Down to the Gate of the She-Camel
‘Nowhere have I experienced more strenuous travelling than in the Yemen … I had the cartilages removed from both knees; apparently I had worn them out.’
Wilfred Thesiger, Desert, Marsh and Mountain
IN THE FIRST CENTURY of Islam, a pilgrim named Yazid ibn Shayban was on his way to Mecca when he met an old man on the road. Yazid greeted him and asked him where he was from; the old man replied that he was of the people of al-Mahrah, in the east of Yemen. After exchanging the usual courtesies, Yazid was about to continue on his way when the old man said, ‘Wait! Upon my life, if you are of Arab stock then I shall know you. The Arabs are founded on four corner-stones: Mudar, Rabi’ah, al-Yaman and Quda’ah. Of which are you?’ Yazid said he was a descendant of Mudar. ‘Now,’ the old man went on, ‘are you of the Camelry or the Cavalry?’ Yazid thought for a while, then realized the old man meant Mudar’s two sons, Khandaf and Qays, and answered, ‘Of the Camelry.’ ‘And are you of the She-Hare or the Skull?’ That needed more working out …
Nine generations on, the old man’s freakishly developed memory showed no sign of flagging. ‘Now, this Shayban married three wives: Mihdad the daugher of Humran ibn Bishr ibn Amr ibn Murthad, who bore him Yazid; Akrashah the daughter of Hajib ibn Zurarah ibn Adas, who bore him al-Ma’mur; and Amrah the daugher of Bishr ibn Amr ibn Adas, who bore him al-Maq’ad. Of which are you?’ ‘Of Mihdad,’ Yazid replied, by now utterly astonished by the performance. ‘Do you see’, said the old man, ‘that I know you?’
The story, appropriately, is quoted at the end of Qadi Muhammad al-Hajari’s Compendium of the Lands and Tribes of Yemen. The Arabs in general are fascinated by pedigree, some families preserving their lineage back to Adam; but nowhere is genealogy as visible – on the ground – as it is in Yemen. The traditional view is that, starting from the ancient civilizations around the desert fringe, the ancestors spread outwards towards the coasts, giving their names to mountains, valleys and settlements on the way. ‘Their inward thought is’, as the Psalmist said, ‘that their houses shall continue for ever, and their dwelling places to all generations; they call their lands after their own names.’
The problem is that the geo-genealogists who charted the diaspora were over-keen. One example of their inventiveness is the attribution of the site of the Ethiopians’ church in San’a – the ecclesia/al-Qalis – to an ancestor called ‘al-Qalis’. Often, too, they found themselves in a chicken-and-egg quandary – did the tribe give its name to the place, or vice versa? – and usually came out on the side of a personal eponym. There is some evidence in the pre-Islamic inscriptions to suggest that the medieval texts often did have a point, and that a particular clan was in fact associated with a place that took on its name. But when al-Hamdani and his school tried to apply the idea across the board – and then work out the blood-relationships between the names – they had to exercise their considerable imaginations.
I would spend hours at a time lost in the map, following in my mind ancestral routes from the desert to the sea, bloodlines radiating from an ancient heartland. Naturally, it was the wadis that formed the main lines of communication, leading up from the desert into the mountains and, from the other side of the watershed, down to the coast.
Most of these valleys were well-worn tracks, cropping up frequently in the texts. But there was one on which the historians and the geographers had almost nothing to say, other than to give the supposed lineage of the ancestor who settled it: Surdud ibn Ma’di Karib ibn Sharahbil ibn Yankif ibn another eight generations ibn Himyar ibn Saba. Wadi Surdud falls to the coast in a virtually straight line from a point a little over twenty-five miles north-west of San’a, and should have been a major line of communication. The main road from the capital to the coast, however, plunges down 3,000 feet then climbs again to its original altitude, covering double the vertical distance of Surdud and snaking across the Haraz Mountains in a series of magnificent but terrifying switchbacks. To find out why Wadi Surdud had been ignored would mean walking it, to the point where it joins the motor road at Khamis Bani Sa’d. Debbie, an intrepid yet sensible walking companion, had fallen in with the plan on the grounds that Surdud is a valley, water runs downhill, and we should not have to do any climbing. In theory.
We left San’a at about nine o’clock in the morning, an early start by Ramadan standards. Our list of equipment was short: walking sticks, a torch, candles, ‘Cock Brand’ mosquito coils, penknives (mine is a Japanese Swiss army model incorporating a full-sized fork and dessert spoon, which once belonged to the chauffeur of the pre-Revolution ruler Imam Ahmad). Also boiled sweets, cheese spread triangles, two small tins of tuna – all these to be considered as treats – and a staple of festival cakes, made for the end of the great fast.*
We found a shared taxi to the town of Shibam surprisingly quickly and, with the temporal displacement that goes with Ramadan, seemed to get there before we left. Shibam market is full of sensible goods – pots, tobacco boxes, pinstriped jackets without arms, spirtles and so on. We made our way to the military bread ovens to stock up on kidam, bread rolls of amazing longevity; they were an Ottoman import, marching-fodder for Anatolian conscripts.
Again with uncanny speed, we found a truck to take us the short distance to al-Ahjir, the head of Wadi Surdud. As she climbed in, Debbie revealed no more than three gold-embroidered inches of her long Pakistani drawers to the other passengers, all old tribesmen. Their fasting ennui melted away.
‘Where are you going?’ they asked.
‘Tihamah.’
‘Tihamah? You’re going the wrong way. You must go back to San’a and get a taxi.’
‘But we want to walk.’
‘You’ll get lost,’ they said.
‘How can we get lost?’ asked Debbie. ‘We’ll just follow Surdud.’
The tribesmen looked at each other. ‘There’s no way down Surdud.’
We began to feel uneasy. These were sons of the land, their ancestors had lived here for generations: how could centuries, millennia of Yemenis be wrong? But they were also mountain men to whom the wadis were little known, sources of occasional income from share croppers, to be passed through as quickly as possible.
‘You see’, I ventured, ‘we’ve heard so much about the attractions of Surdud, we want to see it for ourselves.’
This worked. Even if foreigners do irrational things like sightseeing, and going on foot when comfortable cars are available that all but the poorest can afford, this had struck a chord; the tribesmen were not insensitive to the beauty of their surroundings. They had realized that we were not mistaken, just soft in the head.
Except for one. The truck bounced across a deep rut and he gripped my knee, partly to steady himself, partly for emphasis. ‘Have you heard about the tahish?’
The word rang a bell.
‘The tahish – the monster,’ he explained.
‘What sort of a monster?’ Debbie asked brightly.
‘It’s the size of a cow but it’s got a head like a hyena’s, with a wide jaw, like this …’ He opened his mouth and moved his head from side to side like a periscope. Everyone laughed.
I remembered the word. The Ministry of Culture had put on a play called The Tahish a couple of years before. Curious, I had done some research, but found only a reference to a tahishah in Hadramawt: the gloss on the word was strange and unilluminating – ‘a bird unknown to you’. At any rate, the monster in the play never even appeared on stage, which must have been a relief for the props people. It just roared in the wings and turned out to be nothing more than a figment of mass hysteria, an allegory of the fear inspired in pre-Revolution Yemenis by the tyrannical Imam Ahmad. The tahish was a bogeyman, a myth, a Yemeni yeti.
Suddenly the man’s head stopped swivelling and his eyes fixed on me. ‘Last year the tahish ate a man in Surdud. All but his flip-flops.’
Yemen has its share of disturbing creatures. First, there are snakes. Some are benign, like the snake that guarded the Palace of Ghumdan in pre-Islamic San’a. Guardian serpents are still to be found carved, coiled, on the walls of houses – coiled to spring, like the flying snakes that Greek geographers mentioned as watching over Yemen’s incense groves. The tails of certain snakes, used as kohl applicators, are said to prevent eye disease. As for the malevolent ones, they are dealt with by the hannash, the professional snake-gatherer. One hannash I met in the mountains west of the capital was claimed to be able to attract dozens of snakes from a single house by reciting Qur’anic verses; they would slither into a sack and writhe harmlessly. Not knowing any hannashes in San’a, the only time I found a snake in my house I decapitated it with a coffee-roasting spoon.*
Then there are scorpions. Very occasionally they are found in bunches of qat. Once, a baby one walked out of my bundle and across my lap, and disappeared among the leavings in the middle of the room. I have never seen qat-chewers move faster. Another creature that sometimes pops up in qat is the fukhakh, the hisser – the Yemeni name for the chameleon. Its blood taken externally is a cure for baldness, but its breath makes your teeth fall out. The gecko too is often killed, as it eats the remains of food from round your mouth as you sleep, pisses and gives you spots. Despite this I have been attached to several that have grown up in my house as they are clever flycatchers and converse, like the Hottentots, in clicks. There are few bigger beasts, although hyenas are common and leopards are spotted occasionally. The thirteenth-century traveller Ibn al-Mujawir also noted were-lions in the mountains west of Hajjah. They now appear to be extinct. All the same, who could tell what might be waiting in the unvisited gorges of Surdud?
We said goodbye to the tribesmen where the road entered al-Ahjir. I got my boot caught in the truck’s tailgate; Debbie descended, again with remarkable decorum. The truck lurched away and we were left looking over the valley. Al-Ahjir is a huge bowl. There is something un-Yemeni in the shape, as though, in contrast to the jagged and geologically young mountains, this is the product of lengthy attrition, like a glacial corrie. Behind us rose the ramparts on which the fortress-town of Kawkaban sits, up in the gods of this huge natural theatre. In front, at the far side of al-Ahjir, was a gap – the lip of the bowl – and although it was too far away to see, we knew that beyond it the land dropped away, down, down to the Red Sea. It is easy to forget how high you are, living up here on top of the mountains and surrounded by more mountains; but the thought of that uninterrupted 8,000-foot descent charged the spot with massive potential energy. I had a momentary vision of tilting the bowl we were standing in and seeing Yemen pour away. (In fact, landslides have occurred here. Eight hundred years ago an entire village slid a mile down al-Ahjir and engulfed the hamlet below. The people of the second village complained to a judge and were awarded the topsoil which had arrived so precipitately on their doorsteps. The people of the first village were permitted to recover their houses.)
The track was good, and we almost skipped down it. All around us was the evidence of long and careful cultivation. ‘Al-Ahjir’ derives from the old South Arabian hajar, a town, and the name is shared with many other anciently inhabited areas. The valley is watered by permanent streams which once powered mills. Grain is still produced, mainly sorghum and a little barley, as well as apricots, peaches, almonds and qat.
The motor track soon doubled back to climb around the inside of al-Ahjir, serving a string of villages. We branched off it and climbed down into the empty flood course, turning to look up towards Kawkaban for the last time. We were leaving the familiar and trusting ourselves to gravity, as free as the water which when it rained would tumble over these rocks. Surrounded by Cock Brand coils, we would sleep wherever we were when the sun went down.
A few goats foraged, untended. One was standing on its hind legs in the middle of a thorn bush like the biblical ram caught in the thicket, reaching up to nibble at a leaf; another had scaled a tree and was munching its way, oblivious of the drop, along a slender branch. We neared the lip of al-Ahjir in silence, saving our breath for exclamations of wonder at the great panorama which would open up before us.
It didn’t. Through the gap, all that could be seen was a narrow and gloomy canyon.
‘I wonder if we’ve come the right way,’ Debbie said. She reached into the pocket of my rucksack for the map and we followed the broken line of the track, down from the spot where we had left the truck, past the villages of al-Zuhar and Silyah, into the watercourse. Here the contours began to look like lines of panic in a Munch lithograph. There were no tracks or settlements; not even, for most of the wadi’s length, any of those tiny black squares which show habitations. Mentally I shrunk myself to scale – about the size of a mushroom spore – and dragged myself across the knotty 6-mile squares. We had come the right way. This was Wadi Surdud.
The canyon soon opened up, but in one dimension only – downwards. At the same time the cliffs above us edged closer together, threatening. Boulders underfoot grew larger, and the only sound was of our boots scraping to get a grip on their smooth surface. The cliffs shut out the sky and finally closed on us like a sphincter. We had to double up and edge through a tunnel where the sides of the wadi had collapsed, all but blocking it.
Then the gorge opened up a little and we sat down to rest. Debbie pointed to a tree on a boulder, gripping the rock with roots like a spider crab’s legs: it could have had nothing to live on but air and dew, and it was flourishing. But the light, the little of it that penetrated, was fading with tropical swiftness. High above us, the cliffs were rapidly caramelizing.
‘Don’t you think we’d better find somewhere to sleep while we can still see?’ Debbie said.
I remembered the tahish. This was definitely tahish country. ‘Yes. But not here.’
We had maybe ten minutes of light. Soon the gorge opened up a little more and the sides were no longer perpendicular. We were standing on a small beach of white sand in the lee of an enormous flat-topped boulder.
‘This is the spot,’ said Debbie. She began to unload her rucksack on the sand.
I was horrified. ‘Hey, are you crazy? This place is going to be slithering with snakes!’ In the half light, every twig was taking on terrifying reptilian capabilities. ‘Let’s go up on to that boulder.’
‘You can if you want. I’m staying here,’ she said, unfolding her aluminium foil groundsheet. ‘I’m not sleeping on a rock when there’s all this nice sand around.’
‘Well, I’m the one who’s got to take your body back to your grieving parents.’
‘Well, if you’re that worried … But tomorrow, I choose.’
The top of the boulder was flat: it was not horizontal. We chased the tuna tin, then the candles, as they rolled away. The candles wouldn’t stay lit anyway, so we ate our kidam and tuna in the dark. After supper I stood on the edge of the boulder, gripping it with my bare toes, and peed; there was a long gap before I heard it hit the sand. I swayed. There was nothing else to do, so we lit some mosquito coils, using the Imam’s chauffeur’s penknife and the empty tuna tin as supports, and lay down. Debbie crackled on her groundsheet.
It was too early for sleep so we played Botticelli.
‘Are you’, I asked, ages later, ‘a Danish astronomer with a nasal prosthesis?’ Debbie had failed on Bartók, but she had got Bacon, Byron and Blondie.
‘No, I’m not … B … B …’ She yawned.
‘Want a clue? It was a golden nasal prosthesis.’
A minute later I heard her regular breathing and looked at my watch. Asleep at half past seven. I gazed up at the stars. Framed by the valley sides, their brightness seemed intensified, artificial, like a planetarium. I counted half a dozen shooting stars, and remembered from my research on the valley that in the year 1385 a stone two cubits long had fallen here from the sky. The sliding village, the falling stone – otherwise, the historians were silent on Surdud. I fell asleep wondering what the odds were against being hit by a meteorite.
It was not yet dawn when I woke up, but we needed to get an early start so I made breakfast, opening the kidam bag and feeling for a couple of cheese triangles. I glanced at my watch. It was eleven p.m.
Looking over to where Debbie was, I realized with a surge of panic that she was not there. The tahish hadn’t left so much as a corner of her groundsheet. Or perhaps she had moved down on to her beach, where I would find her in the throes of death, writhing with asps. I dislodged the tuna tin, and the noise was answered by a moan and a rustle from below.
‘Debbie! What are you doing down there?’
‘Down where?’
I felt around for the torch. It too had gone. Then I realized what had happened. Because of the angle, we had slid down the smooth rock. Debbie, on her shiny foil, had gone further. At this rate she would have been over the edge before the sun was up. We found a part of the rock that was not so steeply inclined, but neither of us got any more sleep that night.
That was how it seemed. But what I was jolted out of was sleep, or something like it. The sky had turned violet and the stars were fading; there were twitters from all around, first isolated then joining together. Then I heard what must have woken me – a harsh, high-pitched scream echoing from the cliffs above, then another, then frenzied chattering. Debbie was awake too and we looked at each other, then up at where the sound was coming from. There was a clatter of tumbling scree, more jabbering, a glimpse of something half man, half dog.
‘Baboons,’ Debbie whispered. The sounds continued, but although we carried on scanning the high places we saw nothing. After a while all was quiet.
The distance from densely cultivated al-Ahjir was short, but we had passed into a secret and unfrequented place. Elsewhere baboons are often captured and killed, but this was their territory and we were interlopers. The sun was coming up, the birds had taken over with a seamless counterpoint of warbling, but we felt we were still being watched from the cliffs by Papio hamadryas arabicus.
I remembered the baboon I had met in a San’a street. It was blocking the way, teeth bared. I picked up a stone. So did the baboon. We stood glaring at each other until a group of men came calling, ‘Sa’id! Sa’id!’, and it scampered off down a side alley. Pet baboons are always called Sa’id, which means ‘happy’. They are usually catatonically depressed or in a snarling rage.
We had breakfast and left the rock, light-headed after so little sleep. I needed a caffeine jolt but had to make do with a few gulps of water: there was no indication of when, or if, we would find any, so we had to ration ourselves. Almost on cue and totally unexpected came the sound, mechanical and rhythmic, of a water pump. But as we went on it resolved itself into something different. The sides of the gorge were narrowing again and amplifying the noise like the horn of an old gramophone – not a pump, but water itself, trickling and gurgling. Rounding a corner we saw a stream, only a small one from a side wadi but suddenly growing – from where? – as it met the main watercourse. It could only have come from underground. We washed the sleep from our eyes and filled empty bottles, scattering tiny fish.
The stream stayed with us along the gorge and we had to walk through it. It was a delicious feeling, the cold water swilling around the inside of your boots, until you stepped in a deeper part and they filled up with abrasive grit. For the next couple of hours there was relief, then grit, then a stop to undo laces and empty it out, then relief and the cycle starting again. By mid-morning we had two types of stops – boot-stops and bag-stops. Most of the bag-stops were mine, as my sixty-year-old rucksack had no shoulder padding. Every long walk I do I resolve to get another, but have never found a replacement for its bleached and mildew-spotted canvas among the garish hi-tech creations in the shops.
Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the stream vanished.
‘So,’ said Debbie, ‘that was Surdud.’
We had been looking forward to not carrying heavy water bottles. Now we would have to limit ourselves to sips and lug the stuff to Khamis Bani Sa’d. The sun was getting higher and we sweated down the canyon. During a boot-stop we examined the map and realized we had lost 3,000 feet in height since leaving the truck the day before, which explained the heat: in linear terms there were still three-quarters of the way to go.
Rounding another sharp twist in the gorge, we were heading into the sun and didn’t see the woman until we were within speaking distance. She was coming towards us, picking her way nimbly through the stones.
‘Al-salam alaykum!’ said Debbie, cheerfully.
The woman, old and unveiled, appraised us with pursed lips. Her face was blotched with areas of lost pigmentation.* She didn’t answer.
I was worried. If you meet an old woman in a lonely place and she does not respond to your greeting, she may be a witch. I wondered whether to exclaim, ‘I take refuge with God from witches!’ It would cover all eventualities: if she were a witch she would presumably disappear in a puff of smoke; if not, she would get the point that it is rude not to respond to greetings.
‘Wa alaykum al-salam,’ the woman said, just in time. ‘Where are you from?’
‘Britain.’
‘And where do you think you’re going?’ she asked, with sudden and unaccountable anger. We pointed down-wadi. ‘Ha! So you’re going to spend the festival in Britain!’ She folded her arms and looked at us as if we were crazy. ‘Well, you’d better hurry up or you won’t get there.’
‘Actually … we’re going to Tihamah.’
‘That’s what I mean. You’d better hurry. The festival’s today. Or is it tomorrow. Do you know?’
‘Well, in San’a they said it’s probably tomorrow.’
‘Ha! You don’t know!’ She shook her head in pity. ‘Well I don’t know either. Hmm … you’re going to spend the festival in your wife’s village … what’s it called? Britain?’
There was clearly no point in explaining.
‘So what’s the matter with you, boy? Why don’t you ride?’
I shrugged feebly, gestured to the boulders, the towering cliffs, the burning sun.
The woman turned full on me. ‘Shame on you,’ she shouted, ‘starving your wife like this!’ She strode off, round the bend.
Debbie and I were left looking at each other, wondering where she was going. A full minute later, Debbie asked, ‘What did she say you were doing to me?’
‘She said I was starving you. Tija’ja’. Well, that’s the dialect meaning. In Classical Arabic I think it means “to make a camel kneel so you can cut its throat”.’
The gorge kept expanding and contracting like a gut in spasm. At times, there were glimpses far up into the ranges of al-Haymah on the left and al-Tawilah on the right, shoulders and crests looming above like the silhouettes of prehistoric beasts. The sky was clear, except for a few shreds of cloud which had snagged on the higher peaks; the sun glinted off the windows of houses perched on what looked like the least accessible ridges. I wondered, as I always did in the High Yemen, how men could be deluded into thinking themselves eagles.
Suddenly it would all be cut off, this other, higher world. The wadi sides would close together, shutting out the sun and confining us in secrecy. Translucent ferns, aliens from temperate places, clung where water dripped down the cliff walls, often where moisture showed itself as little more than a stain. And that was the strange thing. All around was the evidence of erosion, cliffs undercut, niches hollowed out of the rock by eddies, some with a whitish mineral deposit where water had lain and evaporated slowly – like the empty fonts and stoops of a redundant church. Gloom and damp and silence all added to the ecclesiastical atmosphere. It was gothic; not the rational gothic of medieval times, nor the stick-on gothick of Strawberry Hill, but the vegetable gothic of Gaudí, growing, slowly, by subtraction. But when? Here erosion was not a gradual process; these rocks had been subjected to sudden and gigantic forces of water and gravity, the same gravity which was taking us, increasingly painfully, down Surdud.
There was a third type of stop, the map-stop. We knew where we were going but not how far we’d gone; time had little bearing on distance. Triangulating by the sun, the direction of contours, and by elimination, we could at least find where we weren’t. Where we were was more conjectural. There were a few scattered habitations marked, not more than half a mile away; but by totting up the contours we realized that the half-mile was both horizontal and vertical, and that the houses were the ones we had seen catching the sun.
It was during a map-stop that we heard an enormous bang. It echoed for perhaps seven seconds, a diapason reverberation on the scale of Notre Dame. And, strangely, there was something in the sound that took me back in time a long way.
Shortly after, a man appeared round a twist in the gorge. He greeted us and came to squat down nearby, his deeply cracked bare feet gripping the rock. His face was that of an old man but no grey showed in the hair escaping from his headcloth. I looked at his gun and wondered how his slight frame coped with the recoil, then remembered that in the school corps we had probably been no more than fifteen when we shot the same .303s. ‘Can I have a look?’
He handed me the rifle. Its butt, smooth and patinated, bore a stamp.
‘Do you know how old this is?’ I asked.
‘Old.’ He looked at me. ‘As old as you.’
I shook my head. ‘It’s as old as my father.’ I pointed to the stamp, a crowned GR and 1916. ‘Seventy-six years. This is the mark of our Queen’s grandfather, George ibn Edward.’
‘George Bush?’
‘No, much older. But they’re still the best guns – much better than the ali.’
The man nodded. The ali is the AK47, the standard weapon of contemporary Yemen, but guns like these, simple as they are, are admired in the same way as old daggers.
‘I just missed a wabr. They move like demons,’ he said.
‘Why did you want to kill it?’
‘For the festival.’
‘So a wabr is lawful meat?’
‘Yes. The meat’s good, but you must shoot it in the head. If you get it anywhere else it pisses inside itself and you can’t eat it.’
Debbie asked what a wabr was. I explained that it was a rock hyrax, a rodent-like creature which is apparently a biological relative of the rhinoceros and the elephant. I had never heard of hyraxes being eaten but knew that their dung is sometimes mixed with warm water and used by rheumatism sufferers as a poultice. They are timid animals, but if cornered are said to fly at their attacker’s genitalia.
I handed back the gun. Alongside the AK47, American automatics are to be seen, and the occasional aristocratic hunting rifle. Even in urban San’a many households have something in case of emergency, perhaps an old tommy-gun gathering dust in a storeroom; a story goes that many weapons were impounded there in the Seventies during a lunar eclipse, when the San’anis took to the streets to shoot at where the moon should have been. I wondered how this venerable weapon had got here – by way of Lawrence and the Arab Revolt, via the Somme or Vimy Ridge, or as part of a consignment bought cheap by a dodgy Aden trader. The man shouldered the rifle. He said he had to be going to see about preparations for the festival and took his leave, off to hunt the hyrax.
We pressed on for a while, then, more as an excuse to stop than from any desire to eat, sat down to have lunch under an acacia. The kidam were running low so, reluctantly, we went on to the festival cakes. They were dissolving into a mass of crumbs, and ants had got into the bag. We picked out some of the more intact fragments and dusted them off. They had a cloying texture, like plaster of Paris. Pudding was a boiled sweet. I read a couple of chapters of a biography of Vita Sackville-West I had brought and lay back.
Debbie was keen to be off. I envied her less aesthetically pleasing but ergonomically advanced rucksack, and grumbled like a camel being loaded as the hard canvas bit into my shoulders. I tried using spare socks as padding but they shed themselves after a few hundred yards. A nail was coming up through the heel of my right boot. Walking in this dry and stony place was ceasing to be a pleasure, and I looked at the patches of shade, longing to give in and curl up again with Vita; there was something of her in Debbie, I thought, striding out like Diana the Huntress. She disappeared round a corner. Then I heard her calling, too far off to know whether it was in distress or excitement. Rucksack bumping, limping to avoid the nail, I stumbled off at a trot and caught up. Debbie was splashing about in a stream. The water had reappeared.
Not long after, we saw signs of cultivation, the first since al-Ahjir. A few tiny fields had been terraced into the side of the wadi, way up out of reach of flash floods; they were long abandoned and, like deserted lazy-beds in the Scottish Highlands haunted by memories of the Clearances, there was an air of sadness about them. Soon after this came the first inhabited spot. It would never have appeared as such to the aerial photographers who made our map – the house, more of a byre, was the concave underside of a cottage-sized boulder, smoke-blackened and, even from the far side of the stream, smelling richly of cattle. A woman and a small child stood watching us. The woman replied to Debbie’s greeting but waved us away as there was no man around.
We walked on, invigorated by the presence of running water, the late afternoon drop in temperature and the thought that we had passed back into the world of people, leaving behind the beautiful but disturbingly empty upper reaches of Surdud. The way had been tiring but not what you would call difficult. From now on it would be plain sailing. In regularly spaced villages curious but kindly people would invite us to decent meals.
‘Whayyy!’ The voice came from above us, on the left. ‘Whaaah! Where are you going?’ A man skipped down the mountainside towards us. He had the same small frame as the hyrax hunter, and carried an axe with a tiny head and a long rough haft.
‘Down the wadi,’ we said.
‘You can’t. Come and stay with us, then you can go on through al-Haymah to the motor road.’
‘Is that your place back there, with the cattle?’ I asked.
‘Yes, but we don’t live there. Our house is up above.’
‘How far?’
‘Two hours. Three for you,’ he added, glancing at our sticks. ‘We’ll be there not long after sunset.’
‘That’s very kind of you, but we ought to press on. You see, we’re walking to Tihamah.’
The man smiled. ‘You can’t.’
On walks I was always meeting people whose parents’ generation had thought nothing of going on a three-day march to buy a pound of sugar but who, within a few years of the first car coming, had been softened into total reliance on mechanical transport. Pansies. Namby-pambies. Thesiger was right: the motor car had spelt the death of Arab virility. ‘But’, I said petulantly, ‘we’ve walked all the way from the head of al-Ahjir.’
He raised his eyebrows, impressed. ‘I said you can’t go on. Listen.’ He cupped his ear downstream. Water tinkled pleasantly; a breeze had begun to blow up from Tihamah, ruffling its surface. But there was something else. A deeper, bass note, growing louder as the breeze gathered strength.
‘You see?’ said the man. ‘The waterfall. Come and stay with us, then go through al-Haymah to the motor road.’
Debbie and I held a quick conference. We were speaking in English but the man, his head cocked to one side, nodded in agreement whenever I caught his eye. We had come so far. There was no way we would give up Surdud. It was just the usual assumption he was making that, being outsiders, we were puny.
‘Is there no way past it?’ I asked.
‘No. There’s no way past it. There’s a way down it, but not for you. Come and stay with us.’
‘You’re very kind, but we’d like to try.’
We must be devil-driven. ‘Well … I’ve done it myself. You … you do this …’ he straightened himself up with his arms flat by his sides, ‘then you slide, all in one go. At the bottom the water’s up to here’, he put his hand to his chin, ‘when it’s low.’
‘Is it low now?’ asked Debbie.
‘Perhaps. But come and stay with us.’
‘May God reward your generosity,’ I said, ‘but we’ll try. We’re strong – good climbers and swimmers,’ I added, without much conviction.
‘Then God be with you,’ he said, shaking his head. He left us and made for the byre.
Five minutes later we came to a pool at the head of the waterfall. By now, the noise was a roar, though we still couldn’t see its source. We ditched our rucksacks and waded in: the water was chilly and came up to our waists. It was still, but with the ominous calm of potential energy. Reaching the far side, I stood astride the lip of the cascade. Only the last few inches of the water’s surface seemed to move, then slide over the edge like an endless skein of gunmetal silk before plunging some twenty feet down a chute.
Debbie joined me. ‘That looks fun! Who’s first?’ She wasn’t being ironical.
I looked down into the seething cauldron below. It led to a series of smaller cascades. ‘Look, we don’t even know what’s under the surface. There could be rocks – I mean, you could twist an ankle, knock yourself out and drown. And how are we going to get the bags down?’
‘So what do you suggest?’
I scanned the far side of the gorge. ‘We could lever ourselves down that crack and …’
‘What crack?’
I pointed to a fingertip-wide fault in the smooth rock. Debbie said nothing for a long time.
For half an hour we weighed pros and cons. Debbie was afraid of the climb; I was afraid of the water. The light went and we decided to sleep on it.
We waded back through the pool, picked up our bags and found a beach of clean white sand. I didn’t argue, and was glad to lie down on the yielding surface after the last tortured night on the rock. We finished the kidam, treating ourselves to some cheese triangles, and before the end of the first round of Botticelli Debbie was asleep. I had discovered how to make a sort of sleeping bag by tying the ends of my sheet into bunches, and lay, hands crossed on chest, like a shrouded effigy on a medieval tomb, waiting for the slither of reptilian flesh. I slept well.
Another visit to the waterfall in the morning revealed the folly of attempting to go either round it or down it. So we went over the mountain instead.
Scrambling up rock that crumbled like festival cakes, clutching at roots, sending avalanches of scree over cliffs, we passed one point of no return after another. Eventually we found a goat-track that led down, and knew the danger was over. But the goat-track became a hyrax-track, then ended at the brink of a sheer sixty-foot gully. We climbed all the way back, then up a horribly steep slope to the next shoulder of mountain, only it wasn’t a shoulder but a shoulderblade followed by a chasm. By now we were almost weeping with frustration. There was to be no more up, we decided, and followed the shoulderblade downwards. It bristled with desert roses and prickly tree euphorbias, and the rock was fissured and rotten like the vertebrae of a decaying carcass. We arrived at the bottom speechless, sweating, hands ripped, and realized the awful truth: six hours after we had started, we were back at the pool.
But something was different. There was no roar, or rather it was much fainter and came from our left.
‘We’ve done it!’ shouted Debbie, pointing to the waterfall five hundred yards upstream. It looked insignificant, a milky smear against the rock.
We tore off our sweat-sodden clothes, hung them in a tree, and lay in the cool water. Massaged by bubbles and fine gravel, the sense of disembodiment was bliss, the knowledge certain that this never was, and never would be, a route down from the highlands. We had solved a very minor historical enigma.
I read Vita while Debbie embroidered. The panel she was working on was a private, unconventional map, each triangle or zigzag representing a halt in a wadi or on a mountain, or a wait to fix a puncture. I suspected that, Penelope-like, she unpicked it at night, so slowly did it grow. By the time we set off, the afternoon was already dying, the sun raking across the water into our eyes. Looking back, the mountains immediately behind were highlighted while their upper ranges were blue and unfocused, like the vanishing point of a Claude Lorrain landscape where centaurs live.
We came to a village. It wasn’t on the map. The houses were of two storeys, one room below for the animals, one above for people. They looked like the garden houses you sometimes find in the walled demesne of a manor house, except that they were painted with blue, yellow and red diamonds like a harlequin suit. A dog barked, a donkey brayed, sorghum rustled. A woman’s face popped out of the sorghum stalks, wished us a happy festival and scolded me for maltreating my wife. I gave her a Stan Laurel look of benign idiocy and left her clicking her tongue. ‘Be careful of the sayl!’ she shouted after us.
The sayl, the flash flood. I looked over my shoulder. Surdud smiled in the warm colours of late afternoon, but the blue distance had lost its innocence. Clouds were massing, stacked over the mountains from which we had come. The shallow brook we were walking through, only a few yards wide, was the outlet for a catchment area of thousands of square miles: it didn’t take much arithmetic to work out the result of even a moderate shower in the highlands. I remembered going up Wadi Sara’, which joins Surdud at Khamis Bani Sa’d, sitting on a load of firewood in the back of a truck, chewing qat and watching the cloud swirling round the peaks ahead. Suddenly the truck shot up the wadi bank with a scream of transmission – luckily I had my foot hooked under the load ropes – and, with a roar, a chest-high wall of water the colour of oxtail soup boiled past us, inches below the rear wheels. That was a sayl, a little one.
Debbie walked nonchalantly on in the middle of the stream. I kept to the edge. The occasional houses we passed – still not on the map – were built high above the watercourse, which at one point narrowed into a throat. Overhangs and undercuttings became sinister in the fading light. There was no longer any doubt about the forces that had sculpted them. Like the Ancient Mariner I dared not look behind.
Just when it was getting too dark to see, the valley opened up again and we camped on a raised bank. It had been sliced away like a cake, but we reckoned we were far enough from danger. I lay on my back, worried less by snakes than by the serpent tongues of lightning licking the high peaks. There was no thunder; there were no stars.
Next day the sky over the mountains was still gravid and threatening. We walked for half an hour before realizing that we were following a motor track: it was so faint, a graffito almost washed away, that it only occasionally showed as a ridge of pebbles separating two barely indented lines. It crossed and recrossed the stream, losing itself in beds of sage which gave off a peppery tang like tomcat’s piss. Stands of tall reeds and the odd talk tree, a kind of acacia, hid little fields, binding the precious soil together. Behind these were bare mountains, now lower and less jagged. From time to time a drab hamerkop flapped past with a whooping cry, or a huge electric-blue dragonfly hovered out of the way. Tall Goliath herons, each with its territory of double-bank fishing rights, stood trying to mesmerize the water. They were as still as garden statues and hardly bothered to lope into the air as we approached.
Visually it was Arcadia, but the pain of rucksack straps and blisters nagged like toothache. I knew how the ancient tyrants must feel, punished in a nether-world of tantalizing beauty by endlessly repetitive trials. I examined my feet: they were pallid, repulsive, like those troglodyte salamanders that live in permanent darkness. The heat was increasing. When we weren’t walking through water we were crunching across a fine layer of silt at the stream’s edge where it had cracked and curled up into huge cornflakes. More hamlets appeared, shimmering clusters of five or six houses on rocky spurs above us, each a little more prosperous as we got closer to Khamis Bani Sa’d, but the motor track was still as faint, a sporadic line on the palimpsest of the wadi bed. Dogs lay in pools of mud, and when one of them charged at our legs in a frenzy of barks I turned and chucked a stone, ripping the shoulder strap of my rucksack. The dog slouched off, grinning.
We stopped for lunch under a talh tree. Weaver-bird nests dangled from its branches like hairy fruit. I pictured rock hyraxes flying at them, teeth bared, in training for the day when they were cornered. We forced down the remaining fragments of festival cake. Food was beginning to occupy every corner of our thoughts. We knew that with each step we were nearer the port of al-Hudaydah and baked fish, blackened on the outside, succulently flaky on the inside, eaten with tomato, chilli and goat cheese relish; nearer to fattah of fresh bread soaked in ghee and dark, pungent acacia honey; nearer to mutton, tender as butter, baked slowly with mountain herbs in a clay oven, all washed down by icy Canada Dry Cola; and nearer to shami, the doyen of qat, raced down from the peaks of al-Mahabishah with the dew still on its asparagus-thick stalks, shami, fuel of dreams …
Somebody was calling us. We waved and passed on but he caught up with us in seconds. ‘Shame on you for not stopping! Come and have lunch with us.’
Good manners require a refusal. We made the feeblest possible excuses and followed him up a rough track into one of the perched villages. It smelt of smoke and goats. In his one-roomed house, with his wife, parents and young son, we had our first decent meal for four days: spongy luhuh bread, like a big flattened crumpet, dipped into milk and chillis; broth with fenugreek; and boiled goat meat.
Until the Gulf crisis, Rashad had worked at a laundry in Riyadh. He hadn’t seen his family for three years, which was typical of many rural Yemeni men who worked overseas. Surprisingly, he expressed little rancour over being thrown out – with nearly a million of his countrymen – by the Saudis, and hoped to go back. Just when was in the hand of God.
They wanted us to stay the night, but we brushed aside warnings that the sayl would carry us away. Rashad thought we might make it to Khamis that day if we hurried, but it was another four hours’ hard walk. There was no chance of meeting traffic on the track: a vehicle might pass by once or twice a year. A greater contrast with Riyadh and its eight-lane highways could not be imagined, but Rashad had taken it all in his stride, as he had the appearance of these two shabby foreigners.
Again, the afternoon cloud was stacking over the mountains behind us, and people we passed shouted, ‘The sayl! Be careful!’ Debbie said that death by drowning held no fears for her now she had a good meal inside her, and something of her blasé attitude began to rub off: from keeping to the stream’s edges, ready for the life-or-death rush up the bank, I started to follow her course down the middle of the sayl bed. It rained, great gouts the temperature of blood, but we weren’t bothered: the danger was rain in the mountains.
It was now five o’clock and from what Rashad had told us of sayl timing we knew the threat was past. More worrying was the thought that we had at least another couple of hours before Khamis and would be walking in the dark: even after a real lunch, we were determined to get a ride from there that night, down to al-Hudaydah and its baked fish.
Rounding a bend we saw something totally unexpected: a man fishing with a rod and line. When we got closer, we saw that the hook was baited with maize.* He confirmed Rashad’s estimate of the time it would take to reach Khamis.
‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen foreigners up this way,’ said Debbie.
The man thought. ‘Foreigners? Loads of them. Someone from San’a came here, oh, it must have been five years ago.’
The light went. Debbie plunged on, I lagged behind, stubbing my toes on rocks and cursing the nail in my boot. Debbie, who like Wilfred Thesiger had spent her early years in the British Embassy in imperial Addis Ababa, seemed to have inexhaustible reserves of stamina, while I wallowed in increasingly frantic self-pity. A dog howled, making me jump, and I remembered a story told by a San’ani friend. A man walking along just such a wadi at just such a moonless hour had stepped on something, a formless, squashy something. Suddenly all the dogs started baying. The man went on. Soon afterwards he developed a tumour in his leg: what he had stepped on was a jinni. I borrowed Debbie’s torch, which she disdained to use, and followed its pathetic stain of light.
Then I saw familiar shapes looming ahead. ‘We’re nearly there!’ I shouted. ‘See those mountains? They’re opposite Khamis, where Surdud joins Wadi Sara’. I remember them well.’
Squinting into the gloom, I soon realized I hadn’t remembered them at all – mountains all look much the same at night with no moon and no stars. I saw more familiar shapes but kept my mouth shut. Khamis Bani Sa’d might as well not exist: I would wake up in San’a, the baboon-haunted nave of Surdud forgotten as I was jolted out of this nightmare by the petit mal you experience as a false footstep in the first moments of sleep.
But we arrived. The sound of dogs and the smell of human habitation told us it was Khamis. We floundered through the confluence of Surdud and Sara’ for another twenty minutes, stepping on squashy things, setting off choruses of barking: the jinn could go to damnation.
At last we climbed the steep track that led up to the tarmac of the al-Hudaydah road. There, bathed in neon, was a shop, its doors open and beckoning, a fridge humming next to stacked crates of Canada Dry. ‘Debbie!’ I croaked, ‘Let’s celebrate.’ I stumbled over to the shop.
As I reached for the bottle opener a truck appeared, heading for al-Hudaydah. Debbie flagged it down and called to me. ‘Come on! We might be here all night.’
I handed back the unopened bottle, the condensation deliciously cool in my palm, picked up my rucksack and staggered to the truck. I hauled my wrecked body over the tailgate. Debbie followed, decorously, and only a little more stiffly than at Shibam. There were half a dozen other passengers in the truck. Mechanically, we answered their questions – where we were from, where we were going, where we had come from.
‘Shibam. On foot.’
There was a pause. ‘Why?’
‘We, er, wanted to save money,’ I said. And we had – a little over a pound. Our questioners fell silent. The wind rushed past, undoing my headscarf.
Peering ahead over the cab roof, I could just see the nick, like a gunsight, in the ridge of rock through which the road passes into the coastal plain of Tihamah. The nick is called Bab al-Naqah, the Gate of the She-Camel, after an unmistakable humped rock by the road. I’ve tried many times but I’ve never made out the She-Camel. Perhaps it is lack of imagination. Or perhaps too much imagination, which turns these igneous outcrops, these last ripped margins of the High Yemen, into a bestiary of stone guardians: herds of camels both dromedary and Bactrian, marine iguanas, spiny anteaters, mastodons, stegasauri, centaurs, griffins, manticores, chimeras, tahishes. Even Britain’s first woman prime minister is there, in profile.
After Bab al-Naqah the land is flat. In the dark, we couldn’t see Tihamah; but we could smell it. Warmth and humidity released distant and near-subliminal odours of smoke, dung, roadside dead dog, jasmine. And somewhere, even here, was the smell of the sea.
Across this vapour-filled plain came the outsiders – merchants and adventurers, diplomats and soldiers, Ayyubids, Mamluks and Ottomans. It is the proper way to enter Yemen. Today, most people land at San’a Airport and see the place inside out. But not all outsiders came this way. One, al-Hadi, the first Imam, came out of the north. In Sa’dah he founded a line of scholar-warriors who ruled, until only a generation ago, for more than a thousand years.