As the coastal channel they were sailing through was full of dangerous reefs and jagged rocks, this skipper (like his predecessor on board the ship from Suez) dared not continue the journey at night. Every evening at sunset he had the sails furled and he hove to, sometimes in a sheltered bay by the desert coast, sometimes in the lee of a coral island. While the fire was being lit in the clay oven, Forsskål found an opportunity to collect shells or to observe the bird life of the beach. There he found snipe, storm gulls and large flocks of vultures that lived off human and animal excrement. At the same time Niebuhr set up his astrolabe to prepare for a few nocturnal observations. We can see from his astronomical tables of this period how at each of these anchorages he took new readings to help him with his large chart of the Red Sea; he determined the longitude of their position by observing the distance of the moon either from Alpha in the Ram or from Aldebaran in the Bull. Afterwards he entered up the results in his tables by the light of his travelling lantern. All about him the others were lying asleep.
On evenings when the tarrád lay at anchor off-shore they could also make brief expeditions to try to buy food from the local population. Partly because the water was very shallow, partly because of their fear of robbers, they always waded ashore without money and with as little clothing as possible, so that in the event of their being attacked they would not lose more than an absolute minimum. The adventurous Forsskål, who was always ready to join these expeditions into the unknown, tells how they sometimes found their way to mean little villages with twisting, covered streets and houses built of straw mats and turf; and how at other times they struck a bargain with wandering desert tribes. When they had reached agreement, they took the goods and invited some of the Arabs on board with them, offering them dates and paying them their money. As soon as a deal had been completed or food eaten together, all hostility was gone, and hospitality took its place. On another occasion they waded ashore to see five or six men running across towards them. The men wore nothing on their heads, but they had let their hair grow so that it hung down over their necks in long plaits. Their only article of dress was a loincloth, and in their hands they carried long clubs. When Forsskål caught sight of the clubs, without pausing he cut down sticks from a nearby tree so that they also might have something to defend themselves with. Then the leader of the men halted in front of them and laid his club in front of him in the sand. Quick as lightning, the skipper tried to snatch it away. The Arabs noted the others’ suspicions, whereupon they all threw their weapons in front of them on the sand and made peace overtures. Almost at once the women joined them, dressed in tattered black shifts with black shawls over their heads—shawls which did not wholly cover their faces, which were painted with black lines and triangles to bring luck. From these women Forsskål now bought a little sour milk and a little liquid butter, which they kept in small skin bags. They preferred to take payment in the form of lead-glance (galena) or some other kind of black colouring matter which they could use to paint themselves; but as the Europeans possessed neither of these things the girls had to be content with taking some freshly baked durra bread, which they collected from the ship by tucking up their skirts and wading out.
With digressions of this kind they made for the south at a rate determined by the northerly wind. On Christmas Eve of 1762 they anchored in the lee of a volcanic island called Kotumbel. Neither Niebuhr nor Forsskål had anything in particular to remark about the day: they had had to find a little money for the pilot, who needed paying; and then there was a slight difficulty about determining the sun’s altitude. Niebuhr had to correct his observations that evening by bearings on Jupiter. That was all. Christmas belonged to a world that had long ago sunk behind the horizon. Now it was not far to the new one that was to replace it. When, four days later, they trained their telescopes to the south-east, they saw the houses of Loheia rising up above the horizon. Loheia was the northernmost port of the Yemen. Yemen was the land which was also called Arabia Felix.
The excitement on board ran high. The following day they reached the town, but it was ebb tide and they had to anchor six or seven miles out from the coast. When the sails had been furled the skipper went ashore to arrange for the provision of rowing-boats and to ascertain whether the place was safe, or whether they should continue the voyage a little farther south to the next town of Hodeida. He returned a few hours later; everything seemed well; the dola or governor of the town, Emir Farhan, sent his greetings; he was a great friend of all foreign visitors and he would very much like to meet the travellers and asked them to be his guests in Loheia; he also promised to let them have his own camels to take them overland to Mocha. Moreover, one of the most important merchants in the town had fallen ill and badly needed a doctor, and he too urged them to come ashore, sending his greetings and offering them free accommodation in one of his houses.
It all sounded very reassuring. After a short discussion, the members decided to accept these kind offers, to break their journey in Loheia and travel overland to Mocha later. The courteous merchant’s son whom they had brought with them from Djidda and who was to continue his journey by ship, now came and suggested he should take the chests containing their collections with him to Mocha and deposit them in the customs house there until their own arrival. Forsskål and Niebuhr, who did not realise what he was after, felt that this was a much better solution than dragging their things across country; they thanked Ismael Salech many times and entrusted to him their irreplaceable possessions. As the baggage was unstacked a cry of delight came from Kramer, who had managed to get a hand under the flooring and fished out the watch he had lost in Djidda; there was not a drop of bilge water in their despised “patchwork boat” and the watch was undamaged. One good omen followed another. There was good humour all along the line as the company took leave of the skipper and the smiling Ismael Salech.
They were then ready to be rowed ashore. On the evening of 29th December, 1762, within six days of the second anniversary of their departure from Copenhagen, Forsskål, von Haven, Niebuhr, Baurenfeind, Kramer and their servant Berggren set foot for the first time on the soil of Arabia Felix.
3
The land of Yemen was already an ancient realm at the time when Alexander called it Eudaimon Arabia. More than five centuries before this thirty-two-year-old horseman king was carried off by fever without having conquered the land of his dreams, the Minaean culture flourished—a culture which derived its enormous wealth from the trade between the Orient and the Mediterranean. Indian ships unloaded their cargoes at its ports, where Minaean merchants then forwarded them by caravan to Gaza together with the country’s own products: frankincense, balsam, and myrrh. Splendid cities sprang up, the kingdom grew and extended as far as the frontiers of Palestine.
The decline came about the year 700 b.c.; the Minaean power waned, but their wealth did not disappear. They were replaced by the Sabaeans, who built the splendid luxury towns of Sirwah and Marib, and who sent the Queen of Sheba as a symbol of their wealth on a visit to King Solomon the Wise and thus into every child’s Bible lesson. The legend of Arabia Felix has deep roots both in history and in ourselves. The Ptolemaeans in Egypt introduced cargo ships into the Red Sea, so that the caravans became superfluous; the empire of the Sabaeans collapsed, Sirwah and Marib became a collection of eroded sandhills in the desert. Alexander kept away, but the Nabataeans came, the Himyarites came, and the Mohammedans sent their swift cruel horsemen down over the desert plain by the sea; but no one was able to establish or to destroy the legend of happiness. It rose blithely from the destruction like a lark’s song above the conflagration. The land where men were killed, women raped and children led away into captivity was not offered as a terrifying example for the rest of the world. It remained a paradise on earth. The hope still lived on as men arrived at the silted-up ports, where once the wealth of the Orient was unloaded. Yemen still continued to be called Arabia Felix. Why?
We do not get very much nearer the answer by considering the coun
try’s geographical situation. Yemen consists of two parts: the long stretch of flat desert plain of Tehama, running along the sea from Mocha in the south to Loheia in the north; and the more mountainous, fertile hinterland with the capital of Sana, which forms with Mocha and Loheia an almost equilateral triangle. If one imagines a circle drawn through the three towns, its centre will fall approximately about Beit el-Fakih, established in the middle of the Tehama desert as a rendezvous for the goods that come down from the rich mountain regions round Sana, and which are divided between the two ports of Mocha and Loheia. There is in fact almost no frankincense and balsam among these goods. Those times are past. But there is something better: Arabia Felix produces several aromatic products much sought after by our present civilisation. There is coffee. There is tobacco. The caravans come down towards Tehama in a steady stream; the camels are loaded with coffee beans and the donkeys with tobacco leaf. In Beit el-Fakih they meet the desert, where the north wind sweeps down over the sand without meeting a single blade of grass. During the rainy season in the mountains, every summer, no drop of water falls in Tehama; there the temperature reaches such heights that the floods that come streaming down from the mountains after the rains literally disappear into the sand before they get anywhere near the sea. In winter the air is dry and light, but in summer, despite the lack of rain, the climate becomes humid and unhealthy, like a steam bath, in which people languish month after month, without strength to eat, without drinking-water to quench their thirst. The expectation of life is low; infant mortality is enormous; and very few other countries can show anything like the annual mortality rate from jaundice, dysentery and malaria of this paradise on earth. This is the Yemen’s destiny. When the waves of invaders finally ceased because there was nothing more to be found, the diseases came marching in as though it were now their turn to conquer the country. Nevertheless, the Yemen is still called Arabia Felix. Why?
This is the country and this the question that the Danish expedition encountered that evening of 29th December in the year 1762. The intelligence the skipper had brought back from Loheia as they waited on the tarrád, the governor who bade them welcome and the rich merchant who offered them one of his houses had all raised great expectations in them. They were not disappointed. As they went ashore the merchant was waiting for them in person on the quayside; he saw to it that they passed through the customs without difficulty, and he accompanied them to the stone house he was placing at their disposal. Shortly afterwards a messenger arrived from Emir Farhan with a splendid live sheep as a gift of welcome, together with a letter in which the governor again begged them to regard themselves as his guests and assured them that they were welcome in this port of the Imam, and could stay there as long as they wished in complete security. As their kitchen equipment was still aboard the ship, the merchant arranged for them to be sent a most excellent supper, which went down extraordinarily well after the long period of dates and durra bread. Both the governor and the merchant offered to pay the skipper of the tarrád for their journey from Djidda. As the expedition’s treasurer, Niebuhr had to decline their offer with thanks; but he asked himself in his diary whether any group of travelling Arabs could ever expect a corresponding gesture anywhere in Europe from the local population. This extraordinary Arab hospitality overwhelmed the modest astronomer, who was not accustomed to asking for things. “We were delighted to find that the Arabs became ever more courteous the farther we got from Egypt, and particularly when the natives of the land which was our main objective received us so courteously right from the start,” he wrote in his diary that first evening in Loheia.
The next day some of their chests they were not sending to Mocha via Ismael Salech were brought through the customs. They feared there might be some suspicious ransacking of their equipment; but along came Emir Farhan himself and gave instructions for all the chests to be delivered to the Europeans unopened. As they noted that the emir would like to see their instruments and have their use explained, they took from the chests various things that they thought might interest him and the other important Arabs who had gathered about them. Forsskål took out his magnifying glass and explained its function to the Arabs. He himself recounted nothing of the episode in his diary, and again it is Niebuhr’s eye for comedy that took in the situation: “Herr Forsskål now asked the customs officials to get him a live louse, but they did not take kindly to the idea that a European should assume as a matter of course that they would have such a thing on them. When he promised them a few stuiver for the creature, it was soon evident that one of them was able to produce something. Nothing delighted the emir more than to see this louse so enormous. All those present scrutinised it in turn; finally they showed it to the customs official who had produced it, but he now swore angrily that he had never seen so big an Arab louse, and that the creature that lay beneath the magnifying glass must therefore of necessity be a European louse. Nevertheless, he was able to tell his comrades that he had been lucky enough to get some European to give him four stuiver for quite an ordinary louse. The idea soon got round that we were not the same kind of traders as the Europeans that occasionally put in there from India. On the other hand, they believed us to be people more interested in lice than in Arabs, and the following day a man came over to us and offered us a whole handful for only one stuiver apiece.”
But Forsskål’s exploit with the louse was merely a preliminary; now it was the turn of Niebuhr’s astrolabe. He continues: “Of all the things we showed the Arabs in Loheia, nothing seemed to them so marvellous and interesting as my astronomer’s telescope, which showed everything upside down. I let them point it at a woman walking across the market-place some distance away. Their eyes almost fell out with astonishment when they saw the woman go past with her feet in the air and without her clothes falling down. ‘Allah Akbar—God is Great,’ they all exclaimed fervently. Everybody was pleased that these remarkable foreigners had come to their town, and we were again delighted at having met such good-hearted natives in this country.”
During the next few days it was Doctor Kramer’s turn to display his accomplishments. At the mere rumour that the expedition included a doctor, half the population of Loheia seemed to feel poorly; Kramer tried to cure them with good advice, but very soon the patients demanded stronger medicine, and the Dane had to resort to a desperate solution in the hope of reducing the stream of patients—with the result that it swelled larger than ever. Niebuhr reports: “Nothing contributed more to Doctor Kramer’s fame than a purgative he had administered to a bas-kateb. This worked both upwards and downwards with such intensity that the poor man became very ill. But as the Arabs always prefer such purgatives to be as strong as possible, a whole host of people came along afterwards asking for some of the same effective powder that had knocked out our bas-kateb.”
During the days following the expedition’s arrival in Loheia, the courtyard of their house was crowded with curious Arabs; and even though they were all very polite, they made things difficult for the Europeans by their inclination to regard everything as unusual, even when it was not. Finally Niebuhr had to post a porter with instructions not to let anybody in who had not come on a definite errand. There was work to be done. Kramer put his purgatives on the shelf and devoted himself in earnest to their rich benefactor; and von Haven took up his not easily defined linguistic studies, telling Bernstorff that “the philological discoveries I am expected to make cannot of course be sent home in their immature state as soon as this or that observation has been recorded; I must have time to test them, and I begin to wonder whether their rightful place would not perhaps be in some collected memorandum.”
While von Haven was thus pondering, the main burden of work rested as usual on Niebuhr and Forsskål. The former had begun work on his description of the town, its history, situation and trade. Every day he walked about the dusty market quarter, with its houses of straw mats and its twisted streets, where the carpenters and turners sat on the ground fashioning their wooden products while
a sunbeam fell through a chink in the roof and shone on their tools. Nobody molested him, and for the first time he could work with his astrolabe and compass without the risk of being attacked. His map of Loheia, the corner-stone of the work which was later to result in his famous map of the Yemen, was his most accurate so far.
With such favourable working conditions Forsskål had recovered some of his old energy; the weariness he felt in Djidda had gone and his activity in Loheia was greater than ever before. Once again his diary is filled with accounts of units of measure and weight, of coins, of exchange rates and of the price of goods. He investigated the history of the town and discovered how it had regularly been attacked by hostile desert tribes and burnt down, while the inhabitants had fled to the islands off the coast, where they could be safe because their conquerors had no boats. The legal system also interested this doctor of philosophy; he was appalled at the principle of blood vengeance, by which the relatives of a murderer with several deaths on his conscience lived under the constant threat of being killed themselves by way of retribution, even though they had no part in the murders which their deaths were to avenge. In contrast to these crude customs, Forsskål was fascinated by the Indian Banyans, of whom there were many living in the town, who would not kill even the tiniest insect because they believed in the transmigration of souls. Forsskål describes how they bought live fish and threw them back in the sea, having to pay double the price because the fishermen knew their faith.
Niebuhr’s plan of Loheia
Naturally it was botany that took up most of Forsskål’s time and attention. Just as in Cairo—but this time he was the only one of the expedition to do so—he set out on long excursions from the town: first, by way of an experiment, to the nearby village of Naaman, then subsequently farther still to Kudmie, and finally as far as Moor, situated where the desert ends and the fertile part of the country begins. For days on end he rode round on his donkey, past fields of indigo plants and basil herb; he followed the mud roads through the fields of pearl millet (Pennisetum typhoideum) standing as high as a man, where the peasant sat up in a tamarisk tree in the middle of the field producing a shrill kind of music to chase the birds away from the almost ripe seed. Nobody attempted to threaten or molest him. For Forsskål, who—as he put it to Linnaeus—had “until now had to submit to studying plants and robbers simultaneously,” it was a genuine relief to learn that he could pursue his botanical studies in the Yemen as peacefully and with as little hindrance as he could at home in Sweden. He returned to Loheia with over a hundred new botanical specimens, full of praise for the excellence of the native population.
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