Slow Boats to China

by Gavin Young

  Now it was a question of extending my stay. It was also time, I felt, to let the British consul know that a lonely Briton was on the loose with a near-moribund visa in his pocket. I hoped that someone in the consulate would know a way of getting a week’s extension of the wretched little three-day permit so begrudgingly handed to me by the bearded Saudi consul general in Alex. A week would be enough. Hanging about Jedda indefinitely was out of the question. I couldn’t afford the time if I was going to reach Canton in under a year, and God forbid that it should take anything like that long. My heart sank still lower. I began to feel like Napoleon when his aides told him that the first few blocks of Moscow were in flames. A retreat was in the offing.

  *

  At the British consulate – a longish drive by taxi from the centre of Jedda – I discovered two Englishmen behind a locked door. They admitted me cautiously. One was tall and slim, the area around his mouth and chin disfigured by a few days’ growth of beard. There was a kind of suave alertness about him, combined with an impatient irritability. The second man was, I surmised, a kind of Dr Watson to the other’s Sherlock Holmes; he wore a moustache, jacket and tie and smiled genially, if warily, over a pipe.

  The tall, unshaven one intimated with all the delicacy of a circus barker that I was really intruding pretty maddeningly into an area of intense and secret activity. I gathered that someone of importance, whose identity could not be revealed (the Duke of Edinburgh?), had soon to be met at Jedda airport. Time, his attitude brayed at me, was precious and, in any case, belonged to Her Britannic Majesty. (As I remember, it turned out that the visitor was some minimally important Foreign Office inspector.) Nevertheless, when I had rattled through my story – which sounded embarrassingly trivial, I had to admit – Dr Watson took enough pity on me to telephone a shipping agency he thought was friendly and obtain a promise from someone there to call me back shortly. (It was not the good doctor’s fault that no return call ever came.) He also gave me the names and office telephone numbers of one or two British shipping men. But it soon developed that they had sneaked away from Jedda some months previously without, apparently, informing the British consulate. At this rate, I thought, I will soon be not only shipless but on the run from the Saudi Immigration Department as well.

  ‘I think I’d better get this visa extended, don’t you?’ I said.

  ‘Try the passport office,’ Holmes suggested helpfully. ‘It’s by the old airport. They may help you there, or they may not; it depends how they feel. If you don’t speak Arabic I don’t suppose they’re likely to.’

  ‘Could you speak a word on my behalf then? Or give me the name of somebody there? It’s Thursday and almost noon. I would be very grateful.’ I didn’t feel like telling them I spoke Arabic. In any case, I didn’t think that Arabic by itself would be the key to a week’s extension (nor was it). But I did know that it was halfway through a Thursday morning, and that the passport office would close at noon. Any delay there could be fatal. ‘A little note, perhaps….’

  Holmes waved a careless hand. ‘If we did that for everyone who came here, we’d be doing nothing else.’ He and Watson exchanged the weary smiles of the permanently overworked. In addition, Holmes had the exasperated air of one who feels that the world underestimates him. ‘Of course,’ I said humbly. ‘But perhaps a short note – in Arabic, of course.’

  ‘Well, perhaps a note. Then you’ll be on your own.’

  They gave me a note asking for a week’s extension, and then Holmes had to be on the move again.

  But the genial Watson called for tea and seemed disposed to talk. What he said made me sympathize with him; he obviously had a wretched job in a wretched place. The Saudis were, almost to a man, deliberately rude and unhelpful, he said. ‘They actually put obstacles in your way for the hell of it. Yet if they want something from you, they expect you to go miles out of your way on their behalf.’ There was only a hint of indignation in his diplomat’s voice.

  ‘Take an example. Suppose some Saudi prince decides to go to London. It’s twelve o’clock at night and I’m in bed. The phone rings – and this has happened, believe me – and it’s the prince’s secretary saying, “The prince and seven other people want to fly to London on a special plane tonight. Give them all visas. Now, please!” Of course I say, “Sorry, the consulate’s closed. But I’ll get there by seven o’clock tomorrow morning, though we don’t officially open until later, and will have your visas ready in five minutes, I promise.”’ Watson paused to drink, then set his teacup down. ‘Slam!’ he cried suddenly. ‘Down goes the receiver! And a few minutes later, after I’ve fallen asleep again our ambassador is on the line, spluttering, “Look, Prince So-and-So just phoned me in person demanding visas immediately. He’s absolutely livid. For God’s sake, give them to him. Get up and give them to him now!”’

  ‘You mean to say that our ambassador gives in to this bullying in the middle of the night?’

  Watson nodded his head ruefully and began scraping his pipe with what looked like a paperclip. ‘It wouldn’t stop there,’ he said in mournful tones. ‘That’s the problem. That prince wouldn’t hesitate to speak to some other royal bigwig – some even bigger prince – who in his turn wouldn’t hesitate to throw a deliberate spanner into some important commercial transaction of value to Britain.’ He shrugged. ‘Of course, it’s blackmail.’

  ‘So to connive in one’s own humiliation is good diplomacy, is it?’

  ‘As we all know, they have all the money,’ Dr Watson said with a sad smile. ‘And, as we all know, we need it, don’t we?’

  Twelve

  The permit office near the old airport was besieged by scores of Saudis, jostling and shouting. The last minutes before the weekend began were running out. At any moment the doors might slam shut until Saturday morning, a day and a half later.

  It wasn’t easy to find the office of the colonel who dealt with cases like mine. (Ask ten urban-dwelling Saudis directions, and you’ll probably get at least six different answers and four arrogant shrugs – and, if you can’t speak Arabic, you’ll get no answers at all.) In the end I found him at a desk in a medium-sized office, surrounded by a frantically heaving crowd in thobes and headcloths. Two telephones at his elbow rang constantly. From three sides of his desk, petitioners were brandishing pieces of paper – applications for permits of one sort or another – like flags at a nationalist rally.

  With few words, the colonel impassively waved away petitioners as if they were flies hovering over his food, or glanced carelessly at the pieces of paper and added a few scribbled words on them with a gold pen, signing and dating the scribble.

  He wore a uniform and his head was bare, showing blond hair, unusual in Saudis, but he may have been Palestinian or Syrian. Shoved and shoving, I made my way to his desk and laid my passport and the consulate’s note on it, keeping my hand on them to make sure they were not snatched away in the turmoil. With a momentarily deafening shout, the voice of a muezzin rose above the babble and the telephones, calling everybody to prayer. I hoped a good number of the people around me would rush out to their devotions, but nobody moved from the colonel’s desk and the scrimmaging went on as before; when it came to getting a permit, prayers evidently could wait. ‘La ilah ill’ Allah….’ The muezzin’s nasal tones filled the room with a metallic roar of static. The prayer call was too highly amplified for the loudspeakers, and, to judge from the volume, the minaret it emanated from might have been in the permit office itself. Everything audible, including the colonel’s throw-away voice, thereafter had to be heard against that ear-splitting background.

  When at last the colonel glanced up at me, unsmiling, and took my passport and the note from the consulate, his telephone immediately rang. ‘Could you give me a week more?’ I asked him in Arabic, but he was talking into the receiver and pretended not to hear. He had already written something brisk on the consulate’s note and, when he rang off, the nib of his gold pen was tapping on the visa from Alexandria in my passport.

/>   ‘This says “Transit only”,’ he said in an accusing voice. ‘And there are these….’ He turned back two pages and rapped with his pen the two unsightly smudges the ham-fisted clerk in Alexandria had made in stamping the visa in my passport. To the colonel they seemed to have been put there as deliberate warnings – a sort of code – to any Saudi official in Jedda not to trust me with an extension, and perhaps, I suddenly thought in burgeoning paranoia, that’s what they were.

  ‘You can stay four days,’ said the colonel, not looking at me. His calculated indifference was positively aggressive. ‘Saturday. Then you must go.’ He had given me no more than one extra day. Already he was reaching out impatiently for an application flapped at him by a shaking old man with a grey beard. Arabic and the note from the consulate had availed me nothing.

  There was now no question about it: Moscow was truly alight and burning merrily; a retreat was inevitable. I would have to leave Jedda before midnight on Saturday, the day after tomorrow, and it would not be possible to wait for sailings or telex messages from Hamburg or anywhere else. I would have to forget Djibouti and fly direct to the Gulf. Fly!

  ‘Go and see Mr Fuad downstairs,’ the colonel said curtly in my direction. No one seemed to know or care where Mr Fuad’s office was. When I found it, a clerk drinking tea said, ‘Fuad is praying. Later.’ I sat on a hard chair and waited with four or five silent Saudis in white cotton robes, all of whom wore gold watches and rings and had gold rims on their spectacles. Mr Fuad turned out to be a grim Mr Punch in a soiled thobe and a cheap red and white headcloth. He added his signature to my passport in green ink, and snapped ‘Sanduq’ – meaning cash desk. There was no sign of such an object in his tiny office, and a clerk who pulled himself slowly to his feet beckoned me to follow him, and led me to another building across a courtyard. There I paid ten riyals (£1.50) to a cashier, and was led back across the courtyard by the clerk. Halfway across, a handsome Saudi, whose face was as black as any face I’ve ever seen, called to the clerk in whose footsteps I was following, ‘Brought your slave with you?’

  ‘What?’ The clerk was puzzled.

  The black Saudi jerked his head toward me. ‘You’ve brought your slave with you.’ The clerk glanced back at me and they both hooted with laughter. I laughed too. It wasn’t a bad joke. Most blacks in Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries are descendants of slaves brought over from Africa. And slaves walk at the heels of their masters just as I had been following the clerk.

  Slavery in Saudi Arabia was a strange system. Despite an official ban on the practice, there were slaves there until quite recently. The term can be misleading. In Arabia slaves often became affectionate servants rather than the pitifully ill-treated human beings we read about in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Furthermore, eventually a faithful slave was almost invariably rewarded with his freedom.

  The impudent remark by the black Saudi suddenly reminded me vividly, as if he stood before me, of the slave boy Saad. I paid about £30 for Saad one day in 1955 in the scruffy backwoods town of Bisha, on the long dust and lava track that led from the city of Taif to the remote – and to foreigners almost unknown – town of Najran on the Yemen border. I had driven into Bisha with my small band of Locust Control helpers – four mountain dwellers from the Medina region, a man from the east, and a young Yemeni from the fortified town of Ib – to buy stores in the market. The next day I was sitting reading in the doorway of my tent when Mubarek, the elderly and reliable overseer of my group, returned from the town to say that he had been approached by a black boy of about sixteen – a slave, he said, whose parents had been sold to the other end of the kingdom, and who wanted to get away from Bisha. Saad had shyly told Mubarek this in a coffee house; the man he worked for was willing to let him go, he said, for a reasonable sum.

  ‘But do we need anybody else? Another mouth to feed?’

  Mubarek said, ‘He would be very useful washing pots and pans and helping with the cooking. If he’s too much trouble, we can let him go in Najran.’

  So Saad joined us, and was as useful as Mubarek had prophesied he would be. He was also cheerful, and the others seemed to get on with him. He liked music, and sometimes in camp in some wild spot between the mountains and the desert, I would see him alone, cross-legged in the shade of the thorny umbrella of an acacia tree, his head thrown back to reveal a crimson tongue, singing in high falsetto and flicking on a saucepan lid the African rhythms he heard in his head.

  We had a football in camp and sometimes the Saudis awkwardly tucked up their long skirts and kicked it about barefoot. Saad was good at it; he was short and bowlegged but nimble. His hair was tightly curled, and his teeth gleamed in his black face like a set of dentures in a coal scuttle.

  Sometimes I found him feeding biscuits to the harmless fluffy tree rats that now and again infested the camp. If a locust swarm descended nearby, Saad gathered handfuls of them into a sack, then threaded them together like beads on a necklace, and grilled them on the embers of the open fire as if they were chestnuts. They had a dull taste – like singed cardboard, I imagined – but were said to be nutritious.

  There were worrying times. Saad’s pleasantly ugly face was so expressive that sometimes I could see some high emotion playing across its black glossiness like electric waves through a steel plate. His speech was punctuated with explosive exclamations – Ah!’ and a squeaky ‘Eeh!’ More than once I found him sitting alone behind the tents, silently staring at a small patch of ground as if he’d lost something precious there and was searching for it. Then I would call Mubarek and the others to get out the football or take my .22 rifle and clamber about the rocks looking for partridges or quail, and soon Saad would be laughing his high-pitched blackboy’s laugh again. To the others Saad wasn’t a slave but a younger brother. That is what Saudis were like outside Jedda.

  ‘Are you happy, Saad?’ I asked him when he’d been with us about six months. ‘More than ever before,’ he answered.

  He stayed with us for a year, and then, when I left Saudi Arabia, went on his way, a slave no longer.

  Now, in 1979, twenty-four years later, in the taxi going back to the hotel, I wondered where Saad was now – fortyish, plump, married, perhaps a shop owner, a taxi driver, a bowlegged mechanic in the eastern oil fields?

  As it happened, the driver of my taxi was also black and no longer young. When I asked him where he came from he said, ‘Oh, Abha,’ casually, as if he was certain I had never heard of it.

  Abha! The capital of the Asir province on the northern Yemen border, a mountainous but watery region intermittently green with orchards and grain fields between jagged ridges full of wild cats and colonies of fierce baboons that threatened men and tore large dogs to pieces. It was a region of some of the loveliest villages I had ever seen, with miniature skyscrapers that were really mud towers with small shuttered windows. After sunset they glowed like dolls’ houses.

  Hardly any outsiders had been to Abha then; I can only think of St John Philby and Wilfred Thesiger. It had a solid fort of stone built by the Turks and used, when I pitched our camp there, by the all-powerful Saudi governor, an imposing, stern but kindly man, bearded, robed and encircled by retainers, some of them black, wearing pistols and swords. I made Abha our base for six months. The people of Asir were short and dark, and their long hair, held by a fillet around their foreheads into which they pushed sprigs of fragrant herbs, hung down to their naked shoulders and chests. They wore short cotton skirts bound at the waist by a thick belt, which usually held a sharply curved dagger in an intricately embossed sheath of some silvery metal, perhaps silver itself. In the market they crowded around me – they had never seen a human being six foot three before or one with fair hair – and shyly and experimentally fingered my shirt or felt the hair of my arms. They were like Lilliputians examining Gulliver, and ran away giggling if I turned suddenly and spoke to them. In time they grew bolder, and eventually one of the bravest broke the ice by asking me to come to his five-storey Alice-in-Wonderland house for
dinner.

  My small group enjoyed Abha. It was cool up there after the desert; the food was good; and the girls, who were beautiful, went about unveiled and often bare-breasted. One of our young men from Medina fell in love with an Abha beauty and, because she evidently didn’t think much of him, he fell into a decline. He actually turned his face to the wall and refused to talk or eat. As birds do, he was pining away; the others said such a reaction was quite common. But after a few days of this I bounced him out of his mood with a prodigious and explosive dose of Epsom salts, which gave him little time to brood over love. I could not imagine that the Desert Locust people at headquarters in Jedda would readily accept a report from me that one of their employees had died of unrequited love.

  Now I told the taxi driver that I knew Abha well, and immediately he became excited. His family was still there, he said. ‘It’s changed, of course, since you were there, but the weather is still good, and the cool breezes, the gardens, the fruits.’

  ‘The grapes and the pomegranates.’

  ‘We had so much running water.’

  ‘And the green grass at Khamis Mushayt and the long-haired people.’

  The governor’s name was Ibn Madhi, a man with a power of life and death over the people of the region, and a brother who was governor of Najran. I told the taxi driver that as I entered Najran for the first time a procession came towards us, leaving the town, kicking up a great cloud of dust in the valley; it was that governor being led off in chains. He’d been arrested by order of King Saud for some misdemeanour and summoned to Riyadh to explain himself. It had been a dramatic scene, like something from another time: the tall moustached men in Arab dress, the sun flashing on their guns and swords, some on horseback, the fallen governor – a Nejdi from the northern deserts – in their midst manacled but still imposing in disgrace.