And then it appeared. First just a smudge on the horizon, it resolved into a line of cliffs with a streak of white sand at their base. We headed for a spot where the line dipped. The dip became a broad strath carpeted in seamless green, its sides framing a foreground of palms and the low cuboid houses of Qalansiyah. Hadid hoisted his red-checked headcloth as an ensign and we dropped anchor in water of incredible clarity. A couple of sambuqs and a few hawris bobbed around us; shoals of fish darted under the hull. A hawri came and took us to the shore, where Egyptian vultures the colour of an octogenarian smoker’s hair stood among green weed, unfazed by a crowd of children who gathered to study the new arrivals. Sa’d, the high-school graduate with the enchanter’s eyes, was there too with a notebook to list the incoming goods. Salim, Hadid and the others were greeted with a gracefully choreographed double nose-touch accompanied by little sniffs. Sa’d and I shook hands.
On board, Kevin and I had felt no discomfort from the boat’s motion but now, on dry land, we were both hit by the effect of thirty-six hours on the ocean. My brain seemed to swivel on gimbals inside my skull. Ali bin Khamis bin Murjan (Ali son of Thursday son of Coral), one of the passengers and a native of Qalansiyah, took pity on us and invited us home. He led us along narrow alleyways where the ground quivered and the walls throbbed. When we arrived at his house, the only two-storey building in the town, he took us to an airy upstairs room with yellow walls and a repeating calligraphic frieze, the Islamic creed stencilled in pink. It just wouldn’t stay still. We were ordered to lie down.
Half an hour later I woke to the sound of low voices. A woman who must have been Ali’s mother was talking to him in a stream of Suqutri and Arabic. In early middle age, she was unveiled and handsome in a strikingly Iberian way – the sort of woman you might run into in a smart Lisbon department store, I thought, remembering the Portuguese connection.
Kevin was stirring. There is no god but God still undulated slightly above him; however, the worst of the delayed motion-sickness had worn off. It was then that I realized something was different: there had been no interrogation. Usually in Yemen a newcomer, and particularly a foreigner who speaks Arabic, is subjected within moments of arrival to intensive questioning on every subject from the Resurrection of Christ to the Duke of Edinburgh’s precise constitutional status. There is rarely any other motive than a wish to break the ice, and to this end the interrogation is very effective, preferable by far to an embarrassed Anglo-Saxon silence. It is a small price to pay for often bewilderingly generous hospitality but, if all you want to do is sleep, the need to perform can be exhausting. Here, though, no demands had been made on us. Writing of his visit to the island 160 years before, Wellsted said of the Suqutris that ‘the most distinguishing trait of their character is their hospitality’. Nothing has changed.
The only losers in the hospitality stakes are the goats. That evening Ali slaughtered one for the Kanafah’s crew and the two nasranis. It was a skull-smashing, cartilage-wrenching occasion, a hands-on lesson in caprine anatomy. An hors-d’oeuvre of bones was served on a palm-frond mat by Salim, who cracked the head with a mighty double-fisted blow and shared out creamy morsels of brain. Then followed the meat itself and intestines stuffed with fat. The flesh was delicious, almost gamey, and an improvement on the days of Captain John Saris, who wrote of the goats of Suqutra after a visit in 1611 that ‘most of them are not man’s meat, being so vilely and more than beastly buggered and abused by the people, so that it was loathesome to see when they were opened’. (The comment is strange – the Suqutris are indulgently gentle with their animals.) Ours was a Homeric feast, its victim the first of a hecatomb which was to fall as Kevin and I wandered the island.*
Salim said it was time for bed. After all, for the last two nights he had, Odysseus-like, ‘never closed his eyes in sleep but kept them on the Pleiads’. Before turning in he spoke to Kevin and me. ‘Come with us tomorrow. We’re going round the island to Sitayruh, my mother’s village in Nujad.’ We agreed eagerly. ‘It’s a ten-hour journey so we must be up before dawn. Sleep now.’ We bedded down with the crew in Ali’s courtyard. With no diesel thumping beneath me, the silence was as profound as the ocean. There was only a single heroic belch answered by a hushed ‘Hani’an!’ – bon appétit in reverse.
At 4.30 in the morning the cold was bitter. The sun rose as we weighed anchor and headed west. Far off to starboard a pair of rocks jutted out of the sea, fondled by rosy-fingered Dawn. Salim said they were called Sayyal, but I later came across their more poetic name in an early nineteenth-century rhyming pilot’s guide: Ki’al Fir’awn, The Pharaoh’s Bollocks. We passed the headland of Ra’s Biduh and crossed the broad bay of Shurubrum, backed by steep green hills.
Here a gurgle from the prow marked the slaughter of another goat, a present from Ali Khamis. When I went to investigate, its skin was almost peeled off and the deck was running in blood. Its dismembered carcass disappeared below with the cook while the skin was draped, Argonaut-fashion, over the bowsprit in front of the singing figurehead. By the time we rounded Shu’ub, the island’s westernmost point, the meat was cooked and we breakfasted at the captain’s table – again, a palm mat – on pancakes, tripe wrapped in small intestines, and liver. Salim, with the help of a spanner, extracted a single quivering column of marrow from a femur and then presented it to Kevin and me, performing the operation with his usual combination of brute force and fastidious delicacy.
Our course took us under the lee of the cliffs, disturbing the cormorants that nested in the rock-face. Over to the south-west Salim pointed out two distant islands, the Brothers, rising from the sea like plinths waiting for statues. ‘That’s where I go shark-fishing. One of them, Samhah, has a few people but Darzah, the other one, is covered in rats.’ A British expedition in the 1960s was unwise enough to camp on the second island; they spent the whole night fighting off its inhabitants.
At the village of Nayt, a few huts on the beach, we dropped an oildrum of salt into the sea; a boy swam out and pushed it back to the beach. Further on at Hizalah, where half a dozen tiny stone cabins clung like barnacles to a cleft in the rocks, we shouted for twenty minutes before anyone answered. Eventually, another boy swam out and climbed into the sambuq. He stood on the deck, dripping, like the half-seal half-man amphibians of Norse legend. After a panted exchange in Suqutri he plunged back into the aquamarine water and fetched a hawri, in which we deposited a spare anchor.
Soon after Ra’s Qutaynahan the cliffs rose again, 1,600-foot walls striated horizontally and falling sheer into the sea. Here and there, high up, there was an inaccessible cave, curtained by creepers. The noise of the diesel bounced, amplified, off the rock; there were no birds. The crew ceased talking and stared up at the caves, as if half-expecting an Arabian Scylla to pop out.
At last, where a tiny settlement called Subraha appeared at the foot of the cliff wall, Salim broke the spell of silence. ‘This is the start of the Nujad Plain, where people bring their flocks down from the mountains.’
Kevin pointed out that there didn’t seem to be any way down. Ahead, the cliffs marched beyond the horizon, sheer and uninterrupted. It was now midday and the bloated shapes of clouds, tethered like balloons in the windless air, were projected on to the escarpment.
‘Oh, there are paths, not that you’d call them that,’ Salim said. ‘The ledges are sometimes only this wide.’ He showed a span. ‘In some places they use ropes. And their flocks can be several hundred head.’
Slowly, the plain broadened, and at Bi Zidiq, another minute hamlet, the figurehead jumped over the side and struck off for a shore of hound’s-tooth rocks. We watched him drag himself out – with difficulty, as a wind had begun to stir up the swell. Soon he was back in a hawri and the last few passengers left. Lunch was rice and the remains of the goat. This time, Salim produced a hatchet from his toolkit-cum-batterie de cuisine to get inside the skull.
The sambuq’s shadow began to lengthen on the sea bed, crossing white sand and black rock beneath water so transparen
t we seemed to be in levitation. Kevin hung over the matting sides trying to photograph a school of porpoises. A couple of pale, yard-long turtles glided beneath the hull with indolent flicks of their flippers, descendants of the ‘true sea-tortoise’ for which Suqutra was famous in the days of the Periplus.
We arrived at Sitayruh an hour before sundown. The shoreline was busy, a metropolis after so many hours of near-empty coastline. Men staggered under unidentifiable loads, draped across their backs like huge rubbery cloaks, which they tossed into a beached hawri before returning to reload at the little headland that formed the bay’s eastern arm. Landing was precarious and we had to jump, between breakers, from the boat which took us ashore.
Kevin went to investigate the loads. They turned out to be sharks, split kipperwise, salted and dried. I found him examining a pile of fms, which they call rish, feathers. Some were enormous and had been cut off the hammerheads and maicos whose flesh was stacked nearby. While this is exported to Hadramawt, the Suqutris themselves are said to be fond of the shark’s liver, salted and preserved in its stomach. The fins were sold on the mainland for 1,200 shilins a kilo, around $30 at the time. ‘We know they go to the Far East,’ said a voice from beneath one of the sharks, ‘but what do they do with them? They must be crazy to pay that much. Praise God!’
I explained that the fins were made into soup. ‘And they pay even more for birds’ nests.’
‘Birds’ nests? The cliffs here are full of them!’ the man exclaimed. Kevin described the collection and auctioning of nests which he had witnessed in a Sarawak cave. The Suqutri listened, then staggered off under his gruesome mantle, muttering the only possible response: There is no strength and no power save in God.
Hadid, who like Salim also had a wife here, appeared and led us over the dunes to the village. The houses were compounds of single stone rooms, bewigged with palm-frond thatch and surrounded by fences of the same material. We sat in Hadid’s yard, eating dates and drinking coffee, until the evening prayer. A bowl of rawbah was passed round. Rawbah is milk after the fat has been removed to make ghee; it is poured into a goatskin, which is inflated with a lungful of air and sealed, and then left to turn sour. Slightly pétillant like a Lambrusco, the Suqutris are addicted to it. At first we found it delicious; a fortnight later we were sick of the taste.
Hadid, Kevin and I went that night to Salim’s house, where the crew and most of Sitayruh’s adult male population sat waiting for more goat. The large compound was mostly in darkness, with a couple of lanterns making feeble pools of light. When the food arrived, we ate in silence while Salim carved bite-sized chunks of meat with which he constantly replenished a pile on top of the huge plate of rawbah-soaked rice. After supper, we talked about magic. The subject seemed appropriate: Sitayruh was the sort of place that would breed spells.
‘There’s a man in al-Shihr’, pronounced Hasan, one of the Kanafah’s crew, ‘who writes charms. He can do one that guarantees you a forty-ton catch of shark!’
Salim scoffed. ‘I suppose you’d believe what they used to say about Ali Salim al-Bid’s father, that he could sell you a charm that made girls think they were walking in water so they’d lift their skirts.’ (The idea, at least, had a Qur’anic basis in the account of the Queen of Sheba’s visit to Solomon, when the prophet made her walk across a mirror-like floor and she bared her legs.)
I asked about witch trials. Snell, a colonial official, gave an account of the procedure in the mid-1950s: a suspect was first subjected to an oral inquisition by the Sultan then, if he decided there was a case against her, she was tied and weighted with 8lbs of stones; if she sank three times in three fathoms of water – the inquisitors pulling her up with a rope each time – she was innocent; if she was seen to be floating in an upright position, she was held to be a witch and exiled to the mainland. Not so long ago she would have been hurled from the cliffs. At another trial, in 1967, a guilty woman is said literally to have sprung out of the waves. Salim’s guests confirmed that the trials had continued until recently. Nowadays witches go about their business more or less unmolested.*
‘It’s since Unification that the old customs have really been dying out,’ Salim said. ‘People come from the mainland to teach the Suqutris about Islam. Take circumcision, for instance. Do you remember the boy who got off first at Bi Zidiq? I saw him circumcised a few years ago. He was about ten at the time but, in the past, they used to circumcise young men not long before their wedding night. Well, long enough for the cut to heal.
‘This is what I saw: three boys were brought, as naked as when they were born, before all the people of the area – hundreds of them, men and women. These guests had brought over a hundred head of sheep and goats, just as they would at a wedding. The boys’ hair was cut very short and their heads were covered with butter – I’ll tell you why in a minute. They were seated on a special stone while the circumciser, whom the Suqutris call mazadhar, did his job. Each boy concentrated on the mazadhar’s chest, or on some distant object, and I swear that not one of them flinched while he was cut. Not even a blink. Any sign of pain, any reaction at all, is a big disgrace to the boy and his people. That’s why they crop their hair and butter it, because if it were to stand up people would see that the boy felt fear. Anyway, immediately after each one was cut he jumped into the air three times, higher and higher until he jumped as high as himself. Then the boys ran together, with their blood still flowing, to a special hut a couple of miles away. Here they have to stay until the cut is better. They heal it with plants and hang bags containing a strong smelling substance – I don’t know what it is – under the boys’ noses. No woman may visit them there. This is what I saw; this is how it was with the Suqutris until not long ago. Wallah! Now, the religious leaders have stopped it because it is unIslamic.’
Public pre-marital circumcision, it seems, is another feature of the old South Arabian fringe. Wellsted noted it among the Mahris, and Thesiger records that the notorious ‘flaying’ version – removal of the entire skin down to the thighs – was practised in Asir. Now, for better or worse, it seems to have disappeared.
We talked of makólis, the traditional Suqutri magic-makers, and of sayyids, the incomers who had usurped many of their supernatural powers. The sayyid who built the main mosque in Hadibu, they said, woke up one day to find its roof miraculously completed overnight, and Johnstone reports that sayyids had taken over from makólis the power to control the wind. One of the villagers told us of the female jinn who roam the mountains at night. ‘And if you meet one,’ he said, ‘she sings to you.’ He sang, very softly, in falsetto. The tune had a lilt to it, something like ‘Girls and boys come out to play’, and it made the hairs on my neck stand up. I asked him what the words meant.
‘They mean’, he said, smiling, ‘ “I’ve been waiting for you so long. Now God has brought you to me, and I’ll have your flesh …” ’
The evening went on. Riddles were told, tongue-twisters recited in Suqutri, English and San’ani Arabic, everyone laughing at my attempts to produce a lateral sibillant. Gradually, conversation changed to Suqutri, then subsided, until you could hear the beating of moths’ wings against the lamp-glass.
Kevin edged closer to the bush, camera poised. The snake lay coiled and motionless, its grey and orange stripes camouflaging it against the twig shadows and sand. The lens was inches from it. ‘They did say there weren’t any poisonous snakes in Suqutra …,’ he whispered, without turning his head, ‘… didn’t they?’
‘Yes, but I’m taking no responsibility for …’
The shutter clicked, the snake reared, swayed, then looped off. We found out later that it was a harmless desert boa, probably of the type called Eryx jayakeri.
So this was the Nujad Plain, Salim’s land of rich pastures: a dry waste of dunes and low bushes.
We had set off early along the beach, then struck inland for Mahattat Nujad. ‘It’s an hour and a half if you take it easy. And Mahattat Nujad is full of shops. And cars. You’ll have no probl
ems getting a ride to Hadibu,’ Salim told us. Five hot hours later we arrived at Mahattat Nujad. We had lunch – rawbah-soaked rice and dates followed by tea in old bean tins – in the police station, a room with half a dozen iron beds and a few well-gnawed foam mattresses. After the meal, we asked the policemen if there was a car to Hadibu.
‘There may be one.’ The ‘may’ was ominous. ‘In a couple of days.’ And shops?
One of the policemen sprang to attention. ‘What would you like?’
‘What is there?’
‘Biscuits.’
‘Anything else?’
‘No. Just biscuits.’
The policemen directed us to Halmah, another three hours to the east, which they said was full of cars and shops.
We passed the great palmeries of al-Qa’r, then re-entered scrub and dune country. Not long after the snake encounter, we saw a large settlement and headed straight for it, abandoning attempts to follow the track. At last, nine hours after leaving Sitayruh, we arrived in the village of Halmah. Some children were playing in a dry wadi bed; when they saw us they ran, blubbing, for the village. We followed them and found a pick-up. One of its wheels was off and a man was belabouring the hub with a spanner. Yes, he was going to Hadibu in the morning, if he could fix the wheel; we should stay the night with him.
Ali Shayif was a Dali’i from north of Aden who had come to Suqutra on military service, married a local girl, and stayed. He was part-owner of a fishing-hawri but now most of his income came from trucking. His sole reason for settling here was that he liked the place; in this he probably resembled generations of outsiders who, like Salim, Hadid and their forebears, have been enchanted by the island and have intermingled with the coastal population. ‘The real Suqutris’, Ali said, ‘are the mountain badw.’ He went on to repeat the story about the blue-eyed tribe of Shilhal. Hadibu, he said, was full of slaves.
That evening Kevin and I bathed at a well just outside the village, drawing the water in a bucket made from an old inner tube and decanting it into hollowed-out boulders. Goats came and drank our bathwater, then some men joined us and the village idiot crept up and poured a bucketful over me from behind, just after I’d dressed. They went off, laughing, to pray. Back at Ali’s I hung my sodden shirt and futah on the palm-frond enclosure fence and we stretched out in the guest room. Ali caught a tiny bird and evicted it; it was back immediately. I fell asleep listening to it fluttering in the roof beams.
Yemen- The Unknown Arabia Page 24
