Yemen- The Unknown Arabia Read online

  To express these feelings and demonstrate the antiquity of the link between land and people – perhaps even to make a political point, that Yemen refused to be marginalized by a super-culture which idealized desert values – al-Hamdani and his school used the super-culture’s own idiom: genealogy. By making placenames the names of ancestors, they were literally planting the Qahtani family tree in the soil of Arabia Felix. It was an extraordinary landscape that they depicted, and – like the corner of it shown in Baurenfeind’s plate – the most remarkable thing about it was the way in which it had been humanized.

  And yet, for the West, the nineteenth century created a different image of Arabia. Explorers like Burton and Palgrave – and, more recently, the neo-Victorian Thesiger – portrayed a landscape of sterile sand where only individual qualities of honour and courage could ensure survival. Desert values were resurrected and romanticized, and they struck a chord with Europeans of a more puritan age. The chord still reverberates; received images have crowded out this other Arabia.

  I wandered round al-Hadiyah suq and sat for a while at the base of a huge tree. Its exposed roots formed a knobbly bench, burnished by generations of backsides. The tree, a Ficus vasta Forsk., was of great age; perhaps Niebuhr, Forskaal and their companions had sat there, too, and botanized. It was lunchtime when I found a truck to Bayt al-Faqih. I sat chewing qat, wedged between sacks of coffee on the cab roof. Down in hornbill country we passed a group of women whose faces were stained yellow with turmeric. They wore fake plaits made of hanks of wool, and purple straw hats the size of teacups were perched over their foreheads. I glanced back at them and noticed that Raymah was gone, melted into the mist.

  6

  Dugong City

  ‘Be’old a cloud upon the beam,

  An’ ’umped above the sea appears

  Old Aden, like a barrick-stove

  That no one’s lit for years an’ years.’

  Rudyard Kipling, ‘For to Admire’

  IN 1992, A SENIOR religious figure in Aden complained in the press about the city’s great number of bars and other dens of lewdness. A senior Socialist Party official replied in an open letter: ‘Since the erudite shaykh, as a son of Aden, must know the location of these establishments, then he should inform the authorities at once.’ Nothing came of the cleric’s complaint. But the fact that it had been made at all was significant. It was perfectly justified but, somehow, not on – as if a mullah had barged into a reading from Omar Khayyam shouting, ‘ “A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse”? Infidels!’ Aden was supposed to be different. Perhaps its days as a place where anything went were numbered. I decided to investigate before it was too late.

  A desultory fight was going on in the street outside. I ducked under the blows, made it into the lobby, and paid. My eyes took a few seconds to adjust to the gloom. A disco globe winked rheumily at a circular room with a small stage and dance-floor. Around this, men in futahs sat drinking beer. So far the erudite shaykh would have heartily disapproved. I’d just found an empty table when a voice, inches from my ear, made me jump. ‘Supper?’ it lisped. ‘Do you want supper?’ I looked round into a black face. Even in the half-light it was clear it had been subjected to heavy-handed maquillage. I nodded. The waiter – it was, just, male – hovered slightly, pirouetted, then glided into a recess. While I waited, the band came on and started to tune up. Again, the hot breath on my ear: ‘Shibz.’ The monosyllable was rich with quivering suggestion; perhaps he was a fan of Zsa Zsa Gabor. With little flourishes, as though his nail varnish wasn’t quite dry, he deposited the plate of chips and a bottle of beer, and melted back into the gloom. Surprisingly, the chips were hot and the beer cold.

  The band struck up a Lebanese hit of the ’70s, a strobe was switched on, and a dancer appeared from another recess. The girl looked half-Vietnamese. She had buck teeth and was wearing an Alcanfoil bikini. Slowly, she cranked herself into action. The performance was not so much a dance as a series of little spasms, like the dying stages of an epileptic fit. I could have made a more erotic job of it. Still, some of the men in futahs got up and began thrusting banknotes in the direction of her bra. They tended to miss, and another waiter came to shadow the dancer like a referee at a boxing match, stooping to pick up the fallen notes. Each time he stood up he carefully rearranged the two remaining strands of hair on his scalp. I ordered another beer.

  The girl showed her first spark of vitality when the music stopped and she ran off stage. Then the band broke into a sort of Egyptian glam-rock number and, unexpectedly, the floor filled with young men dressed in Paisley pattern shirts and pleated trousers. The number of pleats seemed to reflect their prowess at dancing. One particularly energetic youth – a twenty-pleater – shone out: his pelvis was articulated in extraordinary places, and spurts of sweat shot from his forehead. These were the mutamayk-alin, the Michaelesques – the fans of Michael Jackson.

  I was enjoying the spectacle when, suddenly, it was blotted out by a mountainous figure which interposed itself between me and the dancers. This time the sex was in no doubt – a pair of stupendous breasts could be seen shuddering beneath her abayah, like a couple of hippos trapped in a marquee – and the woman, as far as I could see the only one in the place other than the dancer, was gesturing to me to get up and join her on the floor. I was wondering what would happen if I declined when a scrawny man staggered into her and threw up. The vomit just missed her. She went off, disgusted, to look for another partner, while the scrawny man collapsed into a chair next to me. In the light of the strobe, the process of vomiting had looked comical, like an early animated film. The man groaned and I poured him some water.

  Up on stage the lead guitarist did a little virtuoso break and the band went into a Queen song, ‘I Want to Break Free’, a bit fast but very competent. The Michaelesques went wild. The big woman was down there with them like a whale among her pilot fish. Even the scrawny man dragged himself up to join them.

  The song finished, the main lights went on, and in seconds the place was empty. I caught sight of the buck-toothed dancer slipping out in her abayah; the scrawny man’s vomit lay beside me on the floor, still slightly mousseux.

  St Bartholomew, on his way to India, is said to have stopped off at Aden and exorcized a devil from a well on Sirah Island. The devil had been a nuisance to the Adenis for centuries, belching fire and bad-egg smells at them when they came to draw water. According to Ibn al-Mujawir, the well was dug by the Indian afrit, or demon, Hanuman. Also appearing in the traveller’s account is the Prophet Solomon, who expelled a ten-headed beast from Aden in what appears to be another version of the St Bartholomew story, with echoes of the Mahabharata and the Book of Revelation.

  The saint’s visit is, of course, a legend; the well-devil can be explained away as a geyser. But Aden has had plenty of other bizarre inhabitants and unexpected visitors: the fifteenth-century Sufi superman al-Aydarus, who saved a sinking ship by going into a trance and flinging his tooth-cleaning stick at the peak of a mountain, which flew off and blocked the hole in the ship’s hull; the Ottoman admiral Sulayman the Eunuch, ‘more a beast than a man’, who invited the ruler of Aden to inspect his flagship and hanged him from the yardarm; Haines, the ‘sultanized Englishman’, who in 1839 founded Aden’s modern trading fortunes and died as a result of a stay in a Bombay debtors’ gaol; Air Commodore McClaughry, the ‘aerial beduin’, relaxing on his veranda with a cigar and an enormous Chinese fan; people like Hugh Scott, on his way to collect 27,000 insect specimens in the High Yemen, who thought Aden was ‘an interesting and likeable place’; others like Vita Sackville-West who thought it ‘an arid, salty hell’ and ‘precisely the most repulsive corner of the world’; Rimbaud, who indulged his ennui above a godown in Crater; all the transients who ebb and flow round great ports – merchants from Ptolemaic Egypt, from Cutch, Canton and Coromandel, Abyssinians and Persians, Hindus who burnt their dead and Parsees who left them to the vultures on towers of silence and wore hats like coal-scuttles, traders out of Conr
ad, adventurers out of Buchan; all the apparatus of trafficking – pilots and port officials, Jewish customs men, Rasulid treasurers counting the moneyboxes bound for Ta’izz, Somali stevedores who wore their hair like the cords of a Russian poodle, smeared with brick-red clay; Yemenis from the mountains going to live in Cardiff, Welsh conscripts from the valleys coming to die from heatstroke; dark-skinned seamen from Dar-es-Salaam, acne-faced ratings from Rostov-on-Don; President Salim Rubay’ Ali, found guilty in 1979 of ‘loathsome mistakes’ and shot; and, strangest of all, those two other visitors from northern lands who came treading on Britannia’s sullied train, surrounded by a crowd of commissars, apparatchiks, ideologues and ballet instructors – Marx and Lenin. With all these comings and goings, why should Aden not have been host to a demon from Hell and a disciple of Christ?

  The setting, for a city so full of ghosts, is appropriate. A British naval officer who passed by in 1830 described it as ‘very remarkable, looking like an island, very high and rugged at the Top with small buildings or Turrets on different Peaks’. In contrast to the tamer Red Sea havens, Aden is a port of call for the Flying Dutchman or the Ancient Mariner; if it did not exist, Mary Shelley, or Gustave Doré, would have dreamed it up.

  Aden’s craggy profile was formed by the volcanic activity suggested by the well-devil story and investigated by a party of medieval notables; they lowered a rope into the Sirah well and, when they drew it up, found that its end was singed. As a result of its topography, Aden is not one city but a series of settlements separated by outriders of the central peak, Jabal Shamsan. It is a hemmed-in place, a nightmare for claustrophobes; the tenth-century traveller al-Muqaddasi thought it no more habitable than a sheep-pen. And there is always a creeping suspicion that the everlasting bonfire, the volcano below, has only been damped down, not extinguished: a Tradition of the Prophet states that the appearance of fire in Aden, ‘molten, slowly flowing … which will devour anything it overtakes’, is one of the signs of Doomsday.

  On the ground, the geography of Aden is confusing. It would be clearer if we went for a spin out of Khur Maksar aerodrome with the shade of McClaughry and saw the place from the air.

  Taking off, we leave the sprawling mass of low buildings and markets at al-Shaykh Uthman and wheel southwards over the orderly but peeling rows of villas beyond the creek, the khur. The tall structure at their southern edge is the severely air-conditioned Aden Hotel, not so much a place of habitation as a giant refrigerator. In front of it a causeway begins, following the line of a former aqueduct which supplied most of Aden’s sweet water. Grubby flamingoes forage in the shallows and the odd pelican clambers into the air.

  Reaching the old Turkish wall, outside which only the well-guarded would venture in early British days, we gain height to cross the escarpment. Here the Aden peninsula begins, a rough oval five miles by three, most of it uninhabitable. Following the shore clockwise we come first to the original town, the volcanic crater which gave the area its name under the British. Here too was the port, now silted up and used only by the smallest craft, which brought the city its early prosperity. Overshadowed by a frowning gorge under the lip of the mountains to the west, a series of curiously shaped cisterns built in pre-Islamic times – the Aden Tanks – can just be seen. Vita Sackville-West thought they looked like the penguin house at London Zoo; they take on a more sinister aspect at twilight, when the call to prayer fades away into a whine of mosquitoes and the sound of air rushing through the clefts of rock above.

  Continuing clockwise past Sirah, we cross the narrow peninsula of Ra’s Marshaq and then follow an empty coast of cliffs and coves. Some three miles on, a long sandy beach opens up with a headland, the Elephant’s Back, at its far end; the hulk rusting in the shallows was a gunboat, dive-bombed as it lobbed shells over the Elephant during the troubles of 1986. Then there is a string of small sandy bays separated by promontories where, on the verandas of once-grand villas, overworked administrators would relax with a sigh and a sundowner, watching the strange backlit profile of Little Aden to the west as it melted with the afterglow.

  Here the wide Back Bay opens out, and we cross the headland the British called Steamer Point and come to al-Tawwahi, which they developed at the expense of the old harbour. The streets are broader and the buildings grander than in Crater. At Prince of Wales (now Tourists’) Pier the liners of P&O, Lloyd Triestino and the Hansa Line would discharge their passengers through a little neo-Gothic building – not a suburban church but the Arrival Hall – into a world of postcards, duty-free and the obligatory trip to the Tanks before they went on to Singapore or Southampton. It was these, and other non-human cargoes, that made Aden at its height in the late 1950s the greatest port in the world after New York. Now the harbour is home to a number of long-term invalids, rusting away at their moorings under the gaze of a miniature Big Ben up on the mountainside.

  Over another rocky bluff and the headland of Hujuf, and the last component of this scattered city, al-Ma’alla, opens out. We cross a cluster of oil tanks, the magnet that attracted shipping in later years, and follow a long canyon of apartment blocks, Martyr Madram Street.

  Swooping low over Workers’ Island (formerly – plus ça change – Slave Island) we curve round to the west along a low, sandy coast with a few bushes and a clump of early 1960s buildings to the north. This is People’s (formerly Federation) City, which the British built as capital of the ill-fated Federation of South Arabia.

  A final ascent takes us over Little Aden, which the French tried to buy in 1862. This second peninsula is as craggy as Aden proper. Together they hold the great bay in a crab-claw grip. Beyond Little Aden stretches a hazy and sparsely inhabited coast, all the way to Bab al-Mandab and the Red Sea.

  As you scud back over the bay it is all too easy to see through the misty eyes of nostalgia the white prows, the memsahib frocks and hats, the cotton ducks and gleaming mess kits of the British masters of Aden’s heyday. The 1960s, after Suez had struck midnight at the imperial ball, lie outside nostalgia’s periphery. Aden is a feast of faded magnificence for young fogey travel writers and for the Adenis who, never having had it so good, fled Marxism; as it is for some of those who stayed and, even now, sometimes wipe away a tear at the memory of Empire. They forget the cock-ups that surrounded the British departure, that the coolies finally laid down their cheery grins and took up arms. The changes that took place after 1967, so sudden and extraordinary, have for many engendered selective amnesia over what happened immediately before.

  It is time to lay the imperial ghosts. Aden, at Unification in 1990, was proclaimed Yemen’s commercial capital. It has the dramatic presence to rival Sydney or Manhattan as one of the world’s great maritime destinations. More important, it has the strategic location to equal Singapore or Dubai as a centre of trade. In 1992, it still tottered along a narrow divide between the quaint and the seedy.

  Aden’s topography is the main factor behind its equally bizarre human geography. On the map it is an appendage to Arabia, a geological haemorrhoid, or something alien that has run aground. The Adenis know that they don’t fit into the traditional tribal picture of society. They have not grown from the land but have snagged on it, brought on tides sweeping down the Red Sea or across from India.

  The racial mix is ancient. Ibn al-Mujawir noted that all sorts of nationalities lived in and around Aden, particularly Ethiopians and Somalis. Most incomers have been transient, ebbing and flowing with the port’s fortunes. The greatest influx came in the last century. Lord Hardinge, Governor-General of India in the 1840s, feared that free-port status would make Aden ‘the resort of all the loose population of the Red Sea coast’. His worries turned out to be justified: some twenty years later Hunter wrote that ‘the morality of the inhabitants of Aden is not of a high order’ and singled out the problems caused by divorced women. The Jews of Aden, who had some unusual monopolies including the cleaning of ostrich feathers, came in for his particular disapprobation, being ‘not, as a rule, very cleanly in their habits,
only washing and changing their clothes once a week’.

  Not to be outdone by San’a, Aden claims antediluvian origins – Cain is said to have worshipped fire here, and a tower on Jabal Hadid is billed as the site of Abel’s grave. When the Himyaris first came to power in the north they found it difficult to protect caravan routes to such a distant spot and developed Muza in the region of al-Makha; in the first century AD the Periplus said that Aden, which it calls ‘Eudaimon Arabia’, was only a village. However, by Ptolemy’s day Himyar had extended its rule and ‘Arabia Emporium’, as the geographer calls it, regained its importance. A number of dynasties ruled Aden in the medieval period. Under the Rasulid sultans the trade of Aden greatly increased to compensate Mongol depredations in the Gulf, but its fortunes fell with those of its masters. Their successors, the Tahirids, recognized Aden’s great potential and revived the port by introducing preferential duties.

  It was during Tahirid times that the great Sufi holy man of Aden, Abu Bakr ibn Abdullah al-Aydarus, lived. His superhuman doings, in addition to the toothstick exploit, included making the sky rain milk during a famine. Today, the saint’s annual festival is still by far the largest in Aden. Al-Aydarus, however, did not monopolize the miraculous. His predecessor Shaykh Jawhar had a cat called Sa’adah, Felicity, which would indicate how much lunch to prepare by miaowing the number of guests. One day Felicity was found to have miscounted, until it was realized that she had subtracted two of the guests because they were Christians.

  By the end of the fifteenth century, Europeans had discovered the Cape route to India; in no time Aden, the Eye of Yemen, caught the eye of Renaissance Portugal, and it was lust at first sight. The Portuguese traveller Duarte Barbosa wrote that Aden ‘has a greater and richer trade than any other port in the world’, and his countrymen, whose king had assumed the title ‘Lord of the Navigation, Conquest and Commerce of Arabia’, tried in 1513 to capture the place from its Tahirid rulers. Where they failed, the Ottomans succeeded twenty-five years later; but the Turks were tied up subduing the mountain Yemenis and allowed Aden to deteriorate, using it as a punishment posting. The first British ships to visit, early in the seventeenth century, found Aden in a state of decay and turned their attention to al-Makha. In the late 1830s there were about ninety stone houses, much dilapidated, in Aden. Most of the population existed, according to an English visitor, in ‘low crazy cabins of matting or yellow reeds’.