The crossing of Suqutra to Hadibu, a direct distance of around 24 miles, took four hours. It could have been quicker, but Ali had to stop time and again to unblock his petrol filter or beef up the truck’s sagging springs with wooden wedges, banged in with stones. The steering had an alarming leftward bias but no one else seemed worried. Our fellow passengers included an old man with a beard; it was patriarchally long and brightly hennaed, and with his tawny face and green crocheted cap he looked like an upside-down traffic light. A slightly younger old man had a thorn deep in his foot, and whenever we stopped he tried to excavate it, groaning, with an iron spike. There was also a young man in cool-dude denims and shades who had a Nujad mother and an Adeni father. The cargo included several engorged goatskins. These, Ali explained, contained dates which had been stoned, left in the sun for a fortnight, then trodden underfoot. The necks of the skins oozed slightly and attracted flies, as did the younger old man’s foot.
We crossed the plain, heading for a break in the cliffs. Once through this, the scenery changed abruptly. The road followed a perennial stream lined with little date palms, while ranks of bottle trees marched across the slopes above. The place was full of dragonflies and pink-breasted pigeons; at intervals, herons stood staring into the water.
A series of steep switchbacks took us to a high plateau beneath the watershed. Here, there was another sudden change of scenery. The background was dominated by great humps of mountains, covered in green except where granite outcrops thrust through a scanty topsoil. Look upwards and you were in the Scottish Highlands, the Cairngorms, say, complete with shielings and thatched stone croft houses. Lower your gaze, and the vision was broken: the burns below were filled not with rowan and ash but with palms, and the foreground was a gravelly plain studded with euphorbia. It was like being in two places at once; or in Dictionary Land.
We followed another watercourse down to the eastern end of the Hadibu Plain, a great theatre crossed by wadis and backed on the south by a wall of gigantic granite spires, the ‘raggie mountains’ noted by Sir Thomas Roe. I remembered Wellsted’s drawing: it had not been fanciful. Two of the spires appeared to be joined by a bridge. Altogether, it was a most unlikely skyline.
Hadibu itself is a functional place. Its buildings are uniformly cuboid, except for the Communications Office, an edifice in late twentieth-century quasi-San’ani style with coloured glass fanlights. It was a reminder of where central power resides; architecturally, it was wholly out of place, and at the time it wasn’t even working as there was no fuel to power the generator. We cadged our way into the government rest-house. Some of its fittings had come from a wrecked German freighter. It had all the charm of a reform-school dormitory, and little of the hygiene. Goats wandered, farting, along the dark corridors.
‘That’s funny,’ said Kevin. ‘I’m sure I can hear a circular saw.’ Then we realized what the sound was: mosquitoes, clouds of them. It was still daytime. The whine was continual, and at sunset it rose in a crescendo that possessed your skull. The best feature of the rest-house was a powerful shower, but even under this there was no escape from the mosquitoes, which had developed the ability to fly between the streams of water.
We were surprised to discover some other nasrani guests – a pair of Frenchmen. When they said they were entomologists we thought they were joking. In fact they were deadly serious – a glimpse inside their room revealed a row of killing-bottles and swathes of netting. They were also equipped with the latest footwear and rucksacks and, according to their Suqutri guide, ate nothing but pills.
Hadibu’s main interest lies in its being a meeting place for all the elements that make up Suqutri society. There were traders with mainland ancestry, fishermen, and mountain badw with bare feet, knotty calves and shocks of hair; but no blue eyes. Many of the town’s resident population are negroes descended from sultanic slaves, and one of these took us to the palace of the last ruler, Sultan Isa bin Ali.
‘Palace’ is a misnomer for such a modest building. All the same, its former inhabitants had a distinguished history. As long ago as the time of the Periplus, Suqutra was subject to the King of the Incense Land, an area which overlapped with much of the territory under the later Mahri Sultanate of Qishn and Suqutra. The sultanic family themselves, the Al Afrar, are of Himyari origin and had been prominent at least since medieval times. The family tree, however, was very nearly extirpated in the sixteenth century when the expansionist Hadrami ruler Badr Bu Tuwayraq murdered all the Al Afrar males but one, as yet unborn. The child’s mother preserved some of his dead father’s blood and, when he was old enough, showed it to him to instill the spirit of revenge. Grown to manhood, he took a vow of celibacy which he would only break if he defeated the Hadramis. He also refused to shave, and as a result became known as Abu Shawarib, Father of Moustaches. Eventually, the blood feud was successful and in celebration Abu Shawarib had his first shave at Friday prayers in the mosque of Qishn. His vow of celibacy he broke more privately, and his descendants ruled on the Mahri mainland and Suqutra for the next four hundred years.
The last sultan was – despite his martial ancestry – a mild and undistinguished-looking man. He bothered little about the more modern accoutrements of state. It is said that, in the absence of a sultanic seal, he stamped the scraps of paper which did for his subjects’ passports with the bottom of a coffee cup. Photographs taken during a British administrator’s visit in the early 1960s show him peering warily from beneath an enormous Saudi iqal, surrounded by a handful of courtiers and flunkeys. These included the executioner, a huge slave with severe scrotal elephantiasis. The Sultan’s procreative powers were considerable: one of Naumkin’s informants, a daughter of Sultan Isa who now works as a midwife, stated that she had one full brother and twenty-six half-siblings on the island alone, not counting those who had emigrated after 1967. The Al Afrar were making up for nearly getting wiped out.
As we neared the sea, the houses, built of coral stone, became more ramshackle and lost themselves among the palm groves. The palms, in turn, ran into the water in a maze of dead-ends and paths where we had to wade through little estuaries. Some of the houses had miniature gardens growing a few tobacco plants, carefully fenced off from the omnipresent goat. There was a perplexing lack of demarcation between land and sea, an amphibious mingling of humus and spume.
Back in the main street a crowd had gathered, and I squeezed in to see what had drawn them. A man was butchering an upturned turtle, slicing round the carapace as if opening a can. In deference to Islamic precepts he had cut its throat, but inexpertly, and every so often the turtle gulped and waved its flippers. There was a strong sea-smell, and I remembered the pale, graceful creatures gliding beneath the sambuq off Sitayruh. They would eat the meat; the shell, which in the days of the Periplus would have been exported to the cabinet-makers of Rome or Alexandria, was going to be the roof of a chicken coop.
The ‘raggie mountains’ beckoned, and next day we crossed the arena of the Hadibu Plain. At the foot of the great shattered grandstand that backed it the going got rougher; the Hajhir peaks, said to be one of the oldest bits of exposed land on Earth, are of granite, but with a limestone topping that has crumbled and fallen like icing from a badly cut wedding cake. Fragments as big as houses, riddled by erosion, were home to shaggy goats which sat eyeing us from their niches like dowagers in opera boxes.
We made for a gap far above. As we climbed, the vegetation grew denser, streams appeared in unexpected clefts, and now and again one of us would exclaim at some new discovery a spider’s web constructed on perfect Euclidean principles or a caterpillar in poster-paint colours. But it was the plants that fascinated us most. Whatever the Darwinian equations in force here, they had produced fantastical results. Nondescript bushes erupted into bunches of asparagus, trees turned into organ pipes then chimney-sweeps’ brooms, begonia-like flowers sprang from pairs of enormous conjoined boxers’ ears, whisky stills grew on the rocky crags. It was the botanical equivalent of Dictionary Land, the
semantic jungle.
Sap, juice, resin and gum exude from branches and leaves so fleshy they often suggest the animal more than the vegetable. Several species are edible. There are tamarinds, grape-like berries, wild pomegranates and wild oranges. The last are a long way from their sweet mainland cousins: eating one is like biting into a battery. Frankincense and myrrh made Suqutra an important outpost of the thuriferous mainland regions in ancient times, and other species produce everything from incense-flavoured chewing gum to a kind of birdlime; Douglas Botting, leader of an Oxford University expedition to the island in the 1950s, noted that the juice of a certain euphorbia causes baldness, and was used to punish convicted prostitutes. Medicinal plants abound and the Suqutris use them regularly to treat scorpion stings, rashes and wounds. For over two millennia, one of the island’s most famous products was the Suqutri aloe. Its sap gained popularity in seventeenth-century Europe with the rise of the East India trading companies; it was exported, packed in bladders, to the relief of many a costive Restoration bowel or itching pile.
Nearer the crest, the vegetation thinned. Limestone gave way to naked granite. Suddenly, above us and sharply outlined against a brilliant sky, there appeared what at first seemed to be a line of giant conical funnels, their narrow ends stuck in the skyline. The upturned cones resolved as we got closer into branches, topped with spiky leaves and bursting out of a central trunk like fan-vaulting in a chapter house. Even after all the other weird flora, the sight was startling: it is with good reason that this, the dragon’s blood tree, has become Suqutra’s unofficial emblem. Botanically, and by one of those evolutionary quirks that makes the rock hyrax a cousin of the elephant, Dracaena cinnabari is a member of the Lily family. The common name, according to Pliny, derives from blood shed during a fight between an elephant and a dragon, from which the trees sprang. The story seems to be drawn from Hindu mythology, which might explain the Periplus’s reference to ‘cinnabar, that called Indian which is collected in drops from trees’. Perhaps in the Arabic name, dam al-akhawayn, the blood of the two brothers, there is an echo of Castor and Pollux, the twin sons of Zeus whose epithet, Dioskurides, is by coincidence the Classical geographers’ name for Suqutra. The etymology, complex as it is, seems to bear out other evidence of the island’s early trade. Dragon’s blood was formerly in great demand as an ingredient of various dyes, including those used in violin varnish and the palates of dentures; medieval European scribes made ink from it, and Chinese cabinet-makers used it in the famous cinnabar lacquer. Now, consumption is almost entirely local – the Suqutris use it to decorate pots and as a remedy for eye and skin diseases.
I climbed one of the larger trees, perhaps twenty feet tall to the flat bristly top of its canopy. Its smooth bark was marked by scabs where the resin had oozed out and coagulated. In one of the highest branches I found a tiny lump that had been missed by the harvesters. It was globular and brick-red, the outside matt, the inner face glassy where it had been stuck to the tree. I turned it over in my palm; then remembered the blood of the Arabian dragon in my father’s bureau.
On the far side of the col a valley opened out. We were at the head of Wadi Ayhaft, which drains down to the north coast west of Hadibu. The deep green of montane forest was framed by glittering granite. It was late afternoon, and we chose a campsite in a grassy meadow near a spring. The first mosquitoes were biting, and as I set up camp – by spreading an opened-out grain sack – Kevin went off in search of dead wood. A fire, he said, would keep the insects away. Half an hour later, he’d collected a good pile and arranged it into kindling, twigs and larger branches.
‘Where’s your lighter?’
I looked in my pockets. It wasn’t there. I hunted round the campsite. ‘I must have dropped it when I climbed the tree.’ We looked up to the ridge, disappearing in the failing light.
‘Forget it,’ Kevin said. He was silent for a long time.
The first thing I saw when I awoke at dawn, stiff with cold and dew, was my lighter lying in the grass beside me. Strangely, we were unbitten except for my left eyelid, which had swollen almost shut. I tried unsuccessfully to prop it open with a twig. Visual memories of that morning are therefore monocular, as if the mountains had been flattened into a painted set. But reality became painfully three-dimensional as we tried to climb the far side of the valley, making for a plateau that lay above. There seemed to be no path, and in the end the gradient and dense undergrowth defeated us and we retraced our steps.
Further down the wadi we rested in a dappled clearing between silver-barked trees, where the air was scented with mint and aniseed and the river tumbled below. It had the intense clarity of a Pre-Raphaelite landscape. But on closer inspection, everything was wrong. Upward-pointing leaves became fingers, as though a fleeing nymph had been caught, supplicating, in mid-metamorphosis. Brush your hand against that plant and it stung like a wasp. It was Arcadia but, again, unknown and disturbing. A feral goat came and watched us through slitty irises.
The valley broadened into parkland, but with great gnarled tamarinds in place of oaks. It was strangely empty. Not yet the Suqutri winter, the herds were still up in their high pastures. In one tree someone had hung a dead wildcat, not much bigger than a fireside tom but with powerful kid-killing claws. Upside down, with its face desiccated into an eternal smirk, it was a horrible parody of the Cheshire Cat.
Although it has the advantage of being totally dogless,* Suqutra’s mammalian wildlife falls short of its flora. The most interesting large mammal is the civet cat – not a cat but a member of the mongoose family. The Suqutri version is Viverricula indica, also known as the rasse. Civet, an ingredient of perfumes, is obtained in Suqutra by capturing the animal in a cage and then stimulating it until it produces a buttery secretion from a sac near its genitalia; it is then released to stagger off into the bush, exhausted but little wiser, as it will soon be caught again. We were curious to watch the operation, but civet production has declined in recent years and we drew a blank. Probably it was never as highly organized in Suqutra as elsewhere. A French physician, M. Poncet, mentions in his A Voyage to Aethiopia of 1709 that the people of Emfras, in the Gondar region, kept civet catteries up to a hundred strong: ‘once a week they scrape of [sic] an unctious matter which issues from the body with the sweat. ’Tis this excrement which they call civet, from the name of the beast.* They put it carefully into a beef’s horn, which they keep well stopt.’
The parkland came to an abrupt end. The valley sides closed in again and the wadi was all but blocked by a boulder the size of a large house. This, we realized, was what it was: the hollow underside was partly walled off and domestic objects – skins, a jerrycan, a mattress, blankets, clothes – hung at the entrance. We called but no one was at home. Inside, the ceiling was blackened by generations of cooking, and a battered tartan suitcase lay open on the floor. A side niche contained a padlocked green tin trunk. Some Suqutri herdsmen lead permanently troglodyte lives – the 1994 Yemeni census form included ‘cave’ under ‘Type of Accommodation’ – but this was a seasonal dwelling which would be occupied in the winter months only. Judging by the three criteria estate agents use to assess the value of a property – location, location and location – this one, situated above a waterfall with dwarf palms below, was truly desirable.
Kevin and I explored the theme of troglodytism as we skinny-dipped in a pool beneath the palms. We would move to Suqutra, find a cave, grow our hair, and live wild on goats, tamarinds and pomegranates. We fantasized about reviving the civet industry and installing little luxuries in our grotto: octophonic CD systems, tropical fish tanks, central vacuum cleaning, a Steinway grand. Alternatively, I would become a professional hermit; Kevin, as my agent, would tout for custom from the cruise ships, and tourists would part with hard cash to hear me spouting Delphic drivel out of a matted beard. With the right sort of PR and an appearance in National Geographic I would eventually be able to move to California, where grateful disciples would give me Cadillacs and clamour for phials
of my used bathwater.
At the time, we were unaware of the flip-side of Suqutri rural life, the notorious di-asar, a fly which causes a potentially fatal infection by laying its eggs in the nose and throat at certain seasons. People protect themselves by wearing face-masks and amuletic beads, or by stuffing their beards into their mouths. No deaths have been recorded, so the prophylaxis must work.
We daydreamed the hot hours away until we realized that, with ten miles still to go back to Hadibu, we had to move fast. All the way down the wadi and along the coast Kevin, who had cavedwelling on the brain, sang snatches of ‘Wild Thing’ by The Troggs.
For the coastal stretch we were following Hadibu’s airport road, probably the worst airport road on Earth. Past Qadub, it fords inlets of the sea and climbs an appallingly steep pass up to the cliffs of Ra’s Haybaq, the Suqutri Tarpeian Rock from which witches were hurled. More cliffs tower above, riddled with caves; and between them, the bottle trees and the sea, the unsurfaced track is hardly less narrow than when Wellsted came this way: ‘A meeting of two camels on such a spot at night could scarcely fail to be fatal to one, or both.’ When you finally descend to sea-level again, the air is full of spray from the breakers that boom and crash in the undercut shore.
It was night when we reached the rest-house. The French entomologists had buzzed off on the morning flight, to be replaced by a lugubrious one-man wafd, or delegation, from the Ministry of the Interior. He divided his time between moaning on his bed, playing patience, and visiting the Hadibu pharmacy to get remedies for nausea, malaria, liver dysfunction, and an abrasion on the knee caused, he said, ‘by violent contact with a car door’. He was not enjoying his visit.
Yemen- The Unknown Arabia Page 25