The Devil's Cup

by Stewart Lee Allen

  By then, the long-dead hermit al-Shadhili had been dubbed the patron saint of coffee drinkers, and his tomb, located in a local mosque, had become a destination for Islamic pilgrims. I’d seen the minaret while we were being held in the harbor, and as soon as the authorities let me go, I headed for it. Modern Mocha turned out to be the grubbiest, most fly-infested hellhole I had ever seen. Men in rags, their feet black with oil, lounged about on the vulture-picked motorcycle carcasses that made up the local taxi fleet. There were a few fishy smelling cafés and a funduq hotel with thirty men crammed into a single room. The monsoon wind that had harried our ship was still blowing, only here it kicked up a small sandstorm. Within a minute I was covered in rivulets of sand and sweat that slowly dripped down the inside of my shirt.

  When I finally reached the old part of the town, a quote from a book I’d seen in India came to mind.

  “The city presented itself as a very beautiful object,” Jean de La Roque wrote in his Voyage to Arabia the Happy. “There were many palm trees and palaces… The sight much rejoiced us.”

  It had been written three hundred years ago. I realized things might have changed. But this, I thought, standing at the end of the town’s single road, this was unbelievable. As far as the horizon stretched a sandy plain dotted with ruined mansions. Immediately to my left stood the shattered walls of a coffee merchant’s palace straight out of The Arabian Nights, replete with elaborately carved friezes and balconies and onion-shaped windows. Further afield stood a crenellated tower that must once have been the corner of a small fortress. The ruins—some little more than a shattered wall—appeared to stretch for miles. In between them were dozens of small hills of sand that, I later realized, hid the remains of even more buildings.

  The only sign of life was an ancient man squatting next to a crumbling wall, apparently unaware of my presence.

  “Salaam,” I called out. He continued sucking on his hookah. Perhaps he’s deaf, I thought, and went to stand in his line of vision. Nothing. Now, I’ve seen some grisly characters before, but this guy took the cake. His clothes hung in oil-stained rags that looked like they’d come straight from the mechanic’s shop, and his turban was so caked with grease and dirt it must have held its shape in perpetuity. His skin looked mummified, a violent, sunburnt brown splintered into a spiderweb of wrinkles. The sweat pouring down from under his turban left tracks in the sand clinging to his face. His hookah matched him to a tee, being an ingenious contraption of rusted pipes stuck in a broken water bottle, with a sardine can standing in for the pipe’s bowl.

  I pointed to the mosque inquiringly. “Al-Shadhili?”

  I could hear his pipe gurgle as he took another hit. Still no reaction. I wandered over to the mosque to see if I could find a way in. It was a cluster of six low-lying domes from the midst of which leapt a forty-foot-tall white minaret covered in the elegant geometrical carvings of the Zabid school. (Zabid is a nearby village where algebra was born.) I went around to the other side and found a wooden door covered with brass knobs. Before I could knock, however, an old fellow popped out. He gave me a grin, whirled on his heel, slapped a padlock in place, and disappeared into the sandstorm before I could so much as hiss, “Baksheesh!”

  I studied the mosque for a second. Then the ruins. The old man smoking the hookah. Through the wind I caught a whiff of something rank. It was me. I hadn’t taken a shower in a week. I was starving and weak, and my head was pounding from what felt like a shattered tooth. The sandstorm was so bad I had to keep my hand over my glass lenses to keep them from being destroyed. I decided to leave.

  “Bye now,” I said. “See ya later.”

  The old man took another puff from his hookah and stared straight ahead. I set off into the sandstorm to find a way out of al-Makkha.

  An Evil Sister

  The imams complained their mosques were empty while the coffee houses were always full

  Alexandre Dumas

  IT WAS FIFTEEN MINUTES TO midnight as my ride pulled into Yemen’s highland capital of Sana’a. I’d made it, I thought. A scrap of paper blew across the deserted square. Whoopee.

  My car came to a halt.

  “Sleep?” said the driver’s teenage boy. He pointed to the only lit doorway on the street.

  “Hotel?” I inquired.

  The boy nodded. His father, wearing a checkered Arab headpiece, leaned back to confirm once more that Yemen was indeed Number One. Absolutely, I said, handing him the fare. He gave me the thumbs-up and roared off into the dark

  I started climbing the hotel’s stairwell. Was Yemen really Number One? I was not as certain as I’d led my driver to believe. Actually, I knew almost nothing about the place, since the only guidebook I’d been able to locate in Ethiopia was nine years out of date. It boasted that Yemen was the most isolated of the Islamic nations, its citizens were all drug addicts, and its highland capital, Sana’a, where I now stood, had really weird buildings. I turned a bend in the stairwell and found a boy in a gray body-length robe watching me from the second floor. In one hand he held a flickering candle. In the other, he held a sprig of leaves. As we discussed room price, he nibbled the tenderest buds. Qat. The boy noted my glance and offered me a leaf. I declined. He led me down a hallway to my quarters. It was a pleasant room but, like everything else, unpolluted by electrical current. I flicked the light switch to be sure.

  “Lights?” I inquired, pointing to the ceiling fixture.

  The boy spread his hands and looked heavenward.

  “Bismillah,” he said.

  Allah willing, I translated in my head. Right. I shooed him off and sat down to consider the day. It had started well enough. After leaving al-Shadhili’s tomb, I’d gone to al-Makkha’s main road and found a station-wagon taxi waiting. There were already eleven men crammed inside, which meant there was room for one more.

  “We go!” shouted the driver in English as I settled into the rear compartment. “Bring those goats here. We put them in the back with the American.”

  My eyes widened—six goats! The driver laughed and slammed the door shut.

  “Ha-ha!” he shouted. “This is joke!”

  Unfortunately his estimate of a six-hour journey proved to be yet another bit of wit. The trip took over twelve, albeit well spent as the ride turned into a live demonstration of the single most important social force in Yemen, the drug qat.

  “It’s the worst thing that’s happened to Yemen,” said a fellow passenger by the name of Galal. “Worse even than the British.”

  “Worse than the British?” I said. “Hard to imagine.”

  I was already familiar with qat from Ethiopia. But according to Galal, who’d lived in Europe and Mecca, the drug had addicted so many Yemen men that it was destroying the economy and threatening to eliminate coffee from the land that had first cultivated it.

  “It started first in the afternoon. People would chew qat for an hour after lunch and then go back to work. Then it grew to three hours. After a whole afternoon of chewing, you don’t really want to go back to the office, especially if you are in the government. Now, many people, they come to work worn out from chewing the day before, and all they do is think about getting more qat, and then, about ten in the morning, they rush off to the qat market to make sure they get the best. Then they go chew, and soon the day is over and nothing is done.”

  We were driving through a stunning landscape of biblical mountains and cliffhanging villages and castles. It was here, near Taiz and Ibb in southern Yemen, that coffee was first cultivated eight hundred years ago on the legendary Nasmurade (Nakil Sumara), or Coffee Mountain. The Yemenese had convinced Europeans that coffee would grow only on Nasmurade, according to English traveler John Jourdain, writing in 1616, because “it was the highest mountain in Arabic…[on top of which stood] two fortresses guarding their most precious commodity that is carried to Great Cairo.”

  Not anymore. The rippling mountainside terraces, some of which date back before Christ, now grow nothing but qat. This progression
is indicative of the historic relationship between the two drugs. In fact, the cup brewed by the Sufi al-Shadhili of Mocha is thought by some to have been a tea made of qat leaves, which another Sufi named al-Dhabhani replaced with coffee beans because qat was unavailable in his town of Aden. Both are stimulants, but qat, often called coffee’s evil sister, is also a narcotic, and so unusual a substance that it is the sole occupant of one of the World Health Organization’s seven categories for drugs. The American government considers it as dangerous a substance as heroin.

  The area near Ibb is said to produce the finest qat in Yemen, second only to Harrar’s, and boys hawking bunches of bright green leaves dotted the highway. Our driver stopped at every one. Galal pointed out all the varieties, such as sawli, or truck driver’s qat, which sometimes produces horrible crawling sensations, and shami, the qat of poets, bunches of tender buds packed in banana leaves. Qat grown on graves is said to produce hallucinations.

  Galal, who worked as a bank manager in Dubai, also pointed out that our driver took in about twelve hundred riyadhs in fares for the day but spent at least eight hundred on qat. Many men spend three quarters of their income on the drug, he said. I’d noticed that every village market had a qat section as large as all the others combined.

  “Ah, but for real prestige some grow their own tree,” said Galal. “Only then can one be sure it is of the freshest!”

  By evening everyone in our taxi was high on qat except me and a Koran-toting Sudanese—including Galal, who’d been castigating qat through lips stained green by the drug. Why chew, I asked, if he held it in such low esteem?

  He explained he was considering moving back to Yemen. “I don’t want people to think I’m strange.”

  But that was over, I thought, climbing into my hotel’s surprisingly comfortable bed. I snuffed out the candle. So what if Yemen was full of qat-heads? Surely here in the capital, Sana’a, the bean would predominate. I closed my eyes and repeated the only Arabic phrase I knew—qahwa al-bon. Bon is Arabic for bean; qahwa, wine. “The Wine of the Bean.”

  MORNING CAME, AND I HIT THE MARKET OF OLD SANA’A, THE SUQ (pronounced “sook”), Arabic for shopping mall. Sana’a has the world’s oldest, a maze of medieval alleyways bursting with crystallized dates (“Greetings, Ο People from the Land of Dates!”) and raisins and myrrh and incense, spare wheels, guns, moneychangers, Korean girlie dresses, cologne, shoelaces, aftershave lotion, Islamic prayer beads, hookahs, and teapots made from old tin cans. Suq till you puke, as the locals say. And there was coffee too, brown-and-white striped burlap bags brimming with the bean.

  “Qahwa?” I asked.

  The shop owner looked up at me skeptically.

  “Qahwa?” I repeated the Arabic word. “Qahwa al-bon?” He gestured to the bags. “No, no.” I made drinking motions. “To drink.”

  “Drink? You want to drink coffee?” he said in English, then gestured to a crowd of men drinking on the other side of the alley. like everybody else, they were wearing checkered headpieces and ankle-length shirts. A foot-long curved dagger was tucked into each man’s belt. Of course, said the coffee-stall proprietor when I tottered over. We have coffee. But not now. Later. Tomorrow. Would I like some tea? One man pointed me toward San Sarat al’Muzan, the coffee suq. Perhaps there, he said with a friendly shove into the crowd. I immediately lost my way.

  It was the same at every stall I tried. Coffee? Now? Impossible. They all told me to return tomorrow. How could it be so difficult to get a cup of coffee in the markets of Yemen? Was I pronouncing the word incorrectly? Kahwah, koowah, keeqay, keeah…I started muttering variations to myself as I wandered from stall to stall. How many ways could you pronounce the wretched thing?

  Sana’a is like a sand castle built by a kid on LSD, a car-free maze of seven-story mud skyscrapers covered in whimsical white plaster friezes. There’s nothing like it, and for a while I lost myself in the pleasure of mindless gawking. Then I smelled The Smell, wafting through the market’s thousand other scents, the unmistakable aroma of roasting coffee. Drawn irresistibly, I plunged through a huge arch and into a courtyard full of merchants lounging over hundreds of bags filled with a small dark fruit. Raisins. I rushed back to the main alley and followed the aroma to yet another suq, this one dotted with yard-high pyramids of ginger, cloves, cardamom, and cinnamon. I groaned. The spice market. Now I’d never find the scent again.

  “Qahwa?” I inquired of one of the merchants, and a moment later I was in an ancient cobblestone courtyard walled on three sides with stacks of fifty-kilo coffee bags. A man with a waist-length beard sat cross-legged, correcting an enormous ledger. A boy watched me from a doorway. Then I heard a faint rhythmic scrutching coming from a doorway in the courtyard’s corner. Inside sat two men up to their shoulders in piles of unhusked coffee beans. They were tossing the toasted beans into large metal-mesh baskets to separate the husks. The only modern devices in sight were a dilapidated coffee roaster and a single bare lightbulb.

  San Salat al’ Musan. The world’s oldest coffee suq. I removed my shoes and sat on the doorstep to stare at the two men. They were all smiles. I indicated I wanted to touch some beans and then plunged my hand into a pile of the darkly gleaming bodies. This is better than drinking it, I thought as they slid over my skin in a sensuous cascade. I plunged my other arm in up to the elbow. Much better, I thought; no need for a cup.

  The boy appeared bearing a trio of tumblers brimming with a dark, steaming liquid. The men tossed aside their baskets with cries of delight and grabbed two of the cups. The boy proffered the third to me. Ah, I thought, raising the glass to my lips—at last! In the Holy of Holies, surrounded by mountains of the Blessed Bean, taking a cup of that brew most beloved by the Prophet, the thrice-blessed wine of Islam.

  “Shia?” asked the boy, pointing to my glass. “Shia—you like some tea?”

  SHE CAME TO PROVE SOLOMON WITH HARD QUESTIONS AT Jerusalem, with a very great company and camels that bore spices… neither were there any such spices as the Queen of Sheba gave King Solomon.

  It’s a shame that the above passage from the Bible neglects to mention which spices the queen bestowed upon Solomon. Certainly there would have been frankincense and myrrh, since Sheba, or Saba, was one of Yemen’s earliest kingdoms, and those were its most famous exports. Were coffee beans among these precious gifts? Perhaps, according to historians who believe that the kingdom of Sheba included Ethiopia. The only evidence offered is that Solomon forced himself on the queen that night, thus giving birth to the rumor that the bean was an aphrodisiac. It is also worth noting that Arabic historian Abu al-Tayyib al-Ghazzi (1570–1651), writing at a time when coffee was only beginning to gain widespread popularity outside Yemen, also associated Solomon with qahwa, by claiming that soon after the queen’s visit he used coffee beans from “the Yemen” to cure a plague-ridden town.

  The generally accepted theory is that coffee came into use among the Arabs a few centuries after the birth of Islam. Most Westerners today associate Islam with terrorists, bearded fanatics, and a distressing lack of toilet paper. This, of course, is both silly and true. Islam is a beautiful religion. Of course it’s not perfect—any religion that insists half the species walk about with a bag over their head clearly has some issues to deal with—but in its heyday it was the crowning glory of the human race. While the Christians in Europe were sunk in the Dark Ages, Muslims were studying Aristotle, inventing algebra, and generally creating one of the most elegant civilizations in history.

  But who cares? The main thing is they were all teetotalers. Denied the pleasures of the grape, it’s hardly surprising that this new society took to coffee with a passion, particularly the mystic Sufis, who began using it in their religious ceremonies.

  “Bullshit. Awesome bullshit. Sufis!” Ishmael, my tablemate at a local café, was a Sunni Muslim and apparently had little time for Sufism, or, for that matter, Islam in general. “The only thing the people in this country do is chew qat.”

  Sana’a is home away from
home for Islam’s political refugees, and its cafés are crawling with Iraqis, Iranians, Afghanis, and Somalis, all indulging in the favorite sport of expats worldwide, that of slagging off their host country. Ishamel had come to Sana’a with his father twenty years ago and now appeared completely assimilated. He even wore the jambiya dagger in his belt. The only things that gave him away as an Afghani were the hints of henna in his beard and a streak of larceny a mile wide.

  I’d told him I was interested in how people first started drinking coffee. He told me a new version of the old goat story. There once was an Afghani goatherd with an unusually lively herd, he said. The goatherd couldn’t understand why his flock was so frisky. One day he noticed that the liveliest of the goats were always nibbling on these little red berries. Curious, he tried a bean. His fatigue vanished. A sensuous tingly feeling crept across his thighs. He grabbed his prettiest she-goat and…

  And so bestiality was discovered. It was the old Kaldi story, although the X-rated component was new.

  “Right,” I said. “And I guess that’s why people think qahwa turns you into a demon lover?”

  “No. But that is why Yemen men drink so much coffee,” he winked. “They love their goats.”

  “And the shepherds of Afghan do not love their herds?” I teased.

  “Not with such passion. Ask an Afghani if he prefers an English girl to a goat, and he will give you answer. Ask a Yemen man, and he will say, ‘How to compare? I’ve never had an English.’”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know that one. Tell me something new.”

  “You want hash?”

  I declined. I did, however, need to change money. Doing it in Sana a had proved a tad complicated. Not that the black market was hard to find. There was a whole street of young boys sitting on the pavement with piles of money until two or three in the morning, apparently without fear. It was just that no one had ever seen a traveler’s check before. The one check I tried to change was accepted after a fierce debate among the crowd, only to be returned once I’d endorsed it because I was “writing on money and made it no good.”