The others agreed with him. This country was something unusual. Nowhere else on their long journey had they met goodwill to compare with it. Every single one of the expedition’s members, as they sat outside in the little courtyard in the mild winter evening which was warmer than the Scandinavian summer, could quote new examples of the kindness and helpfulness of the natives. It is evident from the diaries that a mood of reconciliation had grown up among them. It is as though peace and calm about them had also tended to smooth out their own conflicts, creating a basis for an atmosphere of pleasant intimacy. Two long years had passed; they knew one another’s foibles so well that they had almost begun to forget them. And now that they had after all their troubles reached the country that had been their goal, they were received like long-awaited guests, like old friends who at last had returned to their rightful home. Carsten Niebuhr writes: “As things were going so well for us in Loheia, Herr Baurenfeind and I took out our violins and in the evenings played a few duets together.” We can picture the scene: the stars over the courtyard; Niebuhr and Baurenfeind standing in the dust, as soft as any carpet; the wax candles in their makeshift holders burning steadily in the warm evening, while the two men played duets to the others lounging on clay benches and smoking their pipes. What kind of music did they play on those still evenings among the low mud walls in this distant Arabian desert town? Telemann? Vivaldi? Bach? We do not know; yet these notes, heard now so shortly after their bitter quarrels and so shortly before the far more bitter outcome, are not without a certain beauty for us too.
But the neighbours could also hear Niebuhr’s and Baurenfeind’s strange music. And people passing outside in the quiet streets could hear it. Soon a rumour went round the town that among the many other unusual accomplishments possessed by these foreigners was also the ability to produce the most astonishing music. One rich old merchant heard of this and sent a message to the expedition requesting them to come to his house with their violins and play for him. Niebuhr and Baurenfeind, however, were not particularly anxious to do this; they knew that those who occupied themselves with music were not particularly respected among the Mohammedans, and they declined the wealthy gentleman’s invitation. A few days passed, then he himself turned up at their house. He was so feeble that he could not walk, but as he very much wanted to speak to the Europeans and listen to their music, he had had himself placed on his donkey and was now waiting outside their door, supported in the saddle by a servant on either side. The members of the expedition invited him in. Niebuhr and Baurenfeind lit the wax candles and played a number of melancholy pieces for him, as they knew that Arabs found it easier to appreciate serious music than gay. Afterwards Berggren served coffee; a conversation began, and they spoke of Europe and the Orient, of Christianity and Islam, and finally the old man began to tell a little about his own life.
Carsten Niebuhr gives an account of this in his diary: “He had never been properly married, but he boasted of having deprived a large number of slave girls of their innocence (if I remember rightly, it was eighty-eight) and thereafter married them off or given them back their freedom. For some time, he went on, he had had two new young and pretty slave girls in the house, and he now very much wished to be able to do the same for them. He therefore offered our doctor a considerable sum if by his art he could give him strength to do this.”
We see from Niebuhr’s diary that this was not the first time in Loheia that Kramer had been faced with similar problems. Niebuhr continues: “Another of the wealthy merchants of Loheia is in the same embarrassing position. He looks to be between fifty and sixty years old. He offers our doctor one hundred Speciedaler if he can fit him for even a single visit to two young slave girls who have hitherto sought in vain to win his love. But he has already tried so many things acquired from English miracle doctors, and thereby so exhausted his powers, that Herr Kramer cannot do anything for him.”
Carsten Niebuhr describes these two gentlemen’s problems with concealed irony. But Kramer probably looked rather differently at the matter. He was not ironic. He was delighted. Where on earth could one find another country where all the patients had apparently the same kind of problem? For this young and rather work-shy doctor, there could be no doubt. Now they had really arrived in Arabia Felix.
The other members of the expedition thought the same, although they were moved by different considerations. All the evidence in this respect seems to agree. Niebuhr and Baurenfeind passed the evenings playing their violins. Even the difficult von Haven was content. He wrote to M. le Baron de Bernstorff that “we have discovered with what kindness and with what good manners Europeans are received when they arrive in Arabia Felix, and even the common people seem to be well-disposed, peaceable and quite remote from any kind of brutality.” On the same day, in a letter to His Eminence Monsieur le Comte de Moltke, he wrote that “we have at length arrived at Arabia Felix and we have found a completely well-ordered land; we have been received most favourably, and things are much better for us among the Arabs here than they were among the Arabs in Egypt.” The most eloquent testimony to von Haven’s satisfaction with this new country is nevertheless indirect. For years we have seen the timorous professor trying by all manner of pretexts to delay and if possible frustrate this dangerous expedition. In these last two letters to Bernstorff and Moltke, the tone is quite different. Von Haven is no longer full of conjectures about the impossibility of exploring Arabia Felix. He declares that he intends to remain two years in the country.
If Berggren the servant has so far maintained an anonymous existence behind the activities and intrigues of the others, we can see from the documents that he had also had his successes during their stay in Loheia. Doctor Kramer had had to cease his treatment of one of the emir’s horses that had been struck down by an illness; whereupon Berggren stepped in, and, from his experience with the Hussars in the war in Prussia, succeeded in curing the animal. The emir’s enthusiasm knew no bounds, and he declared that with Kramer and Berggren the Danish expedition contained no less than two doctors, the one as distinguished as the other.
Loheia and Beit el-Fakih, drawn by Baurenfeind
However, when so many items of evidence point in the same direction, there must be some truth in what is said. We may assume that when, in the middle of February 1763, the Danish expedition prepared for its journey across the Tehama desert to Beit el-Fakih, none of the expedition’s members was any longer in doubt about the most probable reason for the Yemen’s remarkable name. Everything seemed to indicate that this country, which they were now preparing to explore for the first time in its history really was the land of happiness here on earth.
The only problem remaining was that of the right kind of leave-taking present to give to Emir Farhan. The members agreed to present their benefactor with a watch, and also to ask him to keep as his own a telescope he had borrowed from them. In return Emir Farhan renewed his previous offer of paying for their camels and donkeys to Beit el-Fakih, but again the treasurer declined the offer with thanks; they had not come to Arabia to live at the expense of the natives, he said. The next day a messenger appeared at the door from Emir Farhan and asked to speak to von Haven. At his side he held a splendid white Arab stallion. Von Haven appeared and looked in terror from the man to the animal and back again. What in the world could this mean? Then the messenger bowed so low that his head almost touched the ground. His Excellency Emir Farhan sent his compliments and humbly begged von Haven to accept the animal and take it with him. It was a modest gift from His Excellency to the stables of His Majesty the King of Denmark.
4
Towns have their palaces and palaces their rich men, who have problems with their horses and their slave girls. But in the Arabian desert there were no palaces, no rich men, and no real problems. In the Arabian desert people rise before the sun; it is important to use those hours when it is light but not yet too hot. In the dawn, long before the sun makes its appearance and sets the day on fire, the Arab has already lit his own cam
p-fire, squatted down before it, picked out a glowing piece of wood and put it into the top of his pipe while waiting for the water to boil for his coffee. When coffee is ready, he pours it into small cups and hands it round to the others. He offers only a single mouthful at a time; when they have drunk that, they must hand the cup back and get another mouthful. This is the natural law of hospitality. To hand someone a cup brimful would be tactless; it would be like saying: There you are, drink it and go! Instead, things proceed unhurriedly, and one sits a while with the empty cup in one’s hand before handing it across to get another mouthful. Meanwhile, the ball of the sun comes up, clings a little to the low horizon, and then sets off with a jerk. Nothing else happens. No bird-song introduces the start of the day, no trees rustle in the wind. The human voice is the first and only one to break the great silence. Everything seems to have withdrawn to make it easier to scrutinise one’s own life more clearly. Indeed, there is scarcely anything else. It is inscribed upon the surrounding space; it is one’s own voice in the silence, one’s own footprint in the warm sand. It is not much—as one realises—and what there is will soon be erased. One is almost nothing. But the Arabs in the desert are content with small things; they live their lives as they drink their coffee, and are content with a little each time. They are guests of fate, and they accept it as reasonable that fate should not pour an abundance of wealth into the vessels they hold out. It would not be in accord with the laws of hospitality. It would be as though it bade them scornfully go their way. In the desert no other definition of life is to be found but poverty.
Such was the world and such was the attitude to life that met the members of the expedition when on 20th February, 1763, they set out for the south over the extensive sandy plains of Tehama. What became of Frederick V’s Arab stallion is unfortunately not recorded, but it did not go with them in the caravan to Beit el-Fakih; they were all riding donkeys. Their baggage, however, was loaded on camels which every morning were sent on in advance, for their pace was slower than the donkeys’. The expedition spent the nights in the villages where, on their arrival, a sheep was slaughtered. This was an order from Emir Farhan which the guides passed on to the peasants of the village, who had to provide the animal without payment. But every evening Niebuhr quietly tried to come to some arrangement with the owner. He had made his way in the world, but not so far as to have forgotten what one sheep more or less meant for a peasant family in the North Frisian marshlands.
To see as much of the country as possible, and to give Forsskål opportunity for botanical excursions, they followed a route that took them along the mountains by Gannemie instead of taking the direct desert route via Maraua. It was not until 25th February that they arrived at Beit el-Fakih, where they took their baggage over to the customs house; they also delivered a letter of introduction to Ambar Seif, one of the leading merchants of the town, who received them—as the people in Loheia had done—with the most exquisite courtesy. He arranged for their baggage to be taken immediately through the customs unopened and carried to a stone-built house which he lent them; and as they could not unpack and install themselves there before evening, he invited them to dinner at his home. Everything proceeded smoothly. They were still in Arabia Felix.
The desert town of Beit el-Fakih was a centre of trade lying in the middle of the flat sandy plain, approximately four days’ journey from each of the points of the Loheia, Mocha and Sana triangle. One day’s journey inland lay the coffee hills, and a day and a half in the opposite direction brought one to the sea near the port of Hodeia. Coffee dealers from the Hejaz, Egypt, Syria, Turkey and Morocco, indeed even from Persia and India, came to Beit el-Fakih to buy; yet it was far from being a wealthy town. There were only a few stone-built houses; the majority of the population lived in straw huts built in random confusion in the narrow dusty street, where the camels of the coffee traders passed by; only the most essential provisions were to be found in the market, and drinking-water was in short supply.
It was therefore only its central situation that made this town a suitable headquarters for the expedition. With Beit el-Fakih as their point of departure, the members could carry out their exploration of Arabia Felix in their own particular directions. While von Haven and Kramer journeyed to the port of Hodeia, and Forsskål visited the coffee hills to the east with their abundant vegetation, Carsten Niebuhr used Beit el-Fakih as his main base for a series of long reconnaissances into the desert in order systematically to gather information for his great map of the Yemen.
He had already begun on this considerable work en route from Loheia. His procedure was the same as the one he experimented with on the journey to the Sinai peninsula with von Haven. By walking on foot beside his donkey he established once and for all that the animal covered on an average 1,750 double paces every half-hour. From this he could tell the speed at which he travelled, whereupon he only needed to note the time between one place and another and convert this to double paces and then to miles in order to establish the distance between the localities. He determined the direction of his route with the help of a pocket compass. With such a small instrument he could not take accurate angular bearings; but he found it possible to make more frequent and less conspicuous observations. The flat desert horizon described an uninterrupted circle about him, which everywhere served as a firm basis when he wished to calculate the sun’s altitude with his astrolabe. In the evenings he noted his day’s observations and improved his record of the route covered with further astronomical observations, now made by the stars, and by calculating his compass error which for this region he took to be 11° 50′ west.
Day by day and mile after mile he added new pieces to the enormous jigsaw puzzle which eventually became his map of the Yemen—a pioneer work which for more than a century was to serve as the basis for further European exploration of the country. The two great English explorers, Harris and Palsgrave, both carried Niebuhr’s map with them in their saddle-bag when many years later they penetrated into the same region. Harris, in his book Yemen, writes: “It is impossible to overestimate the value of Niebuhr’s work”; Palsgrave, who travelled through the country exactly one hundred years after the Danish expedition, dedicated his book about the expedition to the memory of Niebuhr as one “who first opened up Arabia for Europe.”
The journey from Loheia had merely meant that one single line could be drawn in on the new map; in Beit el-Fakih the real work began, and in the months that followed Carsten Niebuhr was constantly on the move by donkey to some place or another in the distant desert. Because of the heat in Tehama travelling was generally done at night; but as the dark would make observation impossible, Niebuhr and his Arab guide renounced this convenience and utilised the hot day-time hours. They spent the nights lying on the sand wrapped in their capes, with the sky drawn over them like an extra blanket. On other evenings they called in at the so-called mokkaias, poor coffee huts, where it was possible to replenish one’s drinking-water and get a little kishr, a drink the colour of tea made of the shells of the coffee fruit and drunk in small portions from large, unglazed earthenware vessels. On other particularly fortunate days they found a larger kind of inn, a so-called mausale, where along with other travellers they could sleep on clay benches in the crowded and smoky communal room, and get new-baked durra bread and fresh milk so thick that it remained hanging in a long thread when a finger was stuck into it.
One day succeeded another under the same unchanging sky and over the same unchanging sand. Villages with their straw huts and their donkeys. Veiled women who all looked as if they had been dipped fully clothed into the great earthenware vessels on the outskirts of the town where indigo dye is made. In Niebuhr’s diary we follow his movements from day to day. Most of the stages were uneventful—like the night they arrived half an hour after midnight at a coffee hut “without having seen anything more remarkable than a young man who had six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot.” The villagers all resembled one another, the donkeys all left the same
signs behind them; only the names and the dates changed. On 7th March, Niebuhr left Beit el-Fakih for the first time and went by Ghalefca to the villages on the coast, which consisted of a score or so of fishermen’s huts scattered under the date palms. In Hodeia he came across von Haven and Kramer who were allowing themselves to be entertained by the wealthy men of the town; but “as he did not want to be stopped by having to make ceremonial visits,” he left the town next day to ride back by Machfur to Beit el-Fakih. Two days later, on 11th March, he was on his way again. This time his journey took him via Dimne to Zebid. Spring had now come to the desert, and in all the valley beds where a little moisture had collected there was a covering of tiny, almost invisible flowers. The Mohammedans had given the grave-stones in their burial grounds a fresh coating of lime, and in one village he counted more than six hundred earthenware vessels filled with indigo. Then he returned once more to Beit el-Fakih. By now the uplands to the south-west of the town had been explored, and on 19th March he left for the north in the direction of Kahme. He measured, he calculated, he took notes. He saw the picture slowly beginning to take shape. There is no doubt that on these long rides through the spring in Tehama, Niebuhr was enjoying the best time he had had since their departure from Copenhagen. He was completely absorbed in his work. His delight in the systematic and uninterrupted labour, in the solitude and the simple mode of life bounded by the open horizons of the desert was so great that he could not resist making an exception sometimes and inserting a little self-portrait among the more routine observations in his diary. Here we see Carsten Niebuhr in the round for the first time; this is how he was in that first happy period in Arabia Felix.
Arabia Felix Page 22
