* For example, rash, ‘to eat much/to eat little/a camel hairy behind the ears’.
* The jibe refers to two of Yemen’s traditional crafts, and to the baboons which live in its mountains. The remark about nags is unfair – Yemeni horses were held in high esteem. The rat was the one said to have gnawed away at the great Marib Dam and caused its collapse. The woman was the biblical Queen of Sheba/Saba, who the Qur’an says was brought to Solomon’s attention by a talking hoopoe.
* Shelagh Weir, Qat in Yemen.
* For brief accounts of the Sabaean. s and other rulers of Yemen, see the Glossary.
* Until the 1960s, San’a was supplied by water in the same way, by a system of wells and underground tunnels known as ghayls.
* By a quirk of history, oil is now being extracted from just those areas where the ancient trade in incense was centred: Marib, Shabwah and Hadramawt.
* This fancy – if that is what it is – recurs in later works. On the doombur, the Indian fat-tailed sheep, the compiler of Hobson–Jobson quotes a contributor to the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal: ‘I was informed by a person who possessed large flocks, and who had no reason to deceive me, that sometimes the tail of the Tymunnee doombas increased to such a size, that a cart or small truck on wheels was necessary to support the weight, and that without it the animal could not wander about; he declared also that he had produced tails in his flock which weighted 12 Tabreezi munds, or 48 seers puckah, equal to about 96 lbs’
† The French archaeologist Christian Robin has pointed out that among the Sabaean names for incense are two terms for unknown varieties, ‘gold’ and ‘divine gold’. Perhaps, then, the first gift of the Magi to the infant Christ was another aromatic.
* The great church built by the Ethiopians, now a hole in the ground near the suq but still known as ‘al-Qalis’ after its Greek name.
* Accounts of bodies found intact recall the recent discovery near San’a of five mummies, wrapped in leather and linen. They are accompanied, like the ones al-Hamdani describes, by wooden plaques. Carbon-14 dating has given their age as around 2,300 years.
* See, on customs involving bulls and ibexes, the articles by Jacques Ryckmans and Walter Dostal in Arabian and Islamic Studies.
* A sixteenth-century Yemeni traveller considered twenty items indispensable for any journey. His packing list went: kohl applicator, kohl pot, scissors, tooth-cleaning stick, mirror, comb, inkstand, writing-case, penknife, pen-box, staff, overcoat, tweezers, Qur’an, prayer-mat, ablution vessel, belt, victuals, scroll of paper, sewing kit.
* A Tradition of the Prophet says that snakes found in houses embody spirits, some benign, others malevolent: you should give them fair warning by reciting the call to prayer, and only if they take no notice should they be killed.
* Ibn al-Mujawir ascribes the condition, known as ‘white leprosy’, to a number of possible causes: the bite of a yellow fly; an excess of milk and fish in the diet leading to the predominance of moist humours; or infection with the saliva of geckoes.
* Habshush mentions that fish called awshaj, a type of barbel, were caught in Surdud and elsewhere by poisoning with dafar seeds and sold to the Jews. Mountain tribesmen long considered fish to be an inedible kind of worm.
* The sword, of ancient Yemeni manufacture, was found embedded in a column in Sa’dah by a later imam of the fourteenth century AD. It passed into the hands of the Rasulid sultan al-Ashraf, who had its authenticity confirmed when, after having sex, he found himself unable to lift it from its hook until he had bathed. One Dhu al-Fiqar is now displayed in Istanbul, although there are other claimants.
† Zayd’s naked body was exposed on a rubbish dump for five years. Tradition says that his paunch drooped, miraculously, to conceal his pudenda.
* The British Indian naval officer Cruttenden, who visited al-Mansur in 1836, describes the Imam’s stately procession to the Great Mosque, mounted on a magnificent white charger, his hand resting on the shoulder of ‘a confidential eunuch’. The Imam, however, lived a private life marked by ‘gross sensuality’, and within a month had been dethroned, insulted and immured in a dungeon.
* The Sabaean word for a vineyard is wyn. Its similarity to the supposedly Indo-European root (oinos, vinum, wine, and so on) is striking, and makes one wonder where viticulture was first practised.
* The soap story is also told, by Fynes Moryson (An Itinerary Containing His Ten Yeeres Travell …, London, 1617), of the Irish: ‘when they found Sope and Starch, carried for the use of our Laundresses, they thinking them to be some dainty meates, did eat them greedily’.
* The contradictory nature of mountain tribesmen was noted by the journalist Walter Harris, who visited Yemen in 1892. ‘The Yemenis’, he wrote, ‘are the aristocracy of Islam. Wild in appearance, their manners are perfect.’ The manners remained perfect even when Harris did his party trick – administering electric shocks with a small generator he carried in his baggage.
* Tribal generosity sometimes became a fetish. Doreen Ingrams says that travellers who did not stop to accept hospitality from the Buqri family in Hadramawt would be shot at.
* Another version runs, ‘We are thieves, we are highwaymen, our knees are nailed!’ Having nailed knees has something of the English expression ‘putting hairs on your chest’- or even ‘lead in your pencil’.
* This curious people also features in the work of another Anglicized Jew, Disraeli’s 1847 novel Tancred, or The New Crusade.
* The great ninth-century polymath al-Jahiz’s Book of Animals. Al-Jahiz, ‘Popeyes’ (his real name was Abu Uthman Amr ibn Bahr al-Basri), was reputedly killed by his own library when the piles of books he worked among collapsed on top of him.
* Mainstream Zaydi opposition to Sufism has always been implacable. One imam cured a lunatic maidservant by having her fed bread baked on a fire fuelled by Al-Fusus, a famous tract by the Andalusian Sufi Ibn Arabi. A similar prescription also cured an eighteen-month bout of diarrhoea.
* A hoarding instinct seems to have run in the family. Robert Finlay, Assistant Surgeon to the British Mokha Residency, who treated the ruling Imam in 1823, wrote in his diary: ‘The rooms His Highness occupied during his sickness were so full of horse trappings, jimburs [jambiyahs], swords, matchlocks, pistols, organs, common empty bottles, bales of piece goods, broad cloths, English silks, etc. etc. that there was scarcely room left for him to move. On his pillow were fixed 6 gold and silver watches, all going.’
* Until recently Ahmad’s personal barber was still at work in Ta’izz. I have been shaved by him, and admit that as the blade passed over my throat, I felt a frisson at the thought of where the hand holding it had been.
* The old Arabic name for Raymah was Jublan, from a certain Jublan ibn Sahl of the line of Himyar. His brother Wusab gave his name to the next range south.
* The pro-Ottoman historian al-Nahrawali recorded that on one occasion Yemeni forces retreated after their commander’s donkey farted – they took it as an omen of disaster. The Raymis – judging by the flatulence of their donkeys – must have a lot of bad luck.
* Pedro Páez, one of two Jesuits captured off the south coast towards the end of the sixteenth century, records that in Hadramawt they were given ‘Cahua, made from the rind of the fruit Bun, in place of wine’. The Arabic qahwah – by coincidence originally a word for wine – went through various English spellings including ‘coho’, ‘cohoo’ and ‘coughe’, before ending up as ‘coffee’.
* The eighteenth-century French visitor de la Roque said, wistfully, of qishr, ‘La couleur de cette est semblable à la meilleure bière d’Angleterre.’
* Al-Khadir is a fearfully complex figure, variously considered a prophet (Elijah?), a saint or an angel. Some authorities have him as the brother of Qahtan. An eighth-century writer said that al-Khadir, whose name is really an epithet, was told during a visit to the Fountain of Life: ‘Where thy feet touch the earth, it will become green.’ He is still alive and well, and people occasionally bump into him in Yemen’s western mountains.
* A story in al-Hajari’s Compendium tells of some cattle rustlers who sacrificed a stolen bullock as part of the rain-prayer ceremony. Rain fell, but on the territory of the bullock’s rightful owners.
* The name comes from Prince of Wales Crescent (itself commemorating the 1875 visit of the future Edward VII, who was presented with three ostriches in allusion to his heraldic badge).
* For an account of which I have drawn on the late Dr Robin Bidwell’s article in Arabian Studies, VI, 1982.
* Ba is a common prefix of Hadrami family names.
* Mrs Bent’s book (her husband died shortly after the journey) is one of the most fascinating accounts of Arabian travel. It tells of the couple’s wanderings in the region, accompanied by an Indian surveyor who wore a Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers. Among their many discoveries was a new species of scorpion, Buthia bentii, which Mrs Bent found inside her glove. The book is, unfortunately, extraordinarily rare.
* The spiralling price of honey seems to have caused the disappearance of a traditional Hadrami recipe: slaughter a kid and cut the meat into chunks; put these in a large jar and cover them completely with honey; seal the jar tightly and leave for six months. The preserved meat is eaten uncooked. Women should not be allowed to eat this dish, as it is a powerful aphrodisiac.
* He was not the only Yemeni poet to meet a grisly end. In the seventh century, Waddah, having lost his first love to leprosy, cuckolded the Caliph Walid and was buried alive in a wardrobe.
* Sharifahs were, however, credited with the power to promote fertility in others, as Doreen Ingrams discovered: as yet childless, she was made to drink a draught of the Hadrami fertility drug – a sharifah’s spittle.
* A prominent local historian, Abdulqadir Muhammad al-Sabban, gives a vivid description of the Hud ziyarah and its carnival atmosphere. Alongside the performance of the standard Islamic obligations, pilgrims take part in a series of very uncanonical practices which include giving and taking ritual insults. First-timers are set upon by old hands, who grunt and foam at their victims ‘like bull camels in rut’, and pilgrims shout lewd nicknames at the villages they pass, sometimes causing fights – all because ‘laughter on the Hud pilgrimage is like praising God on others.’
* The form can be compared with tombs investigated by Yemeni and Soviet archaeologists above Wadi Rakhyah in Western Hadramawt and tentatively dated to the early second millennium BC. In these, dome-shaped structures containing crouched burials are given tails made of round or oval piles of stones. With the addition of more stones over the years, these would turn into the solid elongated form to be seen in Hud’s grave. While there is no obvious reason for the strange form, it may be linked to the shape of a comet, and thus to the ideas of a celestially based religion. A medieval writer, al-Ghazali, says that ringstones made from the rocks of Hud’s grave have powerful amuletic properties providing they are set at the conjunction of Venus and Jupiter, a possible survival of these celestial beliefs.
* All available evidence points to this part of Arabia as the place where the camel was domesticated, possibly as early as the third millennium BC (see Bulliet, The Camel and the Wheel).
* See Johnstone’s ‘Knots and Curses’. Such spells have also prevented the consummation of marriages. Knotting, however, can be used in white magic. On the isolated mountain of Razih, north-west of Sa’dah, lives a woman physician of repute who diagnoses illnesses by smelling the patient’s clothes, and then prescribes a remedy in the form of an amulet of knotted string.
* The story recalls the debate that raged over the permissibility of eating mermaids.
* The eighteenth-century traveller James Bruce noted the use of ‘a composition of musk, amber-grease, incense and benjoin, which they mix with the sharp horny nails that are at the extremity of the fish surumbac’.
* The choice of name rarely has any significance. However, I have seen a boy with six toes on each foot who was called Zayid, ‘Extra’.
* Unfortunately, we missed out on a delicacy of the Hajhir Mountains eaten by Vitaly Naumkin, the Russian scholar of all things Suqutri – the stomach of a goat cooked complete with its undigested contents, a sort of Suqutri haggis.
* The Moroccan traveller Ibn Battutah witnessed a witch trial in fourteenth-century Delhi, exactly the same as the Suqutri version except for the substitution of water-filled jars for stones. Naumkin suggests that Suqutri anti-witch campaigns could be connected with a subconscious fear of the island’s ancient matriarchal system reasserting itself. The term he gives for a witch, zahra, may be the same as the name of the seductress in the Bir Barhut story (see pp. 185–6). We also heard of an ancient Suqutri female ruler called al-Zahra.
* Wellsted says that the dog they had on board the survey vessel Palinurus was often mistaken for a lion. The distinction of being the only dog to penetrate the Suqutri interior probably goes to Rappo, a huge black Newfoundland that accompanied Schweinfurth in 1881. The reaction of the Suqutris is, unfortunately, not recorded.
* In fact it is the other way round, ‘civet’ having entered the European languages from the Arabic zabad, itself from the root connected with butter.
* Qalansiyah, where we first landed, probably gets its name – like San’a’s al-Qalis – from the Greek ecclesia.
* The Englishman John Jourdain, who visited Yemen in the early seventeenth century, gives a vivid picture of Portuguese decline. In Ta’izz he passed his time with ‘an old blind Portugall renegado witch’, who was considered a saint by the local inhabitants and consequently was in demand for his blessings and pious incantations. In private, however, the Portuguese ‘would burst out in laughing to me, sayinge … hee was noe other than a divell’.
* There can be few places left in the world where people are unacquainted with so ubiquitous an object. Watches appeared in the interior only recently; Wellsted, 160 years ago, had trouble persuading the Suqutris that his was not a live animal.
* Naumkin quotes an example of love poetry from Abdulkuri:
The nose of the woman who gave birth to her first child
Who forgot-you the agony
The bush which covered-you-it
The stone bush so that-would-not-stir.
* In 1993 a Kuwaiti newspaper, Al-Siyasah, said: ‘We have lost ten billion dollars in the Gulf War, and we are ready to lose ten billion more to ensure the partition of Yemen.’
* See above, p. 40.
* Victoria Clark used the phrase as the title of her Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes (London, 2010).
† And so, I saw after I wrote it, did Harold Ingrams in his book on Yemen. Great minds … or maybe just the bleeding obvious.
* The original British edition is called Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land.
* A recently coined word in Arabic, jamlakiyyah, describes the political system most Arabs live under. It is a portmanteau word composed of jumhuriyyah, ‘‘republic’’, and mamlakah, ‘‘kingdom’’. Perhaps the best English equivalent would be ‘‘democracy’’ + ‘‘monarchy’’ = ‘‘demonarchy’’.