Perforce, oft have I fled from evil men
In times long past when I was strong of limb.
But now my youthful days are gone,
And I am old and weak and thin.
The visitor was shocked that his hosts intended to eat the nisnas. ‘Surely’, he said, ‘it is forbidden to eat creatures that can recite poetry.’ ‘On the contrary,’ the Shihris answered, ‘it lives by grazing and has the digestive tract of a ruminant, so it is perfectly halal.’* Yaqut adds an apologia: ‘I admit that these stories are extraordinary, but I have merely quoted them from the books of learned men. If the information is at fault then I personally am not responsible.’ One can only echo the disclaimer.
Al-Shihr has always been associated with one of the strangest, and costliest, of all the sea’s products: ambergris. Despite its origin in the bowels of the sperm whale, it became part of the poet’s stock-in-trade of amatory metaphors: ‘and if you, my beloved, are perfume,/ You are ambergris of al-Shihr’. As well as being a constituent of cosmetics, in other more hedonistic lands it is mixed with tobacco for a voluptuous smoke. Ambergris also has a place in the traditional Arab pharmacopoeia: I have taken a course of ‘beef ambergris’, a concoction of the stuff with honey and herbs, in an attempt to improve my puny-looking physique. There were no visible results. Aphrodisiac properties are also claimed for it. I once bought a lump on the street in San’a as a wedding present for a friend. It smelt of the real thing, somewhere between truffles and BO, but turned out to be mostly candlewax.
Ambergris has always been a great rarity. Ibn al-Mujawir, who calls it ‘sea hashish’, ascribes its scarcity to ‘the wickedness of our opinions and the ugliness of our deeds’. Today, a fist-sized lump is worth at least the equivalent of £100. Down on the shore at al-Shihr, I decided to do some beachcombing. The problem was that I didn’t know what to look for. I walked over to an old man, who was painting the hull of a boat with an evil-smelling substance. He might be able to help.
‘Ambar?’ He grinned. ‘When you find it, it smells of shit. It even looks like shit. It’s only when it begins to dry out that the smell changes. And if you do find some, you must cut your finger and let the blood drip on to it. Then you must pray two prostrations and give a third of it away as alms. Finding ambar, you see, should be what they call “a discovery where joy is mixed with pain.” ’
I scanned the beach, which seemed an allegory for the ugliness of men’s deeds: it was used as a rubbish-tip and public lavatory. ‘So how do you tell the difference, I mean between ambar and shit?’
The man looked at the ocean. ‘Ah …’, he said, and smiled. I thanked him for his advice and left.
The coast of Yemen – all 1,200-odd miles of it excluding the kinks – is, for me, a tacked-on sort of place. The essence of Yemen is here diluted in the ebb and flood of outsiders. If I treat the coast as an afterthought, I admit to prejudice. It is the view from the tower-house in the mountains where I live.
With few exceptions, the coast is visually unexciting. But for this reason, other sense-impressions are heightened, and none more so than those created by smell. For someone used to dry mountain air, the increased humidity acts as a fixative for smells; at times they seem almost solid, trapped in a matrix of moisture. The Greek geographer Agatharchides, writing of the Yemeni coast, notes ‘an indescribably heavenly exhalation which excites the senses, even for those out at sea; and in the spring, whenever a breeze blows off the land, it comes redolent with the scent of myrrh and other trees’. As a sensual idée fixe it is remarkably persistent, occurring in the Bible, in the Latin poets, and in Milton:
When to them who sail
Beyond the Cape of Hope, and now are past
Mozambic, off at sea north-east winds blow
Sabaean odours from the spicy shore
Of Araby the Blest, with such delay
Well pleased they slack their course.
It was only when a new generation of Western romantics began to extol the antiseptic and odourless virtues of the desert that the cliché turned stale. Jeddah, T.E. Lawrence wrote, ‘held a moisture and sense of great age and exhaustion such as seemed to belong to no other place … a feeling of long use, of the exhalations of many people, of continued bath-heat and sweat’. He has a point: the Red Sea is an armpit of a place, where the perspiring proximity of Arabia and Africa generates heat, passion, magic. Hence the practice of infibulation, supposed to reduce the feminine libido; hence the zar, the exorcism by wild dancing and drumming of a jealous spirit, implanted by a rebuffed woman in the object of her desire by making him smell basil.
One could compile an olfactory gazetteer of the Yemeni coast, in the tradition of the founder of Zabid. He was said to have travelled down Tihamah, sniffing handfuls of earth as he went, until he came to a spot where he found ‘the butter, zubdah, of the land’; zubdah gave the city its name. Similarly, Awad ibn Ahmad ibn Urwah, a blind pilot of al-Shihr, was famous for his ability to tell a vessel’s position by smelling the mud on the ship’s plumbline. Once, while his ship was in the Gulf, the crew tried to catch him out by giving him mud from al-Hami, a few miles east of al-Shihr. ‘All this time,’ Awad said, ‘and we’ve only got as far as al-Hami?’
The Sabaean odours of Milton and Agatharchides are now faint. Frankincense has never recovered from the blow dealt it by the early Christian Fathers although, in a sense, it still contributes to Yemen’s hard-currency earnings in the form of tourism: roads (the Incense Road, the Silk Road, the Road to Samarkand) are marketable. And no more striking a setting could be desired for the Incense Road’s southern coastal terminus, Bir Ali, the ancient Qana. Here, at the end of a long sickle bay of white sand, is the sheer black bulk of an extinct volcano. On top are a few fragments of wall; below, the basalt outlines of port buildings where, occasionally, you can pick up a lump of frankincense that was intended for the nostrils of Capitoline Jupiter or many-bosomed Diana of the Ephesians.
Even if the shores of Yemen are no longer as spicy as they were, Tihamah at least is still redolent with the scent of full, a kind of jasmine, and of kadhdhi, Pandanus odoratissimus, a long spiky flower used to scent clothes. It is said only to bloom when lightning strikes its buds. Full, kadhdhi, civet, musk, ambergris and numerous other ingredients are combined to make the perfumes used today by Yemeni women.* The reason for their fondness for scent is in part a practical one, Ibn al-Mujawir says: the women of Yemen are ‘pretty of face, fond of chattering and loose of trouser-band’, which proves that their sexual appetite far outweighs that of men; consequently women have to ‘resort to using much scent in order to excite lust …’
And then there are the odours that accompany change and decay. The once-great coral-stone merchants’ houses of al-Luhayyah, where Niebuhr landed and played violin duets with the artist Baurenfeind to a people ‘curious, intelligent and polished in their manners’, fill with the reek of bats, then, giving up the ghost, collapse into dust, verandas, painted ceilings and all. Dust is everywhere. The cruel afternoon wind whips it up, turning the sun into a liver-spotted ball of yellow bile, then blotting it out. Caught in this recurring apocalypse, this death of air, there is nothing to do but assume a foetal position and wait for the redistribution of defunct earth, houses, creatures, to come to an end. Yet, by the grace of God, the sky opens most years and the coast gives off that most magical scent of all: rain on dust. It is the smell of life in death, and for a time the dunes sway with millet as far as the eye can see.
I have left out much material on the coasts of Yemen (much of it dashed, as Niebuhr said of Arab tales, with a little of the marvellous: a recent Sultan of al-Mukalla who would catch his serving-girls as they flew off a water-chute by the dozen; his neighbour of Balhaf who would throw enemies into the sea in perforated tea-chests – the more hated the enemy, the smaller the holes; a tribe descended from a mermaid; another whose young men rugby-tackle gazelles and play leap-frog with camels; two villages whose people, about their usual business one day in the year
1169, rose into the air, never to be seen again; Sufi adepts who stab themselves and hang by the neck from buttered poles; brides who train their pubic hair in plaits which their husbands rip out on the wedding night; a woman who spent her life standing on her head and was cured by a meteor shower; and so on). But then, I am not Scheherazade.
8
True Ancient Naturals
‘Stories of old …
Of dire chimeras and enchanted isles,
And rifted rocks whose entrance leads to hell,
For such there be, but unbelief is blind.’
Milton, Comus
THIS WAS TO HAVE BEEN a footnote on a place I would never see, but it grew, inexorably, into a chapter. Mine has been a digressive account; the Island of Suqutra, with the clarity of its light, the grotesqueries of its landscape, with its almost palpable genius loci – the spirit of old South Arabia now fading away on the mainland – is the last great sidetrack. To end there is, in a sense, to end at the beginning.
Suqutra had always been unattainable. Waq Waq, the Arab Ultima Thule at the far end of Mozambique, and sometimes beyond China, seemed hardly more distant. There it was on the map, somewhat larger than Skye, butted off the Horn of Africa, nearer to Somalia than to Yemen. But to get there … It might as well have been a place in a dream.
The origin of the island’s name is in itself obscure. Arab writers have glossed it as suq qatr, the Emporium of Resin, but it probably derives from the Sanskrit dvipa sakhadara, the Island of Bliss. This in turn may be a version of Dh Skrd, which appears in South Arabian inscriptions and seems to have given the Greek geographers their home-grown sounding name for the island, Dioskurida. The etymological enigma is compounded by questions about the racial origins of the Suqutris, whose veins are thought to flow with South Arabian, Greek and Indian blood, with perhaps a dash of Portuguese.
Medieval writers did their best to shroud the island in a mist of dubious or downright incredible facts. Ibn al-Mujawir says that for six months of the year the Suqutris were forced to play host to pirates, who would make free with the Suqutri girls. The pirates seem to have worked en famille: ‘They are a mean bunch, and their old women are meaner than their men.’ For defensive reasons, the islanders took to sorcery, and when the late twelfth-century Ayyubids sailed for Suqutra with five warships the Suqutris magicked their island out of sight. For five days and nights the Ayyubid fleet quartered the seas, but found no trace of it. A century later, Marco Polo reported that the Suqutris were the best enchanters in the world and could, Aeolus-like, summon winds at will. The archbishop in Baghdad, to whom they were subject, disapproved strongly. Moreover, the Venetian goes on, the islanders ‘know many other extraordinary sorceries, but I do not wish to speak of them …’
Eight centuries on, Suqutra occupies an apparently stable position 12½ degrees north of the Equator. It is home to a breed of dwarf cattle, to wild goats and donkeys, and to civet cats, which lurk in an eccentric arboretum where a third of the flora is unique to the island. The only pictures I had seen were of trees like yuccas and other pot plants but bizarrely mutated and enlarged; a few illustrating a British colonial official’s visit to the Sultan in 1961; and Wellsted’s drawing, done in the 1830s, of a scene near the capital Hadibu, which owed more to the Picturesque than to observation – a vista of craggy peaks with a foreground of artfully positioned swains, in which the artist himself surveys the view in a peaked cap, like a commissionaire lost in a willow-pattern plate. As for the written sources, my scant knowledge of the place was founded on rumour and travellers’ tales. There were whispers of witch trials as late as the 1960s; Cold War demonologists of the 1980s suspected the existence of a ‘massive’ Soviet naval base with nuclear submarine pens. Cartographers should, by nature, be more down to earth; but a look at the toponyms they had collected included Buz and Berk, Gobhill and Yobhill … Dinkidonkin.
Clearly the only way of proving the place actually existed, was not some elaborate fiction, would be to go there. But how?
For half the year, Suqutra is cut off from the rest of the world by violent storms; for the other half, a small plane is supposed to go there twice a week but flights are often cancelled or booked out. The islanders number around 40,000, but I had never met a Suqutri and knew no one who had. San’anis, if they had heard of the place, thought of it as the very margin of the world. (The problems of getting there are not new. Many years ago, it is said, a mainland woman whose husband had been on Suqutra for seven years could only get to the island on the back of a phoenix. The bird was meant to touch down on the al-Mahrah coast during the first ten days of the lunar month Muharram.)
And then, unexpectedly, the door to Suqutra opened. I was on my way to see Linda and Awad, waiting in Crater for the Aden-al-Mukalla taxi to fill up. It was two passengers short, and had been for most of the morning. Everyone was ratty, with lunchtime approaching and an eleven-hour journey ahead. Hadramis with plastic briefcases and new starchy futahs, worn ankle-length with the labels still attached, were trying to get each other to shell out for the empty seats. I had refused to part with a shilin more. If anyone was pressed for time then let him pay up. I was in no hurry. And since no Hadrami will countenance publicly spending more than the next one, we waited.
Another debate began, on whether to have lunch here or on the road. The driver knew that no more passengers would arrive in the dead small hours between the noon and asr prayers, and lay down to sleep on the desk of the Controller of Taxis, who had nothing to control. The Hadramis went off for lunch. Two passengers appeared. In an instant the driver was out of a deep slumber and running after the lunch party, and soon afterwards we were bowling north-east along the Abyan shore.
My fellow passengers were silent until we had eaten in Zinjibar. Conversations started, I unwrapped my qat. Then I heard something that made me sit up: it cut through the low hum of talk, audible as a stage-whisper. It was that phonemic phantom of South Arabia, the lateral sibillant which is a sh hissed through the corners of the mouth. I turned to the latecomers. ‘You must be Mahris.’
‘No, we’re from Suqutra – if you’ve heard of it.’
I must have stared at them longer than was polite. One of them said something incomprehensible and they both laughed. Still, they did look different. For a start, they were darker and much wirier than the Hadramis; then, there was something about the eyes, a slight upward flare to the outer corners, something feline. The best enchanters in the world.
They brushed off my apologies and we started chatting. Sa’d and Muhammad had finished secondary school in Aden. They were going home to be teachers. ‘And you’re flying from al-Mukalla?’ I asked them.
‘We wanted to, but the plane’s full and will be for weeks. You see, it’s the end of al-kaws, the season of storms, and everyone’s going home. We’re travelling by sea.’
I cut short my Hadramawt visit and returned to San’a. Less than a month after the meeting with Sa’d and Muhammad, I bade an emotional farewell to my San’ani friends. For them, the great and wide sea teems with leviathans and other terrors. ‘You’ll end up’, they said, and in all seriousness, ‘in the belly of a whale. And you’re a nasrani, so praying won’t do you any good.’ At their insistence I had written my will. With me was Kevin, recently returned from four years in Kuala Lumpur, Georgetown and Chiang Mai. In the Far East he had suffered from breakbone fever and from not being in Yemen.
We left a San’a strangely transformed. The authorities were running a clean-up campaign to rid the city of its rubbish, and even the Prime Minister took to the alleys with a broom. Street traders were also swept away, and without its secondhand clothes, tobacco, alfalfa and impromptu poets the suq outside my house was eerily quiet for the first time in centuries. There was no longer a smell of basil on the stairs. The transformation of San’a into a museum had begun, and I was glad not to be watching it.
Three days later we arrived in the small town on the Hadramawt coast which Sa’d and Muhammad had said was the main po
rt for Suqutra. It was late afternoon and the sun slanted, mellifluous, across a broad bay. The only craft were a few hawris, slender, sharp-nosed fishing boats. They hardly moved, so calm was the ocean.
At a tea-house that smelt of fish we asked about a boat to Suqutra.
‘You’re in luck. There’s a sambuq leaving tonight.’
Kevin and I looked at each other. It couldn’t be this easy.
A tuna appeared in the doorway. ‘It’s going to Abdulkuri, not Suqutra,’ said the boy who was carrying it. Abdulkuri is a small island in the Suqutra group but more than 60 miles closer to Africa. Some 250 people live on its volcanic coast in, I had read, ‘extreme poverty, cut off from the world, and suffering great distress’. It was the sort of place where you could get stuck for a long time. Tempting as that sounded, we shook our heads.
‘I’ll take you to Salim bin Sayf,’ the boy said. ‘I think he’s going to Suqutra soon. And he’s the best nakhudhah anywhere.’ Nakhudhah! That was a word with resonances! Persian for a ship’s captain and used in Arabic since the time of Sindbad, it recalls the days before the sextant, before even the lodestone, when ‘the Junk and the Dhow, though they looked like anyhow,/ Were the Mother and the Father of all ships …’
The boy took us to the far end of the street, past the school and up an alley where we knocked on a plywood door. Goats wandered past masticating nonchalantly; there was that rich Hadrami dung-and-tobacco smell and a pinch of salt-sea shark. Salim bin Sayf stuck his head through the door, bushy bearded, rheumy in the eye, the very picture of the best nakhudhah anywhere. He was sailing for Suqutra on the eve of Wednesday. At first suspicious of why we should want to go by sea, he softened when we explained that as foreigners we’d have to pay for the plane tickets in dollars, which meant they would cost us five times what they cost Yemenis. Anyway, the plane was full.
Yemen- The Unknown Arabia Page 22
