Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

22

Extracts from the diary of Dr Jones: he visits the Yemen

Friday 18 November

We are here in the Yemen at last.

The landscapes are breathtaking-towering cliffs that are ochre in the sunlight and purple in the shade, wadis slashed as if with a giant knife cutting thousands of feet between sheer rock walls, with an occasional thread of water at the bottom surrounded by date palm, gravel plains that are an endless expanse of dun, marked here and there by the white crust of the sebkhas where moisture beneath the sand leaches salt to the surface. These are dangerous places where a vehicle might sink if driven across them. On one trip we caught tantalising glimpses of a sea of sand: the beginning of the Empty Quarter, a quarter of a million square miles of uninhabited desert.

And the towns are as wonderful as the desert. From the desert, driving towards a town through the haze and dust, it as if one is approaching Manhattan: many-storeyed tower houses white with gypsum that from a distance look like skyscrapers poke above the walls of ancient fortifications or seem to totter on the edge of brown cliffs. They are beautiful and unlike anything I have ever seen or heard of. Once one is in a town it is a din of shouting voices, a riot of colour, unimaginable smells of drains and spices, and then you turn the corner and there is a garden, hidden away behind the houses.

We spent the first few days here staying in one of the sheikh’s houses outside Sana’a, or touring the country in a convoy of his huge air-conditioned Toyota Land Cruisers. He wants us to get to know his country a little before we travel into the mountains. In the Empty Quarter we saw the beginnings of the dunes, an endless landscape of sculpted sand, dunes like low hills, dunes like long fingers, which shift and change endlessly so that no track through them ever lasts for more than a few minutes before it is obliterated in the restless wind that stings one’s skin with grains of sand.

We drove into the mountains along crumbling tracks of loose gravel, always with a precipitous slope on one side, lurching up steep winding roads along which it seemed impossible from below that any vehicle could travel. We found tiny villages, perched at the foot of great cliffs and in permanent shadow, where a few herdsmen lived tending their goats. We saw deep pools of water coloured an unearthly blue-green, oases where date palms fringed the water’s edge, and where brown-skinned boys in their coloured futahs, a sort of skirt wrapped around like a sarong, jumped in and out of the water.

Once we were stopped as we approached a tented encampment of Beduin by armed tribesmen gesturing with their rifles. The driver of the lead vehicle of our convoy of three stopped some way from them and got out. He bent to pick up some sand, then stood and let it run through his fingers, and showed his empty hand, palm out, to the Beduin.

‘He shows that he has no weapon,’ remarked our driver to Harriet and me.

‘But hasn’t he a weapon?’ I asked, thinking of the rifles I had seen lying on the floor of one of the vehicles.

‘Yes, of course. Everyone has guns here. But he doesn’t show his gun. He says he comes in peace.’

The Beduin let us approach their tents and Harriet and I breathed more easily. I remember we dismounted and drank cardamom-flavoured coffee with them from tiny cups, sitting on a carpet under the roof of a tent with three sides.

I am overwhelmed by this country. It is so beautiful, in a savage way, especially in the mountains of Heraz, where the sheikh lives most of the time when he is not in Glen Tulloch. The people are like the country, crowding around one in the souks or even just in the streets.

‘Britani? You Engleesh? I speek little Engleesh? Manchester United? Good? Yes?’ And one smiles and says something or other, like the phrase the sheikh taught us: ‘Al-Yemen balad jameel’ (The Yemen is a beautiful country).

And they nod back and smile, delighted to hear any word of their own language spoken even if they do not understand what you are trying to say, as friendly as could be. At the same time there is a sense that the friendliness could turn in a heartbeat to violence if they thought you were an enemy.

I worry about Harriet. She is her usual calm, cheerful self for most of the time, then in a moment her face becomes pinched and white, and she is silent. She must be worrying about her soldier. Maybe something has happened. I should ask. I haven’t asked.

We stayed in the sheikh’s house outside Sana’a for ten days. It was a comfortable house with every modern convenience, large, airy and cool inside. It did not have much character. The sheikh explained to us that this was his ‘official’ residence, for when he came to Sana’a on rare visits for business and politics. During those days in Sana’a he was busy, and so we were given a glimpse of the country by his drivers.

Once Harriet and I borrowed a car and drove ourselves around for a while. We went into Sana’a and saw the old city, with its riot of grey and white houses with their curious arched windows and towered storeys. We visited the spice souk, where great bowls of saffron and cumin and frankincense, and every other possible spice, were set out on display. We saw through the entrance to a diwan, where men reclined on cushions chewing khat, exchanging gossip or dreaming of Paradise. But we didn’t have the courage to go into any of the local restaurants. I didn’t know if Harriet was allowed to enter those places, which seemed populated only by men. In the end we went to one of the Western-style hotels on the ring road. Here the twenty-first-century world intruded itself, with piped music, beer being drunk in the bar by engineers back from the oilfields, and a few tourists. We had a late lunch-a plastic-tasting Caesar salad-and drank a glass of white wine each because we didn’t know when we would get our next alcoholic drink. The sheikh might permit drink in Scotland and even have a glass of whisky himself when he was there, but there was no question of his doing so here.

I tried to take Harriet out of her mood of abstraction, and talked about the places and the people we had seen since we arrived here, but although she attempted to keep up the conversation I could see it was an effort.

Then we drove back to the sheikh’s house. As we passed through the villages along the edge of town, the call for prayer sounded from a hundred minarets, the faithful lined up to wash themselves in the communal baths outside the mosques, and then, leaving their sandals and shoes outside, went in to prayer. There were mosques everywhere, their domes vivid blue or green, with the symbol of the crescent etched against the darkening blue sky. Everyone was at prayer, it seemed to me, a whole people five times a day praying as naturally as breathing.

In this country faith is absolute and universal. The choice, if there is a choice, is made at birth. Everyone believes. For these people, God is a near neighbour.

I thought of Sundays at home when I was a child, buttoned up in an uncomfortable tweed jacket and forced to go to Sunday communion. I remember mouthing the hymns without really singing, peering between my fingers at the rest of the congregation when I was supposed to be praying, twisting in my seat during the sermon, aching with impatience for the whole boring ritual to be over.

I can’t remember when I last went to church. I must have been since Mary and I were married but I can’t remember when.

I don’t know anyone who does go to church now. It’s extraordinary, isn’t it? I know I live amongst scientists and civil servants, and Mary’s friends are all bankers or economists, so perhaps we are not typical. You still see people coming out of church on Sunday morning, chatting on the steps, shaking hands with the vicar, as you drive past on your way to get the Sunday papers, relieved you are too old now to be told to go. But no one I know goes any more. We never talk about it. We never think about it. I cannot easily remember the words of the Lord’s Prayer.

We have moved on from religion.

Instead of going to church, which would never occur to us, Mary and I go to Tesco together on Sundays. At least, that is what we did when she still lived in London. We never have time to shop during the week and Saturdays are too busy. But on Sunday our local Tesco is just quiet enough to get round without being hit in the ankles all the time by other people’s shopping carts.

We take our time wheeling the shopping cart around the vast cavern, goggling at the flatscreen TVs we cannot afford, occasionally tossing some minor luxury into the trolley that we can afford but not justify.

I suppose shopping in Tesco on Sunday morning is in itself a sort of meditative experience: in some way a shared moment with the hundreds of other shoppers all wheeling their shopping carts, and a shared moment with Mary, come to that. Most of the people I see shopping on Sunday morning have that peaceful, dreamy expression on their faces that I know is on ours. That is our Sunday ritual.

Now, I am in a different country, with a different woman by my side. But I feel as if I am in more than just a different country; I am in another world, a world where faith and prayer are instinctive and universal, where not to pray, not to be able to pray, is an affliction worse than blindness, where disconnection from God is worse than losing a limb.

The sun set lower in the sky, and the dome of a mosque was dark against its glare.

§

Saturday 19 November

This country was not made for salmon.

Today we drove into the mountains of the Heraz, to the Wadi Aleyn.

The mountains of Heraz rise in huge ramparts above terraced slopes where farmers eke out a basic existence growing millet and maize. From below it looks impossible for anyone to penetrate the mountains on foot, let alone in a vehicle. But, as we had noticed before, cunning tracks made their way round the side of huge shoulders of hillside, snaking between boulders the size of churches, careering down loose and crumbling slopes and up the other side. Harriet had her eyes tight shut most of the time on the drive in, and I could hardly bear to look out of the window myself. An error of six inches by the driver would have had us off the edge of the track, bouncing down on the roof of the car into the valley below. But our driver, Ibrahim, a tall bearded man in a maroon turban, check shirt and jeans, drove one-handed while he smoked incessant cigarettes with the other, and the wheels of the Toyota scraped the edges of the track but never quite went over.

Suddenly we went from bright sun into thick mist, and drops of water covered the windows and windscreen. We could hardly see twenty yards in front, but then the mist began to clear. In front of us we caught glimpses of a fortified village standing on a prow of rock.

‘Al-Shisr,’ said our driver.

Al-Shisr is the sheikh’s ancestral home.

We drove up the track to the village. Perhaps a hundred tower houses stood on top of a cliff, with another cliff above the village soaring up into the mist. It made me think of some forgotten, hidden world from a childhood story. We drove through a gate in the walls surrounding the village, and along narrow lanes of sand and gravel. It was as if we had travelled back in time hundreds of years. The streets were empty, but occasionally a child would peer at us from a darkened doorway. A few chickens scattered before the wheels of our Land Cruiser. We turned uphill up another lane and came to a set of beautiful carved wooden gates set in a high wall, which opened inwards as we approached.

Inside the whitewashed walls was a garden of paradise, cool and mysterious. Water rippled from a fountain and splashed over the edge of a basin, cascading into marble channels that formed a grid of running water going backwards and forwards across the garden. Palms and almond trees provided shade, and a spiky grass grew everywhere, with bougainvillea climbing the white walls, and oleander and euphorbia and other shrubs, the names of which I do not know, planted here and there alongside the channels of flowing water.

It is a magical place.

Beyond the garden an arched colonnade led to the interior of the house, and along it came white-robed men, to greet us and collect our luggage. Beyond the colonnade we entered a marble hall of infinite coolness and grace, clad in tiles of intricate geometrical designs, where the sheikh awaited us.

In the afternoon, when the midday heat had passed and the sun was sinking in the sky, I left Harriet behind at the sheikh’s villa, and set off with Ibrahim down the hill from the village and into the Wadi Aleyn. There was another way into the wadi than the perilous tracks along which we had come. A graded track, the red sand scraped smooth by earth movers, ran alongside the wadi, and along