was a native of the town who knew the sea as well as anyone. We told him we thought the sambuq was a bit on the small side.

  He laughed. ‘Actually it’s one of the bigger ones. But don’t worry, the dangerous season’s over. It begins with the star of al-Nat’h in the horn of Aries, and ends with al-Ramih, Arcturus. They say idha ma natahsh, ramah, “If it hasn’t butted, it’ll kick.” This year the sea kicked – the storms came at the back end of the dangerous period. It will be calm for you, in sha Allah.’ Now, at least, it was calm, the sea susurrating almost inaudibly on the strand. ‘But you’ll still be puking from the smell of sif.’ Sif, used for protecting wooden hulls against rot, is made from ‘the innards of sharks, simmered in earthen pots until the flesh dissolves and turns to oil’, according to a medieval Adeni recipe. Eventually, the crew arrived and Muhammad wished us a safe voyage. We boarded a rocking hawri and set out into the black, the sounds of the wedding fading behind us.

  On board the sambuq, which rolled even in this calm sea, a paraffin lamp was lit. A smear of light revealed a deck crowded with boxes, oildrums, ropes, anchors and bodies. There were fifteen other passengers, already embarked and asleep. That made twenty-three of us in an open thirty-five-foot boat, and the voyage would last two nights and a day.

  The nakhudhah Salim was last on board. Bare-chested, issuing orders, he had somehow grown bigger and younger. A crewman skipped below deck and cranked the engine to life; Salim produced a compass sitting on a bed of woodshavings in a twine-bound box. He lined the box up with the mast and secured it with a few nails banged into the deck. At one in the morning we weighed anchor and headed, on a course of no degrees, for the ocean.

  Gradually, activity subsided. The crewmen joined the rest of the sleeping bundles. Kevin stretched out too, his head cushioned on a tin of Telephone Brand ghee. Only a small space was left, next to the nakhudhah, and I propped myself on the gunwale and watched the lights of the town grow more distant.

  Salim told me about his family. His father and his ancestors had been skippers here for as long as anyone could remember. His mother was a Suqutri from Nujad on the island’s south coast. The lamp was turned low. Salim kept his eyes on the stars. A cord, looped round the hewn tiller, tightened and then slackened in his fingers.

  ‘Nujad is where they come down the mountains to pasture the flocks. Lubnan, my father calls it.’ Lebanon, the land rich in milk. He refolded the tarpaulin he was sitting on and wrapped himself in a large striped blanket. ‘They make these in Suqutra. You see, everything comes from their flocks – milk, butter, cheese, wool, meat.’

  ‘What about fishing?’

  ‘There’s some. The real Suqutris are bad sailors.’

  I looked back to where the town had been, and gone. Three in the morning. The painted backdrop of sea would be lying rolled up. The real sea under us was more jelly than liquid. Blackcurrant jelly. The bride would be lying, deflowered. Tenderly, I wondered, or mechanically? Beneath me the diesel thumped yet, somehow, did not disturb the calm.

  ‘That’s why we Hadramis marry Suqutri girls. It puts some salt in their blood. I’ve got a wife on the mainland and a wife in Nujad.’

  I stretched out, feet hanging over the engine, head next to the compass.

  ‘Look!’ Salim whispered.

  There, to starboard, a pair of porpoises were shadowing the sambuq. They leapt, silent and ghostly in the starlight, disappearing with a flicker of phosphorescence at the end of each parabola.

  Salim tapped my shoulder. ‘Listen: my father, when he was young, was out fishing with a friend. They were in a hawri, a long way out from the shore. Suddenly the boat turned over. It was a dolphin that did it, a big one. Anyway, the boat was sinking and it was too far to swim.’ He tightened the cord on the tiller. ‘But the dolphin saw what he’d done and came to them. He took them on his back and stayed by the boat until they’d baled it out. Then they got back in and returned to land. Glory be to the Creator!’

  The porpoises had gone. Again I stretched out and began slipping away from consciousness.

  ‘When you go to sea,’ I heard Salim say, ‘the Angel of Death follows you.’

  Salim was still at the helm when I awoke. Kevin was sitting upright, rubbing his eyes. ‘I’m bursting for a piss,’ he said. ‘What are you supposed to do? I can’t see one of those boxes.’ One of the crew, on cue, showed how it was done. Kevin changed into a futah. ‘Keep an eye on me.’

  He picked his way across the sleepers towards the prow, squatted on a greasy gunwale and, gripping a stanchion, hitched up his futah. It took a long time. ‘God!’ he hissed, when he got back, ‘What do
you do when it’s rough?’

  But it was as calm as ever. The sea curdled where the prow cut through it, then recongealed in the sambuq’s wake. An odd flying fish shot out of the water like a spat pip. In such a sea, ‘without a stir, without a ripple, without a wrinkle – viscous, stagnant, dead’, perhaps at this very spot, Conrad’s Lord Jim had abandoned the doomed Patna and her eight hundred pilgrims.

  Over to port a ship was approaching, a phantom, silvery in the rising sun. Salim steered across her course. No sound came from her, though the decks and companionways were packed with people, standing silent and immobile as statuary: ‘there were people perched all along the rails, jammed on the bridge in a solid mass; hundreds of eyes stared, and not a sound was heard … as if all that multitude of lips had been sealed by a spell’. God knows, it was the Patna herself. It was the only other vessel we were to see.

  Our six-ton sambuq, the Kanafah (no one ever used the name, and even Salim had to think before he remembered it), had been built a few years ago in al-Shihr. Below the waterline the hull was of teak. For the rest a cheaper hardwood, jawi, ‘Javan’, was used, with pine planking for the deck. Powered by a 33-horsepower Japanese engine, she was also lateen-rigged like all Arab craft but her sail would only be used in emergencies. ‘Diesel engines started coming in in the mid-fifties,’ Salim said. ‘By about twenty years ago they’d taken over completely. If we were under sail it would usually take about five days to reach Suqutra. In weather like this, much longer.’ I remembered reading about the leisurely pre-diesel voyages of the great ocean-going baghlahs of the Arabian Gulf, when the ship’s carpenter would have enough time to build a smaller vessel on the main deck, to sell when the baghlah reached her destination; and I had a vision of a series of ever-diminishing carpenters building ever-diminishing boats, each on the deck of the other, and so on ad infinitum in a windless sea.

  Ten feet below the surface, red-shelled crabs, dozens of them, were heading towards the mainland, slowly, as if through aspic. They had a long way to go.

  The cook, a pudgy boy, appeared from a hatch towards the fore with a pile of pancake bread and a thermos of milky tea. Most of the passengers who had not already risen surfaced at the smell of cooking, and a queue formed to pray in the single free bit of deck. A couple of others slept on. One, I was sure, I saw for the first time only when we dropped anchor off Suqutra.

  The passengers fell into two groups. There were the outsiders and semi-outsiders, like Hadid bin Bakhit bin Ambar, another Hadrami with a Suqutri mother. Most Arabic personal names have a meaning, like ‘Handsome’ or ‘Faith’. Hadid’s meant ‘Iron son of Lucky son of Ambergris’.* Hadid had lived in Kuwait and was going to spend a month in Suqutra, his first visit in seven years. Of the other non-Suqutris, one was a crabby old Mahri trader with jug-handle ears that stuck out from under a white crocheted cap. He had a store on the island and most of the cargo below deck, sacks of flour and sugar, was his.

  The Suqutri passengers were silent men with wild, auburn-tinted hair, wrapped in huge Kashmir shawls and looking queasy. If they did speak, it was in undertones, all aspirants and sibillants like the soughing of the wind in treetops. It reminded me of Hebridean Gaelic. To a speaker of Arabic, the Suqutri language sounds like a distant and dyslexic cousin. But occasional words are familiar and, in time, I realized that it shares with the Raymi and Yafi’i dialects of Yemeni Arabic the past-tense k-ending, another revenant from the ancient languages. Island and mountains, cut-off places: the Celtic fringe of Arabia. ‘There are still some Suqutris in the interior’, said Hadid, ‘who can’t speak Arabic. Thirty years ago, perhaps ninety per cent knew hardly any.’

  One of the Suqutris spent most of his time as the sambuq’s figurehead, his legs wrapped around the bowsprit, singing. It was a four-bar melody, full of quarter-tones and flicked grace-notes, repeated, da capo, without let-up, to the rhythmic chug of the diesel. Salim said it was poetry. With a wavy mane of hair, a high forehead joining his nose in a single arc, and flaring nostrils, he looked like one of the Trafalgar Square lions. There was, too, something archaic in the profile, an eerie resemblance to the early Sabaean bronzes.

  ‘There are some strange-looking people in Suqutra,’ Salim told us. ‘The mountain tribes don’t mix much with outsiders.’ I remembered the people described by Sir Thomas Roe, who anchored off Suqutra in 1615 with his ships the Dragon, the Lion and the Peppercorn on his way to visit the Mogul Emperor of India. The Suqutris, he said, were divided into three groups, Arabs, slaves and ‘savage people, poor, leane, naked, with long haire, eating nothing but Rootes, hiding in bushes, conversing with none, afraid of all, without houses, and almost as savage as beasts, and by conjecture the true ancient Naturals of this Iland’.

  Hadid didn’t agree that all the mountain people were shy of strangers. ‘There’s a place in the east called Shilhal’, he said, ‘where they’ve got fair skin and blue eyes. Just like you nasranis. You tell me where they got them from.’

  ‘Greeks?’ I suggested, ‘Shipwrecked mariners, Portuguese?’

  ‘Oh, they’re probably Crusaders,’ Kevin said ironically. ‘They seem to have got everywhere else.’

  We made a mental note to visit the nasrani-like clan of Shilhal.

  The sun crossed the sky, planishing the surface of the ocean like a coppersmith’s hammer. The Kanafah seemed over-crewed. One of the seamen put out a line, but nothing bit all day. Another, whose father had been a nakhudhah running paraffin to al-Mukalla for the Provençal-Adeni merchant Besse, lashed his shirt to another line and threw it over the side for the sea to wash. The only one who seemed fully occupied was the cook, who popped up again from below deck, like a pantomime genie through a trapdoor, bearing a great plate of rice and something he’d cut off an object hanging from the mast. If the object looked like anything it was a bit of old tractor tyre, but it turned out to be dried shark. After lunch I curled up in the bows and fell asleep to the song of the figurehead.

  Sleeping was the main occupation on board. Kevin had fallen in with the rhythm and settled down for the night soon after evening prayers. Salim was at the helm again and I joined him, curious to learn more about techniques of navigation and whether much knowledge had been passed down from its heyday among the Arabs, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. During this period, the celebrated pilot Ahmad ibn Majid led the field in a science in which mnemonic verses played the part of charts, and nakhudhahs held international conferences to discuss abstruse points on winds and stars.

  ‘We all know Ibn Majid,’ Salim explained. ‘Nakhudhahs consider him their ancestor. But now we rely on the compass. See, we started on a course of no degrees. Now it’s 135 degrees. By the time we reach Suqutra we‘ll be following a course of 150 degrees. If we went in a straight line, the current would take us into the ocean.’

  ‘And if there were no compass?’ To describe, without one, this huge westward-curving trajectory and arrive at a particular spot on a small land-mass in a vast ocean seemed an impossibility, like shooting an arrow at a tiny and invisible target. The sambuq had no radar or radio, and I imagined us overshooting Suqutra, ending up in Madagascar, or wandering the Indian Ocean far from the shipping lanes until the fuel ran out and we were carried past Reunion and the Prince Edward Islands, on and on, towards the ice floes of Antarctica.

  ‘Ah, every nakhudhah knows the stars. Those two point to Mirbat in Oman; those, to Qishn; then’, he went on, running his finger across the sky, ‘Sayhut, Qusay’ir, al-Shihr, al-Mukalla, Aden, Djibouti, Berbera, Abdulkuri, Qalansiyah, Hadibu. Every three hours you must change to a new pair of stars as the old ones fall away.’

  I lay back, leaving Salim at the tiller, wrapped in his woollen shamlah. The old familiar constellations above me were rearranging themselves. Where the Plough, Orion and the Little Bear had been, there was now an array of new signs above like the overhead gantries at a motorway interchange, but on a cosmic scale.

  I was awakened by the dawn call to prayer, which Hadid chanted befo
re the mast in a thin voice as penetrating as an alarm clock’s bleep. A change had come over the sea. The dead, viscous surface was now alive. We were still six or seven hours off Suqutra, but even this far away the invisible island was loosing its aeolian forces on the water. One by one passengers and crew relieved themselves, abluted and prayed. Kevin and I were both unnerved by the business of urinating. Over breakfast Hadid told us that the sea off Suqutra was always za’lan, angry (the dictionary definition is ‘Lively. Writhing in hunger’). ‘This is nothing. Often the waves come over the deck. I’ve done this journey many times, and I’ve usually been soaked from start to finish.’

  Throughout the morning the unseen presence before us made itself known by great banks of clouds and a headwind that brought boobies and terns with it. I imagined we might scent Suqutra before we saw it. Hadid laughed at the idea. ‘If you smell anything, it’ll be goats. There’s still a bit of frankincense-collecting, but the trade’s almost disappeared.’

  ‘What about ambergris?’ Kevin asked.

  ‘I’ve never found any,’ said Hadid, ‘but they say that about twenty years ago a Suqutri came across a huge lump on the beach. He thought it was tar from a steamer and used it to waterproof the roof of his hut.’ He shook his head slowly, looking towards the queasy men in their shawls. Suqutra was beginning to seem a sort of paradise on earth, I said, a land abounding in milk and meat where precious gums dripped from trees and the sea cast up costly unguents unbidden.

  ‘Paradise …’, said Hadid, smiling at the clouds, ‘paradise without doctors or medicines, without communications for half the year. It’s only you nasranis who find paradise in this world.’