Extracts from the diary of Dr Jones: he visits the Yemen
Friday 18 November
We are here in the Yemen at last.
The landscapes are breathtaking—towering cliffs that are ochre in the sunlight and purple in the shade, wadis slashed as if with a giant knife cutting thousands of feet between sheer rock walls, with an occasional thread of water at the bottom surrounded by date palm, gravel plains that are an endless expanse of dun, marked here and there by the white crust of the sebkhas where moisture beneath the sand leaches salt to the surface. These are dangerous places where a vehicle might sink if driven across them. On one trip we caught tantalising glimpses of a sea of sand: the beginning of the Empty Quarter, a quarter of a million square miles of uninhabited desert.
And the towns are as wonderful as the desert. From the desert, driving towards a town through the haze and dust, it as if one is approaching Manhattan: many-storeyed tower houses white with gypsum that from a distance look like skyscrapers poke above the walls of ancient fortifications or seem to totter on the edge of brown cliffs. They are beautiful and unlike anything I have ever seen or heard of. Once one is in a town it is a din of shouting voices, a riot of colour, unimaginable smells of drains and spices, and then you turn the corner and there is a garden, hidden away behind the houses.
We spent the first few days here staying in one of the sheikh’s houses outside Sana’a, or touring the country in a convoy of his huge air-conditioned Toyota Land Cruisers. He wants us to get to know his country a little before we travel into the mountains. In the Empty Quarter we saw the beginnings of the dunes, an endless landscape of sculpted sand, dunes like low hills, dunes like long fingers, which shift and change endlessly so that no track through them ever lasts for more than a few minutes before it is obliterated in the restless wind that stings one’s skin with grains of sand.
We drove into the mountains along crumbling tracks of loose gravel, always with a precipitous slope on one side, lurching up steep winding roads along which it seemed impossible from below that any vehicle could travel. We found tiny villages, perched at the foot of great cliffs and in permanent shadow, where a few herdsmen lived tending their goats. We saw deep pools of water coloured an unearthly blue-green, oases where date palms fringed the water’s edge, and where brown-skinned boys in their coloured futahs, a sort of skirt wrapped around like a sarong, jumped in and out of the water.
Once we were stopped as we approached a tented encampment of Beduin by armed tribesmen gesturing with their rifles. The driver of the lead vehicle of our convoy of three stopped some way from them and got out. He bent to pick up some sand, then stood and let it run through his fingers, and showed his empty hand, palm out, to the Beduin.
‘He shows that he has no weapon,’ remarked our driver to Harriet and me.
‘But hasn’t he a weapon?’ I asked, thinking of the rifles I had seen lying on the floor of one of the vehicles.
‘Yes, of course. Everyone has guns here. But he doesn’t show his gun. He says he comes in peace.’
The Beduin let us approach their tents and Harriet and I breathed more easily. I remember we dismounted and drank cardamom-flavoured coffee with them from tiny cups, sitting on a carpet under the roof of a tent with three sides.
I am overwhelmed by this country. It is so beautiful, in a savage way, especially in the mountains of Heraz, where the sheikh lives most of the time when he is not in Glen Tulloch. The people are like the country, crowding around one in the souks or even just in the streets.
‘Britani? You Engleesh? I speek little Engleesh? Manchester United? Good? Yes?’ And one smiles and says something or other, like the phrase the sheikh taught us: ‘Al-Yemen balad jameel’ (The Yemen is a beautiful country).
And they nod back and smile, delighted to hear any word of their own language spoken even if they do not understand what you are trying to say, as friendly as could be. At the same time there is a sense that the friendliness could turn in a heartbeat to violence if they thought you were an enemy.
I worry about Harriet. She is her usual calm, cheerful self for most of the time, then in a moment her face becomes pinched and white, and she is silent. She must be worrying about her soldier. Maybe something has happened. I should ask. I haven’t asked.
We stayed in the sheikh’s house outside Sana’a for ten days. It was a comfortable house with every modern convenience, large, airy and cool inside. It did not have much character. The sheikh explained to us that this was his ‘official’ residence, for when he came to Sana’a on rare visits for business and politics. During those days in Sana’a he was busy, and so we were given a glimpse of the country by his drivers.
Once Harriet and I borrowed a car and drove ourselves around for a while. We went into Sana’a and saw the old city, with its riot of grey and white houses with their curious arched windows and towered storeys. We visited the spice souk, where great bowls of saffron and cumin and frankincense, and every other possible spice, were set out on display. We saw through the entrance to a diwan, where men reclined on cushions chewing khat, exchanging gossip or dreaming of Paradise. But we didn’t have the courage to go into any of the local restaurants. I didn’t know if Harriet was allowed to enter those places, which seemed populated only by men. In the end we went to one of the Western-style hotels on the ring road. Here the twenty-first-century world intruded itself, with piped music, beer being drunk in the bar by engineers back from the oilfields, and a few tourists. We had a late lunch—a plastic-tasting Caesar salad—and drank a glass of white wine each because we didn’t know when we would get our next alcoholic drink. The sheikh might permit drink in Scotland and even have a glass of whisky himself when he was there, but there was no question of his doing so here.
I tried to take Harriet out of her mood of abstraction, and talked about the places and the people we had seen since we arrived here, but although she attempted to keep up the conversation I could see it was an effort.
Then we drove back to the sheikh’s house. As we passed through the villages along the edge of town, the call for prayer sounded from a hundred minarets, the faithful lined up to wash themselves in the communal baths outside the mosques, and then, leaving their sandals and shoes outside, went in to prayer. There were mosques everywhere, their domes vivid blue or green, with the symbol of the crescent etched against the darkening blue sky. Everyone was at prayer, it seemed to me, a whole people five times a day praying as naturally as breathing.
In this country faith is absolute and universal. The choice, if there is a choice, is made at birth. Everyone believes. For these people, God is a near neighbour.
I thought of Sundays at home when I was a child, buttoned up in an uncomfortable tweed jacket and forced to go to Sunday communion. I remember mouthing the hymns without really singing, peering between my fingers at the rest of the congregation when I was supposed to be praying, twisting in my seat during the sermon, aching with impatience for the whole boring ritual to be over.
I can’t remember when I last went to church. I must have been since Mary and I were married but I can’t remember when.
I don’t know anyone who does go to church now. It’s extraordinary, isn’t it? I know I live amongst scientists and civil servants, and Mary’s friends are all bankers or economists, so perhaps we are not typical. You still see people coming out of church on Sunday morning, chatting on the steps, shaking hands with the vicar, as you drive past on your way to get the Sunday papers, relieved you are too old now to be told to go. But no one I know goes any more. We never talk about it. We never think about it. I cannot easily remember the words of the Lord’s Prayer.
We have moved on from religion.
Instead of going to church, which would never occur to us, Mary and I go to Tesco together on Sundays. At least, that is what we did when she still lived in London. We never have time to shop during the week and Saturdays are too busy. But on Sunday our local Tesco is just quiet enough to get round without being hit in the ankles all the time by other people’s shopping carts.
We take our time wheeling the shopping cart around the vast cavern, goggling at the flatscreen TVs we cannot afford, occasionally tossing some minor luxury into the trolley that we can afford but not justify.
I suppose shopping in Tesco on Sunday morning is in itself a sort of meditative experience: in some way a shared moment with the hundreds of other shoppers all wheeling their shopping carts, and a shared moment with Mary, come to that. Most of the people I see shopping on Sunday morning have that peaceful, dreamy expression on their faces that I know is on ours. That is our Sunday ritual.
Now, I am in a different country, with a different woman by my side. But I feel as if I am in more than just a different country; I am in another world, a world where faith and prayer are instinctive and universal, where not to pray, not to be able to pray, is an affliction worse than blindness, where disconnection from God is worse than losing a limb.
The sun set lower in the sky, and the dome of a mosque was dark against its glare.
♦
Saturday 19 November
This country was not made for salmon.
Today we drove into the mountains of the Heraz, to the Wadi Aleyn.
The mountains of Heraz rise in huge ramparts above terraced slopes where farmers eke out a basic existence growing millet and maize. From below it looks impossible for anyone to penetrate the mountains on foot, let alone in a vehicle. But, as we had noticed before, cunning tracks made their way round the side of huge shoulders of hillside, snaking between boulders the size of churches, careering down loose and crumbling slopes and up the other side. Harriet had her eyes tight shut most of the time on the drive in, and I could hardly bear to look out of the window myself. An error of six inches by the driver would have had us off the edge of the track, bouncing down on the roof of the car into the valley below. But our driver, Ibrahim, a tall bearded man in a maroon turban, check shirt and jeans, drove one-handed while he smoked incessant cigarettes with the other, and the wheels of the Toyota scraped the edges of the track but never quite went over.
Suddenly we went from bright sun into thick mist, and drops of water covered the windows and windscreen. We could hardly see twenty yards in front, but then the mist began to clear. In front of us we caught glimpses of a fortified village standing on a prow of rock.
‘Al-Shisr,’ said our driver.
Al-Shisr is the sheikh’s ancestral home.
We drove up the track to the village. Perhaps a hundred tower houses stood on top of a cliff, with another cliff above the village soaring up into the mist. It made me think of some forgotten, hidden world from a childhood story. We drove through a gate in the walls surrounding the village, and along narrow lanes of sand and gravel. It was as if we had travelled back in time hundreds of years. The streets were empty, but occasionally a child would peer at us from a darkened doorway. A few chickens scattered before the wheels of our Land Cruiser. We turned uphill up another lane and came to a set of beautiful carved wooden gates set in a high wall, which opened inwards as we approached.
Inside the whitewashed walls was a garden of paradise, cool and mysterious. Water rippled from a fountain and splashed over the edge of a basin, cascading into marble channels that formed a grid of running water going backwards and forwards across the garden. Palms and almond trees provided shade, and a spiky grass grew everywhere, with bougainvillea climbing the white walls, and oleander and euphorbia and other shrubs, the names of which I do not know, planted here and there alongside the channels of flowing water.
It is a magical place.
Beyond the garden an arched colonnade led to the interior of the house, and along it came white-robed men, to greet us and collect our luggage. Beyond the colonnade we entered a marble hall of infinite coolness and grace, clad in tiles of intricate geometrical designs, where the sheikh awaited us.
In the afternoon, when the midday heat had passed and the sun was sinking in the sky, I left Harriet behind at the sheikh’s villa, and set off with Ibrahim down the hill from the village and into the Wadi Aleyn. There was another way into the wadi than the perilous tracks along which we had come. A graded track, the red sand scraped smooth by earth movers, ran alongside the wadi, and along it rumbled huge Tata lorries and dumper trucks, churning up clouds of dust which coated our vehicle in grit. Soon we could see the construction site where the holding pens for the salmon are being built. Gangs of Indian labourers were spread all over the site, where three large basins have been excavated in the side of the mountain and are being lined with concrete. Two tanks will hold freshwater. The third will hold saltwater.
From the first freshwater basin a spillway has already been built down to the edge of the wadi. When the summer rains come, the gates of the holding tank will open, and the salmon will swim down the spillway, and run the waters of the wadi. At least, that’s the plan, anyway.
Ibrahim drove up to a line of Portakabins and stopped. I got out and was greeted by a large man wearing orange overalls and a hard hat. ‘Hi,’ he said, extending a hand and speaking with a Texan accent, ‘Dr Jones? I’m Tom Roper, and I’m the project engineer here. You want a look around?’
We went into the Portakabin and Tom showed me a huge wallchart with the project plan mapped out on it. He went through the timetable. It looked to me as if we were on schedule.
‘Sixteen weeks to completion of the holding tanks. Then four weeks to plumb them into the aquifer and start filling them with water, to test the integrity of the lining and the sluice gates and check our oxygenation kit is working. Then we wait for the salmon to arrive, and the summer rains to come.’
We went through everything in detail, and then I looked out of the window at the activity across the site. There must have been several hundred people spread about the hillside, digging, laying concrete onto wire mesh or unrolling huge coils of Alkathene pipe.
‘The guys are working well,’ said Tom. ‘We haven’t had any major problems on site. It’s just a very hot and dusty job. I’m working a month on, a week off.’
‘Where do you go on your week off?’
‘If I can get up to Dubai, I go there, but the flight connections aren’t great. Otherwise I just sit in the Sheraton in Sana’a, drink a few beers and lie around the pool. There’s nothing to do here; there’s nothing to see except rocks and sand.’
I thought of the beautiful village of Al-Shisr, the ancient mosques and even older pre-Islamic buildings and tombs we had seen on our drive through the mountains, and wondered at his lack of curiosity, but said nothing.
I told him I wanted to walk down to the bed of the wadi for a closer look at what the salmon would have to cope with. ‘Yes, do that,’ said Tom. He laughed and said, ‘I guess those fish will just fry and die. You know that, don’t you?’
‘Well, maybe they will. We’ll try and avoid that if possible.’
Tom Roper shook his head and laughed again. ‘It’s not my business what y’all do with your money. I’m a project engineer; 1 do what I’m paid to do. I’ve built stuff in oilfields. I’ve built dams. I’ve built airstrips. I tell ya, I’ve never built fish tanks in the desert before now. You might as well take a heap of dollar bills and burn them as build all this. Your fish will just fry and die. But, hey, I’ll do what you pay me to do.’
I left Tom in the cabin. He might be an excellent engineer, but I am not especially interested in his views on salmon. I am the fisheries scientist, and it is my considered opinion that we will achieve something here. He should stick to digging holes and lining them with concrete.
I walked the few hundred yards downhill to the bed of the wadi. By the time I got there, even though it was dry heat and late afternoon, I was dripping with sweat.
The wadi bed was a mass of boulders, small and large. A trickle of water ran through it, and as I scrambled along I saw that in some places stone channels had been cut to ease the flow of water. There was just about enough flow in the wadi at the moment for a couple of minnows to swim along. Upstream, the wadi ran through a date palm plantation where I knew that the water would flow through irrigation gutters hewn out of the stone. Beyond the plantation I could see where the wadi came down from the hills. The gradient was not as steep as I had feared, and I could see no obvious obstacles to salmon running up when the wadi filled with water.
Turning the other way I could see a few blue pools lying under cliffs so steep and tall the water was in shade all day long. The permanent shadow prevented complete evaporation of the water coming down the wadi. There had been no rain here for twelve weeks, so this water was likely to be coming from the aquifer. It dried up altogether in the heat of spring and early summer, and then filled again in the heavy summer rains.
I leaned back against a boulder, closed my eyes, and tried to shut out the noise of lorries and bulldozers, and men’s voices from the hillside above. I tried to imagine darkening skies and the rain falling. I tried to imagine the first heavy drops sputtering in the dust, leaving minute impact craters wherever they fell. I tried to imagine the rain falling faster, little rivulets forming, running down into the wadi. I tried to imagine streams of water running down the surrounding ravines, and the trickle in the wadi turning to a stream, then to a river, then to a brown and boiling torrent.
I could half picture this in my mind if I tried hard enough, and forgot about the sun that was now reddening my face and neck and burning my forearms. Even in November the heat here is more than I am used to.
Then I tried to imagine the gates of the holding tanks opening, and a bow wave of water coming down the new concrete spillway a few hundred yards away, and waves slapping together where it met the water of the wadi. I tried to imagine the salmon slipping down the spillway, finding the waters of the stream and, following the instincts of tens of thousands of years, heading upstream to spawn. I could not imagine it.
♦
This evening I sat beside Harriet in the dining room in the sheikh’s villa. My face and arms were smothered with Aftersun, but I could still feel the heat in my skin. I drank copious amounts of cold water, which a servant poured from a copper jug into copper goblets. We ate selta, a kind of vegetable broth with lamb, fresh-baked Arab bread and hummus, and a spicy mixture of garlic and tomatoes and other vegetables I could not identify. The sheikh was in a humorous mood. ‘So, you have walked along the Wadi Aleyn, Dr Alfred. What do you think of our project now?’
I shook my head. ‘It will be very difficult. I must confess, Sheikh, I am very daunted. It is one thing to plan this project thousands of miles away and another thing to see the rocks and sand of the wadi.’
‘And another thing to feel the heat,’ added Harriet, looking rather pointedly at my sunburned nose and cheeks. Under the sheikh’s influence her mood has improved a little since we came here. She is more cheerful, although from time to time a sad, inward look still crosses her face.
‘No one who has not seen the wet season can imagine it, what it is like, how the rains fall so swiftly; just as no one who has not been here in the dry season can imagine the heat and the dust that brings. You shall see. Yemen is not just desert. There are green pastures and fields in the Hadramawt, and at Ibb and Hudaydah. Have faith, Dr Alfred, have faith!’ And the sheikh smiled and shook his head, and laughed to himself as if amused by something a child had said.
♦
Harriet and I have been put in a guest wing at the far end of the house, away from where the sheikh and his retinue sleep. There are half a dozen bedrooms here, all large and luxurious with big comfortable beds and marble floors, with prayer mats laid out and a green arrow set in mosaic tiles, pointing the way to Mecca. The bathrooms have huge sunken baths with (I think) gold fittings. Bowls of fruit and flowers are set out and iced water can be poured from a giant Thermos. Sometimes someone lights frankincense in a burner in the central courtyard, and its strange and exotic scent pervades the whole house, making me think of church again in a distant childhood.
As I made my way along the corridor to my room just now, I passed a half-open door and heard the sound of someone weeping.
I stopped. Of course it was Harriet. Gently, I pushed at the door. She was sitting on the edge of the bed. There was just enough moonlight coming in through the filmy curtains to see the glint of tears running down her cheek. I stood there tentatively, my hand still on the door, and said, ‘Harriet? Is something the matter?’
Of course there was something the matter. What an idiotic question. She mumbled something in a choked-sounding voice. I could not make out the words. I stood there awkwardly a moment longer and then instinct took over, and I sat on the bed beside her and put my arm around her. She turned and buried her face in my neck and I could feel the moisture on her face against my skin.
‘Harriet, what is it? Please tell me.’
She sobbed for a while longer and my shirt collar became damp. It was a curious feeling, holding her in my arms like that. It didn’t feel wrong. It felt right.
She said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m being pathetic.’
‘No. Tell me what has upset you.’
‘It’s about Robert,’ she said in a trembling voice. ‘I keep thinking something dreadful has happened to him.’
Harriet had told me about her engagement to Robert Matthews, a captain in the Royal Marines. She never speaks much about him, and I never think much about him as a result, although if I do, it is with an odd, irrational twinge almost like jealousy.
‘I haven’t heard from him for weeks and weeks,’ she said. ‘I’m so worried. It’s like an ache, all the time.’
‘Perhaps he’s somewhere where he can’t answer letters,’ I suggested. ‘I imagine the communications in Iraq are difficult.’
‘It’s worse that that,’ she said into my shoulder. ‘Promise me you won’t tell anyone, if I tell you.’
I promised. Who would I tell?
She told me how the letters she had been receiving from Robert had at first been almost obliterated by the censor and then had ceased to come altogether. What was worse was that she had been contacted by something called the Family Support Centre, and all the letters she had written to him had started being returned. Then she hinted that, in some way she did not make clear, she had received information that, wherever Robert was, he was in serious danger. I tried to think of words to comfort her, and she clung to me for a moment longer, but then she became calmer and sat up straight and I removed my arm.
‘God,’ she said, ‘I must look a mess. Thank goodness it’s so dark. I’m sorry to have let you see me like this. I just lost it for a while.’
‘It must be a huge worry for you,’ I said. ‘I completely understand. I have no idea how you’ve kept so calm all this time. You mustn’t bottle it up. We must help each other. You should have said something about it before.’
‘You have your own worries, I know,’ she said. ‘I had no right to bring my troubles to you.’
‘Harriet, I know we started out on this project—that is, I know I started out on this project—on the wrong foot with you. Since then I’ve gained a great deal of respect for you, and I’m very fond of you. I want you talk to me as you would to any other friend, whenever you want to.’
She looked at me and gave a sad smile. ‘That’s very sweet of you.’ Suddenly, she leaned forward and kissed me briefly and coolly on the lips. Then she stood up and made for the bathroom, saying over her shoulder, ‘I must clean my face up. Thank you, Fred. Goodnight, and sleep well.’
I came back to my room, and now as I sit here finishing this entry in my diary, I still feel the touch of her lips on mine.
♦
Sunday 20 November
Harriet and I went for a walk along the wadi this morning, before the sun got too hot. We left the sheikh’s house very early, and Ibrahim drove us down the bed of the Wadi Aleyn and as far along it as he could get the Land Cruiser, which was a lot further than I could have managed. Then he went and sat on the ground on the shady side of the vehicle, his back propped against it, and let us get on with it.
I had thought there would be a constraint from last night, and that Harriet would feel embarrassed by the fact I had found her in tears. But she said, as we set out along the wadi, ‘Thank you for last night. It helped to talk about it all.’
I said I was glad if I had been of help.
As we walked up the path that ran alongside the wadi, I felt a feeling of contentment I had not known for a very long time. Sheer rock walls formed the sides of a canyon, and above their tops I could discern ridges of higher mountains yet. The sky was a dark blue, and buzzards screeched and wheeled far above—their eerie cries echoed between the rock walls. There was little vegetation here: a few thorn bushes, tufts of grass, the green fading to brown as the memory of the summer rains disappeared. Here the wadi became steeper, and I could envisage it as a series of rills and small waterfalls when it was full. The salmon could get up this far. We turned a corner in the canyon and to my delight the area widened out into a gravel plateau, dissected by the dry beds of smaller streams that formed the tributaries of the main wadi.
The sight of those gravel beds filled me with excitement. I said to Harriet, ‘Spawning grounds. If the salmon ever get this far up, they will love this.’ I bent down and scooped some of the gravel up and let it trickle through my fingers. ‘The gravel is small enough here for the salmon to dig trenches with their fins and lay their eggs in them. I would never have imagined it! Perfect!’
Harriet smiled at me. ‘You look like a little boy who’s been given a toy car,’ she said. Then her smile faded. We were looking at each other and there must have been an expression on my face that gave me away, that gave away the fact I had at that minute, and in that second, fallen in love with her. I didn’t even know it until I saw the look on her face.
‘Fred…’ she started to say, in an uncertain tone, but I had caught sight of movement behind her. Someone was coming.
Harriet turned round, and we both saw a girl walking towards us. She was dark-skinned and thin, not veiled but dressed in a sitara, a brightly coloured robe of greens and pinks, and she wore a headscarf of a deep rose colour. In that barren place the vividness of her dress was all the more striking. On her head she balanced a pitcher and in her hand she carried something. As we watched her approach, I saw that she had come from a small house, not much more than a cave, which had been built into the side of the mountain wall that formed the far boundary of the gravel plateau we were standing on. I now saw that the side of the mountain had been terraced in places and that there were a few rows of crops growing on the terraces. Small black and brown goats stepped up and down amongst the rocks with acrobatic grace, chewing the tops of the thorn bushes.
As the girl approached she gave a shy smile and said, ‘Salaam alaikum, ’ and we replied, ‘Wa alaikum as salaam, ’ as the sheikh had taught us. She took the pitcher from where it was balanced on her head, kneeled on the ground, and gestured to us to sit. She poured water from the pitcher into two small tin cups, and handed them to us. Then she reached into her robe and drew out a flat package of greaseproof paper from which she withdrew a thin, round piece of bread, almost like a large flat biscuit. She broke off two pieces, and handed one to each of us, and gestured to us to eat and drink. The water and the bread were both delicious. We smiled and mimed our thanks until I remembered the Arabic word, ‘Shukran.’
So we sat together for a while, strangers who could speak no word of each other’s languages, and I marvelled at her simple act. She had seen two people walking in the heat, and so she laid down whatever she had been doing and came to render us a service. Because it was the custom, because her faith told her it was right to do so, because her action was as natural to her as the water that she poured for us. When we declined any further refreshment after a second cup of water she rose to her feet, murmured some word of farewell, and turned and went back to the house she had come from.
Harriet and I looked at each other as the girl walked back to her house. ‘That was so…biblical,’ said Harriet.
‘Can you imagine that ever happening at home?’ I asked. She shook her head. ‘That was charity. Giving water to strangers in the desert, where water is so scarce. That was true charity, the charity of poor people giving to the rich.’
In Britain a stranger offering a drink to a thirsty man in a lonely place would be regarded with suspicion. If someone had approached us like that at home, we would probably have assumed they were a little touched or we were going to be asked for money. We might have protected ourselves by being stiff and unfriendly, evasive or even rude.
My thoughts turned back to the water we had just drunk. I asked Harriet, ‘Did you notice how cold the water was?’
‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘it was delicious.’
‘That means there is a well somewhere near here, going deep into the aquifer. To be that cold it must be a long way from the surface. If we can get water at that temperature pumping into the wadi, my salmon will have a far better chance of survival.’
‘Our salmon,’ said Harriet.
We turned and walked back down the canyon to where Ibrahim was waiting.
This evening the sheikh noticed a difference in my mood and asked what we had found on our walk. I told him of the gravel plateau where I thought fish might spawn, and I told him of the girl who had poured out for us the cold water of the aquifer, and he heard the excitement and pleasure in my voice. He said, ‘Now you are beginning to believe, Dr Alfred. You are beginning to believe it could happen. You are beginning to learn to have faith.’
I remembered the words he had spoken a few weeks before, or maybe they were words which had formed themselves in my head: ‘Faith comes before hope, and hope before love.’
‘We will live to see those salmon swim the Wadi Aleyn, Sheikh,’ I told him.
He answered, ‘The salmon will swim the wadi in due time, and if God spares me, I will see them.’ I thought of the man who had come through the trees at Glen Tulloch and tried to shoot the sheikh, and I knew he was expecting another such to come.
Harriot went upstairs, and I sat for a while talking with the sheikh. He was in a communicative mood. We talked about the ancient land that was now the Yemen: the frankincense trade routes across the desert, the arrival of Greeks, Sabaeans, Romans, all seeking the fabled riches of gold and spices from this remote tip of the Arabian peninsula. He told me about the arrival of Islam and the Imams of Zaidi (‘to whom I am a distant relation,’ added the sheikh with pride) over 1200 years ago.
‘This house was first built in the year 942. according to your calendar, and in the year 320 according to ours, and my family have lived here ever since, here and in Sana’a. It always interests me when European people come here, that they have no idea how old our civilisation is. Do you not think we have learned how to live and conduct our lives according to God, in that time? That is why some of our people hate the West so much. They wonder what the West has to offer that is so compelling that it must be imposed upon us, replacing our religion of God with the religion of money, replacing our piety and our poverty with consumer goods that we do not need, forcing money upon us that we cannot spend or if we do, cannot repay, loosening the ties that hold together families and tribes, corroding our faith, corroding our morality.’
It was the first time I had ever heard him speak so openly, this usually guarded and private man. And I realise it must have been because he was beginning to trust me, because I myself am changing.
♦
Monday 21 November
I wrote my diary entry for yesterday before I went to bed. I took some time over it because I want to capture as faithfully as I can everything that happens on this journey. It is a journey, in more than one sense. One day I hope this diary will be a record of something momentous, but whether that momentous thing is the arrival of the salmon or some other event in my life, I am not sure.
Last night I had a dream. I fell fast asleep as soon as I climbed into bed, but then I dreamed that a sound awakened me, and that Harriet was in my room standing by the bed, naked. I dreamed that she climbed in beside me, and the rest of the dream I don’t wish to write about even to myself, but it was the most wonderful, the most real dream I have ever had. When I awakened the memory of the dream came to me at once. My lips felt bruised. I wondered if perhaps it had been more than a dream. I tried to see if I could smell her perfume on the pillow, but somewhere they were burning frankincense again, and its rich, spicy smell was everywhere. It must have been a dream. I dreamed it because something has happened between myself and Harriet. I felt it on the mountain when we walked up the dry riverbed together. I felt it, and I don’t know what Harriet feels or thinks, but my wish that she should feel for me what I now feel for her is so strong it must have invaded my subconscious and directed all my dreams last night.
It was pure wish-fulfilment, of course.
I am married to Mary and have been happily married to her for many years. I know we are having a difficult passage in our life at present, but it is unthinkable we could part, that there could ever be anyone else in my life. I am just not that sort of person.
Am I?
Harriet is engaged to her soldier and visibly pining for him, and therefore nothing could possibly happen between Harriet and me. Therefore it must have been a dream.
But if it wasn’t! What then?
I cannot sit still. Something has happened to me, but what? The windows are open and a soft breeze off the mountains is moving the curtains. It is still early. A golden sunrise is infusing the edges of the soaring cliffs and ridges around us and above us. Through my window come faint scents—of flowers I have never smelled before, of unknown spices. The noise of the village waking comes with them: cocks crowing, the bray of a donkey, the clatter of tin water containers, and occasionally a burst of Arabic.
I have journeyed this far, to this strange place. The man who started the journey months ago as a staid, respected scientist at the National Centre for Fisheries Excellence is not the same man now standing at a window looking out onto the wild mountains of the Yemen. How much farther will this journey go? Where will it end, and how will it end?