A few miles east of Hadibu, along a shore that crunches with a litter of shells and coral, lies the village of Suq, the island’s original commercial centre. Proof that it was so in ancient times came from excavations carried out by a Yemeni-Soviet team of archaeologists, who discovered fragments of a Roman amphora and other, possibly Indian, imported wares. Suq was still Suqutra’s capital when the Portuguese decided to occupy the island in 1507.
We had come to visit the fort of St Michael, which the Portuguese captured from a Mahri garrison and rebuilt. It lies on a spur of Jabal Hawari, the eastern limit of Hadibu Bay. Most of the inhabitants of Suq seemed unaware of its existence, but eventually a boy showed us the way. A scramble up a rough track brought us to a flattish area filled with the remains of a cistern, bastions and walls with rough lime-plaster facing that reminded Kevin of Albuquerque’s fort at Malacca. The ruins are unprepossessing but the view over Hadibu Plain is panoramic: below us, palms crowded round a lagoon where a wadi met the sea; eastwards stretched a broad bay backed by dunes, while in the opposite direction were the little gable-ended thatched houses of Suq and, in the distance, the palms and houses of Hadibu; to the south, a thick cloud blanket was pierced by the Hajhir spires; in front of us lay the ocean.
It seemed incredible that this was just one of an immensely long chain of coastal and island forts stretching from Mozambique via Muscat and the Malabar Coast all the way to the East Indies – that, for a few decades, the Indian Ocean had been a Portuguese lake. In the history of empires, this was one of the shortest-lived, an overblown thing like the monastery of Belem, outside Lisbon, where sober Gothic suddenly burst out in a Manueline nautical panoply of prows, poops, hawsers, anchors and dolphins – a building that stands as an allegory of the strange mix of crusading Christianity and naked capitalist expansion which propelled Iberians across the Old and New Worlds.
In Suqutra, the Portuguese expected to find a ready-made outpost of Christendom – the Gospels are said to have been brought by St Thomas, en route for India, while a sixth-century visitor from Egypt, the monk Cosmos Indicopleustes, noted that the Suqutris were Nestorian Christians of Greek origin.* But after a thousand years of increasing isolation, what the Portuguese found was not a long-lost and innocent version of Christianity but a syncretic nightmare. In a report to Rome, written after his visit in 1542, Francis Xavier complained that the Suqutris practised circumcision and that their forms of service had decayed into mumbo-jumbo incomprehensible even to their priests; in the following century, the Carmelite Padre Vincenzo commented that the islanders named all their women Maria, prayed to the moon for rain, and buttered their altars.
Moreover, the island was controlled by the Muslim ‘Fartaquins’ (Mahris – named after Ra’s Fartak in Mahri territory), and the Suqutris, preferring the devil they knew, offered no assistance to their new would-be masters. For a few years a Portuguese garrison mouldered unprovisioned up on its redoubt, until Suqutra was given up as a bad job. St Michael reverted to the Fartaquins, and Our Lady of Victory, the church which the invaders had converted from a mosque, returned to the embrace of Islam. Its plaster floor and column bases, excavated in the 1960s, were visible down below.*
Following this abortive occupation Suqutra, on the whole, eluded the imperialist grasp – though never quite as spectacularly as when it vanished out of sight of the Ayyubid fleet. The Portuguese returned on and off but never stayed; the Omanis attacked half-heartedly in 1669; the British tried it out as a coaling station before deciding on Aden, but their garrison succumbed to fever; the British Secretary of State for India suggested in 1943 that it might become an ‘adjunct’ to the Jewish state in Palestine and was told by the Colonial Secretary, in as many words, not to be such a bloody ass. The Suqutris of the interior, meanwhile, went on as before, collecting dragon’s blood and aloes, and milking their goats.
It was as if the Portuguese had been and gone and left nothing. Or had they? There were the blue-eyed people of Shilhal. Or could they be an even older genetic throwback, connected with the claim of Cosmos and later writers that the island had been colonized by Greeks? We hired another Salim, the owner of a battered green Landcruiser, to take us as far east as possible. We would finish the journey to Shilhal on foot.
There are no petrol stations on Suqutra – you just knock on a door and fill a jerrycan, if you’re lucky. Petrol is in short supply because of the difficulty of importing it, and costs up to five times the official rate in San’a; the cost of hiring a car is correspondingly high. After a lengthy tour of downtown Hadibu, we had a full tank and had also picked up a Hadrami, an official of the Central Organization for Control and Auditing, who wanted to come for the ride. The Hadrami said that hard statistical facts were difficult to come by on the island, although when I asked him how many cars he thought there were he replied, without hesitation, ‘Three hundred and one.’ Considering vehicles had to be brought to Suqutra lashed to the decks of sambuqs and then rafted ashore, it seemed a lot. Whatever the true figure, most were laid up through lack of fuel and spare parts.
An hour out of Hadibu, we were up on the high rolling moors, heading east under low cloud. Occasionally the cloud parted to light up a distant peak or hamlet, but at the village of Ifsir the rain set in, thick and wet. Here lived Salim’s sister, so there was another slaughter, another massive lunch of meat, rice and rawbah. Outside on the grassy roofs Egyptian vultures sat hunched against the rain; at every settlement here they sit and wait, ruffling their grubby plumage, patiently watching the houses until someone makes for the spot used as a public latrine. After he has defecated, the vultures gobble it up: a happy symbiosis but unnerving, for they encircle you as you squat, edging closer and closer.
From Ifsir to Kitab and Aryant the rain fell hard, turning the red road to mud and making the Landcruiser slip on the pass up to the higher plateau. But by the time we reached our destination, the village of Qadaminhuh, the rain had stopped. Kevin and I were dropped at a newly built house and wandered off into the sodden landscape while Salim went to find the owner.
Qadaminhuh is also known as Schools, from the big quadrangle of incongruous barrack-like buildings next to it. Here, a hundred or so weekly boarders live and study, boys from across this eastern region of Mumi. As we walked down the track towards the schools a fitful light broke through the cloud and a rainbow materialized. The place seemed deserted, but then a figure appeared from a doorway and headed towards us. He was dark-skinned and tall, clearly not a Suqutri, and before we could greet him he spread his arms in a wide sweep that took in the plain, the low surrounding hills and the rainbow, and said in rich and unaccented English, ‘Welcome to our … humble surroundings!’
Muhammad was an Adeni high-school graduate sent to do his obligatory teaching service on Suqutra. At first he had thought of it as a punishment posting. But up here in Mumi, he said, the scenery was so beautiful, the people so kind that you might imagine yourself in England. I agreed that even if the nearest country, in a direct line, was Somalia, you might be forgiven for thinking you were in northern Europe. ‘But in England you couldn’t just turn up on someone’s doorstep and stay for the night.’ Not in England, but perhaps further north. Again, I found myself remembering my months in the Outer Hebrides.
The rain – that at least could be English – came on again with sudden force. We shouted goodbye to Muhammad and ran for the house. Like the other houses of Mumi, this one was built of dry-stone and plastered on the inside with mud. Two columns supported a roof of irregular branches fitted together with great skill, and in the corners squinches were formed from wishbone-shaped boughs.
Sa’d, our host, expressed no surprise that two total strangers should be billeted on him. ‘It’s our custom,’ he said simply. In spite of his protests, Salim and the auditor left to drive back to Hadibu in the dark. We asked Sa’d about the blue-eyed people of Shilhal; he, too, was sceptical, and spoke of the place – only a few miles away as the vulture flies – as if it might not have existed.
We turned in early and spent a night disturbed by fleas and bedbugs. They (or, from the insects’point of view, we) were only a taste of what was to come.
By seven the next morning we were high in the uplands under a lowering sky on the way to Shilhal. The going was hard, over sharp rocks dotted with tiny alpines. Kevin found a beetle with iridescent peacock-blue wing cases splotched orange and yellow, a furry orange head and bright green feet and feelers; as it was dead he put it in his shirt pocket. Every so often we had to cross low walls of misshapen lichen-covered stones that were clearly very old: some authorities have taken them to be the ancient boundaries of incense plantations, but in fact they marked out claims allotted by the Sultan for the harvesting of aloes. The Bents, who visited Suqutra in the 1890s and must have seen them under the same grey sky, commented that ‘the miles of walls … give to the country somewhat the aspect of the Yorkshire wolds’. Once more, the sense of displacement was extraordinary.
We crossed a little dale, filled with basil and lemon-scented herbs, where we breakfasted on unripe tamarinds. Here, Kevin’s beetle suddenly came back to life. He put it on a stone, where it stretched its legs and tottered about: against the grey rock, its acid-trip colour scheme made it look like an escapee from Naked Lunch.
The valley marked the beginning of cattle country, and up on the far top we passed a herd. Like their cousins in al-Mahrah and Dhofar, these were humpless beasts no bigger than a small donkey; one of them glared at us and pawed the ground. Progress was slow, for at each hamlet we passed we were invited in for rawbah, and at lunchtime we joined an apparently never-ending feast in honour of a villager just returned from the Emirates. He sat in a corner, glassy-eyed, Buddha-like, mopping his face with a towel that said ‘Hawaii’ in multicoloured capitals, while plate after plate was set in front of him. They had killed a calf and seemed determined to finish it at one sitting, however long it took. I thought it was the prodigious quantity of food that made the prodigal so silent, until someone whispered to me, ‘He hasn’t been back for twenty-five years.’ It was, then, a severe case of culture shock. Or, maybe, time shock: over the last quarter-century, the Emirates had undergone as much change as Europe had over the last hundred years or more; in Mumi, almost nothing had altered. The man was like a long-term coma patient who comes round only to find that his dreams were more eventful than waking reality.
Groaning from a surfeit of rawbah and meat on top of green tamarinds, we set off again. Past the village of Ambali a wide, airy valley opened out. By now, the cloud had dispersed and the sun lit up lone clumps of bottle trees, megaliths with quiffs of foliage cut oblique by a sea wind. At the end of the valley the track climbed under a crag with walled caves at its base, then petered out. Before us, a few houses in a hollow, was the village of the blue-eyes: Shilhal. It looked no different from the other villages of Mumi. It felt like the end of the world.
‘A year or two ago,’ said Thani, in whose guest-house the clan of Shilhal were gathered, ‘a foreign woman came here. She might have been French, or Russian. I don’t know. Anyway, we were sitting round like this, talking about history, and she asked us: “Do you think your grandfathers were oranges?” ’
There were tears of laughter at the memory. Thani got out of a leather pouch what looked like a clay cigar holder, then a fragment of tobacco leaf which he placed for a moment on the lamp before crumbling it and putting it in the holder. When his match refused to light I handed him my disposable lighter; he looked at it with curiosity then, shaking his head, handed it back.* A second match worked. He took a single long drag then went on. ‘Then she said, “I mean the people, not the fruit.” You see, “oranges” and “Portuguese” sound the same in Arabic.’
‘So what do you think – have you got any Portuguese blood?’ I asked. In build the people of Shilhal looked the same as the other mountain Suqutris we had met; but a few of them did have fairer skins, and there were undeniably striking eyes that ranged between green and light hazel. Striking enough, anyway, for reports of them to circulate and become embroidered.
A man who had so far been silent, a dashing figure, bare-chested and with a shawl thrown round his neck, replied. ‘They say that we, the real Suqutris, have two ancestors. One lived here in Mumi and the other at the western end of the island. In time, people came in from outside and married with their descendants.’
I remembered the claim later, when reading Naumkin’s analysis of Suqutri palm-prints and teeth. He was able to come to few firm conclusions about the islanders’ origins, other than saying that they are a mixture. However, he goes on, the inhabitants of the western and eastern highlands are both ‘mutually similar’ and markedly different from other groups. Linguistically, he puts forward the hypothesis that Suqutri became isolated from the ancient South Arabian languages at some time between 1000 and 500 BC – well before Mahri and other related tongues. This suggests a rough date for the settlement of the island by groups from the mainland.
It is probably true to say, then, that here – in these isolated communities on an isolated chunk of land – are the people who are closest to the first sons of Qahtan: true ancient naturals, whom the genealogists digging for Qahtani roots had overlooked.
Schweinfurth went so far as to call them ‘the last real South Arabians’. Recalling the similarity between the singing figurehead on the sambuq and the earliest Sabaean portraits, I wondered if he might not have been exaggerating.
As for Portuguese forebears – if there ever were any in Shilhal – time has obliterated all memory of them.
Talk was reverting to Suqutri. I was interested to hear some Suqutri poetry and asked the Shilhalis if they knew any. It was the bare-chested man who answered again. ‘I have a little,’ he said, and chanted a haiku-length verse. It was received with sighs, then silence.
I asked the man what the verse meant. He smiled. ‘Ah, it’s about love. But I only know the words, not the meaning. I’m not a sha’ir, a poet.’
Then I remembered the root sense of the word: sha’ir – not a reciter of verses or an arranger of words, but one who was endowed with insight, one who perceived. Suqutri poetry is a dense thicket of ellipsis and metaphor. It needed a perceiver to see the way through it. Perhaps it is the language of Dictionary Land, of the wilderness of idea within the wall of words.*
I had come to Yemen to learn a language and understand a people. In Suqutra, where they spoke with the purest of ancestral voices a language I did not understand, I was back at square one. And now there was this other language, that of the non-sha’ir and the singing figurehead. Looking round, it had clearly moved the Suqutris; yet they could not tell me what it meant.
The mood of the gathering had changed. More pipes were lit. I had a go with Thani’s. The single puff seemed to contain as much nicotine as a whole cigarette; combined with the effects of yet another meal of meat, rice and rawbah it made me reel with queasi-ness. The diet was beginning to tell.
Kevin was staring at the sinuous beams in the ceiling. I followed his gaze and noticed a single sawn timber. Thani told us it came from an old wreck.
‘The sea must be very close,’ Kevin said.
‘Oh, about four or five hours,’ Thani replied.
I sat up and looked at Kevin. It seemed impossible – we should be almost at the eastern tip of the island, and were hoping to see the sea in the morning. We could only afford to spend tomorrow here, and as we were both in bad shape ten extra hours of hard walking would be too much. The gathering broke up and we went to bed, disappointed.
To bed, but not to sleep. Klinophilos horrifer saw to that. This aptly named bedbug was new to science when Ogilvie-Grant squashed the first specimen in the pages of Vanity Fair, around the turn of the century. ‘It does not bite white men,’ he says. The claim is strangely unscientific; if apartheid does exist in the insect world, then this was another species. But whatever it was, it was certainly no ordinary bedbug: it hurt.
The morning was bright and cloudless. Down in a
large stone pen the goats of Shilhal were queuing to be milked. Thani dealt with them deftly, pinioning one of each goat’s back hooves under his big toe and milking her into a spherical clay pot, which he placed on a small fire of sticks. We were given a pot and drank the sweet, foaming liquid, thankful for a change from rawbah.
‘By the way,’ Thani said, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t give you any blankets, but they’ve got a few fleas in them. They come off the goats. I hope you slept well anyway.’
We checked with him about the distance to the sea. He confirmed that it was half a day’s walk to reach the shore, ‘More for you. But if you just want to look at it, go up there,’ he added, pointing to the hill behind the village.
We made our way slowly upwards over a cracked limestone pavement. Near the top of the hill, a breeze began to buffet our faces. Then the ground vanished. A 2,000-foot cliff fell sheer to white sand, white surf, blue sea where a single speck of black, a hawri, hung in motionless suspense between the elements. To the right was the great dome of al-Jumjumah, the Skull, then the long promontory of Ra’s Mumi, a haunt of sirens, a wrecker of ships, a scimitar cutting the ocean. The last place in Yemen.
I remember sitting above the village that afternoon under a westering sun. Light raked across ruddy earth and bald limestone, across the grassy roofs and drystone walls of Shilhal. They were bringing in the goats. I remember remembering the gathering of the sheep on Harris.
Here they buried every second baby. Treatment for many illnesses was a brand with a red-hot iron. But they had the Arabian dream, a simple pastoral existence, rich in milk and meat. In most of Arabia, as in most of Europe, the pastoral life is dead, living only in the idealized memory of a shared ancient past. Virgil described the scene at Shilhal in the Eclogues:
Yemen- The Unknown Arabia Page 26