by Norman Lewis
IX
The nakhoda awaited us on our return. He was deeply concerned over the missing man, but he had disturbing news of his own. We were about to run into a storm of exceptional violence, he said, which would put us miles off course. We looked down at the pellucid green sea and watched tiny wavelets slapping at a boat tied up immediately below, waiting to be hauled aboard. It seemed hard to believe that a storm was coming, but the nakhoda, his usual calm if pessimistic self, warned us of what was about to happen. All baggage would have to be stowed away below deck and the nakhoda recommended that we take cover there, too, as soon as he gave us the signal. Male passengers, he warned us, might be forced to shelter in an area below normally reserved for females, and would be called upon to swear a religious oath not to molest them in any way. Second thoughts caused him to shake his head doubtfully. In our case, since we were not people of the Book—within reach of the salvation of Islam—such oaths would carry no weight. Were we, he wondered, prepared to change our faith for the period of the emergency? Playing for time, I said that it was a possibility to be considered.
We returned to the temporary sanctuary of our deck space, where the bad news was under discussion. One of our friends who had been in situations of this kind before assured us that anything was possible on the Red Sea. A few months ago a two-masted decked vessel bound for Jeddah had hit the south-west monsoon somewhere in this area and simply disappeared from sight.
Watching the western horizon we saw a powdery vapour spread over the sky and slowly lift itself from the water. It brought with it a humming that could only be the roar of a distant storm. Five crew members were on deck busying themselves with the sails, but they were too late, for the first blast of the wind to reach us ripped the mainsail to shreds. At the last moment, the nakhoda swung the dhow around to face the tempest head on. Confronting it, the boat bowed very slightly, as if to a worthy adversary, before a mountainous wave smashed over its bows. A torrent of water rushed around us, over us and through our collection of struggling men, and the Koran held over us by the nakhoda was torn from his hands.
The storm waned, the sea calmed, and the nakhoda and his second-in-command went off with their lamps to inspect the damage, for by this time the loss of the mainsail had reduced our speed to barely two knots. The news that followed was bad. It would be impossible, we were told, with no mainsail, damage to the steering gear and a leak that threatened to get worse, to reach Hodeidah without assistance. Our remedy was to make for the island of Kamaran, where whatever repairs were required could be attended to. Kamaran was actually further off than Hodeidah, our eventual destination, but the wind favoured it, or so the nakhoda said.
The prospect filled passengers and crew alike with dismay. Kamaran—the Red Sea’s only listed desert island—was seen as a place of supernatural terrors, of mysterious sickness and mania. Sailors shipwrecked there, even if physically undamaged, were said never to be the same again—they were prone to foolish behaviour and notably lost interest in their wives. Assuring his crew that there was no alternative, the nakhoda closed his ears to their pleas.
We were in a paradise of nature that went unobserved. Long-winged terns encircled the boat, performing a kind of serial ballet before diving with infinite precision and grace to snatch fish from the waves. But the mood of the passengers, crammed together in appalling heat on a seemingly endless voyage, had changed. Little local feuds broke out among erstwhile good friends—often as they chased the small patches of shade which constantly shifted across the deck. There was an attempted suicide by a young man who, we learned, suffered from bouts of chronic depression. The nakhoda worried about the fate of the crew member who had disappeared at Al Mukha—it was feared he had been kidnapped, or even murdered. The fortunate lady’s custom of appearing on deck at night to serenade favoured males came to an end when she was doused by infuriated wives with urine.
Two days later, as the sails snatched at the last flicker of breeze and fell limp, and as the belief spread that another night would be spent at sea, Ladislas groaned with despair. He loathed dhow journeys, he said, complaining of their terrible dependence upon the weather and their inevitable delays, the fetid breath of the bilges and the infernal creaking of timbers that robbed the night of sleep, the dire poverty of most of the passengers, and the religiosity of the nakhodas, who virtually enforced the attendance of travellers at prayers. Rex Stevens, who carried with him a small collection of classical books in readiness for such moments, passed Ladislas a volume of Smollett’s Travels, but Ladislas put it aside. In a way boredom was his undoing—it was to cause him to drop his guard and take me into his confidence in matters which had previously been excluded from our talks.
That afternoon, I was to hear for the first time that Ladislas had had far closer contacts with the Italians in Abyssinia than I had ever imagined. In an outburst of candour he admitted that he had spent five months in Rome as correspondent of the London Sunday Chronicle. He had even been received by the Duce, for whom he had been provided in advance with a made-to-measure address of eighteen adulatory words. Remarkably, too, Ladislas had confided to Stevens after our first meeting that he would be particularly happy to work with me as I looked like an Italian, and reminded him physically of the fascist General Balbo with whom he had been on exceptionally close terms.
These revelations were followed by an assurance that he knew every Italian worth knowing in Aden, and that although Aden had been promoted to the status of a Crown Colony, Italian settlers—most of them in British employ—surpassed in numbers, wealth and prestige those of the resident English. The shadow of Mussolini, Ladislas emphasized, had fallen across this great settlement of uprooted foreigners by the sea. The Aden press, he told me, was manipulated by the Italians so as to present the Abyssinian war as a one-off situation, with Ethiopia remaining the single constituent of the Duce’s Roman Empire. But nothing was more relentless, said Ladislas, than the Duce’s determination to go ahead with territorial acquisition. The small and weak Arab state of the Yemen remained the only free nation in this corner of the world, and little, said Ladislas, could be clearer than the fact that it, too, would ultimately be snapped up by one or other of the European powers. Our Arab friends on deck took this news with their characteristic fatalism. Whoever their rulers, they assured us, their situation was unlikely to change.
With the dhow in the doldrums it was an excellent time to fish, and while the children were left to quarrel happily among themselves our friends caught fish of all sizes, shapes and colours, forcing us into acceptance of the choicest prizes. Stevens withdrew with a book into a square yard of shade in search of the comforting unrealities of Suetonius. But Ladislas was not to be diverted from the magnificence of the new Roman Empire. Finding a passenger recently returned from Abyssinia, Ladislas questioned him on the quality of life under the Italians as compared with their Ethiopian slave masters, and the Arab told him there was absolutely no difference. In the afternoon’s heat even the ship’s timbers sweated gently, and here and there tiny scorpion-like creatures pushed their heads for a split second out of crannies in the blackened wood. Somewhere nearby a colony of cicadas clicked and hissed, and Ladislas wrapped a wet towel round his head.
Another mystery soon became clear. In the seven weeks Ladislas had been booked in at the Marina Hotel he had rarely been available to callers, and he was now quite happy to offer an explanation for these absences. ‘I was away in Perim and Al Mukalla,’ he said. ‘Also Hadramawt. Ever been there? The name means “the Presence of Death”. Understandably, too.’
‘What made you go to all these places?’ I asked.
‘We were wasting our time in Aden. We were supposed to be going to the Yemen, but nothing happened. I knew people who could help us. I know the Sultan of Perim, and also the Sultan of Lahej.’
‘We knew Sir Bernard Reilly. He did all he possibly could.’
‘He didn’t have the connections—people who count for something. The King of the Yemen has four w
ives and twenty-nine children. One of his nephews worked as a porter in our hotel. You would have done better to talk to him.’
‘Well, there it is. We’re committed to this now. We can only hope for the best.’
Years were to pass before the real explanation behind Ladislas Farago’s mysterious journeys in southern Arabia appeared. His book of our travels, The Riddle of Arabia, was published in 1939 but, despite his fame as an author, it received little publicity and disappeared from the booksellers’ windows within days of publication. The explanation generally offered was that it was in the course of reprinting, but the leading bookshop that had taken my order for a copy was never able to supply it. My attempts to find the book in the London Library proved fruitless. Finally, in 1999 a friend unearthed a copy for me and the puzzle of Farago’s unexplained absences from Aden was solved.
In his book Farago describes how within days of our arrival in Aden he was lucky enough to meet a Monsieur Klar, a dealer in furs just back from Paris where he had attended an auction of hides and skins by the Hudson Bay Company. ‘He gave me a letter in which it stated that I was a fur merchant and his representative. Without Monsieur Klar’s letter I would never have reached the forbidden shores of the Yemen.’ As the agent of an established trader all doors were open and a permit for the Yemen was immediately arranged. Travelling on the Portuguese steamer Ayamonte, he visited Hodeidah where he was comfortably housed and well looked after in the forbidden city. After completing whatever business it was that had taken him to the Yemen, a secret which he was never to reveal, he returned to Aden and checked in again at the Marina, this time in preparation for boarding the Arab dhow which was to take us all (in his case for the second time) to Hodeidah. This was the way, as he was to insist so often in our discussions, that operations of this kind were arranged.
X
Yard by yard the dhow edged forward through the night. Seven weak lamps lit the deck after nightfall, providing a gentle and soothing environment by comparison with that of the brash illumination of the day. The passengers, nevertheless, had wrapped scarves round their heads to protect them against the threat to their health of weak moonlight. Most had fallen asleep, and so they remained until the softest of winds picked up once again and Kamaran surfaced from the sea in the first flush of dawn.
Kamaran’s romantic name, meaning ‘two moons’, was ascribed to the belief that under certain conditions the moon’s reflection was visible in the water on both sides of the island at the same time. The first accounts of the island spoke of a race that had learned to harness cormorants in such a way as to carry human passengers in short aerial journeys over otherwise impassable territory. Subterranean galleries, said our guidebook, in which the population had taken refuge from piratical attacks still remained to be explored. Kamaran had been part of the kingdom of the Yemen until a few years before our arrival, when quite suddenly, and without explanation or published excuse, it had been taken under the control of a British administrator.
A freak of the dawn light revealed not desert sand as expected, but sparkling crystals by the thousand, heaped all along the edge of the tide. These, as we drifted in, separated into innumerable slivers of mother-of-pearl and shells tossed away by pearl fishermen, still asleep by their canoes in postures that mimicked death by exhaustion.
The nakhoda nodded and the anchor was dropped into the incomparably clear water. The families bustled into the boats to be taken ashore, while their menfolk waded through the bright mud and glittering nacreous rubbish to the beach. Smoke curled up as the first of the stoves was lit, the children chattered excitedly, the nakhoda prayed, and within minutes one of the pearl fishers raised himself with obvious reluctance and came scrambling into view. There was a primitive elegance about the scene. The supreme effort and the simplicity of the pearl fishermen’s hard lives had left them with flat stomachs, protuberant ribcages and eyes brightened by peering into the depths. It was a breach of custom in all these isolated societies to ask questions, but we were to spend many days in Kamaran while our timbers were strengthened and our sails repaired, and answers were provided readily enough without questions being put. Nothing grew on the island, and in these pearl-fishing waters there were no fish except the occasional shark. ‘If we eat nothing but oysters we cannot have children,’ we were told by one of the wives. A husband had to take himself off to the mainland and live there for a month like a mainlander until his virility returned.
We sat down by a stove and struck up a conversation with one of the divers. ‘We use a petrol can with a glass plate in its bottom,’ he said. ‘The shells are so large that only one at a time can be held in the hand and brought to the surface. Here we are all what they call shallow divers and we shall live to reach fifty years. Some of our friends are deep-sea divers. Their pearls are better than ours, but those divers will not last so long. At forty they’re finished. It is all a matter of luck. A hundred shells were brought up yesterday, but of those only two produced pearls of reasonable size, and both were yellow and misshapen.’
Our surroundings were of the most austere beauty. The sea was dazzlingly green and vivid, and when—as we were later to discover—the dhows set sail for the fishing banks soon after daybreak, their keels could be seen so clearly through the water that they sometimes seemed to be floating out upon the air.
The British occupation of the island was still considered ‘questionable’, even by the press of the Crown Colony of Aden. Many maps still included it in the kingdom of the Yemen, and some even referred to it as Turkish. At its nearest point this long sliver of land—hardly more than a vast sandbank—was only some five miles from the coast, but its usurpation had aroused little concern or excitement in the Yemen. It had never been peopled except by a few transient pearl fishers. Its land was without water and produced nothing; and there were fewer hotter and drier areas in the world. Despite this, the British annexation had been carried out in a final flush of empire-building—a house was put up for an official ‘administrator’ who had in reality nothing to administrate, plus barracks for the handful of soldiers sent to support him in his duties.
XI
Kamaran’s administrator at the time was Captain David Thompson, and as soon as we had recovered from our journey we set out to present ourselves at his headquarters, a mile or so away. The captain and his charming young wife were possibly the two loneliest people I had ever seen. Up until a few years before Thompson had been a military attaché at the British Embassy in Tehran, which he described with enthusiasm as one of the few cities of the Middle East where the good life was still to be found. The solution, Thompson told us, to the problem of their present isolation was to create occupation at all costs, and he lost no opportunity for keeping himself busy. With this objective in mind he had persuaded Aden to provide them with a Model T Ford and in this, despite the lack of roads and the presence of many areas of sinking sand, he was able to keep a benevolent eye on the island’s people. These, he said, were no longer just a handful of pearl divers, but now included the members of a small community who had arrived on the scene a year ago. He had persuaded them to stay and taught them how best to fish away from the empty pearl-diving area.
Our visit to the Thompsons was a resounding success. Writing of this occasion in The Riddle of Arabia, Farago admitted that the days on the dhow had been some of the worst of his life, hardly less awful than the few days he had spent due to a police mistake in prison in Addis Ababa. (On his release he had received an apology from the Emperor himself.) By comparison with the long days and nights of the dhow the island, though ‘a sea-lipped desert’, ‘came close to paradise’ and the Thompsons’ bungalow was upgraded to ‘a mansion where I enjoyed refrigerated drink and all the comforts of an English country house’.
Farago had something in common with Thompson, for although they had not previously met he had been sent to Tehran by the London Sunday Chronicle to cover a difficult political situation while Thompson was there. Rex Stevens, too, was on home ground wi
th his background in colonial government. Later, when Mrs Thompson joined us, Rex Stevens and her husband wandered off for a few words in confidence on colonial matters into a garden in which a single rosebush had struggled to survive under the protection of a small tent. This plant was regarded almost with reverence by the locals, who had seen no more by way of vegetation than a few blades of grass in all their lives. The Thompsons’ serving girl even addressed it politely by the name of ‘Ayesha’.
The nakhoda sent news up to the house that the repairs to the dhow would take some days, even weeks, to carry out. Thompson himself confirmed that he could not allow the dhow to leave until it was fully seaworthy once more. Nevertheless, the future was not wholly depressing, for a radio message came in that a steamer bound for Hodeidah was due to call in ten days’ time. There was nothing to do but relax and occupy oneself in the meantime with whatever activity Kamaran might offer. For me it was to provide an opportunity to study the hard existence of the island’s pearl divers, who were at the bottom of the human pyramid of one of the world’s luxury trades.
Thompson, who I would have described as far from a social reformer, told me that, ‘There is something about the pearl business, like the wealth mined from the earth—say, gold or oil—that seems to exclude mercy. These men are the sweated labourers of the sea.’ The youngest of the divers were ten years of age and only a handful reached fifty—as my friend on the beach had told me—by which time their active life was at an end and they depended upon the charity of the community to survive. They were battened upon by a sequence of exploiters. A third of their catch became the property of the dhow owners who took them into deep waters. The price of what was left was negotiated by the agent the divers were compelled to employ and the pearl merchant—described by Thompson as a man of education and charm. What was extraordinary was that Thompson, who saw himself as a fair man, had been unable to abolish a traditional form of chicanery by which the negotiations between this pearl merchant and the divers’ agent were carried on by secret hand-signs in which fraud was concealed. Eventually the pearls would be packed up and sent off to be sold in Bombay, at a price estimated by the administrator at some fifteen times that received by the men who risked their lives and ruined their health gathering them from the sea.
