Yemen- The Unknown Arabia Read online

  The path wound for much of the way between high stone walls enclosing terraces. They were overhung with coffee trees and ferns, and gave the place a churchyard feel. Now and again, water channels opened up on the left to give views of the great sugarloaf of Jabal Zalamlam. Then the path dropped down into a deep valley scattered with houses, their window ledges glowing with the autumnal colours of drying coffee berries.

  Coffee has a special place in the Yemeni’s heart. As a modern symbol for Arabia Felix, the coffee tree appears on stamps and bank notes. The anti-qat lobby makes the largely unjustifiable charge that coffee trees have been rooted up to be replaced by the more valuable crop, but optimum growing requirements for the two trees are different. Certainly, though, the heyday of coffee production is over. As early as 1738 an English traveller in Egypt noted that Yemeni coffee was being adulterated with cheaper beans from the West and East Indies. The Yemenis themselves have always sold the beans, bunn, and drunk qishr, made from the husk.*

  If coffee used to be the prime export crop, the staple for home consumption has always been grain, as traditional dishes show. There are scores of bread varieties, and these are used in dips, like saltah, or to soak up broth, milk or ghee. Porridge- or polenta-like dishes such as asid or harish are common. Within a limited but delicious range, the Yemenis are connoisseurs of food, suffering the furnace heat of a crowded eating house that makes the best saltah, or queuing – sometimes for hours – for special sabaya bread during Ramadan. Before qat caught on (probably in the fourteenth or fifteenth century) food seems to have been the national obsession. Ibn al-Mujawir says: ‘Their talk is of nothing but food. One will say to another, “What did you have for breakfast?” and he replies, “Millet bread with two kinds of milk,” or, “Layered bread and oil.” Another asks, “What did you eat for supper?” and his friend replies, “A round of wheat bread and four fils-worth of sweets – altogether it came to six fils!” Or you will hear someone say, “I’ve eaten enough today to last me three days! Bread and milk and sugar candy – I gorged myself until I was bursting …” ’

  Sorghum is the most widely grown cereal, and has been since ancient times: the names of the different varieties derive from those of the old South Arabian seasons. Life itself turns on the harvest, surab (another pre-Arabic term), as the bachelor’s prayer shows: ‘Be patient, O my prick, until the harvest, or I’ll chop you off!’ To pay the bride-price would be impossible without the money generated by a good crop.

  Another legacy of the so-called Age of Ignorance before Islam is the widespread use of star lore, by which farmers overcome the problem of the lunar Islamic months being out of step with the farming calendar. The rising of certain stars divides the seasons, and in some places ancient rock gnomons are used to calculate sowing times. Another rich source of farming lore is the collection of verses of Ali ibn Zayid. Star lore in particular has been formalized, often versified in mnemonic form to give information like when to cut wood so it won’t get wormy, and when the fleas will start jumping – as if one needed to know.

  The minutiae of astral calendars fascinated the inquiring minds of the Rasulid rulers. They were both patrons of science and scientists themselves, and married local star lore with the latest international developments in astronomy. Their heritage is very much alive, and a number of astral calendars are in print today. In terms of varieties grown, Rasulid rule also marked the golden age of Yemeni agriculture, and the sultans imported fruit trees, herbs and flowers from as far away as Sind. A contemporary list of products includes exotica like cannabis and asparagus. Their passion for all things agricultural took off at Sabt al-Subut, a date festival centred on Zabid which reached Bavarian Bierfest proportions. People came from all over the country to drink wine made from dates and wheat flour, and to be entertained al fresco beneath the palms by three hundred camel litters full of dancing girls. The bash lasted for weeks and ended with the revellers going to the sea on bejewelled camels for a mixed bathing session. As a result there were, Ibn al-Mujawir says; ‘many divorces and many marriages’.

  Coffee, a more sober crop, is associated with the Sufi mystic al-Shadhili, founder of the modern town of al-Makha. He is reputed to have introduced it from Ethiopia in the early fifteenth century and made use of its stimulant properties to spend more time in prayer and contemplation. In Yemen it has never attracted the faintly racy image that went with the London coffee-house or the espresso bars of the 1950s, although elsewhere in Arabia some of the more extreme members of the puritanical Wahhabi sect have disapproved of its aroma of unorthodoxy.

  Some women called me over from the yard of their house in the valley bottom. There were no men about and, although they were far from nubile, I sat at a demure distance on a wall. One of the women went inside the house while the other went on feeding a cow.

  ‘Come on, my dear, eat,’ she said, coaxing a bundle of dry sorghum stalks wrapped in greenery into the cow’s mouth.

  ‘Can’t she see it’s a trick,’ I asked, ‘I mean wrapping up the sorghum like that?’

  ‘Oh, she knows. But if you don’t do it she’ll eat nothing at all. It’s a game.’ The woman held an unwrapped stalk out to the cow. It shook its head like a truculent child.

  The other woman appeared with a tin bowl full of qishr. All around, on large metal trays, coffee beans lay in the sun. I remembered The Dispute between Coffee and Qat, a literary contest composed in the middle of the last century in which each tree vies with the other in praising itself and belittling its opponent. The coffee tree says: ‘When my berries appear, their green is like ringstones of emerald or turquoise. Their colour as they ripen is the yellow of golden amber necklaces. And when they are fully ripe they are as red as rare carnelian, or ruby or coral.’ The nearest jar of Nescafé was far away.*

  I said goodbye and set off on the track, which zigzagged up one of those stegasaurus backs like the one we had crossed in Surdud. I was still panting when I got to the yard-wide ridge. I hung my jacket on a prickly pear and sat down. Two men appeared from the direction of a solitary tower further down the ridge. They were dressed in spotless white zannahs, lounge-suit jackets and highly polished loafers. Not a bead of sweat showed on their faces. They greeted me without stopping, leaving behind them a strong scent of rosewater. The scent was still there when I looked up to the left ten minutes later. The men were far above, white flecks moving against the dark green of the mountain.

  In an hour or so (a great deal of effort is compressed into those five monosyllables) I reached a village, unimaginatively – if appropriately – named al-Jabal, the Mountain. I propped myself up against a shop doorway and gulped down a can of ginger beer. Flavoured with chemicals resulting from decades of research, packed in al-Hudaydah under franchise from a German firm in a can made from the product of a Latin American bauxite mine, furnished with a ring-pull which was the chance brainchild of a millionaire inventor, and brought here by truck, then donkey, for my delectation, it wasn’t nearly as refreshing as the qishr. The ground was strewn with empty cans, each saying in Arabic and English ‘Keep your country tidy’, and I wondered for a moment whether to put mine in my rucksack until I found a litter bin; but the nearest one was several days away, so I placed it at one end of the counter. The shopkeeper picked it up and threw it on the ground.

  From al-Jabal to al-Hadiyah is downhill. At first the path was covered with rubbish, but soon there was just the odd sweet wrapper or juice carton as a reminder of the world of creation and corruption. The afternoon cloud rose, swirling past at speed, forced upwards by the cooling of Tihamah and channelled between the sides of the gorge. Everything but the rock wall either side of the path was cut off and I walked in silence. It was like swimming. Only once was the silence broken, by girls’ voices singing a snatch of antiphony as they gathered fodder high above on the cliffs. The last note of each phrase was held, then let out with a strange downward portamento, like an expiring squeezebox.

  About half an hour out of al-Jabal, a strange thing hap
pened. For perhaps a minute the cloud parted, revealing two conical peaks directly in front and, below, a field of cropped turf, like a green on a golf course and perfectly circular. Then another column of cloud rose and shut out the vision. The precise geometry of the field’s shape and its vivid colour, and the way in which it had been revealed so unexpectedly and then veiled over, made it a mysterious sight. It had seemed to hover. It was the sort of place where you might bump into al-Khadir, the Green Man.*

  I half thought I had imagined the field and that the path would continue prosaically downwards, but I soon reached it. Once on it the perspective was different and its shape not apparent, a trompe-l’oeil but seen too close to work. A few cattle lay round the margin of the field. They took no notice as I stood watching them and seemed anchored to the ground, oblivious of the intruder in their tiny, circular paradise.

  After the field, the mist gradually disappeared and the other-worldliness was gone. Once more the path was beautifully maintained – it had to be, for it passed through an unbroken string of hamlets and carried a constant traffic of heavily laden donkeys. The boys who drove them had their zannahs hitched up and tucked behind their daggers. I stumbled down; so did the donkeys – but at twice the speed; the boys danced on stork-thin legs. Even the ones coming up danced.

  I stopped to rest, and to look at the vista of receding mountain flanks sprinkled with little houses. Somewhere on this very path, Baurenfeind, the artist of the Niebuhr expedition, had stopped more than two centuries before to sketch the original drawings for the plate, ‘Prospect among the Coffee Mountains’. It was the expedition’s first experience of highland Yemen, and they were captivated by the scenery, the people and the flora. The coffee trees, Niebuhr wrote, were in blossom and ‘exhaled an exquisitely agreeable perfume’. It was a landscape in which, despite its natural ruggedness, the hand of Man could be seen everywhere.

  Niebuhr’s original Beschreibung von Arabien was at first ignored; but the French and then the English translations were hugely popular when they came out some years later. They had touched the spirit of the new age – the age of burgeoning Romanticism and the Picturesque. Up to then, the reading public had been given an Orient almost entirely of the imagination, colourful but savage. Now Europe began to look at the East through new eyes: Southey wrote of a garden ‘whose delightful air/ Was mild and fragrant as the evening wind/ Passing in summer o’er the coffee-groves/ Of Yemen’; George Moore, in Lalla Rookh, of ‘the fresh nymphs bounding o’er Yemen’s mounts’. They had read their Niebuhr. Baurenfeind’s plates, too, contributed to the new way in which people looked at mountains. Hitherto, mountains had been forbidding places, ignored or feared. Baurenfeind recorded a different image, of mountains dotted with folly-like dwellings, sculpted into terraces and covered with crops – in a word, humanized.

  The light was beginning to go and the mountains were turning to amber, then carnelian. The humidity was increasing. The path levelled out and entered a wadi, snaking along the side of the valley through banana terraces which resembled a Rousseau jungle. I was half expecting to glimpse the shade of Baurenfeind sketching from a terrace wall, and when an old woman called out to me from above the path, I jumped. She laughed, and offered me some mouth-snuff. I was tempted but, not being used to it, didn’t want to find myself retching for the sake of a quick nicotine fix.

  After the airy peaks of Raymah, al-Hadiyah smelt fetid and unhealthy, although in Niebuhr’s day it had been something of a hill-station for the European coffee merchants, a retreat from the even clammier heat of Bayt al-Faqih down on the plain. (The latter was sometimes rendered in English as ‘Beetle-fuckee’ – probably a reflection of the merchants’ feelings towards it rather than simple bad spelling.) I arrived in al-Hadiyah just after dark, knees jellified by the relentless descent from al-Jabal. I had arranged to stay in the English midwife’s house; she had left the key with her neighbours as she was away – something of a relief, since it would save a lot of tongue-wagging.

  The electricity went off early, interrupting me as I flicked through Diarrhoea Dialogue, the only reading material I could find in the house apart from Where There Is No Doctor – a book no hypochondriac should ever open, for its refuses to mince the strong meat of medical problems from leprosy to yaws. I made up a bed on the roof. A frog croaked softly from a pot of geraniums; elsewhere, geckoes clicked; and the night was alive with other, unidentifiable, susurrations.

  Not long after dawn the flies woke me. No trucks would leave for Bayt al-Faqih until later, so I walked to al-Hadiyah’s main attraction, the waterfall. This plunges over a cliff in a single dizzy drop, then cascades in a series of deep pools. The path to it wriggled through rocky undergrowth and was home to dozens of glossy black millipedes; some were nearly a foot long and looked like pieces of self-propelled hosepipe.

  When I reached the waterfall I found it empty. Little more than a dribble of moisture stained the rock. Only when it rained on the high places would the waterfall come to life, a roaring column of white against the dark cliff.

  I sat there watching the dragonflies and thought of my absent hostess, delivering babies up in the mountains where the waterfall had its source. Horizontally she was no distance away; vertically, she was in a different world where climate, crops, dress, buildings, even speech, were different from those of al-Hadiyah. Any study, agricultural, ethnographic or dialectological, of Yemen’s mountains would have to use a three-dimensional projection to map these variations. But in spite of the contrasts encountered over the vertical, the mountain people are bound together by a tenuous lifeline of water.

  Rain for the Arabs is barakah, a blessing; and it is particularly so for Yemen where the great majority of cultivable land is rain-fed. In poetry, rain is a metaphor for human as well as divine generosity; historically, water is the reward of just government, and drought the punishment for profligacy. The beneficent rule of Imam al-Mutawakkil Isma’il in the mid-seventeenth century caused an increase in the water table, and even British policy in Hadramawt was said to have resulted in heavy rains there in 1937 (followed, it should be noted, by seven years of drought and famine); in contrast, Imam al-Mansur Ali – he of the donkey-pizzle aphrodisiac – made the wells run dry.

  Barakah is for God to grant or withhold, but intercession can pay off. When there is no rain, the entire male population climbs to the high places and starts a litany – ‘Give us rain, O God. Have mercy on us, O God. Have mercy on the dumb beasts, thirsty for water, hungry for fodder.’ A sacrifice is made and left to the birds of the air.* And if the rain comes, they do everything possible to hold it back. This is the function of the terraces which are so much a feature of the Yemeni landscape.

  Yemen’s terraces, its hanging gardens, contouring voluptuously round the flanks of mountains or perched, sometimes dinner-table sized, in what are often no more than vertical fissures, are not just a way of making a level surface. More important, they act like a cross between the pores of a giant sponge and the locks of a canal. The rain is trapped by them and contained in subdivisions separated by little bunds, before being released to the next level down in a slow and measured cascade. In slowing the downward flow of rainwater, too, terracing enables more of the wadi land to be cultivated. A torrential downpour, unchecked, runs away to waste and takes with it the wadi’s precious topsoil. The mountain men, as masters of the whole system, tend also to own the valleys and farm them out to sharecroppers. It is a system that calls for continual maintenance. The collapse of one terrace will affect the flow of water, and this in turn will lead to the destruction of terraces further down. Terraces must be kept planted so that the roots of plants consolidate the soil. The delicate balance can also be upset by the building of a surfaced road, which will speed up the flow of water and force streams into new channels.

  People have to live at the top. If they didn’t, the upper reaches of the wadis would also be uninhabitable, and cultivable land restricted to a few central plateaux, the hot and malarial coastal region
s, and great inland wadis like Hadramawt and al-Jawf. The mountains would in time be stripped bare from top to bottom. Since the protective covering of forests was felled, the history of mountain Yemen has been that of a war waged against loss of land. The weather is, at the same time, the mountain farmer’s reason for being and his antagonist.

  And what an antagonist! Millions of tons of water, sizzled out of the Red Sea, fried off Tihamah, bounced up the wall of the escarpment and colliding with the cold highland air, pour down on Milhan, Hufash, Bura’, Raymah and the Two Wusabs. Evaporation and potential energy; blessing and destruction. This is why the Raymis live like eagles, why Yemen looks like nowhere else on Earth.

  Gazing up at the terraces hanging all around above me, this ultimate symbol of the Yemenis’ co-existence with their land, I began to understand why al-Hamdani and the other geo-genealogists had turned mountains into ancestors. Lineage seems to have been relatively unimportant in pre-Islamic Yemen. It was the North Arabians, the rootless nomads, who developed the science of genealogy to give themselves a sense of continuity. At the same time, they looked down on settled farmers as peasants, with all the scorn that the word implies. As Islam spread over the Near East, the desert Arabs came across huge populations of settled serfs, in Egypt and the Fertile Crescent, working land which was not theirs.

  Yemen was different. Here, the old civilizations had been based on agriculture. When these broke up, settlers moved further and further into the mountains, cutting down ancient forests and terracing the slopes. They were owner-occupiers, yeomen not serfs; and they still are – Yemen has remarkably few big landowners. Ali ibn Zayid, the Yemeni Hesiod, summed up their feelings: ‘The tribesman’s glory is the soil of his home.’ Pride for the Yemenis is in land, not lineage.