Yemen- The Unknown Arabia Read online

  This word association came to mind as I travelled alone late one afternoon across the uplands on the way to Khamir. Here is the territory of the Hashid tribal grouping, who have been powerful for nearly two thousand years. Boundary-stones, oaths, idols, were all around. I remembered the Old Testament curses heaped on those who move their neighbours’ landmarks, and the marching lines of little cairns, their shadows lengthening on the bare limestone, suddenly took on an aspect that was ancient and not a little sinister. The way into Dictionary Land is often to be found here, where present and past intersect.

  For some Arabs the past is an ephemeral existence on the fringes of desert or sea; for others it begins with the Pharaohs or the Mediterranean of Phoenician and Classical times. Yemen is different: it is one of those rare places where the past is not another country. I have eavesdropped on tribesmen visiting the National Museum and heard them expressing surprise, not at the strangeness of the things they see, but at their familiarity. Asking the way to al-Qalis, the site of Abrahah’s ecclesia in San’a, I have been quoted the Qur’anic account of his defeat on the Day of the Elephant as if it had happened yesterday. There is a feeling in Yemen that the past is ever-present.

  The most recent past has been eventful: there has been revolution, war, unification and – as I shall relate – a bizarre and doomed attempt to re-erect the old internal border. At the moment, the future is uncertain and there is a sense, more than ever, of people looking back to the distant past with affection, even with nostalgia. It is appropriate. Nostalgia, as far as the Arabs are concerned, was invented by a Yemeni, the poet Imru al-Qays. The settings of his poetry go beyond the land of Yemen, however, for Imru al-Qays was a scion of the noble sept of the Kindah tribe which transferred to Najd, then to the north of the peninsula. It was he who first addressed the remains of a campsite associated with a past love affair.

  Stop. Let us weep, remembering where a love once lodged,

  Where the sand hills fall between al-Dakhul and Hawmal …

  The tiniest of traces, the atlal – charred sticks, dried goat dung, the minutiae of memory – evoke the deepest passions. ‘In the open plain with its wild, parsimonious beauty,’ wrote Wilfrid Scawen Blunt in The Seven Golden Odes of Pagan Arabia, ‘every bush and stone, every beetle and lizard, every rare track of jerboa, gazelle or ostrich on the sand, becomes of value and is remembered, it may be years afterwards, while the stones of the camp-fire stand black and deserted in testimony of the brief season of love.’

  Imru al-Qays, born when the great civilizations of ancient South Arabia were in their final decline, is an appropriate figure to end an account of pre-Islamic Yemen. His life was quixotic and marked by the same combination of wanderlust and homesickness shared by so many other Yemenis of his own time and now. His poetry has become – like so much that originates in Yemen – part of the common cultural inheritance of the Arabs. His obsession, almost Proustian, with the atlal, resembles the Yemenis’ love affair with their past – not so much the concrete past about them, but a past reconstructed from the slenderest historical fact, interpreted not by the mind, but by the heart.

  We were taking the short cut to Hadramawt across the sands of Ramlat al-Sab’atayn. It was the way the incense had come from Shabwah to Marib, the route followed by the ancestors of Shaykh Zayid and of my Muscat taxi driver. The Safir oil installation to our left was black against a rising sun. A single flame shot silently upwards. The only sound was the hiss of air from the tyres as Abdulkarim, the desert guide, let them down with a twig to grip the sand better. It would be an easy crossing, he said; the sand was still firm from the autumn rain.

  We left the tarmac and crossed the first dune. For a while, we saw the traces of passing humans, an oil-can, a mineral-water bottle: twentieth-century atlal. The desert, though, had kept its looks, beautiful and frightening. For several hours we went on, at first through a sandscape that looked as if it had been formed by a giant ice-cream scoop. Then, gradually, the dunes began to get lower. In places there was the lightest covering of grass, fading blue-green into the distance.

  Lulled by the motion of the car over the gentle sand swell, I began to doze. Images of Iram of the Columns, the city of Ad destroyed by divine wrath, flickered, then burst when I opened my eyes. Iram, they said, was somewhere here, in the middle of nowhere, halfway between San’a and Hadramawt.

  Suddenly, in front of us, there was a group of buildings.

  I sat up and rubbed my eyes. The buildings were still there. Abdulkarim broke a long silence: ‘That’s the old border post.’

  He stopped the car and we got out.

  The Iram of the Qur’an had been wiped off the face of the earth. The Iram of legend was a mirage, a reaction to the horror vacui of the sands and of history. These buildings were the iram of the dictionary: a marker set up in the desert. As a memorial to imperialism, they are fittingly ugly. And unlike camp-fire traces and oil-cans, it would take many years for their cement blocks to be buried or worn away.

  We stood for a while, where the sand hills fell away into the distance, and looked. We remembered, but did not weep.

  3

  Down to the Gate of the She-Camel

  ‘Nowhere have I experienced more strenuous travelling than in the Yemen … I had the cartilages removed from both knees; apparently I had worn them out.’

  Wilfred Thesiger, Desert, Marsh and Mountain

  IN THE FIRST CENTURY of Islam, a pilgrim named Yazid ibn Shayban was on his way to Mecca when he met an old man on the road. Yazid greeted him and asked him where he was from; the old man replied that he was of the people of al-Mahrah, in the east of Yemen. After exchanging the usual courtesies, Yazid was about to continue on his way when the old man said, ‘Wait! Upon my life, if you are of Arab stock then I shall know you. The Arabs are founded on four corner-stones: Mudar, Rabi’ah, al-Yaman and Quda’ah. Of which are you?’ Yazid said he was a descendant of Mudar. ‘Now,’ the old man went on, ‘are you of the Camelry or the Cavalry?’ Yazid thought for a while, then realized the old man meant Mudar’s two sons, Khandaf and Qays, and answered, ‘Of the Camelry.’ ‘And are you of the She-Hare or the Skull?’ That needed more working out …

  Nine generations on, the old man’s freakishly developed memory showed no sign of flagging. ‘Now, this Shayban married three wives: Mihdad the daugher of Humran ibn Bishr ibn Amr ibn Murthad, who bore him Yazid; Akrashah the daughter of Hajib ibn Zurarah ibn Adas, who bore him al-Ma’mur; and Amrah the daugher of Bishr ibn Amr ibn Adas, who bore him al-Maq’ad. Of which are you?’ ‘Of Mihdad,’ Yazid replied, by now utterly astonished by the performance. ‘Do you see’, said the old man, ‘that I know you?’

  The story, appropriately, is quoted at the end of Qadi Muhammad al-Hajari’s Compendium of the Lands and Tribes of Yemen. The Arabs in general are fascinated by pedigree, some families preserving their lineage back to Adam; but nowhere is genealogy as visible – on the ground – as it is in Yemen. The traditional view is that, starting from the ancient civilizations around the desert fringe, the ancestors spread outwards towards the coasts, giving their names to mountains, valleys and settlements on the way. ‘Their inward thought is’, as the Psalmist said, ‘that their houses shall continue for ever, and their dwelling places to all generations; they call their lands after their own names.’

  The problem is that the geo-genealogists who charted the diaspora were over-keen. One example of their inventiveness is the attribution of the site of the Ethiopians’ church in San’a – the ecclesia/al-Qalis – to an ancestor called ‘al-Qalis’. Often, too, they found themselves in a chicken-and-egg quandary – did the tribe give its name to the place, or vice versa? – and usually came out on the side of a personal eponym. There is some evidence in the pre-Islamic inscriptions to suggest that the medieval texts often did have a point, and that a particular clan was in fact associated with a place that took on its name. But when al-Hamdani and his school tried to apply the idea across the board – and then work out the blood-
relationships between the names – they had to exercise their considerable imaginations.

  I would spend hours at a time lost in the map, following in my mind ancestral routes from the desert to the sea, bloodlines radiating from an ancient heartland. Naturally, it was the wadis that formed the main lines of communication, leading up from the desert into the mountains and, from the other side of the watershed, down to the coast.

  Most of these valleys were well-worn tracks, cropping up frequently in the texts. But there was one on which the historians and the geographers had almost nothing to say, other than to give the supposed lineage of the ancestor who settled it: Surdud ibn Ma’di Karib ibn Sharahbil ibn Yankif ibn another eight generations ibn Himyar ibn Saba. Wadi Surdud falls to the coast in a virtually straight line from a point a little over twenty-five miles north-west of San’a, and should have been a major line of communication. The main road from the capital to the coast, however, plunges down 3,000 feet then climbs again to its original altitude, covering double the vertical distance of Surdud and snaking across the Haraz Mountains in a series of magnificent but terrifying switchbacks. To find out why Wadi Surdud had been ignored would mean walking it, to the point where it joins the motor road at Khamis Bani Sa’d. Debbie, an intrepid yet sensible walking companion, had fallen in with the plan on the grounds that Surdud is a valley, water runs downhill, and we should not have to do any climbing. In theory.

  We left San’a at about nine o’clock in the morning, an early start by Ramadan standards. Our list of equipment was short: walking sticks, a torch, candles, ‘Cock Brand’ mosquito coils, penknives (mine is a Japanese Swiss army model incorporating a full-sized fork and dessert spoon, which once belonged to the chauffeur of the pre-Revolution ruler Imam Ahmad). Also boiled sweets, cheese spread triangles, two small tins of tuna – all these to be considered as treats – and a staple of festival cakes, made for the end of the great fast.*

  We found a shared taxi to the town of Shibam surprisingly quickly and, with the temporal displacement that goes with Ramadan, seemed to get there before we left. Shibam market is full of sensible goods – pots, tobacco boxes, pinstriped jackets without arms, spirtles and so on. We made our way to the military bread ovens to stock up on kidam, bread rolls of amazing longevity; they were an Ottoman import, marching-fodder for Anatolian conscripts.

  Again with uncanny speed, we found a truck to take us the short distance to al-Ahjir, the head of Wadi Surdud. As she climbed in, Debbie revealed no more than three gold-embroidered inches of her long Pakistani drawers to the other passengers, all old tribesmen. Their fasting ennui melted away.

  ‘Where are you going?’ they asked.

  ‘Tihamah.’

  ‘Tihamah? You’re going the wrong way. You must go back to San’a and get a taxi.’

  ‘But we want to walk.’

  ‘You’ll get lost,’ they said.

  ‘How can we get lost?’ asked Debbie. ‘We’ll just follow Surdud.’

  The tribesmen looked at each other. ‘There’s no way down Surdud.’

  We began to feel uneasy. These were sons of the land, their ancestors had lived here for generations: how could centuries, millennia of Yemenis be wrong? But they were also mountain men to whom the wadis were little known, sources of occasional income from share croppers, to be passed through as quickly as possible.

  ‘You see’, I ventured, ‘we’ve heard so much about the attractions of Surdud, we want to see it for ourselves.’

  This worked. Even if foreigners do irrational things like sightseeing, and going on foot when comfortable cars are available that all but the poorest can afford, this had struck a chord; the tribesmen were not insensitive to the beauty of their surroundings. They had realized that we were not mistaken, just soft in the head.

  Except for one. The truck bounced across a deep rut and he gripped my knee, partly to steady himself, partly for emphasis. ‘Have you heard about the tahish?’

  The word rang a bell.

  ‘The tahish – the monster,’ he explained.

  ‘What sort of a monster?’ Debbie asked brightly.

  ‘It’s the size of a cow but it’s got a head like a hyena’s, with a wide jaw, like this …’ He opened his mouth and moved his head from side to side like a periscope. Everyone laughed.

  I remembered the word. The Ministry of Culture had put on a play called The Tahish a couple of years before. Curious, I had done some research, but found only a reference to a tahishah in Hadramawt: the gloss on the word was strange and unilluminating – ‘a bird unknown to you’. At any rate, the monster in the play never even appeared on stage, which must have been a relief for the props people. It just roared in the wings and turned out to be nothing more than a figment of mass hysteria, an allegory of the fear inspired in pre-Revolution Yemenis by the tyrannical Imam Ahmad. The tahish was a bogeyman, a myth, a Yemeni yeti.

  Suddenly the man’s head stopped swivelling and his eyes fixed on me. ‘Last year the tahish ate a man in Surdud. All but his flip-flops.’

  Yemen has its share of disturbing creatures. First, there are snakes. Some are benign, like the snake that guarded the Palace of Ghumdan in pre-Islamic San’a. Guardian serpents are still to be found carved, coiled, on the walls of houses – coiled to spring, like the flying snakes that Greek geographers mentioned as watching over Yemen’s incense groves. The tails of certain snakes, used as kohl applicators, are said to prevent eye disease. As for the malevolent ones, they are dealt with by the hannash, the professional snake-gatherer. One hannash I met in the mountains west of the capital was claimed to be able to attract dozens of snakes from a single house by reciting Qur’anic verses; they would slither into a sack and writhe harmlessly. Not knowing any hannashes in San’a, the only time I found a snake in my house I decapitated it with a coffee-roasting spoon.*

  Then there are scorpions. Very occasionally they are found in bunches of qat. Once, a baby one walked out of my bundle and across my lap, and disappeared among the leavings in the middle of the room. I have never seen qat-chewers move faster. Another creature that sometimes pops up in qat is the fukhakh, the hisser – the Yemeni name for the chameleon. Its blood taken externally is a cure for baldness, but its breath makes your teeth fall out. The gecko too is often killed, as it eats the remains of food from round your mouth as you sleep, pisses and gives you spots. Despite this I have been attached to several that have grown up in my house as they are clever flycatchers and converse, like the Hottentots, in clicks. There are few bigger beasts, although hyenas are common and leopards are spotted occasionally. The thirteenth-century traveller Ibn al-Mujawir also noted were-lions in the mountains west of Hajjah. They now appear to be extinct. All the same, who could tell what might be waiting in the unvisited gorges of Surdud?

  We said goodbye to the tribesmen where the road entered al-Ahjir. I got my boot caught in the truck’s tailgate; Debbie descended, again with remarkable decorum. The truck lurched away and we were left looking over the valley. Al-Ahjir is a huge bowl. There is something un-Yemeni in the shape, as though, in contrast to the jagged and geologically young mountains, this is the product of lengthy attrition, like a glacial corrie. Behind us rose the ramparts on which the fortress-town of Kawkaban sits, up in the gods of this huge natural theatre. In front, at the far side of al-Ahjir, was a gap – the lip of the bowl – and although it was too far away to see, we knew that beyond it the land dropped away, down, down to the Red Sea. It is easy to forget how high you are, living up here on top of the mountains and surrounded by more mountains; but the thought of that uninterrupted 8,000-foot descent charged the spot with massive potential energy. I had a momentary vision of tilting the bowl we were standing in and seeing Yemen pour away. (In fact, landslides have occurred here. Eight hundred years ago an entire village slid a mile down al-Ahjir and engulfed the hamlet below. The people of the second village complained to a judge and were awarded the topsoil which had arrived so precipitately on their doorsteps. The people of the first village were per
mitted to recover their houses.)

  The track was good, and we almost skipped down it. All around us was the evidence of long and careful cultivation. ‘Al-Ahjir’ derives from the old South Arabian hajar, a town, and the name is shared with many other anciently inhabited areas. The valley is watered by permanent streams which once powered mills. Grain is still produced, mainly sorghum and a little barley, as well as apricots, peaches, almonds and qat.

  The motor track soon doubled back to climb around the inside of al-Ahjir, serving a string of villages. We branched off it and climbed down into the empty flood course, turning to look up towards Kawkaban for the last time. We were leaving the familiar and trusting ourselves to gravity, as free as the water which when it rained would tumble over these rocks. Surrounded by Cock Brand coils, we would sleep wherever we were when the sun went down.

  A few goats foraged, untended. One was standing on its hind legs in the middle of a thorn bush like the biblical ram caught in the thicket, reaching up to nibble at a leaf; another had scaled a tree and was munching its way, oblivious of the drop, along a slender branch. We neared the lip of al-Ahjir in silence, saving our breath for exclamations of wonder at the great panorama which would open up before us.

  It didn’t. Through the gap, all that could be seen was a narrow and gloomy canyon.

  ‘I wonder if we’ve come the right way,’ Debbie said. She reached into the pocket of my rucksack for the map and we followed the broken line of the track, down from the spot where we had left the truck, past the villages of al-Zuhar and Silyah, into the watercourse. Here the contours began to look like lines of panic in a Munch lithograph. There were no tracks or settlements; not even, for most of the wadi’s length, any of those tiny black squares which show habitations. Mentally I shrunk myself to scale – about the size of a mushroom spore – and dragged myself across the knotty 6-mile squares. We had come the right way. This was Wadi Surdud.