Voyage By Dhow (6 page)

Kamaran’s administrator at the time was Captain David Thompson, and as soon as we had recovered from our journey we set out to present ourselves at his headquarters, a mile or so away. The captain and his charming young wife were possibly the two loneliest people I had ever seen. Up until a few years before Thompson had been a military attaché at the British Embassy in Tehran, which he described with enthusiasm as one of the few cities of the Middle East where the good life was still to be found. The solution, Thompson told us, to the problem of their present isolation was to create occupation at all costs, and he lost no opportunity for keeping himself busy. With this objective in mind he had persuaded Aden to provide them with a Model T Ford and in this, despite the lack of roads and the presence of many areas of sinking sand, he was able to keep a benevolent eye on the island’s people. These, he said, were no longer just a handful of pearl divers, but now included the members of a small community who had arrived on the scene a year ago. He had persuaded them to stay and taught them how best to fish away from the empty pearl-diving area.

Our visit to the Thompsons was a resounding success. Writing of this occasion in
The Riddle of Arabia
, Farago admitted that the days on the dhow had been some of the worst of his life, hardly less awful than the few days he had spent due to a police mistake in prison in Addis Ababa. (On his release he had received an apology from the Emperor himself.) By comparison with the long days and nights of the dhow the island, though ‘a sea-lipped desert’, ‘came close to paradise’ and the Thompsons’ bungalow was upgraded to ‘a mansion where I enjoyed refrigerated drink and all the comforts of an English country house’.

Farago had something in common with Thompson, for although they had not previously met he had been sent to Tehran by the
London Sunday Chronicle
to cover a difficult political situation while Thompson was there. Rex Stevens, too, was on home ground with his background in colonial government. Later, when Mrs Thompson joined us, Rex Stevens and her husband wandered off for a few words in confidence on colonial matters into a garden in which a single rosebush had struggled to survive under the protection of a small tent. This plant was regarded almost with reverence by the locals, who had seen no more by way of vegetation than a few blades of grass in all their lives. The Thompsons’ serving girl even addressed it politely by the name of ‘Ayesha’.

The
nakhoda
sent news up to the house that the repairs to the dhow would take some days, even weeks, to carry out. Thompson himself confirmed that he could not allow the dhow to leave until it was fully seaworthy once more. Nevertheless, the future was not wholly depressing, for a radio message came in that a steamer bound for Hodeidah was due to call in ten days’ time. There was nothing to do but relax and occupy oneself in the meantime with whatever activity Kamaran might offer. For me it was to provide an opportunity to study the hard existence of the island’s pearl divers, who were at the bottom of the human pyramid of one of the world’s luxury trades.

Thompson, who I would have described as far from a social reformer, told me that, ‘There is something about the pearl business, like the wealth mined from the earth—say, gold or oil—that seems to exclude mercy. These men are the sweated labourers of the sea.’ The youngest of the divers were ten years of age and only a handful reached fifty—as my friend on the beach had told me—by which time their active life was at an end and they depended upon the charity of the community to survive. They were battened upon by a sequence of exploiters. A third of their catch became the property of the dhow owners who took them into deep waters. The price of what was left was negotiated by the agent the divers were compelled to employ and the pearl merchant—described by Thompson as a man of education and charm. What was extraordinary was that Thompson, who saw himself as a fair man, had been unable to abolish a traditional form of chicanery by which the negotiations between this pearl merchant and the divers’ agent were carried on by secret hand-signs in which fraud was concealed. Eventually the pearls would be packed up and sent off to be sold in Bombay, at a price estimated by the administrator at some fifteen times that received by the men who risked their lives and ruined their health gathering them from the sea.

Thompson had done his best, he said, to rectify the worst of the abuses of the pearl-fishing trade. He had been promised a resident doctor to remedy a situation in which men, elsewhere accepted at their age as in the prime of life, were seen on the island as worn out. Above all, ferocious punishments had been abolished. Formerly a diver discovered attempting to dispose of a pearl secretly for his own profit had been given a can of water and set adrift in a canoe without oars. ‘We’re far more civilized now,’ Thompson said. Nevertheless his own description of the pearl fisher’s standard of living was that it was ‘no higher than that of the labouring poor in the most downtrodden countries of Europe’.

Later on the conversation turned to the eccentric lives of those working Europeans—usually Englishmen—bold enough to take on rarely offered employment in Hodeidah, or the capital, Sana’a. A Britisher, the head of a foreign commercial undertaking in Hodeidah, had found himself in difficulties for importing a gramophone. This he was eventually allowed to play, but only in a room close to the shore where, with all windows closed, the music would be deadened by the sound of the waves. He was soon under investigation for teaching his servant to play tennis, which the Yemeni proposed to ban on the score of its being a dance and therefore atheistic.

In the Yemen, most human activities apart from those linked with actual survival were banned as ‘against the will of God’. Apart from beheadings prescribed for all major crimes, thefts of petty objects or even food were punished by the amputation of a hand, and a whole range of minor punishments was inflicted for trivial offences seen as possibly against the wishes of the Almighty. It was illegal to sing, and even more to whistle, but retribution could also result from giving a horse a human name, walking backwards, climbing to the top of certain mountains and—seen in this case as a reprehensible superstition—pointing at the full moon. In Hodeidah and Sana’a watches could be worn, but only if they were left unwound as ornaments. Harsh penalties were imposed for smoking. The Britisher in Hodeidah who was forced to close all his windows for playing his gramophone distributed cigarettes among a group of labourers who worked for him. The penalty for smoking them in public turned out to be three months in chains.

Ten days later, as expected, a small cargo steamer, the S.S.
Minho
, called in to pick us up, its only other passenger being a gun-runner who boasted of the fact that he had just sold the Yemeni a cargo of defective weapons.

It seemed that Sir Bernard Reilly’s appeals on our behalf were at last to bear fruit, for when our ship dropped anchor a quarter of a mile from the Yemeni shore a reception party of notables came chugging out in a motorboat to meet us. The newcomers, including Hodeidah’s remarkably bejewelled harbour-master, climbed aboard, and Rex Stevens and I were told that our party’s permit to enter the country had been granted, and that a house had been placed at our disposal for our stay in Hodeidah. With that the visitors climbed back into their boat and returned to the port. We settled to await their return to be escorted to the promised house, and a longish period of suspense ensued. After an unexpectedly long delay it occurred to Stevens and myself that some problem might have arisen over the fact that Ladislas, who had been running a high temperature that morning, had not been present for our meeting with the Yemeni officials. ‘His Majesty’s permit granting your entry into our country,’ the harbourmaster had said, ‘was for three persons. Where is the third?’ It was explained to them that Ladislas was suffering from an attack of fever, which we took to be malaria. Stevens asked if there was a doctor in the port, and they shook their heads. There was none.

Two hours passed slowly with no sign of the return of our friends and doubt began to settle in our minds. Could something have gone wrong? Could Ladislas’ absence from the interview have in some way aroused suspicions? There was no way of knowing. It now dawned upon me that Farago’s sudden temperature had come as a surprise. He had passed some hours on the
Minho
before its departure from Kamaran, and during this time he had appeared normal in every way. But now suddenly he was complaining of a severe attack of malaria. He held out a thermometer which registered, he said, a temperature of 103 degrees. His face was twisted with anguish. It was impossible for him to talk to the Arabs, he insisted, because he was just about to be sick. A lurking doubt appeared in my mind as to whether Farago genuinely intended to go with us into the Yemen or whether, for some reason that remained wholly obscure, he did not. At this point I didn’t, of course, know of the incredible subterfuge by which he alone had already crossed the frontier as a fur-trading agent of Monsieur Klar. At the time I thought it possible, as Captain Thompson had insisted, that as a newspaperman Ladislas would be automatically refused entry to the country, and that his non-appearance was a ruse to enable him to sneak by the officials. But Ladislas was not the only cause of our worries—next day the
Minho
would leave for Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. The Yemeni were supersensitive to the problem of foreign spies slipping past their frontier guards to explore the strength of their defences. Almost equally they went in fear of the plague—from which sick foreigners might turn out to be suffering. ‘They are the victims,’ as Thompson had put it, ‘of faith, fanaticism and fear.’

That afternoon the harbour-master and his accompanying officials were back and our intuitions were confirmed. These men had discarded their masks of shallow amiability, and now proclaimed by their expressions that they saw through us. The harbour-master told us that His Highness, the King, had assumed we were there to sell them arms for the defence of their country. If we could offer the latest models of rifles and machine-guns for sale, His Majesty wished to be shown samples of them, but if our intention had been only to travel in his country and study its defences, our entry would be refused.

The turbaned dignitaries of the town solemnly arose from the chairs we had put out for them, and pressing our hands one by one they silently withdrew. They were returning, the harbour-master said, to obtain further instructions from His Majesty. Then he went. We knew from that time that only unofficial visits could be made to the Yemen.

Rex Stevens went back to tell the Portuguese ship’s master that we would be ready, tides permitting, to put out at any time, and I was left alone on deck to take in a final view of the memorable front of Hodeidah—gateway to the Yemen.

This, like all the prospects of southern Arabia, was different in many subtle ways from the models that had inspired it. In the great tidal wave of escapism that had followed the end of the First World War, rich Arabs from north Africa and the Yemen coast had sought temporary refuge from the asceticism of their lives by visits to such European playgrounds as the Cote d’Azure. Overcome with admiration they had strolled down such avenues of social display as the Promenade des Anglais at Nice, determined on their return to repeat these northern splendours in the sweltering tropics from which they so rarely emerged. But the environment they tried to replicate in Hodeidah was far removed from that of the Midi of France. It was charming in a wan sort of way, but it was different, and the final result reflected not the high-spirited self-indulgence of European holiday-makers but the inbred asceticism of Islam. The people of this coast had been trained from birth to draw their pleasures from fasting and prayer, and Hodeidah was the result of a temporary compromise between the two faiths. Decoration and architectural exuberance were restricted in these buildings to the top storeys ‘because they were nearest to Heaven’. At street level they were plain and mute. There were doors but no windows.

I had been cautiously taking my last photographs of the scene when I noticed that a thin, ant-like stream of distant humans had come into view on the previously vacant and inanimate sea front. Putting my camera out of sight, but continuing to watch, I saw that these people soon branched off on to a narrow track that led eventually into the port. A few minutes passed and a black vehicle like a delivery van came up from the rear, pushing past the pedestrians that blocked its way. It turned off into a cleared space among a collection of hutments close to the water’s edge, where it came to a halt. As the bystanders closed in, two uniformed men climbed down from the front seats, went back to open the rear doors and reached into the van. Moments later they reappeared with a man who was clearly a prisoner, since his arms were fastened behind his back.

The Portuguese captain was now at my side. Neither of us spoke while the guards hauled the prisoner into the centre of the cleared space, now kept empty by the arrival of two more guards. The two new arrivals took charge of the prisoner and forced him to his knees. ‘This man has been brought here to die,’ the captain said. ‘Soon the executioner will come and cut off his head. If the people ask for him to die they will shout “
na’m
”. If they are not wishing this they will make faces, and groan.’

‘Why are they killing him? Is he a murderer?’ I asked.

‘No, he is not murdering. They are bringing him here because there are foreigners on the ships offshore and they wish them to see. This is the penalty for spying. The executioner will dance before he cuts this man’s head off.’

‘But why on earth should he dance?’

‘It is custom. The executioner is dancing to give the people good heart. Before he strikes with the sword he will call out “
Ya akhuya
” which is meaning “Oh my brother”, because he is sad for this man’s death. Perhaps then he will sing. You must understand me these are not cruel people. All people in Hodeidah are kind. Only God is cruel.’