Blood and Sand

by Frank Gardner

  Yemen wasn’t quite the holiday Carrie had had in mind – she’d packed for the Bahamas, I’d packed for the desert – but she coped stoically with having to be almost fully covered up in the August heat, having conservative Yemenis avoid all eye contact with her, and, at one point, getting chased out of a mosque by an angry imam. On the day we arrived in the ancient mud-walled capital, Sana’a, a man in the street gripped my arm and cautioned me: ‘Be careful, my friend, for there are many wizards here.’ And it was true: ten thousand feet up on the terraced hills of Hajjah we watched a man blow coins out of his nose and perform other inexplicable tricks to an audience of grinning, heavily armed tribesmen.

  Yemen was a little-known country of extraordinary contrasts: one day we would be swimming in the Red Sea amongst the pelicans of Khokha, the next we would be reclining on padded benches in the port of Hodeida, smoking metre-high hubble-bubble waterpipes beneath slowly turning ceiling fans. In the sand dunes of the Empty Quarter we traipsed round the pre-Islamic Sabaean Dam and the Temple of Marib, gasping in the 45-degree heat. In the northern town of Sa’ada we awoke to the sound of gunfire: happy shooting by local tribesmen, we learned. There, two young Yemenis befriended us and took us for a drive in the hills, where we took turns at target practice with their Kalashnikovs and pistols until an irate farmer came out and complained that bullets were ricocheting around his sheep.

  When we returned to London I resolved to do something about using my Arabic, which had been idling away in neutral at the back of my brain for a year now, waiting in vain to be called on. A friend of a friend passed my CV to Sir James Craig, a former British ambassador to Saudi Arabia and now head of the Middle East Association. His Arabic was so flawless that he could hardly have been impressed by mine, but the following week I was summoned for an interview in the City at Saudi International Bank (SIB), a joint venture between the Saudi government and a handful of Western banks. I tried to make it clear that I had no grounding in finance or economics, but the interviewer droned on about interest rates, leverage and product placement. I had no idea what he was talking about and was about to write off the interview as an afternoon wasted when they offered me a job on double my present salary. Hell, I thought, even if they kick me out after six months’ probation it will have been worth it financially. I fixed my starting date to allow a generous three months’ travelling and set my sights on the Middle East. If I had been hired for my Arabic and familiarity with Arab culture then I had better deliver and brush up on it fast. It was time to pick a country.

  The early summer of 1986 was not a good time to be a Westerner in the Middle East. Hijackings and kidnappings in Lebanon were all the rage, while Arab tempers had been raised by events in Libya. In retaliation for Colonel Gaddafi’s suspected role in the bombing of a Berlin disco frequented by US servicemen, the US Airforce had carried out a bombing raid on several targets in Libya on 15 April. One of Gaddafi’s many homes, his barracks in Tripoli, had been hit and his adopted daughter killed. The colonel had escaped unharmed but severely rattled. Meanwhile the world’s TV screens were filled with the sight of angry fist-shaking crowds on Arab streets. Robert Fisk of the Independent pronounced that the Arab world had changed irrevocably and that the US had blown for ever its chances of making friends in the region. There would be reprisals, he warned. Sure enough, there were more kidnappings in Lebanon and a Western hostage was executed. But the violence seemed largely confined to that country, which was anyway in the grip of an eleven-year-old civil war, with various factions shelling and shooting each other from the pockmarked husks of ruined houses.

  So where to visit to brush up my rusty Arabic? I ruled out the Gulf – too expensive and I didn’t know anyone there yet. Yemen, North Africa and Egypt I had been to fairly recently. Syria would be fascinating, but Anglo-Syrian relations were at a low ebb after a Syrian intelligence plot to put a bomb on board an El Al Israeli airliner flying out of Heathrow had just been foiled. (The Palestinian perpetrator, Nizar Al-Hindawi, had tried to put his pregnant Irish girlfriend on the flight, who was unaware that she was carrying 1.5 kg of Semtex high explosive in her luggage – if this had not been discovered at Heathrow the bomb would have killed all 375 passengers on board.) It’s worth remembering these things when we think the 2000s are dangerous – there was plenty of terrorism around in the 1980s too, it just wasn’t in the name of Al-Qaeda and was not quite so apocalyptic in intent.

  Jordan looked like a good bet for a visit, though. It had a stable monarchy under the charismatic King Hussein, its people spoke some of the purest classical Arabic in the Middle East, and I knew it to be rich in culture and heritage. As a schoolboy I had been intrigued by pictures I had seen in a travel brochure of bandoliered border police patrolling the red sand dunes of Wadi Rumm. Altogether it seemed the right place in which to reimmerse myself in the Arab world, so I bought a ticket and took off on Air France.

  In my pocket I carried a letter of introduction from Time Out magazine commissioning me to write a travel piece on Jordan. Even though I was soon to begin a career in investment banking I had an irrepressible urge to write. I had managed to get my first article published the previous year – on life as a student in Cairo – in a magazine put out by the Egyptian embassy, and I used that as a stepping stone, sending off the published article, with accompanying glossy photos, to the editor of Midweek magazine, a freebie handed out to commuters at London Tube stations every Thursday morning. Midweek agreed to take a piece I wrote on Yemen – they paid £150 a time and it was a great thrill to see my byline in print. I then showed the article to Time Out, and so on, until eventually I built up a stable of newspapers and magazines that took my work, even squeezing an account of a Bulgarian train ride into The Best of Sunday Times Travel Writing 1987. It was nearly all travel writing or the occasional think piece about security in the Middle East, and for a while I was content just to write on a freelance basis while using my banking salary to pay the rent.

  The flight to Amman was almost empty; nobody was going to the Middle East. The French flight attendants had plenty of time to chat to me, so I asked them if they had received any special training for hijacks and hostage-taking.

  ‘Sure,’ said one of the cabin crew, ‘they issue us with these special loose-fitting jackets.’

  ‘Really?’ I replied. ‘How do they help?’

  ‘They allow us to raise our arms in surrender even quicker!’

  In Amman I stayed with a university friend, Nigel, who was out there working for a British bank and living in a pale-stoned villa where purple bougainvillea tumbled down the walls. Nigel was playing with fire. He had started an affair with a Jordanian girl from a well-known family, and although they were Christians, not Muslims, any hint of pre-marital sex was considered a grave insult to the family’s honour. The girl’s brothers had learnt of the affair and had sent him a death threat. In a country notorious for its so-called ‘honour killings’ this was not to be taken lightly, so Nigel was now contemplating leaving Jordan rather sooner than he had intended.

  I found Amman to be a pleasant but unexciting city, built on the rolling, boulder-strewn hills of the biblical Middle East. I was eager to get out to the desert, so I lost no time in walking into a small building marked Ministry of Tourism, clutching my letter from Time Out magazine. The place was as quiet as a grave and my arrival caused quite a stir amongst the bored officials behind their desks.

  ‘You’re a tourist? You want to write about our country?’ Pause, quick exchange of glances, then big smiles. ‘Yes, of course! How can we help you?’

  The Jordanians could not have been more helpful. They assigned me a driver/guide and put a jeep at my disposal to go anywhere in the country for as long as I wanted. I could hardly believe my luck. Feeling as if I was the only tourist in the country, we ranged eastwards towards Iraq, exploring the castles and forts where T. E. Lawrence had rested and regrouped before attacking the Turkish Army in the First World War. We went north to Jerash, where I spent a sun-dren
ched afternoon wandering over the fantastically preserved Roman forum with only basking lizards for company. Then we turned south, down the King’s Highway, one of the two arteries that connect the country.

  My guide was Jamal (pronounced juh-mairl, not jummal, which means ‘camel’ in Arabic). He told me he had previously worked as a security guard at the Jordanian embassy in London, and it wasn’t long before he was showing off the automatic pistol he carried. On a high plateau in the hills north of Aqaba we set up a line of cans and blatted away at them, sending them spinning into the clear blue air, the gunshots echoing around the empty landscape.

  The ancient city of Petra took my breath away. Built in the third century BC by the Nabataeans, this once-rich trading settlement lay hidden away in the wind-blasted canyons of south Jordan until it was ‘discovered’ in the nineteenth century by a European explorer. The Nabataeans derived their income from taxing local caravans, then spent the money on building whole streets, temples and baths out of the sheer rock face. It was easy to see how explorers failed to find this place for so long. A mile away we had been walking through the gentle, grassy hills of Wadi Musa; now we found ourselves in an almost labyrinthine world, shut in by towering red cliffs hundreds of feet high with only a ten-foot gap in between. The clichéd words ‘a rose-red city half as old as time’ kept repeating themselves in my head; I just wished I had thought of them myself.

  That night I wrote in my diary:

  Jamal and I dismounted from the jeep and rented a pair of white horses to take us through the narrow, mile-long canyon known as the Seeq. Powder-fine dust hung around us, kicked up by the animals’ hoofs and we raced the final few yards, pulling up breathless and coated in sweat just in front of the Khaznat Faron, the Pharaoh’s Treasury, the first building you come to in ancient Petra. Its stone columns rose several storeys high, built into the red rock, topped by a carved capitol. Dwarfed by its shadow, languid Bedu lay at its base, twirling their sticks in the sand and pulling their chequered headscarves closer around their faces to keep out the summer flies. Aside from them, there was no one around, no sound but for the wind whispering in the flowering bushes of oleander.

  All day I roamed around Petra, climbing two-thousand-year-old steps that had been chiselled into the rockface, trying to imagine what must have happened at the High Place of Sacrifice, picturing the great trading caravans that passed nearby on their way up from Oman to Syria, bearing sacks of frankincense. In the noonday heat the air was rent by the scream of swifts wheeling through the blue void, and my path was crossed often by the skitter of a heavy lizard. The force of the sun rebounded off the rocks like an echo; they were like nothing I had ever seen before. Eroded and mutated by wind and water, they resembled treacle poured over a cake and then frozen, so that the rock appeared to drip down from the peaks. Shepherds and their goats emerged from tiny caves that festooned the mountainside, then vanished back into the cool shadows. The colours, too, were extraordinary. In places the rock had formed itself into an intricate kaleidoscope of reds, yellows, browns and purples, stretching one’s belief in its natural formation.

  There was an overpowering feeling of history here, but I was sad to learn that the local Bedu families who had lived for centuries in these caves with their sheep and goats were now being moved out in a government drive to smarten the place up for tourists. I mentioned to Jamal that I was keen to meet the Bedu as I wanted to experience a life as close as possible to that lived by the nomadic tribes that had long roamed the Middle East. ‘Right,’ said Jamal, ‘but not here. I know just the people for you.’

  We drove east, past Ras Al Naqab, an abandoned station on the old Hijaz Railway that T. E. Lawrence attacked during the First World War. The railway lines remained, overgrown now by purple thistles and littered with the detritus of seventy years. Some villagers, seeing a vehicle with the official markings of the Ministry of Tourism, came forward eagerly to ask if there was to be a project here with work for them all. But Jamal shook his head and they turned away sadly. We gave a lift to a cloudy-eyed sheikh with a gold-trimmed robe, and then we entered the broad desert valley known as Wadi Rumm. Great golden rock massifs rose up hundreds of metres high on either side of us, split by purple-shadowed crevices and flanked by red dunes. In his book Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T. E. Lawrence wrote that ‘a whole squadron of aeroplanes could have wheeled in formation within its walls’. He was probably thinking of tiny Sopwith Camel biplanes, but I have since seen modern footage of RAF Tornado jets flying through just this sort of terrain across the border in Saudi Arabia.

  Wadi Rumm was huge and majestic; dwarfed by this setting, the tiny settlement of Rumm was a scruffy, unimposing place. Rusting corrugated-iron shacks stood surrounded by chicken-wire fences, hemming in the odd camel or a couple of goats. Here and there was the occasional black goats’-hair tent, giving a tantalizing glimpse of nomadic desert life. We drew up at the police post, a surreal Beau Geste fort with crenellated battlements and a Jordanian flag fluttering from the top. The national guardsmen were dressed in long khaki-coloured robes, criss-crossed with leather bandoliers, beneath red-and-white chequered headdresses encircled by the royal Hashemite crest. They offered us coffee from brass pots with curved spouts that simmered in the hot ashes from a dying fire. It was my first taste of Arabian coffee, and it took me by surprise. Instead of the sweet bland flavour of instant coffee that I had grown up with in school bedsits and dormitories, or the sugary, grainy texture of Turkish coffee served in thimble-sized cups that I had become used to in Cairo, this was a thin, green and bitter liquid flavoured with cardamom seeds. It was clearly an acquired taste and I had difficulty in not spitting the first mouthful on to the sand. (I have later come to love it, finding it goes down especially well with sweet Hassa dates from Saudi Arabia.)

  Jamal disappeared off into the village of Rumm, leaving me to chat to the border police. They still patrolled the southern border with Saudi Arabia by camel, they said, mainly to stop smugglers. Sometimes they found it more efficient to travel by jeep, but there were still places only a camel could reach. I was about to ask them what happened to the people they caught when Jamal reappeared, his bearded face beaming with excitement. ‘You’re in luck,’ he announced. ‘One of the most respected sheikhs in the whole area just happens to be visiting Rumm today, and if he likes you then you can stay with his family out in the desert. They are from the Bani Howaitat tribe. How does that sound?’

  We found Sheikh Hajji Attayig sitting bolt upright and cross-legged in the tent his family used when they came into Rumm. He was scanning the sides of the canyon with an old pair of binoculars, his gnarled fingers working the focus, his lined face squinting in concentration. We exchanged courtesies in Arabic and then I noticed Jamal withdrawing to the corner of the tent, watching to see how I got on. Despite his tough, hawk-like features, Sheikh Attayig was kind and hospitable. I was welcome to stay with him and his extended family, he said, for as long as I wished. Tomorrow we would be moving out deep into the desert. Jamal was satisfied I was in good hands. ‘I’ll come back for you in a month,’ he said and drove off in a cloud of dust, leaving us in the stillness of this desert valley.

  The sheikh pointed to a magnificent curved sword in a silver sheath that dangled from the roof of the tent behind his head. ‘Do you know who that sword belonged to?’ he asked with a look of pride on his face. I did not. ‘It belonged to Auda Bin Abi Tayyi. Have you heard of him?’ I most certainly had. He was a famous warrior chieftain of the Howaitat tribe who had fought alongside T. E. Lawrence against the Turks in the Arab Revolt of 1916. In David Lean’s film Lawrence of Arabia, Auda’s part had been played by Anthony Quinn, whose stentorian voice uttered that memorable curse, ‘My mother mated with a scorpion!’ I am quite sure the real Auda Bin Abi Tayyi said no such thing, but that did nothing to lessen the drama of the moment. I was sitting with a sheikh from one of the most famous tribes in Arabia. At that point a vile-smelling goat poked its head round the tent flap, as if asking to come in
. The sheikh hissed at it and shooed it away by tossing a pebble at its hoofs.

  Sheikh Hajji Attayig passed me his binoculars. They were old, made entirely of metal, with tiny cracked lenses and none of the black rubber coating found on modern versions. ‘They belonged to Glubb Pasha,’ said the sheikh. ‘I was his scout and he gave them to me as a farewell present.’ The sheikh then fished into a pocket and pulled out a worn piece of paper. Sure enough, it was his discharge papers from Glubb Pasha’s Camel Corps; I was impressed. Glubb Pasha was an honorary title bestowed on John Glubb, a former British Army officer given the job of raising an army of Bedu tribesmen to keep order in what was known in the 1950s as Transjordan. Called The Arab Legion, it had a reputation as the best-run force in the region, but when the teenaged King Hussein ascended the throne after the assassination of his father in Jerusalem, he decided he would rather not have his army run by a foreigner and he dismissed Glubb Pasha. But sitting in his tent that afternoon, Sheikh Attayig was happy to meet someone from Britain – Glubb Pasha’s ‘tribe’ – and he talked at length about his service with the Camel Corps. When he first joined, he said, his marksmanship was already so good that the sergeant asked him where he had acquired his experience. Just here in the desert, he had replied truthfully, and the sergeant had hit him twice in the face for being a liar.