by Gavin Young
‘You were certainly there!’ The driver had slowed down in the Jedda traffic, and was talking and listening with his head turned more to me than to the road. A green Rolls-Royce swerved past us, and a princely figure in the back seat glared at us through the smoked-glass window. ‘Drive a longer way round, then we can talk,’ I suggested to the driver, and he laughed and agreed.
Talking to him, I remembered more about that long valley of date gardens, wells and mud mansions. Ten years later the valley became something of a tourist trap, its peace ruined by the soldiers, European mercenaries and journalists who crowded in to participate in or cover the Yemen War from the Saudi side. Abha and Khamis Mushayt were smothered by urbanization and new military installations. ‘There are too many new buildings,’ my taxi driver mourned, turning out of the centre of Jedda for the Mecca highway.
In the Asir there had been an Arcadia worth mourning: it was not a place of beauty where people died of malnutrition; it was a granary, an orchard, a waterfall, a seventh heaven – that is, if a heaven will admit witches and magic. A number of witches were said to live around Abha in those days in isolated villages amid a landscape that had a strange Grimms’-fairy-tale look about it. There were huge rocks with holes in them like Henry Moore sculptures. Obelisk-shaped rocks shot up from flat, stony plains, and hills rounded like domes were strangely grouped in pairs. The Arabs, who like giving things names, called such landmarks the Sultan’s Penis or The Bosoms.
The witches of Asir specialized in love potions or curses. In southern Arabia the spirits or genies we read of emerging from magic lamps in the Arabian Nights were more like the little people of Ireland, and lived under bushes, rocks or small hills where they guarded treasure. My Arabs hated to pitch a tent without first consulting a local Bedouin. After all, they said, if you urinated on a subterranean household of ill-natured djinns, you were asking for smallpox or a heart attack. Djinns could strike back. The Arabs believed in these things as people in America and Europe believe in haunted houses, and could become irritable if their beliefs, or half-beliefs, were mocked. Riding beside me in a jeep towards the great mountains behind Najran, the Yemeni from Ib, Abdullah, pointed and said, ‘See those mountains? There are dangerous people living at the very top of them who kill everyone they get their hands on. They are called the Beni Chilab, and they have long hairy tails.’
‘Who told you that!’ I asked, conscious too late of the disbelief in my voice.
‘My cousin told me,’ he said sharply. ‘He’s been there.’
‘Well, did he say whether they wore their tails inside or outside their skirts? If they were inside, how did anyone see them?’
Abdullah turned a darker shade of butterscotch and began furiously stuffing handfuls of qat leaf, the Yemeni equivalent of pep pills, into his cheeks. I had seldom seen him so angry. ‘You don’t believe a simple thing like that,’ he exploded, ‘yet you tell me – we all heard it – a ridiculous story of an air pilot, married and with children, who goes into hospital in London and comes out of it a woman.’ He jammed another wad of the bitter leaf into his mouth. ‘You tell me, furthermore, of a country somewhere in the north where the people have six months of day and six months of night. All that I am expected to believe, and yet men with tails is all lies….’
Abdullah’s diatribe went on for some time, until qat swelled his cheeks like a hamster’s and began to redden his eyeballs. I didn’t blame him. Why shouldn’t there be human tails – or at least why shouldn’t Abdullah reasonably expect me to believe that there might be? Luckily, the qat made him giggly, and his anger faded away.
Now, in 1979, I said to the taxi driver, ‘Let’s go to Abha tomorrow. You drive me, and we’ll visit your family there.’
He saw I was joking – Abha was a very long way off – and his shoulders shook with amusement. He said, ‘Which way? Down the coast road and up the mountain highway to Abha? It’s all asphalt now.’
‘Never! We’ll go the old way, past Mecca, through Taif, eating noodles at a Bokhari restaurant on the way, down to Bisha across the lava fields. The old, long way: three days and nights.’
‘I’ll come,’ he shouted. ‘Let’s get away from this hot, damp city and up to the breezes and the pomegranates. Welcome to my Abha house!’
But by now the asphalt highways are everywhere; Bisha is a modern town; the orchards of the south are ringed and dwarfed – even replaced – by missile sites and air-force bases. I wondered about the Darb el Fil, the Elephant Road, that used to wind through the mountains north towards Mecca from the Yemen. This was the undulating way of great stone slabs, the width of a bus, that the Ethiopian kings of Yemen had built so that their battle elephants could advance on Mecca. (God had smitten the poor beasts with hailstones.) Probably the Elephant Road, which I had often explored in those days, had also been paved over for heavy motor traffic.
When we reached my hotel at last, I got out to pay the black driver, who was by now beside himself with the excitement of reminiscence. ‘Let’s go, let’s go!’ he cried, displaying the gaps in his teeth. I told him of my three-day visa, and we looked at each other sadly.
‘When you see Abha next, give it my regards,’ I said. He smacked his pink palm into mine, clasping it, and threw his other arm around my neck and kissed me on both cheeks. A party of stubble-chinned men who looked like Iranians stared at us in astonishment from the entrance of the hotel. Then, ignoring the money I held out to him, he hopped in his taxi and drove away with a wave and a grin. A small pendant sign in his rear window saying ALLAH swung back and forth as he went down the street. At least one Saudi had survived the oil boom with his humanity intact.
The avalanche of memories the taxi driver had shaken loose from the past – and his own sweet simplicity – had made my stay in Jedda worthwhile.
*
In my hotel at lunch I shared a table with a Lebanese businessman whose hair resembled corrugated tin, and who wore a cream silk shirt with green cufflinks as big as saucers. He informed me genially, ‘I am in big business here. No good coming here unless you have big business.’ He waved a fork. ‘Mine is worth four million sterling pounds.’
‘Bravo,’ I said. I saw that he had sheaves of typewritten paper by his plate and, by his chair, the inevitable leather briefcase with a combination lock.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘with small business you lose.’ He looked round the dining room at other Arabs poring over papers as they ate kebab and chips. ‘No one ever comes to Jedda except for good big business. You know what my trip is? Three days here, three days in Riyadh, three days in Kuwait, three days in Baghdad.’ He seemed satisfied. ‘All very big business.’
‘Better you than me,’ I said.
‘Kuwait is more expensive even than here.’ He pronounced this as if it was a recommendation. ‘Have you seen Sana, capital of Yemen? It’s dirtier than Jedda.’
‘I like Sana.’
‘Just a living museum.’
‘At least it’s living,’ I said. ‘People here have heads full of gold watches, and as a museum it’s zero.’
He laughed. When he asked, I told him I was a writer. ‘A writer! In Jedda?’ he exclaimed. ‘No business?’ It was as if I’d said I was a unicorn trainer. ‘You must be the most unusual man in Jedda.’
Whenever I saw the Lebanese again, he was running busily about the lobby, in and out of taxis, dashing to the telephone, always in a hurry. He had given himself only three days in Jedda and didn’t have time to say hello again. He was four million pounds of big business on the move.
I went to the Saudi Airlines office near the hotel. A sign on the door said, CLOSED FOR PRAYERS. After an hour I returned, survived a stiff dose of rudeness from two Saudi clerks, and finally bought a ticket to Bahrain from a jolly Pakistani from Lahore. Then I wandered around the centre of the city. Old buildings in piles of rubble alternated with modern structures of no distinction; Jedda looked like a poodle in a diamond collar suffering from the mange.
And gold poisoning. Ne
w, high, arched emporia filled the city centre: rambling covered markets that seemed to go on acre after acre; mazes you could get lost in, an Ali Baba’s Cave. Over the high plate-glass shopfronts – window after window – the words sparkled in gold lettering: JEWELS, WATCHES. Gold and gems sparkled out at the gaping shoppers from every side: necklaces, brooches, bracelets, watch faces studded with diamonds and sapphires. I squinted at the price tags: the equivalent of £700, £1650, £5000 and more. The robed figures of Saudi men and women elbowed their way into these treasure-houses, while once more the voice of a muezzin rose deafeningly over us: ‘La ilah ill’ Allah!’
I realized with joy that people like my taxi driver existed – exceptions to the evident rule that wealth and its arrogance had deprived too many Saudis of all grace, generosity and tolerance. Did God feel at home among the Cadillacs so matter-of-factly ranged in window after window like those in a Los Angeles used-car lot? What did He think of the whisky and the pornographic films behind high villa walls? The soul of Arabia lay entombed in the bazaar, behind the plate-glass and burglarproof grilles, with the gold rings and diamond necklaces.
*
The next morning, the last day I was permitted by my ‘extended’ visa to remain in Saudi Arabia, I remarked to the manager, a Palestinian, as I paid my hotel bill, ‘Well, I hope the flights leave on time from Jedda. I have a connection from Bahrain to Dubai.’ He gave me my last jab of fear. ‘All go on time,’ he grinned, ‘except Saudia. With Saudia, some prince comes along with eleven persons and everyone is turned off the flight,’ then added, patting my shoulder, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll try to keep a room for you here if you’re turned off the plane.’ With longing I thought of the sea.
My taxi driver to the airport was a sturdy fellow, like Mubarek in the old days. He came from Medina, he said, as he pushed through the jams of Cadillacs with a fine nervous dexterity. When I pointed to a group of Pakistani labourers and said, ‘Once all the work was done by the Yemenis, and by black Takrunis from Nigeria,’ he answered, ‘The Koreans are the strongest workers now.’
‘Pakistanis?’
‘Lazy, lazy.’
In the chill of the air conditioning in the airport waiting room, Filipinos in orange overalls swept the floor with brushes and emptied the ashtrays. They looked neither happy nor miserable. ‘If you don’t like it, go home!’ their boss had told them. The departure board read, ‘Abha. Flight SV 833 09.10’, and I remembered Saad saying he was happy – ‘more than ever before’. Then my own flight to Bahrain was called. No prince wanted to hijack it that day, and it left on time.
Near Bahrain, after miles of wilderness occasionally interrupted by sheer buttresses of sand, the Saudia Boeing banked and dropped toward the sea through a sandstorm. It was as if a giant were throwing handfuls of red pepper at the plane’s windows.
I caught my connection to Dubai from Bahrain and, as the Gulf Air aircraft crossed the shallow waters off Qatar, looked down on the dhows and fishing craft moving slowly on the surface of water so shallow and still – and therefore so invisible – that they seemed to be suspended in air, not water. It was so clear that I could see strange delicate seabed shapes like dragonflies’ wings, and what looked like gold-flecked folds of silk undulating there as if trapped under glass.
Thirteen
I sat on my bunk and opened Lady Sustant’s Recruit at random. Where the pages fell open, I read:
Peggy sat up to ease off her black lace briefs….
Hands wormed into the waistband of her tights, stretched the thin material outwards and eased down. She wriggled her bottom on the rich leather…. ‘Well, do you fancy me?’
It wasn’t the only reading on the Pacific Basset, a 360-ton tug with, as I saw from a brochure provided by the owners, Swire Pacific Offshore, two Yanmar G250E engines totalling 2600 b.p.h. at 820 revs. per minute, and a speed of twelve knots. In Captain Peter Barton’s cabin I had spotted Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, Jacques Prévert’s Paroles, Priestley’s Bright Day, an Agatha Christie, Francis Chichester’s Lonely Sea and the Sky. Barton had studied French in Paris and wanted to live there, which perhaps accounted for the air of catholicity aboard the Pacific Basset. It was not really Lady Sustant’s ambience, perhaps.
*
I was spending a couple of days at sea in the Gulf to watch John Swire’s Pacific Basset tow an oil rig from one position to another somewhere off Abu Dhabi.
Arriving from Jedda, I had telephoned Swire’s offices in Dubai and been invited around by Swire’s manager, Chris Pooley, an energetic veteran of eighteen years’ merchant navy service, mostly around Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand and the Philippines, and always in Swire ships. Telephoning his friends and acquaintances in the shipping offices in Dubai, Pooley had, he thought, discovered a vessel, a 1200-ton acid carrier with a British master and a Honduran and Filipino crew, which would take me across the Arabian Sea to Karwar port, three hundred miles south of Bombay. That, I said, would suit me nicely.
It was pleasant to know that after these two days on the Pacific Basset I was assured of a smooth transit on to the next great leap forward. Or rather, as it turned out, it was a relief to think so.
‘Are you seasick?’ Captain Barton asked.
‘Not up to now.’
‘Nor was I until I began to work offshore. The Basset is very solid and very stable, so it takes a hell of a lot of pressure to push her over. But once she’s over it takes an age before she gets back.’
‘Doesn’t she have stabilizers?’
‘Anything sticking out – rudder, propellers, stabilizers – are a liability on a tug. Anything that sticks up is a liability, too,’ he added, patting the top of his head. Peter Barton was six foot five, and was continually banging his head on something, he said. ‘I trust men who are tall,’ he said. He was thirty-five years old, long-nosed, long-jawed, highly articulate.
The Pacific Basset was a handsome tug with a spick-and-span firehouse-red hull, white bridge, and the squat, nimble tough-guy look of a middleweight boxer. She looked capable of bashing her way through the short, steep waves you find in shallow water, and of riding the bigger, more gradual but heavier waves of the oceans.
Seen from her roomy fore-to-aft bridge, the rigs of the biggest Abu Dhabi offshore field sat on the hazy horizon like grey spaceships. A long tapering flare rose from a tall sticklike pipe in the water. Helicopters hovered and swooped down to alight on platforms of rigs like tentative bees. Closer to the rigs, in the midst of them, it was like being in a Meccano world of robots and miniature Eiffel Towers. In certain conditions of light and mist, their widespread legs seemed to turn them into striding mechanical men. In my notebook I wrote:
We approach the rig named Penrod stern first, edging alongside one of the three towering legs and spreading floor of the drilling platform. The voice of Penrod comes over Barton’s radio speaking in a French accent. ‘Please ’urry urp and we’ll gate on wiz eet.’
‘Jesus Christ, first you say “Starboard”, and then you say “Port”….’ A clash of French and British temperaments seems in the offing. Men in hard hats shout down at us from the rig.
‘Stand by with the boathook,’ Barton calls to his Filipino first mate. The mate throws a line up to the rig; a big noose of wire is hauled up after it, and draped over the bollard. We edge away, tightening the wire.
The body of the rig starts to settle silently onto the water, moved by machinery slowly, foot by foot, down the three thick Meccano legs. The platform is really a kind of barge as well as a mass of rails, steel ladders, radar antennae, pipes, things that resemble generators and a small helicopter pad. Finally the subsided rig is more like a small grey aircraft carrier with three metal-strutted towers sticking up from it.
A Filipino puts his head into the bridge and says, ‘Chow?’
‘What is it today?’
‘Fly lice.’
‘Fried rice is good. Okay, bring it up.’
But, mysteriously, what appears is omelettes, raw tomatoes an
d a dish of tinned peaches. ‘Fly lice, eh?’ Barton moans. ‘Bloody ’ell.’
We begin to tow the rig. The wire between us tightens as we turn and drops sizzling into the sea as if it were red-hot. Tight, it becomes a quivering white snake with water trailing like threads of cotton between the rig and a winch just behind the bridge. ‘Towing under full power,’ says Barton. The disparity in size is laughable: Goliath dragged along by a pygmy for twelve miles.
For Barton it’s the Centre Court at Wimbledon. The wheel and telegraph are on one side of the bridge, the radio at the other. He leaps from one to the other like a tennis champion playing himself from both sides of the net at once. Even stooped, he is unable to avoid an occasional crack of his head on some protuberance in the ceiling. It is an impressive performance.
‘Imagine this for three months on end. It’s pure escapism.’ Escapism from what? Barton wanted to be a seaman from the age of thirteen. After nautical school, he took his master’s certificate at twenty-five (‘Par for the course’). Not a bad life. Travel – yes, some element of romance. In practical terms, you get four months’ leave a year (six weeks every three months), although it’s a sixteen-hour day for those three months. ‘We’ve worked eleven hours today already. No one bothers at sea. If you have work, you finish it.’
After dark the rig lights up with neon strips. We are dazzled by the strong light blazing down on us. In the limelight we cast off, pirouette to starboard, then throw up another line: more manoeuvres of balletic precision. The rig is positioned very exactly, according to delicate instruments. At last, at 8.00 p.m., the unseen French voice says, ‘Fine. Fine positioning. Jacking down now.’ We wait. The mechanical legs probe down through the water under the white light; they find the seabed.
