CHAPTER 12		|	YEMEN
		WAA-OWW!

I THOUGHT I’D KNOWN what restless meant, but the minute my contract at NYUAD expired, the bottom dropped all the way out. Almost as soon as I set foot back in my apartment in the Emirates, I rented a car the size of a teacup and raced in a skinny circle through all seven emirates, sleeping in the driver’s seat leaned back and eating baked beans cold from the can. I hadn’t let myself believe it, but that contract had kept me intact, defending the value of each day no matter how I spent it. Now, I could justify my wandering only with discovery.

I was completely unscrewed now, back in an apartment that served no greater purpose than to hold spare shoes and cutlery. Neal was on January term leave from the university and felt hemmed in by the city. Together, we set our eyes on a place with unclear visa restrictions and a reputation as the region’s time capsule, isolated from the Gulf by money and dialect and money—Yemen has yet to achieve membership in the Gulf Cooperation Council, which includes the other six states on the Arabian Peninsula. It was the kind of set-apart place I hoped would let me feel like the photographer who first stood on the moon and watched the Earth rise. In my state of blankness, Yemen was the capital.

I was saying my good-byes to people I knew and didn’t, people I liked and didn’t, as they flitted between the two buildings on the university’s temporary campus. It seemed strange to everyone that I’d leave now, as the school had started to settle into its routine, as our expat cohort was finally finding its footing and the beaches beckoned. Brittany understood the urge; she was an anthropologist who studied Yemen and gushed about it at the wooden table outside the cafeteria where I seemed to be holding casual court. “I went overland once all the way south by taxis,” Brittany said. “I went alone in Peugots, completely alone in 1999, as a woman, in Peugots filled with men, from Sanaa to Taiz and Ibb and Hudeidah and Aden.”

She would entrust Neal and me later with two copies of her thick book intended for a friend, an outspoken journalist in Somaliland. All we had was his name, but if we found ourselves in Somalia’s secessionist province across the water from Yemen, she said, it would be lovely if we could seek him out. We said sure.

Like everyone I had ever met who had been to Yemen, she oozed with knowledge and opinion about the place, and wonder. No one returned from Yemen unaffected. “You might want to do the things that in any other place you would consider touristy,” she said. “Everything is off the beaten track at this point.”

Jamal, a freshman from the Yemeni capital, found me at the table. We’d met first at the weekend where potential students flew in for a last round of the admissions process; Jamal had arrived a week early to escape the violence in Sanaa. “I was in the airplane and I looked down, and you could see these beautiful flower-like formations around all the gas stations that went out for miles and miles and miles. People just waiting for gas.”

Yemen retreated into the otherworldly partly because the world wouldn’t have it. “It’s kind of like a fetishized place, which is . . . cool,” he said. “Even Yemenis fetishize it, so we don’t want to live anywhere else.” It was poetic and lovely, but with a fat caveat: “Except, if they open like visa situation here. Then everybody would move to the Gulf.”

When it was time to come to school, he did have visa troubles with the UAE. “So I ran to the ambassador’s house and was like, ‘Please give me a visa quick, I need to go to university.’ ” It worked. I loved that kind of administrative mushiness—not for what it revealed about the power of elites, but for showing how a connection between single people could cut through chaos. There was still the promise of discovery through little collisions with one another.

There was that promise, and then there was the planning to make that promise bear fruit. Before taking off for uncertain places, I sought advice most intently from nearby sources. Even though some of them told me not to go, the Pashtun tailors down the block had given me useful advice and clothes for my days in Afghanistan. Iman had picked sandals for me to wear in Pakistan. These meetings gave me a kind of confidence simply by revealing something tangible in my blank predictions—they are from there, so there is a place. And there was always the jitter-reducing province of preparation for its own sake, despite how little preparation I really accomplished. If I was still answering a twelve-year-old’s questions, I had to stay as much like him as I could. I didn’t buy guidebooks or cram regional history or stockpile toiletries I might not find abroad. And if I went on travel forums to measure the off-ness of a city’s limits, I looked for threads that suggested even the faintest possibility (and always found it) that the door was still open, and took that tiny hope as good enough.

It was unconscious sleight of mind to maintain the place’s mystery, all while distracting myself from the kind of true fear that would keep me away from an airport. I titrated my ignorance to keep me just afraid enough. Travel without fear is nothing, as Camus liked to say, or said once.

The flat winter sun beat down hard around the umbrella and Jamal prepared me with useful Yemeni dialect: qabili, “tribal matters,” rubta, “a bundle (of qat, the stimulant shrub),” muftahin, “chillin’.” This was practically everything I packed in my head.

Before that, this was all that I knew (and I knew it then in even less detail): on October 12, 2000, a boat rigged with explosives detonated against the hull of the USS Cole, moored in the Aden harbor. Yemen materialized instantly in the public consciousness of the United States. Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility and, after September 11, the Yemeni government began to cooperate with the War on Terror, accepting in return tens of millions of dollars (and rising) in military aid.

Arabic students from American universities began to flock to Yemen in small, adventurous numbers. Yemen, now uncovered, was the place for unspoiled immersion.

The Arab Spring and the government’s abusive reaction put all of this on hold.

Jamal remembered the Cole bombing from his childhood. “I remember going to the TV, like, ‘Daddy daddy, Yemen’s on the TV for the first time in history!’ and he’s like, ‘Oh . . . that’s cool son.’ ”

That introduction has colored much of the world’s relationship with Yemen ever since, however fairly or unfairly or oversimplified or cautious. I asked Jamal what came before all of this, before the students, before the violence.

“Before it didn’t even exist,” he said.

WE PICKED A GOOD TIME to go to Yemen, between the cease-fire and the elections. The warring factions of Yemen’s revolution were holding fast to a period of tense calm, a fuse curling out of the capital, waiting to be lit or doused on inauguration day. Entering its second year the Arab Spring had lowered flight fares to Sanaa, too. Mainly, though, we had visas, and we were Yemen bound even if the time was wrong.

We flew Qatar Airways in the wrong direction, to Doha for a transfer, and then turned back to the south. In the Sanaa airport, they checked our papers as our bags were X-rayed and then sent us to a small room.

“Tourists?” said the immigration officer in his sky-blue uniform and beret, incredulous. His eyes darted between papers on opposite sides of his desk. “We don’t have that.”

He looked at our visas as if they were stickers from another universe.

In these situations of broken promises and suspicion, sudden moves must be avoided. An argument would mean we had already lost. Recently, four American doctors had been denied the chance to return for a second trip to Yemen. The consul was convinced: They are FBI, he said. The officer was shocked and suspicious that we would come now, for our first visit to Yemen.

And even worse, we were young—further proof of our espionage. The consul had passed this message to the doctors: “They should come back after they retire.”

Our guard’s shaded eyes were glassy calm now, no longer straining to understand. “What are you doing here?” he said. His coolness was a sign of our lost ground. Men grow calm when they know they have all the power.

“Siyaha,” I said. Tourism. His eyebrows twitched and I quickly added, “we’re visiting friends.” We were talking in Arabic now. It was a gamble. Certainly a spy would speak Arabic, but I was betting the country’s gatekeeper was warier of the naive than the crafty.

A Japanese man entered the waiting room to stand by us, ushered by a guard.

“There’s no tourism here,” the officer said to me and Neal, in English. “There’s harb”—war—“and it’s dangerous and you can’t go anywhere. We don’t have tourism.”

“Yes, we know, but there are safe areas. Our friends know,” I said, meekly.

Hope sank into my toenails. He was actually going to send us home. He flicked idly through the pages of our passports, hardly looking.

He turned to the Japanese man who struggled to make himself understood in English. I helped translate between the two as best I could—yes! They would reward us for this service!—and listened as the situation deteriorated. I had made the right choice: the Japanese man denied all knowledge of instability, a genuine look in his eyes as he cited a trip to Yemen twenty-five years earlier. He asked to come in—the freshman outside the college bar—face full of indignation and entreaty.

“No,” the Yemeni said. And turned to us.

We got the tourist visa in Abu Dhabi and we came, I said. For our friends, I said. I was holding a sheet of paper with a few names and numbers from friends of friends of friends and from the Internet, a skeleton of an address book for our wanderings.

A blue cotton arm reached over the metal desk and snatched it. The officer began calling the numbers on the list, under SANAA.

First he called Anoud, a woman we had contacted on Couchsurfing. “Leave me a voice mail to tell me who u r to call back I don’t answer numbers I don’t know,” she had written me. But she did pick up, and they spoke for ages in rapid dialect. And when he asked for her address, she hung up.

The man put the phone softly back in its holster. “She is not your friend.”

My heart was squirming to find somewhere lower, considering breaking the way a business considers bankruptcy, pulling my face down so that it could hardly move. Yemen, I thought, wistful, as if I had already lost a lover.

The Japanese man offered to change his flights to Socotra, the faraway Yemeni island a world apart from north or south Yemen, unique with wildlife, language, history. He stood, waiting for an answer. In a stroke of luck, as I remember it now, my hopeless face had frozen in an expression perfectly suited to the man I was pretending to be, the one in control, unworried. The officer moved—I flinched—and picked up the phone again. He dialed Tal, an Italian who had lived his entire life in Yemen, the friend of a Sana’ani I’d bumped into once or twice in Abu Dhabi. They spoke for a moment, before the phone was passed to me. Finally, a moment for collusion.

“Yo man.”

I’m certain the officer’s English was better than my Arabic, but he was unprepared for, or uninterested in, the slurry of mumbled slang and bakery fresh neologism. In Syria, Danny and I had practiced consulting each other in public-secret with a monotone of ahmnotlike trynnadothashitbranahmsayin, where “no” might’ve done. It was our Navajo. I handed the phone back.

A click.

The man reverted to Arabic, tapping our passports together on the metal. “Ruh,” he said. Go. “Be careful.”

We ran without running, new energy surging through our legs as we stood and turned our backs. I passed through the door, praying he wouldn’t change his mind, power walking until we were safely out of earshot.

WE BOUGHT SIM CARDS for pennies and charged them with a few Yemeni rial as we raced toward the city. Colorful clothing and white thobes, a cluster of roadside shops, tree-brown faces overgrown with stubble and highly decorative belts with a curved dagger tucked in front. Memories flashed as everything blurred by, a crowded street in Pakistan, the impoverished outskirts of Cairo. But then we were there, at the thousand-year-old gate to Sanaa’s old city, and all similarities ceased for good.

Hilltop fortifications and central souqs, castles and mausoleums, ancient stone synagogues-turned-churches-turned-mosques, each with singular stories and nuanced architecture—the Middle East is ripe with Old Cities. Sanaa’s is made from wholly different ingredients. Crammed together on narrow streets, the six thousand houses in the old city are likened often to gingerbread houses of fired brick and rammed earth, reddish brown and iced with white gypsum bands between the floors. They climb as high as nine stories above the valley floor, with rooftop diwan—meeting spaces, qat-chewing rooms—looking out at the mountains and minaret tips all around.

Sanaa is one of the world’s highest capitals. At ground level, the city is seventy-two hundred-feet high. As we navigated its winding streets looking for hotels that hadn’t closed for lack of business, the sun was setting, the light sliding up and off the tops of the sand castle buildings.

Like Fez or Damascus, Sanaa’s old city is made to reconnoiter by foot. The first order of business: food. As we found out, Yemeni cuisine was as wonderful as it was hard to find. Whenever we least expected it, we were invite-demanded in for lunch, but when we were the hungriest, restaurants appeared a foreign concept. Even the hotel we finally found had few ideas.

When we asked for recommendations, the doorman-concierge-groupie whispered the name of a famous chicken joint that exceeded his wildest fantasies for quality and elegance. He bent in close, as if he were forfeiting some coveted secret. “Have you heard of Kentucky?”

Instead we wandered the dark signless streets off Shari‘a September 26, a thoroughfare that remembers the Yemen Arab Republic’s coup against the short-lived kingdom that ruled the north between 1918 and 1962. It was Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rise in Egypt that sparked the antimonarchy revolution in Yemen. After a minute, we hit Gamal Street.

At the intersection of the two wide roads, long green canvas tents stood in Midan Tahrir, “Liberation Square.” Following the Egyptian model again, Yemenis camped in their Tahrir Square to call for thirty-three-year-ruler Ali Abdullah Saleh to leave, just as Cairenes had demanded the ouster of Hosni Mubarak. In both cases, protestors insisted power not be ceded to one of the president’s sons.

Protestors in Yemen had never been extremely organized—Facebook and Twitter were far less accessible and active than they were in Egypt—and the square had often been flooded with government lackeys bought and fed “because they have nowhere to go.”

“There was a very, like, motivated central group of students who were involved with the shit,” Tal would explain with Californian cadence, “but there was also people who would just come to voice very minimal and not politically oriented, you know, unhappiness.” These might have been paid disorganizers, plainclothes progovernment thugs trading in confusion for a moment, instead of their usual violence; or it might simply have been a by-product of the wildfire nature of the region’s revolutions: all encompassing, populist, vague.

“They would just come by and be like, ‘I can’t fucking like get my car fixed because the guy at the car fixing store is charging too much. This is because the regime does this and this and this!’ ”

Now the tents were empty. Two months earlier in November, Saleh had ceded all executive powers in return for immunity and the square fell quiet, a cease-fire holding between the government’s military and the armed rebellion. One month later, Yemen would unanimously elect the current vice president, Abdo Rabbuh Mansur al-Hadi, to the presidency. Hadi would be the only candidate.

In these interim months, life continued, it seemed, as usual. On the streets, vendors sold shoes and watches and loose ammunition, bullet casings glinting in the light of a laundromat, the photocopy shop, anything but a restaurant. Finally, a young boy made an offer for our salvation in a no-frills cafeteria with picnic bench seating wrapped in disposable plastic.

“Biid?” He said: eggs. Yes, please. He brought onions and an omelet and a spicy tomato salsa known as sahawiq to put on everything. The other restaurant-goers looked and turned away. The boy watched us inhale ravenously before bringing a plate of something we didn’t think we’d ordered: the salsa was here, the Cokes, the bread, eggs . . . and then the fog of hunger lifted, and Arabic that mattered came back to me. As in Spanish, eggs may be other spheroids that hang low on many mammals, these, in particular, from the back of a goat. A faint taste of musty liver. Neal abstained. Sated, we began to see the city.

WHEN WE FOUND TAL, he took us to a friend’s stately home on the other side of town where he and his friends were lazing after an afternoon of chewing qat. For almost all men and a less huge and more hidden set of women—in sessions generally separated by gender but not always, qat, said gat in north Yemen, was an afternoon drug. When we got there, the guys were leisurely sprinkling dark hash into rolling papers.

We dropped into the couches that wrapped around the walls of the diwan. “Everyone has one of these rooms in their house. They’re basically just getting high rooms,” said Muhammad, a Yemeni university student with curly hair and a voice that was relaxed and righteous. (An estimated 80 percent of the population will chew on Fridays, 50 or 60 percent on other days. This includes every living human being in Yemen, up to one out of every five children under twelve.) This room was lit by one lamp plugged into a generator. These days in Sanaa, electricity came on for about three hours a day, one out of every six hours. When the crisis was worse, they said, the electricity shortage was less severe. Maybe that kept people in their homes.

Adam had just arrived with a bottle of vodka. “But now that things are getting better,” he said, “the electricity is getting worse.”

The beautiful thing about the gat chew, which usually begins after lunch around 1 P.M. and stretches into the night, is the conversation. Yemenis are deliriously social because of it, and with their hospitality, we could tap into the locals’ shared information, opinion, gossip and rumor. All of it out in the open.

“After the revolution everything is chaos. They opened up U-turns in the middle of the highway . . .” I had seen piles of rubble cleared to make unmarked Michigan lefts, further allowing amateur traffic engineers to make rules on the fly.

“It’s part of the government’s grand plan to show that without them everything is crazy . . .”

“We don’t have water in Yemen, but we have 3G Internet . . .”

“I heard they boil the beef with Panadol tablets and put weed in the salts to make people eat more. I think it makes the kids sleep better at night I don’t know. That might be a rumor I don’t know . . .”

In a place where truth is hard to come by, collecting stories is the best first move. “Are there any agencies where you can get straight news?” I asked.

Staggered noes from around the room.

“The opposition and the government, it’s all exaggerated. Like none of it is real. It’s complete propaganda.” He passed the hash in foils to Tal. “The Internet—”

“—on TV it’s bullshit,” said Tal.

“Bullshit, man,” said Muhammad.

“The biggest bullshit,” said Tal, looking back across the room. “Give me the papers, too, don’t be a whore.”

Like this, on Neal’s birthday, we were introduced to Yemen. The territory safe to travel was receding, leaving a space rumors filled. The room knew less the farther south we talked, until we hit the bottom of the country, where electricity might have been stolen and held from the people on offshore ships, and where, Jebel had heard, you could hitch a ride to Somalia by boat.

WE WOULD HEAR ECHOES of these complaints and speculation from every echelon. Unwaged revolutionaries and the unwound elite often sounded alike, trusting in a deep mistrust of power. Jamal had explained the hired mobs that clustered around Saleh’s meetings just when he was taking pen to his resignation papers. “He paid them to all carry signs that said, ‘Yo, we want you to stay.’ And then he doesn’t sign. He’s like, ‘Oh, they don’t want me to go.’ ”

He didn’t even believe Saleh’s November handover was genuine either, in the wake of these last-minute reversals and the fighting that raged on city streets only months earlier. The Arab Spring had turned to summer, had turned to fall. “People have to be hopeful, because, you know, it’s been a year.”

Tahrir was quiet now, and it would stay that way. “The protests are over,” said Muhammad, “like all the shit. The revolution is over.”

Minutes later, appliances whirred to life as the lights came on.

“Allahu akbar allahu akbar,” Muhammad cheered soberly. “Bring the TV, man, bring the TV! What do you want to watch?”

Tal shrugged. “Whatever.”

The future was coming fast whether or not anyone knew about it, but it made no promises of change. The lights would come on in Sanaa, at least. In a month, Hadi would be in charge—the vice president becoming president—and ruling oligarchs would shift their weight accordingly. Despite Hadi’s southern birth, Yemen’s southern movement boycotted his predetermined election; they preferred full secession, a return to the pre-1990 state of things: North Yemen and South Yemen. Tal mentioned something from the papers—that Hadi was selling electricity to Yemen from Africa.

“You know what I read a while ago? That fucking Hadi—”

Muhammad interrupted. “Who’s Hadi?”

WHEN THE LIGHTS finally went off (after two unexpected hours) and the smoke was settling on the ceiling, we had forgotten our politics. Conversation drifted toward the other subject, ripe with rumor and detached cynicism, that locals know visitors are hungry for. It was the language they flirted with when they dressed up with daggers on Chatroulette—the video chatting site that pairs strangers at random—just to scare people. Danger. Acquaintances of acquaintances disappeared and reappeared in a puff of tribalism and statement making.

Muhammad remembered when the Polish ambassador was visiting his grandfather’s house.

“—like ten years ago right?”

“—his daughter went to our school.”

Kidnappers rushed him off to the countryside where he feasted, spoke with his wife, and gave chocolates to kids in the village. “They set a whole ram in front of him. The village was fucking with the government.”

As it turned out, kidnapping was a form of politics: tribal leaders pressured the government with foreigners held in legendarily convivial custody. The government paid ransom to keep its foreign allies. As the friends saw it, these were problems outside the diwan and over the high walls, problems too ingrained or too intangible to engage with constantly. If something really mattered, it was probably too late to do anything about it.

A very small number of kidnappings ever went wrong. Deaths of hostages were generally blamed on government mishandling.

“There are tourists who come here to get kidnapped,” Tal said. “It’s a cultural experience, you know.”

We laughed. He shrugged.

I SPENT MUCH of the dawn hours in digestive mutiny in the dark bathroom of our seventeenth-century hotel, a sliver of light finding me withered and broken through a pane of red glass. Neal was separated from this fate only by goat balls. I argued with my guts as the sun rose, hoping to impart upon them some sense of urgency, of the value of time exploring Yemen as it compared with time spent clutching an antique toilet.

On this first morning, we visited the still-functioning Tourist Police to request permits to leave the city limits. A permit application includes passport photocopies (painfully xeroxed from the shop outside Tahrir Square) and exact travel dates. If locations on the permit didn’t match the checkpoints we hit, there would be repercussions along the Disappointing-Troubling spectrum.

I never knew if a well-placed bribe would substitute. This fell into the category of qabili. Jamal had offered only one simple rule of bribing etiquette: “You gotta be classy about it.”

Our first encounter with the Tourist Police was an amicable one. Yousif, one of their agents, was eternally having tea in the courtyard of our hotel. He gave us his mobile number to call whenever. (I did, at ten in the evening, at 7 A.M.—and he almost always picked up and facilitated.)

Yousif walked us to the office, two little rooms with the lights off, one with a phone (disconnected), the other with a bed. Our permits were given immediately with one caveat: the Interior Ministry could always call and reject them. We were told to leave our phones on.

STUBBORN AND NAUSEOUS, I hobbled with Neal through the Bab al-Yemen, an archway with so much character that the Yemeni Embassy in Abu Dhabi had borrowed its look. Castle walls thirty-feet high bound much of the city with colors to match the buildings, but the gate is a deeper brown with a trim of dark gray stones and four thin pillars under the entablature. The Yemen Gate has Yemen on both sides, separated by one archway and a thousand years.

In the knot of cabs outside the egress from the old city, one driver in an ancient yellow taxi cornered us with a good deal. He spoke in clearer tones than the old chainsmokers, with a higher voice that cut through the throng; he thronged best. We negotiated vehemently without knowing what reasonable was, and Abdulkhaliq, who began to call himself AK, never stopped grinning. His grins stuck with me as a Yemeni national treasure.

AK had the face of a twenty-five-year-old to match his even-younger-man’s voice, and he bubbled with the kind of excitement that felt trustworthy because it came fast.

We drove with him to the northwest, passing buildings with lost windows like black eyes. AK pointed to one skyscraper in red brick, the blast hole of an artillery shell high above us. These were the only indicators that less than two months ago, Yemenis were killing each other in the streets.

Bloody weeks into the uprising, the Yemeni government began to lose control. In a meeting with religious leaders in February, Saleh was reported to have said, “I’m ready to leave power but not through chaos. I’m fed up now after thirty-two years, but how to leave peacefully? You scholars should say how.”

On March 18, unidentified forces killed forty-five protestors with gunfire. In the continuing series of ministerial defections, President Saleh lost support from high-ranking generals. Then came the tribal leaders, among them Sheikh Sadiq al-Ahmar, hereditary chief of the Hashids, the second largest tribal federation in Yemen. The president himself was a Hashid, but the federation didn’t act as a bloc. The third time Saleh balked at signing over his powers, in late May, Ahmar flexed. Tribal loyalists and government forces met in the capital, with guns. In the coming weeks, more than a hundred fighters were killed.

With tribes involved, loyalty tended to trump strategy. The International Crisis Group quoted a tribesman who explained the dangers of domestic combustion. “It will spark a cycle of revenge. Secondly, we are all armed. It will not be like Tunisia or Egypt, where only one side is armed and where people are only hitting each other or the security forces only use tear gas. . . . If we were to follow the Egyptian or Tunisian examples, it would be a disaster.” Nearly every home in Yemen has a gun. Amazingly, though, as so many Yemeni men were quick to tell me, unaffiliated civilians did not reach for their weapons when the violence erupted. The guns, they said, were not proof that Yemenis were violent people.

Northwest across the Red Sea, NATO was bombing Libya to help rebels in their full-fledged civil war. Yemen seemed on the brink of the same. On the southern coast, Islamist militants had taken advantage of the distracted government and attacked the medium-sized city of Zinjibar thirty-one miles from Aden—every inch of which locals were forced to flee by foot. Ansar al-Sharia took control of roads and towns in the south that were once safe to travel.

Sanaa locals saw war in the capital. On June 3, a bomb detonated in the mosque of the presidential compound. Saleh suffered second-degree burns and shrapnel wounds. The next day, Hadi was named acting president, Saleh left for treatment in Saudi Arabia, and a tentative cease-fire was brokered.

“There was tanks there!” AK pointed, on a street that didn’t look wide enough to hold a minivan. Stone walls were chipped and pockmarked.

It was purposefully irresponsible, the way I watched these city scars from the bench seat of an old cab. I was still desperate to find something I could wrap my eyes around that might make my life flash before me.

On September 23, Saleh returned. A hundred Yemenis died in renewed fighting. In November, he finally signed the Gulf Cooperation Council agreement to step down, as if he had intended to do so all along.

AK ran directly over a pothole, as he was wont to. I clenched against puking or shitting myself. The next day, the Yemeni parliament would grant Saleh total immunity.

IN FORTY-FIVE MINUTES, we were ready to show our papers at the first checkpoint. Children were streaming out of Friday prayers in Shibam dressed in formal thobes and blazers with curved daggers in sheaths, janbiya, on belts at the navel. A darker trio stayed apart from the rest in shirts too small, pants too big. The others eyed us curiously, smiled, jostled into line for pictures they demanded. The most precocious, with a bright teal scabbard tucked under a golden threaded belt, stuck his tongue out.

AK left the car to negotiate with the officers while the kids stole glances from behind their friends, dagger handles glinting. Something was slow. Our permit should have easily let us pass through to Shibam and to Kawkaban, the town perched on the mountain next door.

“He wants to come with us,” said AK of the officer. Neal and I were doubtful. We’d be under much tighter guard with the police following us. “He wants to have lunch.”

It became quickly clear that we weren’t moving an inch farther if we didn’t accept. Bilious and grumpy, I trudged into the restaurant the officer indicated, figuring lunch was just another form of bribery-for-passage. He appeared outside in a gaggle of seven soldiers in camouflage and fur-lined hats. We’d been had.

With no tact or class I told the commander how unfair it was to make us stop and pay for a battalion, that we would not be strong-armed while precious hours of the short day waned.

“No!” he pleaded, his big brown eyes lifting into his broad face. “Only me! I’ll pay for everything.” Officer Naji was crestfallen. He hadn’t wanted to have to say it. This was an invitation, not a demand. The whole world seemed to sharpen into clarity while my ego crumbled with that sad assumption. Oy, I thought, now I’m the asshole.

Shamed, we climbed the stairs to our private room, beautiful and empty, lined with cushions along the wall. A dozen dishes came in heavy metalware. Fahsa, a thick yellow lamb stew spiced with fenugreek—that pea relative often pulverized for curry powder; shafut, bread soaked in yogurt and coriander; plain rice and tomato rice; a brothy soup spiced with hawayij; flatbread fresh off the taboon, and another drizzled with honey for desert. The hawayij blend is also used for coffee, cardamom heavy with various additions to suit the region and the purpose. Yemeni Jews brought the mixture north to Israel, where coffee is now sweet with its gingery fragrance.

I could hardly convince Naji that I was still battling the last night’s cafeteria consequences, and so I picked at the boiling pots with a look of quiet despair. To Naji, that made me a rather dour, inscrutable sort. Neal ate like a man.

In the highest room upstairs with bright windows on the town, men were starting to chew gat—after 2 P.M., all of Yemen talks with its mouth full. The mafraj was overflowing with green leaves, stems tossed onto tables and the floor, sunlight streaming through the windows onto red couches. Daggers had been removed, laid quietly on the cushions next to handguns.

The word mafraj means “relief, relaxation.” The immortal Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic also offers “denouement” and “happy ending.” The same stem leads to words for “a state of happiness,” “removal (of grief or worry),” “opening wide,” and “observation.” The mafraj is often a room with a view where days go to untie themselves, and to end. Just after lunch, we began to pick the leaves with a man named Max and his friends, all in white robes under suit jackets, light keffiyehs on their heads or around their necks.

The World Health Organization does not classify any of Yemen’s four dozen gat species (or African varieties) as markedly addictive, but insomnia and lethargy are common consequences and, as a doctor at the University of Sanaa said, “people who are genetically predisposed are extremely vulnerable to psychosis.”

Within a couple days off the branch, gat can lose much of its potency. Every hour counts. The quality and freshness of every leaf is examined by the buyer, savored for its uniqueness, and everyone is a connoisseur. It is like wine or weed or bourbon or theater tickets.

Chewers claim strength, stamina, clarity, while nonchewers report exactly the opposite. An old man might admit to being unable to get out of bed without a few leaves to nibble. A British minister of parliament lamented the quoted ten tons of gat imported and distributed weekly through the United Kingdom, where it was banned only in 2014. In Canada, possession is officially illegal, but a woman caught with seventy-five pounds at the airport was fully discharged. Ontario court justice Elliot Allen said, “I read everything I can get my hands on about it and I find it difficult to be persuaded of anything other than what I was told . . . when I had my first case, which was: ‘We think this is almost as dangerous as coffee.’ ”

In America, the Drug Enforcement Agency classifies cathinone (and any traces thereof) in the same category as heroine and cocaine; the FDA says the plant may be detained, not specifically as a drug, but by invoking the “Misbranding” section of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938. This is marvelous: its labeling fails to bear “adequate directions for use.”

Naji gave Neal and me our first instructions. The stems were not to be eaten, I learned first, though the soft red joints of the leaves where they met the branch were fair game. It was important to chew up front, passing chopped leaves back to the pocket behind the teeth, but not too much, or the fine pulp would slip away down the throat. Or, as some experts did, whole leaves could be stuffed directly into the cheek, to be massaged as a ball slowly over time.

“Chew gat and you’ll see America from here!” Max grinned.

If gat was the national drug, and salta the national dish, this was the national joke. A gat scholar reported the very same in 1972, and I would watch so many others deliver that punch line again and again with the same expectancy. Were they awaiting kudos for originality, or was it just something you said to be pleasant, the gat-chewers’ “bon appétit”?

BY EARLY AFTERNOON, we were packed into Naji’s armed police truck with the seven soldiers and AK holding on outside in the truck bed, clustered around a massive armor-piercing machine gun.

Naji’s police forces were loyal to the government of Ali Abdullah Saleh. He indicated his units along the road, men at checkpoints under his command. He pointed vaguely across yellow fields at the hills where the revolution had attacked.

“There is shooting, there are firefights,” Naji said. But, he explained insouciantly, his men would shoot back and Ahmar’s forces would disappear.

“Are there problems for you because of the revolution?”

“No. No! We are not in a revolution. We are in a crisis, a small crisis. The president, Ali Abdullah Saleh—in Yemen 80 percent are behind Saleh. Ali Abdullah Saleh is okay.”

The truck rattled up Mount Kawkaban, winding around vast gat plantations. Naji’s cheek was puffing. Ours were, too, as we dipped into gift bags of fresh leaves. Naji broke off twigs of his rubta when we were empty. We barreled through the entrance of the fortifications around Kawkaban, fifty miles an hour through the narrow, rocky town road. We missed children by inches. At a clearing, Naji roared up to a ledge that fell one thousand feet straight down to the valley floor. He eased the truck forward until the edge was hidden under the hood of the car.

When he spoke, it was in an Arabic accent unlike the city folk, never in English except for one special word, broken into his two favorite syllables, enunciated with every muscle in his face. He turned: a Cheshire grin with the truck five loose stones from death.

“ Waa-oww!”

From this vantage in the Haraz Mountains, Yemen is splayed out flat like a coloring book. Only the mountain and a pair of small clouds cast shadows on the mosaic of empty fields, copper, wheat, tan and camel browns. A spot of green. Naji smirked mischievously with a cigarette between his fingers, surveying Shibam from above. The blocky tan homes of a few thousand looked like stones that had overflowed the mountains, almost invisible if I forgot we’d come by their roads.

In Thula, an ancient walled city only miles away, a long ladder climbs to a stone staircase that switchbacks to a view of a similar sort. From the unconquerable fort in Thula, the fields along the plateau are Yemen’s most deliberate kind: terraced grassland stretches for miles. Brown for the winter, the terraces make long, geometric waves—wholly man-made, but entirely natural. If I didn’t look too closely, I wouldn’t see a single trace of mankind.

Of all places, Yemen was not where I expected to find hints of the far east, of Balinese rice paddies carved into verdant hillsides. Another distinction muddled and thrown away.

Down below, women descended into an open cistern. Their abayas were bright and colorful in the patterns of older traditions, and they carried buckets on their heads that they dipped into green water. On a stone street the shade of raw almonds, I bought a janbiya—said “jambiya” almost always—with a bone handle and a fraying belt, and a silver bracelet for Masha.

“Made by Jews,” the shopkeeper said. “Only they know how to make this silver.” When Israel was established, and they left, he said, Yemenis forgot how to make such delicate patterns.

A resident pointed out Stars of David, marked on the older houses in motifs of loosening brick.

ON THE WAY DOWN from Kawkaban I sat untethered in the back holding a machine gun while Naji slammed through town, driving as though he wanted to dismount his entire regiment. The scrawniest soldier sat near the back, holding my folded pages of Lonely Planet’s single Yemen chapter and sounding out the only Arabic words at the section headers. Thirty percent of Yemeni men are illiterate, twice that figure for women.

“Kaw-ka-ban!” he beamed.

The others often called him yehudi, “Jew,” as a joke. It meant “cunning,” sometimes, or that someone was being an idiot. Or it meant nothing.

Neal was keeping Naji company in the front. The only other Jew in the back was holding a Kalashnikov and feeding a mild amphetamine into his system.

“I’ve got the gun now,” I shouted through the wind. “You guys can feel safe.”

They laughed. The gunman standing at the trigger wore my aviator sunglasses. AK continued to take video on his cellphone, putting his arm around the soldier at his sides. I’d forgotten my bellyaches.

When we reached their checkpoint again, Shibam was getting dark, and Naji invited us into a small shed to continue chewing. We had stopped along the road to buy another rubta each. AK never partook.

We squeezed together against cement and cinder block walls. Guns relaxed on the green tarp floor. Balls of chewed leaves grew inside our cheeks. Despite the soldiers’ untroubled warnings not to eat the juices (Lonely Planet counsels: “Only Ethiopians swallow!”), I couldn’t keep the leaves from spilling over onto my tongue and down into my stomach to wreak whatever damage they would. (Not much, probably—a small-scale summer fad in Israel popularized gat juice lemonade at cafés and partygoers’ street stands.)

We talked, sipping water. Naji drank Mountain Dew from the bottle, as he always did, gulping it behind the pocketed mash in his cheek. “With Jack Daniels, even better!” he said. We discussed our plans, to head south with AK at the wheel for a few days if we could get the permits. We’d be in Aden just after the weekend, for seafood and a culture shock in the capital of the south. Naji said he would come. Big eyes bulging, he smiled from his cheeks. “Waa-oww!”

We sat until it was fully dark, waiting to buzz. The soldiers were quiet, entering a different phase of the afternoon pastime—they had been plucking leaves for eight hours. Most people will say the effects never really kick in until a chewer’s third or fourth sortie—perhaps for lack of efficient technique, or because the amphetamine-like chemicals haven’t built up a sufficient reserve in the bloodstream. All night after we stopped, I couldn’t stop clacking my teeth and chewing at air.

In the Sanaa mansion where Tal and his friends came down from their chew, Tal had explained something important. “There’s another thing that needs to be established,” he said: “Yemen is the slowest place on earth. Because we’re the slowest people on earth.” I nodded.

But could it have been the other way—that they were slow because the place was slow? Did the energy of the drug match the speed of a racing mind with little place else to run—and, in matching it, let it be still? Too fast in a too-low gear, the engine wails; sometimes gearing up is all it takes to calm down.

I kept nodding, as calm on those plush couches as I was lounging against the concrete.

“Yeah,” Tal said. “We’re chillin’.”

AT THAT TIME, the road into Sanaa was diced with competing checkpoints. Taftish. At one, forces loyal to the government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh. A few minutes later, another group of uniformed men, standing with guns in the near-dark.

“This is with Ali Mohsen,” AK said, greeting the soldiers politely at the window. General Mohsen had defected months earlier and urged the armed forces to follow suit, after serving as the president’s top military advisor for years. “Like Ali Abdullah Saleh! Same village!”

Jamal had explained very briefly the backgrounds of Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, and Saleh, and Sadiq al-Ahmar. “It’s true they all share the same last name and come basically from the same village and they all want the same thing”—Ali Mohsen and Sadiq al-Ahmar at least—“but I doubt any of them are big on sharing.”

These opposing taftish made sure no one had full control of the capital.

“Sanaa love Ali Abdullah Saleh,” AK said disappointedly. “Sanaa I think all the people, all the home, there is one person he work in the army.” (Yemen has more than a quarter the number of military personnel as the United States in a country one-fifteenth the size. Top brass were all Saleh’s tribal allies.)

AK had not surrounded himself with the like-minded. Not only did he live in the regime’s stronghold, he also worked in the barren offices of the government’s Ministry of Youth and Sport. His uncle worked for the state-run Saleh-loyalist newspaper Al-Thawra, “The Revolution,” named for the overthrow of the religious monarchy that established the Yemen Arab Republic, “North Yemen.” (A month after Hadi took office, Al-Thawra halted publishing indefinitely.)

AK spoke of his mudir, his boss; the ma‘arada, the opposition; a masiira, a demonstration. “I sometimes can’t talk about Ali Abdullah Saleh in my work. I think my mudir he see me with ma’arada, masira, I walk with ‘Irhal! Irhal!’ ”—a sign saying GET OUT!—“he see me, ‘You go with ma‘arada.’ I say, ‘Yes I do.’ I need change. Twenty-three years Ali Abdullah Saleh, why come new four years and come another . . . no good?”

In moments like this, his indignation spewed faster than his English could handle. Everything that AK said was said in absolute honesty, in earnestness that bordered on reckless. He couldn’t pretend—he could only choose when to show himself. “I don’t talk with Naji anything,” he affirmed.

And yet, he had friends who supported the revolution and who hated the revolution. Was it hard to talk openly with them? “No. Not difficult.”

I hardly have any friends who vote differently for president, let alone ones who would take opposite sides on the Civil War. It isn’t deliberate. Possibly, some combination of political convictions is refracted by more friendship-relevant ideals. Maybe those are just the circles I run in. But something bigger than politics united these Sanaanis as friends, something that shaped their lives far more than the revolution, with consequences far more permanent than the future of Yemen’s government. It was a lifestyle choice like vegetarianism or neck tattoos or playing a lot of golf:

None of them ever chewed gat.

IN THE LONG HOURS after sunset, Neal and I walked through the outer edges of the old city looking for lights—a janbiya shop with walls covered in daggers, a biqala selling phone credit. Across a four-hundred-year-old bridge built by the Ottomans before they were ousted for the first time, there was a well-known tea shop with unsteady tables outside. Inside, a man angrily stirred milky tea in black iron cauldrons. He scooped the shai into glasses with a metal cup and brought them to us, scowling.

Moments later, AK showed up with four friends. We had only just said good-bye, but there really weren’t many other places to hang out. Sometimes for a certain type of people—expats, non-gat chewers—the country could feel like a college campus. In other cases, Old Sanaa alone might seem bigger than the solar system.

The friends wore their politics on the sleeves of their blazers and army jackets. On each side there was one Muhammad—AK and Muhammad al-Sukari were revolutionaries; a second Muhammad and Abdullah supported Ali Abdullah Saleh. The fifth, a goalie for a local soccer club, was totally apathetic. “He sees the future and he’s okay with anything,” said AK.

“You like Real Madrid or Barca?” asked the goalie.

“I like Inter Milan,” I said. I’d be neutral, too.

“It’s a draw. Two with the thawra two with president Ali Abdullah Saleh,” AK said. Amazingly, both he and Muhammad were government employees. Muhammad was even in the army.

“Are there other people like you in the army?”

“Five percent or ten percent, like this,” he said. He was not a deserter or a man fed up with Saleh as a direct result of the uprising. He was a Zaidi Shia (like Saleh) and part of the Houthi rebel campaign that had challenged the central government for greater autonomy in intermittent skirmishes since 2004. He explained himself simply: “Just Houthi. Ideologia Houthi.”

“He just want justice in all this. But he don’t like America,” AK said.

“Equality between people. But there isn’t equality with this government,” Muhammad said.

In 2014, Houthis stormed the capital; soon, they dissolved parliament. Saleh’s replacement Hadi was forced out, replaced by the “Revolutionary Committee” and a new iteration of civil war in whose name, heeding Hadi’s calls for support, Saudi Arabia would bomb the nation to smithereens.

Houthis are famous for their catchy slogan: “God Is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, Damn the Jews, Victory for Islam.” Shia activism tends to provoke actors on all sides—the Yemeni government; Saudi Arabia, afraid of Shia incursion and effects on its domestic politics; and Al-Qaeda, which markets its terrorism under an orthodox “Sunni” label.

It didn’t really follow that Muhammad could actually be a member of the Yemen Army, seeing as his Houthi compatriots had been actively killing them for years. But it didn’t have to make sense. Jobs were scarce and he had one, or so he said, for the moment.

“You know why I like thawra? Because this,” AK said. “Some person he have four job, three job, and there is some person there isn’t any work, he sleep all the time in the home. There is no any work.” In the hearts of revolutionaries, at least, the revolution had at its heart the revival of a middle class. AK was the most vocal about his opinions—the others seemed content just to be their characters as the world changed. Muhammad was Houthi, and that was all. He endorsed justice and equality for people.

The other Muhammad was a comfortable economics teacher, but AK was most enviously critical of his friend Abdullah. Abdullah did, in fact, hold four jobs: in the police, in the army, for the government’s Al-Thawra newspaper, and as a doctoral student of journalism. If the regime fell, he would lose three of those.

“This is why he won’t change president Ali Abdullah Saleh, because this. Because there is man he have four jobs.” Apparently, Abdullah spent a fair amount of time in the Police Club and the Army Club. Supposedly he was the best at billiards.

Abdullah smiled politely and pulled out a stack of ID cards from his wallet. This one showed him in army gear, that one licensed him to report in Jordan. One was for the university.

“You’ll still have that one,” I said.

Everything about it seemed like a sitcom. The boisterous and silly cabbie-cum-ministerial seat-filler and his gang of activists, soldiers, and goalies who all grew up with one another. The rebel whose movement “officially” cursed Jews. His new Jewish friends.

After lunch, these were probably the only guys in town who moved.

More tea came, sweet with condensed milk. “Like you!” I said to Muhammad. His last name, Al-Sukari, means “sugary.” It might have been my most successful joke in Arabia.

After a short back and forth where Muhammad granted that Israelis were no more like the Israeli government than Yemenis were like theirs, he was wondering where I was from. “Citizens are not the government, true or no? Sah walilaa?” I asked. “Cor-rrect,” said AK, rolling his Rs until they popped.

In my Arabic, they had picked out influences from all over. They knew Egyptian from films, Syrian from the superpopular Ramadan series Bab al-Hara. “You talk like Maghribi. Or Lubnani.” Moroccan and Lebanese dialects couldn’t be further apart, but they were right. I tended to borrow whatever I could remember, like making do with unmatched socks. Still, I sort of liked the perplexed eyebrow raises.

“Your origin is Arab?”

“Jewish.”

“Origin, I mean, country.”

It was a delightful change: ethnicity or nearly irrelevant ancestry had always been the goal of the where-are-you-from-from question, so refreshingly untaboo across the Middle East and beyond. “America” is almost never a satisfactory answer, especially not after conversations out of English with confusingly named foreigners. (“Neal” is pronounced in Arabic like the longest river in the world; “Adam” is equal-opportunity Semitic.)

“America,” I said. And for however much that was meaningful, it seemed to mean something good to them; and for however much it was meaningless, it was great for me—leaving space for a teatime’s worth of conclusions to do more than a name could overwrite. And as we agreed our citizenship was a weak indicator of our identities, our systems of preconception began to fall apart. The army isn’t all for the army, the Houthis aren’t all for anything, and we foreigners weren’t always totally foreign.

SOMEWHERE TO THE WEST of Sanaa facing away from Mount Nuqum, there is a neighborhood known as Al-Ga‘a, “The Plain.” If you ask for directions, a local will always repeat its full name, just to make sure you know what you’re looking for.

“Ga‘a al-Yehud?” they say. The Jews’ Plain?

Eventually, the chain of finger-pointing leads to a crossroads down Gamal Abdel Nasser Street near Salta Hut where there is a brown sign—the emblem of all tourist attractions: ALGA‘A QUARTER

“This was the Jewish neighborhood?”

“Yes,” said a young boy, about twelve and aging fast. He hardly looked at me—he just watched his smaller neighbors watching us. “They are not here anymore.”

Some Yemeni Jews held that their ancestors broke from Moses’s train during the exodus from Egypt, heading south and settling in Arabia. (In 1992, though, genetic testing showed that Yemeni Jews were far closer to other Yemenis than they are to other Jews.) Historians posit Jewish genesis here in the early years of the first millennium AD when the spice-trading Himyarite Kingdom controlled much of modern-day Yemen. Somewhere during the reign of their last king, Yusuf Ashar Dhu Nuwas (named for his curly hair), the kingdom converted to Judaism and began to execute Byzantine traders for apostasy. Soon the Byzantines came with their Ethiopian allies. The Jewish Encyclopedia says this: “Preferring death to capture, Dhu Nuwas rode into the sea and was drowned.” Curly hair and all.

The synagogues have vanished from Al-Ga‘a. Within two years after 1948, the vast majority of the sixty thousand Jews in northern Yemen and Aden and Hadhramout had left their homes to emigrate to Israel. The portal that first opened was not on the flank of Mount Nuqum—where local legend predicted a gate to Jerusalem would appear upon the Messiah’s return—but above the staircase to an Alaska Airlines propeller plane. With the cooperation of the ruling imam, the controversial Operation Magic Carpet whisked Jews away to their scriptural homeland. By 2014, the last of the tiny communities were disbanding; hardly anyone with sidelocks stuck around to cope with the Houthi insurgency (“Death to Israel, Damn the Jews . . .”)—these days, Yemen’s Jewish population numbers around fifty and falling.

The streets narrow quickly, always in shadow except for minutes when the sun is exactly overhead. At the tops of low buildings, molded into the walls or the qamariyya—“moon windows,” crescent-shaped patterns of colored glass—there are clear Stars of David. There is Arabic graffiti across bolted metal doors and down the alleys blocked with broken cinder block and empty plastic bags. Other passageways are neat, quiet. Houses have faces of white plaster and large stones, unlike the more decorative icing elsewhere in the Old City.

When we were tracing our exit from the quarter, a young man was hustling home with his father and bread and a clear plastic bag of gat hanging from the handle of his dagger. If only because of our foreign faces, eye contact was enough for invitation (and this was a place where eyes always made contact). We must come and eat with them, they said, and ducked into their house. Soon, they were shouting into the street. Come!

I bowed to enter and guarded my head from the ceiling, stepping up to a room where a few men and a boy were lounging against the walls, waiting for boiling salta. This time it was light green, coagulated hilba (blended fenugreek) bubbling at the edges of the iron pot. Salta is Yemen’s national dish, ostensibly derived from the Turkish word for “leftovers” during Ottoman times when Yemenis made due with whatever they could find. Meat is involved, tomatoes and onions usually, leeks, spices, garlic, broth. It is different everywhere, most popular in Sanaa, and ferried scalding hot to the face on folded scoops of pita. There was skhug, too, a spicy condiment I knew from Israel. It had been introduced by Yemeni immigrants. With the belly warmed, the digestive system is primed for the gat chew.

Our young host had the kindest of faces under a short beard. He was more religious than the others, the older man said, and they teased him for it.

“Osama! Osama!”

They wondered if I wouldn’t like to convert to Islam. I said something like, “not on such a full stomach,” and sat back against the wall to digest. Plastic bags were opened.

ELSEWHERE IN THE SWARMING gat market at the Souq al-Milh, casual religious conversations took a different turn. The “Salt Market” inside the Bab al-Yemen is a labyrinth of spices and appliances and housewares and food, and salt, probably. One alley is dedicated solely to the mongering of the leaves of Catha edulis. Vendors sit on the sills of their stands, mouths overflowing, beckoning for a sale or waiting carelessly. When I told one man with teeth freshly green that I was Jewish, he beamed proudly.

“Oh, from Yemen?”

“I’m from America.”

“The origin of Jews is from Yemen.”

“No habibi, I’m from America.”

“Before zamanin they were from Yemen. Your origin is from Yemen.”

I didn’t argue. Yemenis often claimed the birthplace of coffee (Ethiopia) and gat (also Ethiopia). It was nice to feel wanted—not simply tolerated or accepted, but claimed.

The seller, stuffing more leaves in his cheeks, had refocused on more important matters.

“You want to buy gat?” he said, offering a bundle. “This is . . .  our vodka.”

The insides of my gums were torn and sore, my jaws exhausted and swollen. All along the street, sitting on the ground around piles of filled bags, men were buying and chewing, cheeks puffed. Hands in camouflaged uniforms, in lily-white thobes, reached down to grab bags. It was six or seven dollars for a standard rubta, more for something fancier.

While gat chewing was once the province of the rich, it is now everyman’s pastime. An average sample of families in Old Sanaa spent more than 10 percent of their salary on gat. Later case studies have found men who spend upward of a third, or, relying on remittances, more than everything they’ve ever earned.

I remembered Tal and his friends coming down from their chew, coolly drinking tea. Muhammad wondered aloud about the price of diesel. Someone hazarded a number of rial.

“No no, not in Yemen,” said Muhammad. “In the real world, man.”

I thought it was hysterical. But how true was it? How far from “reality” had Yemen slipped, high up into its many mafaarij where the windows looked out on anywhere at all. Each single-serving bag of gat requires approximately five hundred liters of water to cultivate. The industry takes a third of the nation’s water. Avoiding the consequences by choice or necessity, Sanaa will likely be the first world capital to run dry, possibly within ten years.

THE NEXT EVENING, we finally reached the woman who had told the airport officer that she was not our friend. It had been a bit of don’t-talk-to-strangers self-defense. When Anoud heard we were coming, she e-mailed a very warm welcome with her contact instructions:

what a kuck i openned my mail today!! NO shit, our friend Gert just got kidnapped a few days ago and u got a visa!!!!! Woooooow.

I suggested the scowling man’s tea shop over the Ottoman bridge, but said she couldn’t sit there without being stared out of her otherwise expansive comfort zone, and so we arranged to meet on the rooftop of the Dawood Hotel.

The waiter carried a pot and cups up seven flights of the spiraling seventeenth-century staircase to the table outdoors that overlooked the city—the sun had set behind the mountains, leaving a pink-purple sky and a hint of chilliness. Jacketless, the three of us hopped in a cab to the new part of the city. On the way, near a cluster of police cars, someone had set something on fire.

Anoud had thick, dark hair dyed bright red for the moment. She worked for a French company, laughed loud and often, and supported the Saleh regime. The cab bounced toward Hadda Street, the one place in Sanaa where foreigners might be at all numerous. In a pizza place that had electricity all day long we ran into friends of hers, Judith and Boudweijn, a Dutch reporter and her businessman husband. We exchanged contact info as we did with almost everyone, just in case. Expats unite.

Later, in the leafy garden of a coffee shop that might have been grafted from Portland, Anoud, Neal and I drank more tea. It was a shock that someone so open, worldly, foreign friendly would support “the regime.” My default assumption for Arab Spring uprisings was that the educated and modern (except those with a direct stake in the current leadership) would support the revolution. Anoud acknowledged Saleh’s suppressive tendencies, but defended him nonetheless. Despite her position on the outside of ultraconservative Yemeni society—she did not hide that she was a single mother, living with no male presence—she did not want to see the government change. After all, the attitudes that scorned her were not the attitudes on the chopping block.

The lights were always lit on Hadda Street, KFC and Pizza Hut, Ethiopian food and more pizza. This was Anoud’s world, or at least half of it. In the morning, there would still be scowls from crusty cafés, and something on fire.

So many Yemenis saw the malls and franchised glory of Hadda Street as the epitome of class and culture. Our driver felt the same way—but he saw the other side, too.

“There was a German man living in the Old City, I ask him why you not live outside on Hadda Street—big buildings new building. He said, ‘In my country I have the best from Hadda Street, but I don’t have this.’ ”

THE SUN APPEARED behind schedule over Mount Nuqum, washing the old city in orange where the mountain’s shadow was on the ebb. Purples turned to pink and gold as Sanaa woke up. We met AK in the predawn alleyways outside the Golden Daar, permits in hand, looking south.

We had spent much of the evening before screaming in the nearby office of the Tourist Police, or sitting cross-legged and docile in quiet submission. The man behind the desk had been experimenting with all the variants of negation in two languages; the road to Aden was dangerous now, he said through green teeth. No foreigners, not in private taxis, not in buses. As we pushed, he hardened further. More shouting. If we wanted to see the seaside south of Happy Arabia, he said, we should fly.

The most active domestic Yemeni airline carries this ancient optimism in its name, Al-Saeeda, “Happy,” Airways. It was on strike every day we stayed in Yemen. We might have bought seats on more stable, less frequent Yemenia, but the forty-minute flight would have skipped over thousands of years of highland history and the irreplaceable sense of a place gleaned from soaking up small towns with your forehead stuck to the glass of a backseat window.

Our window of opportunity was closing. Twice, the man stormed into the unlit back room to lay on a cot and ignore us. It was 5:30 in the evening, and our one hope for a permit was descending further into a gat-fueled fury.

“I stay off the roads then,” Anoud had said. “People are crazy then.” As the alkaloids in the leaf kicked in, business dealings grew more aggressive.

Yousif, the kindly, wandering Tourist Policeman, appeared to mediate. At least officially, the man with the permits was worried for our safety. Our taxi driver was well seasoned, we said (his license had expired, we discovered). And we had an efendim, and he would protect us with his array of firearms. We had adopted AK’s habit of referring to Naji in the third person as the efendim (once a mark of formal address: “my sir”).

Yousif coaxed his colleague off the bed and advised us: if we wanted to use our officer escort as a defense, we would need his paperwork. But Naji was almost unreachable, and his identification cards were not in the same governorate as the nearest fax machine.

Finally, we agreed with a wink: Okay, he’s “not” coming. We proposed our plan the same as when we walked in, we two tourists and our taxi man. Nothing had changed in those hours, except the notary’s willingness to submit our application to the Interior Ministry. “We will call you if the Ministry rejects it,” he said, like they always did. But they never would. And with that, we shook hands and disappeared.

The men at the other end of the fax machine were asleep now. And we would be gone by the time they were awake, a world away by the time they were chewing gat.

AT 6 A.M. WE GATHERED the efendim from his friend’s village on the way out of town. He brought paper cups of boiling tea that we held gingerly as AK swerved around holes in the road. Reprimands were uncouth. Once, as the car nearly fused with a massive speed bump, I issued an Oh fuck! in surprise. Naji thought it had been directed at our driver, and wouldn’t talk to me for hours.

The southern highway took us high above the valleys, over the clouds that settled sometimes among the terraced fields. Driver, soldier, and tourists—we all thought it was unfathomably beautiful, even without the explosion of greenery that comes every spring.

“Waa-oww!” Naji grinned. He always rode shotgun.

The corners and highlands of Yemen where the edges of the monsoons bring rain, where Arabia Deserta turns green and fertile, were once the envy of the world outside. Ptolemy dubbed the entire peninsula Eudaimon Arabia, a name popularized by its Latin translation, Arabia Felix, “Happy Arabia.” Legends of the luxurious smells of the East—of the sensuous resins frankincense and myrrh, of cinnamon imported from India—cast Yemen as a rich utopia. Were it not for the gat industry’s profligate use of water, the country might still have a chance to be the region’s fruit basket. But for farmers, growing gat is many times more lucrative than fruits, less prone to drought and pestilence. It grows best above a mile high, up to altitudes higher than the Sanaa valley. The crop grows quickly and can be harvested often.

“The happiness of this region has seldom been noticeable, and its woes have waxed with ripening years until they bid fair to culminate in a crop which the sword alone can harvest,” G. Wyman Bury opined in his 1915 Arabia Infelix. The “crop” were the human struggles, as the Ottomon Empire collapsed and foreign powers swirled and the longtime religious authorities of the Yemeni highlands prepared to declare their new state’s independence. Bury was a scientist and explorer completely in love with Yemen, but at a loss for solutions to avoid impending bloodshed. Appreciating its intricately braided history is essential, he said (mentioning tribes as far back as Moses’s father-in-law). The preface ends: “In any case, that ‘most distressful country’ has my best wishes.”

We wound down into the flatlands through ramshackle gat farms and tiny hamlets. Camels grazed along the road, picking their way through prickly bushes and debris. It got hotter. Women begging in abayas came to the car windows, fully covered in all black but for their wide straw hats. It felt like an image from somewhere else—the caps were just like the woven paddy hats typical in Asian rice fields, with a softer cone that flattened into a brim. Naji gave a few bills, without comment.

By midday we were in Ibb, capital of the eponymous governorate nicknamed Al-Khodra’, “The Green Province.” Summers report triple the rainfall as in Sanaa, the trademark of the country’s southwest and the justification for its “happiness” in the eyes of early traveling Greeks. Even in January, the tightly packed hill town was striped with shades of asparagus and olive.

The city centers around its market, the mouth of which is dedicated to the trading of guns and ammunition, often under imported umbrellas branded with the Nestle logo and the word glidot written in Hebrew: “ice cream.”

Three or four men sat with their wares, bullets and holsters and Kalashnikov magazines, while a shop owner stood like a mannequin for his merchandise. He wore a silver Brazilian sidearm with a leather handle and a dagger at his navel. I started to feel like “dagger” wasn’t the right way to think about it—the way it sounded like a pirate’s weapon and painted Yemen against a romantic, swashbuckling backdrop. The janbiya—literally “side thing”—was far more style than function; the guns were both. For handguns from Brazil or Russia, about two hundred dollars, the man said. More for American.

Nearby, atop the hill called Jebel Rabi, there is a community pool with high walls guarded with broken glass, and an empty café where we had lunch outside with a view over the city between the mountains. Hummus came, then kebab, to our makeshift table on a stool, and Neal and I drank cans of Royalty ginger beer imported from the United Kingdom. Naji ate while squatting on the pavement. He couldn’t bear to eat when sitting in a chair, he said.

Out of nowhere, there was a man singing. He smiled under a short black mustache, crouched in a blazer and a patterned cloth like a sarong, an oud propped on his knee. Friends gathered. Over the occasional rumble of a motorcycle’s ignition, he wove the undulating pluck of oud strings with lines in guttural dialect. My Arabic faltered, and I crouched in with the others to sip at glasses of sweet black tea. “In my wedding, I call him!” AK declared triumphantly.

In the early afternoon, it seemed the entire population—totaling somewhere between Wichita Falls and Fremont—had jammed the two miles of north-south route that cut through town. AK drove us through choking traffic to the sister city of Jibla, like the suburb to Ibb’s commuter hell, and Naji produced bags of gat he had procured from the market. With my mouth half-healed from my first attempts, I set in again, putting my gums on the line in hopes of feeling something, plucking dry leaves—drier and more bitter by far than the last time—from a long red stalk.

Naji was always scrutinizing prices, always examining quality—of guns, of gat, of our mood. I spat green juices onto the steep streets, rubbing my face and trying to keep chewing.

Naji guffawed behind me. “My jaw is made in Japan, your jaw is made in Taiwan!”

In the car, his gat energy began to take hold. He drew a handgun from his holster, jokingly, loaded the magazine, and pointed it at AK’s head. His movements were like exaggerated pantomime, except that he had a loaded gun as a prop. He positioned it closer, withdrew, and put it back again, watching our reactions ever so curiously in the backseat.

“Abdulkhaliq is not afraid!” said the policeman in Arabic.

AK was laughing in bursts. He took his hands off the wheel and raised them in mock surrender. “Kidnap me!” he giggled, in Arabic.

Naji turned back toward the road, still aiming the gun at our driver. Now he spoke to us in English: “My friend. My friend,” he said.

Suddenly, he whipped back around, grinning, in a James Bond pose, gun raised, cigarette in his other hand, gat oozing between his teeth and into his cheeks.

I was squealing, no! No! But it was a good kind of squeal. I felt shaken. That felt good. Even though it was all a joke, he was giving me inklings of the danger I craved. And, it wasn’t coming from the outside, from the wide world of terror. If someone killed me, I loved the idea that it would be a single unaffiliated guy. That way, the existential terrors of the world would have lost out to the power of something far more human.

The gun lowered. I might have wanted him to keep playing with it. For reasons I never understood, AK made a mysterious suggestion with his sigh of relief. “Go my country!” he said, with long vowels.

WE MADE OUR APPROACH to Taiz from the coronet of hills to the flats that bumped and rolled away down below. For a moment, it seemed like we had found a hidden civilization in the shadow of the ten thousand-foot-high Saber Mountain. We slept here, in Yemen’s third-largest city, where six hundred thousand people’s worth of buildings appear to have grown from the ground like lichens on every patch of craggy rock.

In the morning Naji was wearing the Yemeni version of an off-green Hawaiian shirt, complete with matching pants. Free from the confines of his police uniform, and without a jambiya around his waist, he had wonderfully adopted all the charisma of a duvet cover.

He said something like, “I changed my clothes. Now no one can tell I’m not from the south.”

A few steps ahead, AK could hardly keep his giggles dignified. He intercepted not-quite whispers from the sides of the old town market, translating them for us perhaps as payback for the efendim’s snoring. “They are saying, ‘Who is this guy?’ ”

I wasn’t free from jeers either. I had just had the buckle of my own dagger belt fixed in a nearby shop and I’d put it on over a T-shirt so as not to have to carry it. The jambiya is always a distinguished accoutrement, and a far less common one in the south. To all the Taiz shopkeepers, I must have looked like I was wearing a bow tie over an apron.

I made it a few blocks before I felt self-conscious enough to take it off.

CHANGES IN LANDSCAPE begin to accelerate along the narrow highway between Taiz and Aden. Somewhere short of midway is where the fragile border once was between the nations known as North and South Yemen. We dropped out of the greenery into sandy plains with fewer bushes and more camels to graze at them. We rolled the windows down when the sand didn’t blow in. It got hot, hotter.

Before we landed in Sanaa, I never knew that Yemen had once been two independent countries. I figured, like other countries on the peninsula, it had arisen in recent times as a confederation of emirates or sheikhdoms, tribal federations coming together and unifying as a state, perhaps as part of gaining independence from colonial occupation. This was true in Yemen, but in two acts: the northern theocractic monarchy declared statehood from the collapsing Ottoman Empire in 1918, and the last king was dethroned by the founders of the Yemen Arab Republic in 1962.

In the south, warring nationalist groups ousted the British from Aden and unified with its former protectorates to the east, claiming independence in 1967.

According to a CIA report from January 1990: “Despite a sense of common national identity, Yemenis have traditionally been fragmented along regional, tribal, and class lines. Successive regimes in North Yemen (YAR) have coopted support of the country’s major Islamic figures to buttress regime legitimacy, while South Yemen (PDRY) has been among the most secular and radical states in the Arab World.” No wonder that, in 1970, Marxists had renamed it the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen.

Only as the Soviet Union fell did the halves of “Greater Yemen” unify for the first time in modern history.

Four years later: a civil war. Yemen became the theater for one of the last proxy battles of the Cold War, and a marker of American–Saudi tensions to come. Saudi Arabia backed the south for fear of a consolidated, Shia-controlled Yemen. The United States pushed for unity and the final dissolution of that Marxist state. With U.S. support, Sanaa bludgeoned Aden into submission.

Saleh, the Yemen Arab Republic’s president, kept that job; the general secretary of the south, Ali Salim al-Beidh, became vice president. From exile, al-Beidh had recently returned to politics to champion the separatist Hirak, “the Movement,” short for the fragmented “Peaceful Southern Movement” that seeks secession from the union. There were whispers about the execution of northerners at Hirak road stops. A honey trader and his wife told the Yemen Observer they’d barely escaped a stop just outside Aden where everyone in the car behind them was killed. But at our checkpoints, Naji always seemed to know the guards; if they waved us through without asking for our papers, he’d get out of the car and lecture them on how to do their jobs.

We rumbled toward the southern capital under a midday sun. When we passed the last checkpoint, I thought I could smell the sea.

IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON when we dropped into Aden on the south coast, humid even in January, and I started thinking about Somalia. At our first night’s gat chew in Sanaa, Tal had mentioned whispers about cargo boats that might take passengers across the Gulf of Aden to Africa. Justified with professor Brittany’s book-delivering mission, our first trip was to the port.

At one entrance, guards reacted with suspicion but without aggression to the idea that tourists would want to snoop around the industrial loading docks. At another way in, I tried something that I had limited experience with in preliminary dealings with officials: honesty. “We’re looking for a boat,” I said. “To ride on. To Somalia.”

In fact, Berbera, the port we were shooting for, was no more like Mogadishu than Erbil is like Baghdad. It is the second city of secessionist Somaliland, something else entirely from Somalia: different currency, different government, different visas, and a wholly different respect for the rule of law.

But all I knew was rumor. I was told Somaliland had “the fastest Internet in Africa.” I had read on online forums that it was far more dangerous to sail in the other direction, into Yemen—this was the only way to see this stretch of sea. We had balked at the option of a four hundred-dollar one-way ticket on the weekly half-hour flight from Aden to Berbera and traded that near certainty for the possibility of something much cooler, cheaper, and potentially more fatal. Yet with that risk came a new ideal, a new best-case scenario. I felt a surge of honest, intestinal belief in the wisdom of fortune cookies: this trip became about the journey—not the destination! This was my chance to travel with the world’s original travelers, a ship of traders—the common man’s ambassadors and storytellers from distant lands to the neighbors of the faraway.

Ibrahim, the port official, had the blue shirt of his uniform open to the undershirt, black and gray scraggly chest hairs crawling out from underneath. He mentioned an “agency,” and gave directions that sounded clear enough—near the Lebanese Grocery and by the American Language Center—and seemed to suggest that boats left multiple times daily with passengers. My heart flew. The likely response I feared—Are you out of your gat-chewing mind!?!—never came.

But gun-toting Naji and loyal Abdulkhaliq were soon stumped as we twisted around the apocalyptic main drag of Aden’s Mualla neighborhood. An aisle of whitewashed buildings of even height sat on top of decrepit shops and graffitied storefronts and pink plastic bags. A tiny number of people milled about, a few children played with rocks or ran after their parents across the road—this was very clearly somewhere that once expected to be busier. Thousands of gray bricks were strewn almost deliberately like styled bed head, remnants of antigovernment protests the government hadn’t bothered to clean up. One bright sign indicated HA’IL WALID HA’IL MARTYR STREET, THE YOUNGEST MARTYR IN THE SOUTH. A constructed barrier three bricks high directed traffic; driving through the parking lots and avoiding the street, we squiggled into fish traps with no way out.

We circled back to the port with some difficulty to find Ibrahim and take him with us. To find the Bamadhaf Shipping Company (in the “Boston Language Institute” building), we were supposed to have pulled into the wrong lane of the functioning part of Mualla Main Street, U-turned again into oncoming traffic, and picked our way left onto a side street where no one had ever heard of any Lebanese anything. Ibrahim picked out the nondescript entrance of the five-story building—the door was already open.

Three women in black abayas manned the Bamadhaf office late on that Tuesday afternoon. Naima and Salma showed their faces under simple headscarves, Naima’s completely black, Salma’s a bright violet. A younger woman smiled from her cheeks and eyes over her niqab, and told me she was from Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland. She loved it. She never asked why I wanted to go there.

They considered this a noble journey. “He has to find his friends!” the women would say to anyone who asked, because I had mentioned Brittany’s books.

Salma was audibly and visibly of Indian descent and spoke wonderful English, but was born and raised, like many others whom Yemenis would call “Indian” or “Ethiopian” or “Somali,” in Yemen. She was studying business at the university and wore contact lenses that made her eyes a sharp sapphire (her e-mail handle is “lovebird”). Her laugh kept rising tempers in check. Naima was the office elder, maybe pushing twenty-eight or thirty-two—I didn’t fall for her trap to have me guess. She was “Yemeni Yemeni,” as those others would say, and was happy to speak only Arabic.

This staff made copies of my passport and visas for Yemen and Somaliland, found no issue with my American citizenship, and said they would call when they knew if there was a boat. Cargo ships didn’t come and go every day, and took a few days to load and unload, but they seemed confident that one would come soon. Inshallah, they said. “God willing.”

Inshallah is one of the phrases in Arabic a foreigner can understand literally and semantically and culturally, but cannot grasp for lack of belief. For all of my uses of “God willing” as a secular English expression—“God willing pizza still has cheese on it when we get home” and the like—the god is a passive one. The McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs notes: “[This is] an expression indicating that there is a high certainty that something will happen, so high that only God could prevent it.”

The American “prove me wrong or else” mentality is distinct: innocent until proven guilty, free until locked up. Inshallah gives mortal defendants different odds. “God willing” here accompanies every mention of an event or a plan for the future from “See you tomorrow” to “I promise I will win the lottery”; at its most frustrating, it can appear to qualify the past: Has the authorization been confirmed? Inshallah. But . . . has it? Inshallah.

Implying more than one plausible option, it seems to translate to “hopefully.” English speakers tend to run with that toward the unlikely side of “maybe.” Really though, inshallah carries no judgment of probability. It is weighted only toward what you believe: if you have doubts, it will strengthen them; if you are confident, you’ll remain so. The way you feel in the moment between inshallah and conscious thought—that is your default setting on the spectrum from optimism to despair.

When Naima checked her books and told me inshallah the boat will arrive, she said so like a newscaster delivering the unadorned truth. And because I doubted, I heard have reason to doubt.

AFTER TWO LONG DAYS on the road, AK and Naji were planning to go straight back to Sanaa, though AK wanted to go to the beach. Without us, it was clear the poor taxi driver was fettered by the efindim’s whims. We said our good-byes, but I answered my phone several times over the next few days to hear Naji’s voice. Always he asked for Neal. Ten feet away from the phone I could still make out his message, as clear and meaningless as ever.

“Waa-oww!”

Feeling their absence, Neal and I took in the balmy January evening air on a block-partying main drag in Crater. The neighborhood that is Aden’s nighttime hub is settled in the hollow of the ancient explosion of an eighteen hundred-foot-high volcano, millions of years extinct, with rugged cliffs at its back and an oceanfront view. Now Crater earns that moniker in a different way: the word crater comes from Greek for “mixing bowl.” In Crater nights, people mix.

Aden is a storybook trader’s city that absorbs pastimes and recipes and sundry itinerants. Outside near the Aden Gulf Hotel there are billiards tables and ping-pong, and a line of Somali women and children sleeping on single-layer mats of cardboard. Refugees were fleeing to Yemen at ten thousand per month, and the city did its best to ignore them.

There is a stand for muttabaq, “folded,” like a savory crepe that would have made phenomenal drunk food if we only knew where to get a drink. There is a stand for betel nut, called fofal in Arabic and paan in South Asia, to wrap in leaves and squirrel away like chewing tobacco. In the thousand-year-old Hitopadesha collection of Sanskrit fables, a king narrates:

Betel-nut is bitter, hot, sweet, spicy, binding, alkaline—

A demulcent—an astringent—foe to evils intestine;

Giving to the breath a fragrance—to the lips a crimson red;

A detergent, and a kindler of Love’s flame that lieth dead.

Praise the gods for the good Betel!

All around Aden, its red spit is burned into cobblestones and curbs like blood stains.

“Hey Obama. This is Black Label,” said a happy chewer. And Neal and I bought two leaf pouches, because when in Aden, and because it was new to us.

The ping-pong table sat on a slight incline, and a ten-year-old smoked me with his Chinese penhold grip while the neighborhood watched. And there, outside a popular sandwich joint, we spotted Judith and Boudweijn, Anoud’s friends from the pizza place in Sanaa. For expats at least, the Dutch couple said, Yemen was a small town. Before the next year was up, they would be kidnapped and held ransom under credible threat of execution. Their captors leaked a terrifying, seemingly hopeless video. Judith was crying. They had ten days to live. The Dutch government swore they never pay ransom, but in six months they were free. The tears were fake, Judith says—that’s just how they made her play along.

That night in Aden, Boudweijn told us to call him Bo and we made plans for dinner like a sweet double date.

THE NEXT NIGHT, we met them at Ching Sing, Yemen’s most famous Chinese restaurant. Fluorescent lighting and a few red Chinese lanterns lit line drawings and Eastern landscapes on the walls. Ching Sing is one of the few spots left in town still serving alcohol unabashedly, albeit in a basement, and our newish Dutch friends ordered a round of Amstels. Bo was struggling to attract Yemenis to the idea of insurance brokerage with his new firm, and Judith the reporter was planning to interview the owner, the founder’s son.

The restaurant’s founder was a Chinese sailor stranded by war in Aden in the 1940s. Ching Sing had remained ever since on Mualla’s ghoulish Main Street, despite encroaching conservatism and tightening restrictions on purveyors of alcohol. “You should blow on the top,” said Judith of our Amstel cans. They’re smuggled in by sea, she said, and buried in the sand for someone else to collect. Luckily, beer has a shelf life of some months.

But not wanting to bury myself in Aden’s sand—muddy on most free beaches and unfairly priced at the Sheraton Hotel—I was still looking for seafaring options to skip town. Next to our piles of dumplings and squid soup and stir-fried beef was a table of pale and boisterous Russian men and a Yemeni associate who let slip that they had access to boats making international trips. They wouldn’t say more. Another bottle of vodka came from behind the bar. Happily convinced that they were arms dealers, we watched them climb out of Ching Sing and said good night.

It wasn’t our luck that night to get bubble wrapped onto a freighter hauling Kalashnikovs to Somalia, but our Dutch friends—whom we knew only as friends of Anoud, who we had only known from a website for traveling strangers—had met a man named Joseph. Along with Naima and Salma, Joseph was our other last hope.

He was like Aden’s Godot, a man we never saw but counted on for our salvation. Bo described him in all uncertain terms: a fixer, a highly connected man, a usual at expat parties, someone who behaved like a local but was really from . . . Bo couldn’t tell. He thought that if we showed up at a particular bar before 1 A.M., we’d find him. We went, and didn’t.

“Joseph would know,” Bo said several times above a Heineken at the empty bar where Joseph wasn’t. “Joseph can help you,” said Judith.

I REMEMBER A GREAT DEAL of waiting in the days Joseph didn’t appear. Except for the Sira Fortress high on a conical hill dangling from the city by a narrow causeway, and the fish market below where a hammerhead shark bled recumbent on wet tile, and the north Yemeni monument locals had taken to calling “The President’s Dick,” Aden was not a city rife with sights to see. There were the cisterns, an engineering marvel explained by a plaque from 1899 on its restored staircases. The title reads simply, THESE TANKS. It begins the story of their accidental discovery like this: “Regarding the original construction of these tanks of which nothing is accurately known. . . .” Later, folks in town would tell me their guesses that ranged from the sixth to the sixteenth century.

I laughed when I read it. Not a laugh of mirth or mockery, but a puff of relief at the sign that signified nothing at all. I saw myself in it, of course, as if Aden was telling me I was allowed to be unsure, too.

We ate more grilled fish and bread with sahawiq and relaxed. But in our hyperactive curiosity, we itched again to leave Paradise.

And then at a café in Crater, I read an e-mail from a kindly bank agent that my entire debit account had been siphoned away for a shopping spree in Vietnam. Back in Abu Dhabi, the Sama Tower ATM next to the new Baskin-Robbins had been hacked. I responded in the only way I knew how—Help?—and clicked Send in the corner of one frantic e-mail to the bank. And then because it was an unthinkable problem, I did everything I could not to think about it. I held what little money I still had, felt especially grateful for Neal’s company, and returned to running away.

For the Yemeni tourist, there was one El Dorado, called Shibam, just like Naji’s hometown outside of Sanaa, whose old city boasted five hundred mud brick houses up to eight stories tall. Its nickname was the ultimate draw: “The Manhattan of the Desert.” It was to be our only foray into Hadhramaut, a part of Yemen the professor Brittany and every other returning traveler rhapsodized about like a mythical kingdom. Its name, according to one theory, comes from a simple sentence in Arabic: Death has come.

We scrounged for cash to pay a travel agent to reserve a ticket to nearby Seiyun. My rial were dwindling fast, as was the small stash of just-in-case dollars zipped deep in a backpack pocket. Hours later we sat in the airport. We bought a package of butter biscuits and tea to dip them in. Minutes passed. A man hustled over to our bench.

“Seiyun?” he asked.

We nodded.

“The flight is canceled.”

“Happy” Airways, in all its unhappy consistency, was back on strike.

Buses were another option—the sixty-minute flight would take about ten hours by road, but it was worth it, and we hailed a giant van cab to investigate at the depot.

We had no permits, but we made our case to the company manager from the doorway of a coach. He was incredulous, and unflinching.

“Al-Qaeda will come on the bus and see you and kill you,” he said.

There were checkpoints along the way, territory ceded to Islamists during the last year’s Battle of Zinjabar and throughout the uprising, and militants had been known to kill travelers, even Yemenis.

“We could cover our heads,” I said.

“No,” he said.

Earlier, army guards had been murdered on the roads. Things were getting worse in the south.

We lounged defeated along the bench seats. The driver and his almost Jheri-curled friend Adam in the front passenger seat consoled us. And as I always did automatically when I met an Adam, I asked myself, What if that were me? What if, in the great prenatal vending machine of Adams, I’d tumbled out for life in that seat and those slick curls?

Out of ideas, we drove together to the Adeni permit office and sat for hours, discussing and rejecting the possibilities. I was amazed at how vastly more humane the Tourist Police were here than in Sanaa. They sat, placid, on cardboard mats outside their office, chewing gat and drinking Mountain Dew. They wanted to help.

But their chief Yousif wouldn’t make a permit. He was learning how dangerous the roads were himself, calling for updates, listening to Adam and his friend. Our driving duo was on our side—they really wanted us to get to see Shibam, our frustration was their sadness—but they also didn’t want to send us off to die. They would have regretted that terribly, they said.

Through their connections to connections, we found a driver, a private car willing to take us by a different road he knew, free from Al-Qaeda and its affiliates. We returned to Yousif and told him. And just when our efforts were making good, the chauffeur called. The car’s owner said no. Al-Qaeda controlled that road now, too. They controlled all of the roads east of Aden.

At that moment, despite my inbred stubbornness and an inability to let go of even the slightest whiff of the merest fragment of a long-shot possibility, I remembered that earlier lesson, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Iran: some things truly are impossible. And the relief that came with letting go.

I had been pulled here for selfish reasons; I was not a Marine, I was not a doctor without borders, not a journalist. Without a greater cause, the me in these unknown places was freer, and freer still because the few things I really was—an American, a Jew—were like clothing I felt encouraged to wear differently at different occasions. Without a greater cause, danger suggested that I be flexible—but even more that I attend to life as it was lived moment to moment, and that I keep my head close to the ground. Danger gave me freedom without disorientation.

It was nice to know I could actually take no for an answer.

STILL HOPING FOR NEWS of a boat, and itching to move somewhere after spending a circling day in a van, we took off at dawn the next morning. A bus took us in the only direction we could still go and hadn’t been, west to the coast, and then back north along the Tihama plains. It was Kerouacking in the most blatant way: “Now there was nowhere to go but back. I determined at least to make my trip a circular one.”

We had no plan. We were pushing so hard against the stifling weight of travel restrictions that when they lifted, when we pushed against a direction that didn’t push back, we shot off like the hammer of a mousetrap. North—we could only go north. We couldn’t stop. We landed in Zabid, a UNESCO darling—a mosque built in the eighth year of the Islamic calendar with Stars of David etched into the vaulted ceilings, old houses with stained glass windows on rainbow-lit rooms to rival Notre Dame—and kept going. We hit Hudaydah at night, searching for food on the backs of teenage motorbikers who hustled for inflated “taxi” fares. We took off after dark in a Peugeot, climbing six hours into the mountains back to Sanaa, the only place we thought we knew.

The trip that had taken three days southward took one long day to return.

I sat in the front, Neal and a young, legal arms dealer in the back. Seven of us and the driver pushed through the dark. Whenever I fell asleep and the keffiyeh slipped off my head, we were stopped at a checkpoint. We had no permits. But no one cared enough to fuss, and there was no Naji to force them to touch paperwork. When I stayed covered, we passed through with a wave.

It was in the wee hours of the morning when we made it to Tal’s friend’s place in Sanaa. As soon as the electricity came back on, I started looking for flights to Aden. And while Neal was hanging with the boys, I was e-mailing him notes he’d never respond to from nearer the router:

so i just checked the yemenia website and it came up with almost 15000 riyals for a one way and i was like, shit, thats a bunch of riyals. but nah. it’s like seventy bucks.

There was no reason why any of this should have been important. To me, at least. It became an obsession just to make landfall on the shores of Somaliland. Nothing and no one depended on this. I was practically sick of traveling, slowed even more by the heaviness of light pockets. I was ready to sit still. Yet I stoked fixation with daydreams about the seafarers’ way across the Gulf of Aden, and with pictures of the pristine cave paintings just north of Hargeisa.

I had seventy bucks, and so did Neal, and Tal brought us to a travel agent so we could buy our cash tickets straight back south. We flew out immediately.

(I could hear Masha’s voice, saying what she often said: “You’re being a crazy.”)

NEAL WAS SMART ENOUGH to see the circles we were spinning. Work called from Abu Dhabi, and though work was flexible, he saw an easy escape from the dizziness and took it, leaving me with Brittany’s thick books for the Somalilander with no address. The hotel room was too wide and dark, I noticed, and silent.

I reached Joseph by phone from the Aden Gulf Hotel.

“Yes my dear,” he said often, “I will let you know.” He spoke in clear English with an accent from somewhere in a voice that was on the dainty side of high-pitched. He always seemed delighted to talk even though he never called back. He would speak to captains of dhows taking sheep and cows across the Gulf. He was going drinking with some of them, he said one day. And if they said no? “My guys can push them a little.”

But before Joseph could tell me that no captain was willing to take an American onboard for a fear of legal problems that made a little ticket money an unsound gamble, Naima called to tell me yes. Bamadhaf Shipping had a boat in port named Al Medina, and it was stocked with its thirty thousand-dollar load of biscuits, chocolate and soap and ready to sail on Saturday. I needed only the approval of the port general. “He cannot say no,” said Naima. “He has no right to.”

She put me in an old car with a company man to get the stamp. The general received us with an officer at his side in a bright, windowed room on the highest floor of the Port Authority building that looked like the bridge of a British schooner. He wore the complete naval uniform, all white with golden buttons, and, with all the authority of the surprised and cautious, proved he had every right to say no.

“No,” he said.

Six weeks earlier, an overloaded Somali-made dhow capsized and sunk just out of port. Since the Yemeni government still valued U.S. aid and alliance, it would be no good to have an American go down with the cows. My weak shipping company liaison could accept the impossibilities of only sailing legitimate channels.

The general dismissed us to a separate agency, one that might assume liability and issue me clearance. I was losing hope. In a hot room by the docks a fat man wheezed, wedged into a wooden desk chair behind a table piled high with paperwork that fluttered against a fan. It was illegal for foreigners to travel by boat from Aden, he said. He never moved. I proposed that I write an affidavit absolving anyone of any accountability if the boat sank. Tongue jutting into his bottom lip, he struggled to find a pen with meaty fingers, not because he thought it was a valid suggestion, but because he was willing to have us tell him what his job was. Papers whiffled and blew off the desk.

Disheartened, we left the fat man to pass my plea on to his superiors. It looked like for all of Bamadhaf’s inshallah-laden yesses, there were the noes where it counted. Private captains were unwilling to face commercial penalties, or delays in port where livestock begin to die in underventilated cages, and commercial agencies were wary enough not to break the law.

The legal injunctions sank in. And then, hand to the car handle, I forehead slappingly remembered my place in the scheme of things, my potential to be a slippery cog in a greasy machine. Benjamin Franklin winked from inside my backpack.

I returned to the office where Naima still sat in monochrome elegance. I’d be happy to bribe anyone of import, I said. Aha, she mused, and then gave me a friend.

Imad, Bamadhaf’s man Friday, was handling paperwork before Al Medina could set sail. Puzzled and smiling to meet me, he confidently disappeared with my passport to make whispered deals. Fearing the anxious quiet that comes with idle waiting, I called Joseph again in a desperate attempt to keep my foot in whatever doors were still open, and within twenty minutes, he had appeared at the door of the Boston Language Institute building.

Soft-spoken on the phone, Joseph George was anything but in person. He looked a young fifty, with a powerful jaw and straight white teeth that gleamed when he grinned. His skin was the darker shade of those who likely settled from parts of neighboring Africa decades or centuries earlier. He was in his every fiber a native Yemeni. There could be no one more Adeni than Joseph George.

Joseph introduced me to a friend he had spotted on the street, a government minister named Muhammad who, it just so happened, controlled the federal government’s Department of Inspections. If I’d still had my passport, Joseph said, I could have given it to Muhammad and he’d have it back within half an hour approved for anything I wanted. Civilian officers like the men at the port are “scared shitless of these guys,” he said.

In the meantime, while Imad pressed his luck with the brass, Joseph and I cruised the road around Aden in his massive white pickup truck, hoping to grab his friend the boat captain on the way to get a couple lunchtime beers.

Children heading home from school chased us, shouting, and Joseph bared his teeth. Seething, he slammed on the brakes so the kids would slam into the back of the truck. They never did. They jeered in their white uniforms.

“They eat, they drink, they fuck and die. And they leave their children in the street like a bag of bones.”

It had been a long morning at work, he said—at the unsurprisingly vague-sounding Transoceanic Projects & Development—and I summoned the nerve to ask, cautiously, what he did. “Logistics,” he said. The boat sticking out bottom up in the harbor—that had been captained by his drinking buddy, along with two other dhows that had sunk in the past year. He was a man in Joseph’s debt.

We found the boat captain at a famous spot past the Catholic cemetery at the edge of the tunnel out of town toward the Sheraton, where bottles are handed through the sliding grate of a metal shed a few yards off the road. A Heineken was five dollars.

Together, with another quiet man Joseph seemed to know and picked up along the way, we tried to relax, squinting at the sea from cliffs baking in the afternoon. Too hot, we drove lazily back through the tunnel, Joseph singing every word along to “No Woman, No Cry.” Everything’s gonna be alright . . . everything’s gonna be alright, now. I felt a little calmer, if only for escaping into a moment of the familiar.

He pointed out the repulsive cement President Dick obelisk. “We call it a very bad name in Arabic,” he said, smiling broadly. Joseph roared with laughter: “He wants to remind the South people that this is my dick, I’m fucking all of you!”

And then my phone rang with Bamadhaf’s number. Salma called me to return to the office: Imad had settled things—$100 for the ticket, $120 for the bribes, bargained quickly down as if we had returned again to legitimate dealings. Racing back with windows open under the reverberating call to prayer, Joseph took me back to be Bamadhaf’s first dead-weight customer, and Naima wrote out a ticket like she had done it many times before.

The ship was to sail after salat al-‘asr, the afternoon prayer. They were happy, too, as if we had overcome a great challenge together. Grabbing my bags, I promised I would e-mail if I could, unless, as their worst fears flashed, I drowned en voyage in a sea of warm chocolates.

Imad whisked me off to scarf chicken and rice; I spent my last rials on candy; I shook hands with the logistics man. Joseph played no direct role in this new plan, but he loaned me hope when I was running on empty. “To my American business partners, I never say inshallah,” he said. “I say, ‘I’ll do or die.’ ”

I STOOD VICTORIOUS on the cement patterns of the Port of Aden. In a flourishing series of fortunate events, my plans to find a boat to Somalia were paying off, and after a month of daydreaming, a week of coordination and a considerable dollop of palm grease I was closer than I had ever been.

Brown and sun baked with curly black hair, Imad was short and sinewy in jeans and a worn T-shirt. Twenty-one years old, he had accepted me into his care like a brother. It was his ninth year working for Bamadhaf. His cousin Muhammad was always with us, riding in the passenger seat and disembarking often to fetch something or copy something else or handle unnamed problems.

I cashed a crisp hundred-dollar bill into small Yemeni notes. Every single person from the entrance of the port to the ship’s rigging would get a cut. At the entrance, Imad presented a creased copy of my passport to a man out of uniform who made the universal gesture for What the fuck is this? An American? Imad leaned over his shoulder and placed one thousand rial (about $4.50) into the fold and pushed the paper closed with a rigid index finger: What American?

Everything ran smoothly from then on with Imad fielding every question and speaking so I wouldn’t have to. In the immigration shed, a burly man retrieved a new date stamp from a closet, marked my exit from Yemen, and added my passport to the pile entrusted to the captain. I followed Imad onto the pier and around to the benches where the crew of Al Medina were sitting on the ground, chewing gat, waiting for her to pull around the corner from the docks.

And then, with an impossibly gat-puffed cheek, he answered his cellphone for the thousandth time that afternoon and disappeared to check on the boat. “Maybe fifteen minutes late,” he said. “Mechanical problem,” he smiled.

A fat orange sun was sinking into the jagged mountaintops along the coast. I snapped a few pictures from a perch on the pier where boys were diving or making their friends dive, or giving me intimate compliments: “What a beautiful hat. And a beautiful scarf. And a beautiful coat.” Eccentricity, in a place where simply being foreign is enough to be eccentric, is excused by being foreign. It’s a delightfully logical double negative: foreigners who act normal, whispers say, are probably spies.

So when they inevitably took to the game of volunteering others for photos, giggling and stabbing at the others with a finger—Get him! Get him!—I was happy enough to oblige. Where taking pictures is suspect, where people hear a camera snap and cringe, clicking away is a little like pulling hair or pinching cheeks. They bubbled with the kind of excitement that makes one kid push another kid into water with all his clothes on. And pretty soon, the divers were mugging for my camcorder and braving backflips, thrilled to watch themselves on video over and over and over until the sun boiled away into the sea and they shivered too much to go on.

Many of the boys—ages in the teens-ish, thirteen-looking-ten, eleven-claiming-fifteen, seven, or unplaceable—asked me if I had Facebook. What had seemed like a unified group revealed itself as a collection of mostly curious strangers proving their status in a new system by virtue of their interaction, it seemed, with me. A small boy with black skin and African hair sang and danced and hugged me and climbed on the others. “He will steal from you,” said another, deadly serious in a gray dress shirt, greasily ingratiating himself as an advisor and confidant. There was Ahmed, the nephew of one Al Medina crewman, in a red sweatshirt with light peach fuzz on his upper lip, who became a quiet mediator. And there was a jester in a blue shirt who hovered near me and made jokes loud enough for the older boys and the divers’ friends to hear.

“Give us seven million dollars!” The kid in blue was all smiles. “Okay, give a million!” Suddenly, his whole face and spirit changed. He kissed my shoulder, a gesture typical of panhandlers in Middle Eastern cities, then my hand. He wasn’t smiling anymore. Give me something.

I told him I had spent all of my rials, which was true, as I was expecting to leave the country, which technically, with my passport stamped, I already had. He tapped the wallet in my pocket and made an eating gesture with his hand. “Check.”

Ahmed explained in pieces: the kid in the blue shirt was one of Yemen’s many neglected, known as the bidun—the “without”—those born and raised in Yemen but lacking passports or official identification and, therefore, denied access to any benefits of citizenship. The bidun live off the unfriendly land, in the backcountry of the UAE’s poorer emirates, on Hangam Island in Iran, in shantytowns or no towns at all. The kid in the blue shirt had relocated from the north when he was younger, and his passport was lost in the move. His father was dead. His mother, Ahmed explained, was an amnesiac who could no longer read or write. Without money or identification, her children had no access to school.

Ahmed delivered this passively. I held out a couple candy bars I had in a backpack pocket. Ahmed and the boy sat with me a little longer, looking out at the ships’ lights in port, waiting for the boat to come.

BUT AFTER THE DIVERS had gone home and the boy in the blue shirt left, Al Medina had yet to appear. There was an issue with the gearbox, someone reported, and it started to seem less and less likely that it could be fixed. Those first fifteen minutes, after fifteen minutes, grew into half an hour. After half an hour became an hour’s wait, then an hour and a half, then two. The longer we waited, the longer we had to wait. After six hours, Imad called to say the ETD was a “morning” that almost instantly became an afternoon. He and his cousin Muhammad came to fetch me from the port outcropping. I had no visa, no Yemeni currency, no way to change dollars and no way to get more. I had no phone credit. I was thinking about getting hungry. And with every inshallah, doubt grew and grew and howled.

I was without. Legally I had no right to be where I was, but I had even less right to go anywhere else. But I was not bidun—I was not without friends or without help. I was not abandoned: there were people willing to do more for me than I did for the boy in the blue shirt. The night immigration officer handed me a small, laminated orange card to issue me shore leave—CREW #75—and Imad collected my things and piled me back into the car, laughing a little and telling me not to worry. He pulled the brake up in a parking space in Mualla mostly free from bottles and flattened containers and gravel and Muhammad jumped out to bring me egg sandwiches and mango juice from a late-night cafeteria.

I begged them not to; I asked for boat updates and nothing else, but for Imad, this hospitality was automatic. He would sleep on the floor of the office tonight instead of returning home to his wife and baby daughter outside the city. He would buy us gat to chew in the double room of the hotel he paid for, just for me. “You’re a human being, I’m a human being. Correct?” he said. That was all. And, “Maybe one day I’ll be in America.”

On the top floor of the hotel, Imad and Muhammad sat quietly on one of the two queen beds pushing leaves into their mouths. We watched TV. The room was clean, white, with beds so hard it seemed like they had never been used, and it looked from the cousins’ eyes like they had never been in a room so proper in their lives. I sipped the thick mango juice from its Styrofoam cup.

Imad flicked through photos on my phone asking questions. “That’s my cousin in Israel,” I blurted. Soon, they left, and caffeinated out of my mind by our midnight gat chew, I would stay awake all night with my doubts. The mosque loudspeaker pointed upward from three floors below, and my window took the blunt force of the screaming azan at three o’clock and five-thirty. For a few minutes it was too loud to worry. Soon after it was light out, I called Imad. “Go back to sleep,” he said.

Past the time when he said he’d call, past the time the boat was scheduled to leave, there was no news. Calls and reluctance to call—was Imad mad about Israel? I let my anxieties coil themselves into a monster that reeled when I looked at it—Yes! it said when I asked if something was wrong. The gearbox can’t be fixed! Their magnanimity ends in Jerusalem! You’ve failed! I couldn’t stop chewing at air, an aftereffect of the gat, compounded by the fidgetiness of waiting.

All I wanted was that one meaningless hello to know I was still unforgotten. I just wanted to call Imad again and let him know I was still there, still waiting. I wanted to express my excitement and ask how he was feeling at the same time. I wanted to call just to say Waaaa-owwww!

I walked the mile or two to the Bamadhaf building and said a sad good morning to Naima and Salma. The boat would leave, they said. It had to—its permit was going to expire, and every day of delay was losing them money. We ate beans and drank tea.

Even when Imad came back for me, I couldn’t feel optimistic. I quivered when I overheard the words problem or tomorrow in phone conversations I mostly didn’t understand. “It’s going to leave. Three o’clock,” Imad said. “Inshallah.” But it was Groundhog Day as we circled Main Street, gathered photocopies, ate chicken and rice. His brother Sameer had returned that day from Bosaso on a boat carrying 645 cows and sat down to eat with us carrying with him in his thin sweatshirt the smells of every one.

We sat in the car together, moved it, moved it again, and parked it somewhere else. At three, we were still nowhere. Three guys in the backseat looked amused at how tense I was, how obsessed with time I was, how un-Yemeni. I asked to be deposited at the port where at least I could wish again to see the boat pulling in—something about that seemed like a place for a more tangible possibility. It was like squinting in prayer for a seven on a craps table and having that moment of calm, of suspended hope in opening your eyes, and by opening them forcing the Fates to deal their cards. Enough sitting, I thought, as more unoccupied brain cells twirled off to help dramatize and mix metaphors. I’m going crazy.

WHEN I WAS A KID, I learned a cool game.

Not a game, really, just: I’d stand on the threshold between rooms and hold my arms at my sides. Then, keeping them straight, I’d press them against the door frame. I’d push hard for a minute or two, or longer. The longer I held and the harder I pushed, the better the reward: when I stepped away my arms would rise, weightless. My whole body felt lighter. It was fun to invent new pressures just to feel the relief in lifting them.

If I could have held it for longer, I was sure, I would have been flying.

IT FELT SO URGENT NOW. This was what I needed to feel relieved and satisfied, I told myself, as I did before every visa application, every booked flight, every hassle made doubly desperate. This corner of Somalia was the next fix. I’ll feel fulfilled, I told myself, all the while knowing it wasn’t true, knowing I was feeding a lazy addiction and calling it bold. Just one more step higher on the ladder of Mother-Frightening Nations. . . . 

In the port, I slumped onto the floor of an office to chew gat with the entirety of the port staff—clerks of some sort, immigrations officers, coordinators of something or other. And I hardly registered the fizzle of a radio and Imad’s bulletin that Al Medina was on the move. I chased my legs as they followed him back to the immigration shed to exit Yemen a second time.

There were no divers that day. And with the fat sun setting again, I dropped into the motorboat to taxi out to Al Medina. She was a Somali-made dhow, deep brown wood with a white stripe along the hull as if she wanted to race, not much longer than a hundred feet of mostly boxes covered with tarp. From the tiny deck painted robin’s-egg blue, the crew peered over the railing and I climbed the ladder up the side. A young Somali bowed and sang the azan out into the Gulf of Aden. Waving good-bye to Imad and the city, we chugged slowly through the harbor, passing the rusty carcass of something larger that had sunk, until, as the last light faded, we stopped. We were a few hundred yards from shore.

The engine wasn’t running properly—some gear or clamp was stripping a crankshaft. “We might be going back,” said the Kenyan engineer. I dangled my legs over the side. I’m not getting off this boat. If she did leave, I knew, it wouldn’t be because she was entirely seaworthy, it would be because the permit was going to expire and it was time to roll the dice and throw them into the sea. That was the captain’s choice, too.

We set sail at the end of a gray day, the wind dead, leaving bureaucratic and existential stresses under the piles of garbage on Mualla Main Street. Twenty-three, I thought, as if it were the biggest number I’d ever heard. It was my birthday. An Aquarius taking to the waveless alley. The ship yielded to the wine-dark sea, and we moved into that part of the Gulf where contemporary pirates were all too well-known. Yo ho.

ONBOARD, THERE WERE phone chargers and outlets for iPod speakers; a four-foot-tall kitchen where Atham the cook steamed the spiciest curry and taught me to roll roti; cushions and a flat spot between the cookie boxes on top of the cabin for the ten sailors to sleep in shifts. Late January in the Gulf of Aden, the night air is luxurious and perfect with one blanket.

Digestive responses to the curry were delivered from a man-sized plastic bucket with the bottom cut out that hung from the side of the boat. It was terrifying stepping in at first, what with the sea frothing past below and tales of sharks, but it got easier.

I knew what was coming: as per my seafaring traditions, I puked violently over the side of the boat after three hours. I closed my eyes and thought of whale-watching trips I went on as a boy, vomiting and trying to spot whale flukes and vomiting. Somehow, no one on Al Medina made fun of me, and as watchman shifts were rotating in the dark, someone unrolled a mattress on a bench and told me to go sleep. I obeyed without protest, having hurled myself to exhaustion. Just before dawn, we floated out of Asia and into Africa.

LATER, I’D UNDERSTAND that there was almost no risk of attacks on Somali dhows like the injured Al Medina, and that increased presence of naval warships in the Gulf had helped create a safe channel. Pirates make more frequent attempts on tankers in the narrow strait between Yemen and Djibouti, and on dhows sailing through the Gulf farther east. As reported to the International Maritime Bureau Piracy Reporting Centre, 113 attempted attacks in the Gulf of Aden in 2009 fell to 13 by 2012. The year we sailed, the only three successful hijackings in those waters were on the route between Mukalla in Yemen and Bosaso in Somalia, more than two hundred miles off our course. I’m not sure I would’ve cared how close they came. I knew these men would sail anyway—they had to, and I wanted to be with them.

I was unusually at peace. This was my sweet spot in the place between places. Everything I was seeking was ahead of me, and it was approaching, and restlessness abated in the way that hunger does when dinner is in the oven.

Before daybreak, while the Somali watchman sailed without radar, someone had lowered the Yemeni flag and raised the Somalilanders’: red, white and green and bearing a black star and the Islamic credo, There is no god but God and Muhammad is his prophet.

For the crew, a turn at the wheel is a chore, and Jirani was more than happy to trade me for it. Just like that, I was in charge of all the ship’s load: as it turned out, all we were carrying was a quarter-million pounds of chalky Abu Walad Sandwich Biscuits. I felt like I’d never been seasick in my whole life. No one looked nervous. The two officers and the cook were from India, and the remainder of the ten-man crew hailed from Kenya, Tanzania and Somalia. Abdulfaqih, a twenty-two-year-old from Hargeisa, had been working the job for eleven years on a $150 monthly wage, plus fifty or a hundred for full shipments.

A friendly bunch gathered to hang out and watch me try and aim south. It was harder than I thought; an inch clockwise on the wheel could have a huge effect, or none at all, and the waves pushed us gently, irregularly, toward Djibouti.

I plugged in portable speakers and put on bubbly soukous music from the D. R. Congo—it seemed like the closest thing I had to “local.” Soukous gained popularity as the African rumba in the 1960s. The style is still incredibly popular and influential across Africa, but I started to feel like I was trying too hard.

Outside the cabin, the Tanzanian was playing Tupac’s “Po Nigga Blues” from his phone. He gave a big laugh. “I do not understand!” The beat lifted his shoulders and dropped them. “This is power,” he said.

I changed my iPod to Tupac.

Soon, the others let their preferences show. “Have any Michael Jackson?” Jirani asked. For the rest of my captainship, we jammed to MJ’s number ones and, on Hari’s urging, a solid hour of Bob Marley. It couldn’t be too loud, though, since one shift was always sleeping.

But after winding myself so tight in Yemeni offices, I was barely able to sit and chill. I wanted to move. Sitting on the key-lime-green captain’s bench with my feet on the steering wheel, I felt the urge to nudge the throttle with the butt of my palm. We were only going seven knots. I can jog that fast.

I nudged.

Passing back through the wheelhouse, Hari noticed the gentle increase and tapped the throttle back. I shrugged innocently. The sea wasn’t glassy, he said. If we went any faster, the boat might pitch against the waves and crack apart at the seams.

After all that could have been, that moment was the trip’s most perilous. Crossing Pirate Alley, the closest I came to real danger—and to killing everyone onboard—was at my own hands. I knew that to be a powerful lesson . . . about . . . not to . . . of . . .

Who’s bad? MJ said from the speakers.

“Who is bad? Who is nice?” answered the Tanzanian. He bubbled over with laughter. Berbera emerged just visible on the horizon.

It is 140 nautical miles (160 miles) due south from Aden to the shores of Somaliland, and sailing gingerly, we made it in twenty-two hours. The Ogo highlands sloped back from the coast, lion’s yellow under a winter’s haze. Farther away it was green. At the eastern end of the port of Berbera, hulking shipwrecks and rusting half-sunken ships clumped together like car parts in Camden.

“Welcome!” Hari beamed.