Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity

by H. E. Jacob

  “The goatsucker has been plaguing them,” said an old herdsman. This bird takes its name from its supposed habit of pecking at goats’ teats in the night-time, and thus driving the animals crazy.

  “There is no goatsucker,” said young Hassan with a contemptuous laugh.

  “What, didn’t you hear it churring out of the darkness four nights ago?”

  “Certainly. I heard the call of the nightjar, but that bird drinks no milk. A fable for children! The creature is no larger than my hand. What would it stand on to pluck at a goat’s teats with its bill?”

  “Idiot, could it not cling to the beast’s hair with its claws?”

  Already the two men were raising their staffs against each other in their anger. Old Abdullah parted them, and said:

  “Let us fetch the imam from the hill!”

  The chief of the monastery came. He looked rather like a goat himself, as he sat among the goatherds: lean, with a tremulous beard, large eyes peeping forth from reddened lids, and a leathery skin. Two of the animals were brought. There was nothing amiss with their teats, no sign that a bird had been pecking.

  “Your goats must have eaten poison.”

  “What poison could they have found?”

  “Follow them, and keep them under close watch.”

  But the goats, as usual, nibbled coltsfoot, sage, mimosa leaves, broom; plundered the caper bushes. Their udders swelled with milk. All the same, they did not sleep.

  “We’ve found the plant that has bewitched them!”

  The imam, who was resting in the shade with his chief assistant, Daood, beside him, looked up. Before him stood one of the goatherds, holding out a spray.

  It was a moderate-sized, flexible spray, that of a shrub rather than a tree, with the dark-green, firm, and shiny leaves, somewhat resembling those of a laurel. From the axils of the leaves projected short, white blossoms, closely set like those of jasmine. Some had ripened and fallen, leaving their fruit, little berries of a strange magenta hue. If you grasped one of these between finger and thumb, you could feel that it had a thick, hard kernel. The imam turned the spray over and over, much astonished. What he held resembled a Planta universalis, with the characters of many plants he knew, but in its assemblage of characters unknown.

  “Your goats have been eating this?”

  The goatherd replied that there could be no doubt of it. A coppice of this unknown shrub had been discovered, obviously devastated by the goats in their search for food.

  “In what direction?”

  “Towards the north.”

  After climbing for more than three hours, over screes and smooth boulders, through gorse and agave and brambles, the imam and Daood, guided by the goatherds, reached the coppice. It was in a wadi, damp and hot. What remarkable trees! They ranged in height from six to twelve feet, and looked more like overgrown shrubs than trees.

  No one had ever seen anything of the kind before. The imam, who wanted to try the effect of the leaves and blossoms, plucked some and chewed them, but soon spat them out. The taste was neither bitter nor sweet, neither salt nor sour nor oily—they had no taste worth speaking of. Nor had they any scent that could have allured the goats.

  On the way back, Daood said that perhaps a description of the unfamiliar plant might be found in a herbal. The monastery was well provided with parchment volumes, among which were some containing all that the Arabs knew about plant lore. But the herbals were searched in vain.

  “To my way of thinking,” said the imam, “this shrub is not a wild one, but a cultivated one that has escaped from a garden and run wild.”

  Daood protested.

  “How could there ever have been a garden in or near so desolate a spot? Even the jinn would hardly have established one in a place as inaccessible!”

  “I was not thinking of a garden planted either by true believers or by the jinn,” replied the imam. “You must have heard that, centuries back, our land was conquered by the giaours. I do not mean the white Christians of the North, the Roumis and the Feringhees, those who call themselves Romans and Franks; but Christians from the West, black Christians from Africa, subjects of the monarch of Ethiopia. They crossed the narrow waters of the Red Sea, coming from the territory known as Kaffa. They brought with them domestic animals, and also their favourite vegetables and flowers. I think this is a Kaffa tree. . . .”

  “If the tree has magic virtues, surely we should have heard of it?” said young Daood, dubiously. “It is but a tree like many another, and I can hardly believe that Allah would have equipped it with powers peculiar to itself.”

  The skies had flushed red while Daood was speaking. A large green beetle, metallic and burnished, flew into the room from the courtyard. It circled desirously above the blossoms on the sprays the monks had brought back with them.

  “The goatherds,” the young man went on, “have probably lied to us. They are habitual cheats, up to every kind of dodge. Who can tell whether they may not, wishing to humbug us, have filled the goats’ hair with stage-beetles and poisonous ticks, and whether these pests may not have kept the poor beasts awake. Now the rascals are laughing at us up their sleeves because we have swallowed their fable about Allah having made a plant which can render his creatures sleepless. It amuses them to fool the learned and the pious!”

  Daood said good-night and departed. The imam prayed. Daylight quickly faded, the red sky turning to a peaceful green, which became a blue that darkened apace. The evening star shed its silvery beams into the courtyard. Deliciously soothing were its cool rays after the heat and glare of the tropical day.

  Donkeys laden with goatskins full of water were being driven up the hill. They brayed as they clattered into the yard. The monastery possessed no well, and its pitchers had to be replenished every morning and every evening. The monks issued from their cells carrying vessels of unglazed earthenware, in which the water would remain fresh and sweet for hours, whereas it would soon begin to stink if stored in goatskin sacks.

  The imam, too, went out into the yard to fill his pitcher. He was much exercised in his mind as to whether Daood was right in the surmise about the goatherds’ trickery, or whether the strange plant could really have mysterious powers.

  “I will make an infusion,” he thought, throwing some of the leaves and flowers into a glass vessel, and crushing them with a spoon. There were berries as well, and his spoon encountered the kernel of the fruit. The beans were hard and firm. Cold water could have no effect on them. With a twist of the container he ejected water, flowers, leaves, retaining only the kernels. Eagerly pursuing his investigation, he heated these in a chafing-dish over the embers on the hearth. They sweated, dried, and darkened. He crushed them in a mortar, and, having boiled some water, while it was still bubbling from the fierce heat, he threw a fair quantity of the dark-brown powder into the vessel. The result was a brew dark as the lowermost sea in Gehenna, while an aroma such as had never before filled his nostrils rose from the pot.

  The imam poured out for himself a beaker of the steaming decoction, and drank. It was bitter to the taste, savouring of forbidden pitch, of charred wood, of the droppings of Eblis. Then he lay down and composed himself for sleep.

  Within a few moments, the imam of Shehodet Monastery was as if under a spell. He was in a state of intoxication differing from all other intoxications hitherto known to his people. The imam, indeed, being a fervent Moslem, had had no experience of drunkenness.

  He was somewhat painfully aware, on the left side, between the fifth rib and the sixth, of the quickened beating of his heart, as it rhythmically expanded and contracted. Was not the rhythm somewhat disordered? He was sweating a little, and had a wondrous sense of lightness in the limbs. This was the hour when, ordinarily, night began to take possession of his frame, and to slacken his joints with the first promptings of sleep. Now, however, though he had almost ceased to be aware of his body, his mind was unusually active, cheerful, and alert. He was not merely thinking; his thoughts had become concretely vis
ible. He watched them from the right side and from the left, from above and from below. They raced like a team of horses. A hundred details, ordinarily blurred, became meticulously clear. Although the team was covering the ground faster and faster, there was no confusion. Far from it, he was thinking five times or ten times more clearly than ever before. In the time normally requisite for one thought, the imam could now, without effort, think a dozen thoughts, and yet keep them absolutely distinct. The members of the racing team did not get their harness tangled. The ideas were luminously clear, and sped onward towards the distant horizon. But, having reached that horizon, they were as plainly visible as if they had been close at hand.

  Thus the imam lay, sweating a trifle, and panting gently as he breathed. He found that something unusual was going on in his consciousness besides the way in which his inward eye contemplated his racing thoughts. With his outwardly directed vision, too, he saw other things than the normal. The parchment tome close at hand had an unwonted length, breadth, and thickness, and an unusual lustre. His “chalat” (an outer garment for daily use), though hanging empty from a peg on the wall, looked as if it were filled out with the curves of his figure. His gaze darted briskly hither and thither in the room, which was dimly lighted by a floating wick. The objects he contemplated were not flat, but full-bodied. He himself was as lively and vigorous as if he had been refreshed by thirty hours’ sleep, had been strengthened by heavenly food brought to him by the angels of Paradise, and would never need to sleep again. . . . Thus did the imam feel as he lay on his pallet; thus did he feel thereafter when, having sprung to his feet, he paced the chamber untiringly.

  When midnight came, the hour for the prayer which is called “ishe,” he went along the corridors to awaken the brethren in their cells. Heavy with sleep, they reluctantly sat up and yawned. They yawned to get the sleep out of their throats and lungs, yawned and stretched. Heavily and unwillingly they began, as commanded by the Prophet, to invoke the blessing of the Allah of midnight.

  As they did so they felt, as they felt night after night, that this particular commandment of the Prophet was grievously unnatural. Was it true, as they had so often heard the muezzins call from the minarets, that prayer is better than sleep? When the world was created it had, by a wise ordinance, been divided into a white half and a black, into a day-side and a night-side—that is, into waking and sleep, which must not be allowed to encroach upon or jostle each other. What wonderful willpower must Mohammed the Prophet of Allah have had to be able to wake up, in order to pray, after four hours’ sleep! The monks found it a great hardship, for they were ordinary mortals.

  But the imam, coming to each of them in turn, gave them to drink of a black, bitter drink, which had an unpleasant taste though the odour was pleasant enough. This beverage instilled into them the will to wake. It seemed that one who swallowed a sufficiency of it forgot that he had been prematurely aroused from slumber. The sense of fatigue departed from his knee-joints, and he felt not the dead weight of his arms hanging from his shoulders. He was freed from the insistent pull of gravitation.

  Night after night, when the hour of the “ishe” arrived, the imam and his monks refreshed themselves with the decoction of the Kaffa-seeds. In their thankfulness they gave the elixir a name with a twofold meaning. They called it “k’hawah,” the stimulating, the invigorating; this was with reference to the magical qualities of the coffee-bean, as well as to the supposed original derivation of the shrub from Kaffa. They thought also of Kawus Kai, the great king of Persia, who had conquered the force of terrestrial gravity and had ascended into heaven in a winged chariot.

  2

  The Fight Against Bacchus

  THE essentials of this tale were related by Antonius Faustus Nairon, a Maronite monk and scholar, who ultimately became professor of theology at the Sorbonne in Paris, and died in the year 1710.

  Is the story true? Beyond question it has been widely related in the West. It is to be found, with similar imaginative embroidery, in an old encyclopædia, Hübner’s Natur-Kunst-Berg-Gewerk-Handels-und Zeitungs-Lexikon, published in 1717. It bears the manifest stamp of an Oriental apologue. The fact that the excrement of goats looks very like coffee-beans may have given rise to the fable. The famous doctrine of similars, the belief that objects that resemble one another must have a mysterious connexion, had an even stronger hold upon the Oriental than upon the medieval Western mind. That led to a supposition of some link between goats and the coffee-shrub.

  The important core of the legend is not the discovery of coffee by goats (although in early days the behaviour of domesticated animals often guided human beings in their researches) but the speedy recognition of the magical qualities that reside in coffee-beans. More important, therefore, than the goat story is another myth as to the origin of coffee. According to a fairly modern Persian saga, when Mohammed, the Prophet of Allah, was suffering from excessive somnolence verging on stupor, the angel Gabriel appeared to him at the command of the Almighty, bringing him for his relief an unknown beverage. This drink was black, as black as the Black Stone built into the corner of the Ka’ba at Mecca. The Black Stone is meteoric, of heavenly origin, and is venerated by all true Moslems. The name of the elixir brought to Mohammed by the angel Gabriel, a bitter fluid, was “kahveh,” or “k’hawah,” the Stimulating, the invigorating.

  This much is true, that when the use of coffee began, the world was dowered with a magical force unknown to classical antiquity. Wine had played a leading part in the history of the ancient world. The ancients were familiar with the Bacchic stimulation obtainable from the juice that issued from the wine-press when once that juice had been fermented, but they knew nothing of the anti-Bacchic influence of the no less exciting and mysterious caffeine, the active principle of the coffee-bean. It was Arabic civilization, a vigorous rival knocking at the door of medieval Europe, that brought coffee as a sustaining companion to man on his way through life.

  Coffee has sometimes been spoken of as the “wine of Islam”; and, in actual fact, Mohammedan civilization, the Moslem love for drawing fine distinctions, for hair-splitting, for disputation—all the “cold heat and flaming sobriety” of Arabic civilization, are closely connected with the effect of coffee upon the human brain. The Stoics of Hellas had taught “ataraxia,” passionlessness, resignation to the will of destiny; but it was left for the conquering Arabs, paradoxically, to inculcate these virtues at the point of the sword. Anti-Bacchic stimulation, the idolization of reason, the religio-intellectualist doctrine of salvation that has always been characteristic of Mohammedanism, are cousin german to the aroma of coffee. The peculiar style of architecture that spreads across the sometime empire of the caliphs, from the Alhambra to the mosques of Baghdad, was devised by coffee-drinkers and never by wine-bibbers; it talks the language of Moorish dialectics, and lifts minarets skyward like pointing index fingers. It resembles the conversation of the men who inhabited these buildings—they and their talks being rich in arabesques, wide awake, and yet perpetually elusive. This style of architecture is of the same family as the bold philosophical systems of Avicenna and Averroës.

  Coffee is, indeed, “the wine of Islam.” To become this, however, it had to present itself as an anti-Bacchic, and to overthrow the classical culture, which was a Bacchic culture. No matter whether, as the aforesaid legend tells us, Mohammed the Prophet knew coffee or whether the angel Gabriel revealed its use to some of the latter caliphs; Mohammed, with his fulminations against wine, changed the human heart before coffee had changed the human brain.

  In the chapter of the Koran entitled “The Table,” the Prophet inveighs against the use of wine. He prohibits the enjoyment of that drug, that intoxicant, which for several thousand years had furnished man with his only possibility of escape from himself and from the weariness of everyday life. He rejected any enchantment, any expansion of the ego—that without which the life and literature, the civilization and the art of the ancient world would never have come into existence. Wine had be
en the very mortar of the edifice of classical culture!

  Why did the founder of Islam come to this epoch-making decision? There is nothing comparable to his prohibition of wine in religious systems earlier than his own. Above all, neither Judaism nor Christianity, which Mohammedanism synthesized into Islam, had adopted a hostile attitude towards wine.

  According to Jewish legend, Father Noah discovered wine shortly after the Deluge. The tale is related in the twentieth and subsequent verses of the ninth chapter of Genesis. Simultaneously, indeed, we are warned of the disastrous effects of drunkenness! “And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard: and he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent. And Ham . . . saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without. And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father’s nakedness.” Wherefore Shem and Japheth were blessed, but Ham received his father’s curse. This anecdote is a parable against the immoderate use of wine, but the reasonable use of it is not condemned.

  Nor, with one exception, is the reasonable use of wine forbidden anywhere in the Old Testament. The exception stands apart so clearly that it has no bearing upon the normal, everyday life of the ancient Hebrews. I refer to the description of those who are styled Nazarites, in the sixth chapter of Numbers. There we read: “When either man or woman shall separate themselves to vow a vow of a Nazarite, to separate themselves unto the Lord: he shall separate himself from wine and strong drink, and shall drink no vinegar of wine, or vinegar of strong drink, neither shall he drink any liquor of grapes, nor eat moist grapes or dried. All the days of his separation shall he eat nothing that is made of the vine tree, from the kernels even to the husk. All the days of the vow of his separation there shall no razor come upon his head: until the days be fulfilled, in the which he separateth himself unto the Lord, he shall be holy, and shall let the locks of the hair of his head grow. All the days that he separateth himself unto the Lord he shall come at no dead body. He shall not make himself unclean for his father, or for his mother, for his brother, or for his sister, when they die: because the consecration of his God is upon his head.” Even this passage is not so much a diatribe against wine as against the disturbance of concentration that might result from the enjoyment of wine, thus threatening the “separation,” that is to say, the fulfilment of a vow to go into retreat. The old scribe has in mind the paralysing force of wine, the way it breaks down inhibitions. This influence is compared with the working of the razor, which removes the primitive energy of the growing hair, shown by the legend of Samson and Delilah to be one of the most important emblems of virile strength. The mental derangement that results from excessive wining is, in the passage quoted from Numbers, put on the same footing as the paralysis caused by the contemplation of the dead and of organic decay—which, according to the Jewish hygienists, was readily transmitted from the dead to the living.