Into the heart of Yemen

Jeremy Atiyah chewed qat, bonded with his taxi driver and followed in the Queen of Sheba's steps

Jeremy Atiyah 

Sunday, 3 August 1997

Not for nothing did the Romans call this place Arabia Felix, or Blessed Arabia. With torrid deserts to the north and the steaming Red Sea to the west, this corner of the Arabian peninsula should have been as hot as hell.

Instead it became the happy land that supplied the temples of the ancient world with their frankincense and myrrh. The Queen of Sheba - the Yemen's best-known businesswoman - even rode up the Frankincense Road to the Mediterranean for trade discussions with King Solomon. Gold poured south down the caravan routes, while the blessed tree resins flowed north, keeping temples fragrant from the Rhine to the Euphrates.

Blessed trees? In austere, puritanical Arabia? The Yemen is full of them. Its cool, green highlands, terraced by thousands of years of agriculture, produce almonds, peaches, oranges, pears, pomegranates and qat. The people of these mountains were no dour desert nomads but beneficent qat-chewing farmers who built permanent towns and villages; so permanent, in fact, that their fabulous embellished towers of cut stone still guard the highlands today.

Not that all this greenery is apparent when flying into the capital Sana'a in July. I had the vaguest impression of white molten lead as we crossed the Red Sea. On land, the air was brown with dust kicked up by summer storms. Only from close up did features such as dusty acacia trees, then entire vineyards, become visible. The Yemen is not a PR job. I rode into town from the airport in a juddering old car with a shouting Arab at the wheel. The road was lined by half-built breeze-block structures surrounded by plastic litter. When we reached it, I found that the main road encircling the old city doubled up as a wadi.

What of it. Men in tweed jackets and scruffy headwraps, hitching up their white futas (skirts), picked about the puddles, showing hairy legs and plastic sandals. Wives in black trailed just behind.

What the Yemen lacks in PR it soon makes up for in substance. Complete strangers kept stopping to shout greetings to me in the street. I checked in at the pounds 8-a-night Taj Talha Hotel, and clambered up six flights of stairs to the top. The steps were giant slabs of stone, while the walls of whitewashed gypsum were wrought into ornamental reliefs. I opened a tiny carved doorway to my bedroom and looked out at the old city of Sana'a. Can any hotel have better views than this? Probably the largest intact medieval city on earth, an Arabian cityscape of cut stone, mud, ornate geometrical plaster reliefs and brick arrangements spread out around my windows.

I was looking at - quite literally - fancy medieval skyscrapers. Round windows, arches, balconies, rough plaster friezes and open lattice-work multiplied in all directions. Tall, square towers reached for the sky. Occasional palm trees lent a splash of green, while the mosques gleamed pure white in the growing darkness. A sheep on a nearby rooftop was bleating and lightning flickered in the mountains.

The next day I went walking in the old city. The streets were as rough as old goat tracks. Approaching the Bab Yaman, the last gate from the old city wall, I crept through the flag-stoned entrance, past political posters, past skirted congregations of water-sellers and moneychangers with daggers in their belts. Rubble and heaps of rotting litter lay about in the sunshine; a giant cactus protruded from a wall. Later I noticed sticky dates, raisins, cinnamon, trinkets. Stubbly youths pushed wheelbarrows of dried chillis. Pungent tobacco leaves competed for my attention with chunks of incense. And everywhere, the stone turrets of Sana'a loomed above our heads.

How ancient could this city be? Were there, perhaps, still remains of one of the great churches of the world, the teak Ecclesia built by Ethiopians, supposedly with nails of gold and silver, and destroyed by Muslims around AD700? I asked a passing banana-seller if he knew where the Ecclesia was.

"Galise?" he echoed, using an Arabic word (qalis) which sounded remarkably like the modern French word for church. "Of course. It's round the corner." I followed his directions to a smelly hole in the ground, which banana-sellers know about because their fathers and grandfathers (in a line extending back 14 centuries) have told them about it. In search of more relics, I wandered into the National Museum, off the Maydan At-Tahrir. Here I found Yemeni teenagers, riveted by evidence of animal sacrifice and naked statuary, as well as the sight of ancient South Arabian runic script. "You can read this?" enquired one boy, perhaps hoping that I might be in touch with my ancient Christian forebears. Sadly, I wasn't.

I was titillated by the suggestions of cultural diversity though. And when, after lunch, a taxi-driver called Abdul invited me to join him in a qat-chewing session, I saw it as a chance to dig for the heart of the Yemen.

First step: head for the qat market (qat has to be bought fresh ). Qat- snobs apparently prefer long woody branches covered in foliage; Abdul recommended plastic bags stuffed with leaves. In the car, we began nibbling qat like crisps from the bag. It wasn't easy - qat leaves look like rhododendron and my mouth instantly overflowed with bitter saliva.

"Eat on the left side of your mouth," urged Abdul, now that my whole mouth was green with qat. Abdul's left cheek, meanwhile, was bulging nicely. Serious qat chewers never spit out their qat, but accumulate it in the side of the mouths.

The key to qat is perseverance. Abdul led me up to the Mafraj, the traditional room at the top of the house where qat must be chewed. There I reclined with taxi-drivers on cushions overlooking the city.

What is qat for? It is banned in Saudi Arabia and in America (but legal in most of Europe, including Britain) so it must do something. From what I could see, its main effect was to encourage bonding between locals and tourists.

"You are welcome to stay in our country as if it were your own family," one man announced. "By Allah," added another. "You are welcome a thousand times."

Qat left me immune to hyperbole. As the afternoon wore on, and left cheeks bulged ever larger, we effectively covered politics, tribes, marriage, families. In the political sphere, America and Saudi Arabia (the two qat- hating countries) were definitely out, but Britain was tentatively in. These were charming people.

Like all Yemeni males, they were armed. In addition to the curved dagger (jumbiya) dangling from their belts, they all admitted to keeping a Kalashnikov or two under their beds. Abdul explained the rationale for this. "If, for example, your brother kills my brother, then our families will eat qat together in the mafraj and agree on how much compensation you should pay. We will all bring our weapons and put them on the floor. Governments cannot solve family problems, you know." After half a kilo of qat, who needs litigation? I never got used to the taste, but by nightfall I had certainly bonded with my taxi drivers.

The next morning I was curious to see more of this blessed country. Hiring Abdul as my driver, I spent a day touring the stern villages of the highlands. Soaring stone walls sprang organically from the rock of the land. In the town of Thulla not far from Sana'a, where the alleys were little more than random gaps left by buildings, I crept about in the shadow of bare rock. Donkeys and a cow grazed in filth. Grubby children scuttled out to be my guides.

The countryside around comprised green terraces swirling round the hillsides. We drove up to the sinister village of Kawkaban, stone walls on top of menacing cliffs, overlooking a sister village of Shiban far below. Walking the tiny 1,000-metre path down the cliff-face, I kept running into unpuffed, wiry old men, on their way up. "Everyday!" they cried. "We walk up everyday!"

Where was the original life source of the Yemen? On my last day we drove out into the eastern desert, down from the cool highlands and into the torrid zone that eventually merges with the empty quarter.

We passed road-blocks full of soldiers hollering about rebels on the road to the north (tourists are put into armed convoys around here). In the desert we were soon irritable in the heat. But it was down here, where the Wadi Adhanah flows into the desert, that the first Yemeni civilisations emerged. The Queen of Sheba, known in the Yemen as Bilquis, cultivated her fabled wealth here around the great dam of Ma'rib.

According to local folklore, the stone relics baking silently in the sands of Ma'rib are the temples and palaces of their Queen. The vast ancient sluice-gates of the original dam, which controlled the waters of the wadi, can still be seen, spanning an impossibly huge, but now waterless, canyon.

Had the Yemen lost something there in the sands? Driving back into the cool hills afterwards, Abdul began singing with joy. Beside a green field he scrabbled down to kiss a peasant on the forehead. "Thanks be to God," he shouted, returning to the car with a bulging cheek. Here in the uplands, the spirit of Yemen was still alive and well.

FACT FILE

Getting there

The author flew from London to Sana'a with Yemenia (tel: 0171-4092171). Yemenia flies new Airbuses but does not win prizes for sticking to schedules. There are two flights per week, current three-month return fare pounds 440, dropping to pounds 390 later in the year. For organised tours, contact Explore Worldwide (tel: 01252-319448).

Getting around

In the Yemen, the author received assistance from Universal Travel and Tourism (tel: 00-967-1-272861; fax: 00-967-1-275134). 4X4 cars with driver can be hired by the day.

Accommodation

In Sana'a, the author stayed in the Taj Talha Hotel (tel: 00-967-1-237674) whose rates are variable according to season, but should not exceed pounds 12 for a double room with separate bathroom. For five-star luxury, try the Taj Sheba Hotel (00-967-1-272372) in the centre of town. Rates from pounds 122.

Reading

Tim Mackintosh-Smith's new book Yemen, Travels in Dictionary Land (John Murray, pounds 18) is a little masterpiece of wit and erudition.

Yemen festival in the UK

A festival of Yemeni culture will be running in the UK from 18 September to 1 November, with events in London and a national tour. A free brochure is available from the Yemen Festival Hotline (tel: 0171-354 4141).