MUCH OF 1938 WAS spent in travelling, journeys financed by occasional windfalls from my incursions into the world of trade, added to a little money Ernestina had of her own. A peregrination took us through Central Europe into the Balkans, through Rumania and Bulgaria to the Black Sea, and back through Yugoslavia and Hungary. It was done on the cheap in an elderly Ford V8 costing £31, bought expressly for the journey and thrown away at the end. Discarding comfort, we chose the seediest of accommodation, and when no inn existed in a village when we decided to stay the night, there was never a problem about finding a room in a peasant’s home. In this way our outlay was hardly greater than if we had stayed at home.
That spring I had met Ladislas Farago, a Hungarian Jew, and the author of a successful book, Abyssinia on the Eve. Many years later Farago was to create the Bormann legend, publishing a book that purported to describe his meeting in South America with Martin Bormann, Hitler’s vanished deputy. This was said to have netted him a million pounds. It was a minor spoof and of slight importance. What was of disastrous consequence for the American people was that Farago should have become one of President Nixon’s evil geniuses and an inspirer of his policy in Vietnam. Ladislas, who was considerably older than myself, was the possessor of irresistible charm, fatally allied with the power to carry conviction in all his utterances. I found him in those days also a kind man and it was hard to believe that he could have perpetrated the cruel deceptions (for he knew and cared nothing for the Far East) by which the sufferings of the war were prolonged.
I listened to Ladislas’ pronouncements as to an oracle, accepting without question all he told me. His new project was a journey to the North Yemen, about which he would write a book for which his publishers had already paid an enormous advance. He suggested that I should go with him to take the photographs, and I instantly agreed, being at all times, both before and since, the ready prey of any Pied Piper.
In those days the North Yemen remained a terra incognita to Europeans, previously visited by two or possibly three Englishmen, and Ladislas painted pictures of the marvels it contained. It was ruled over by an all-powerful despot, the Imam Yahya, who daily administered the ferocious Koranic justice seated under a tree at the gates of his palace, and entrance to the country could only be granted by him in person after application through his envoy in Aden. The application had to be sent by sea — carried in a dhow — to the port of Hodeida, thereafter by despatch rider to Sana’a, the Imam’s mountain capital. It took up to two months to receive a reply.
In the event we spent seven weeks in Aden and the enormous area of the Protectorate — much of it, with its medieval desert cities and their mud skyscrapers, of great fascination — before word arrived through Imam’s emissary that we might travel to Yemen, but only as far as Hodeida, where we should receive further instructions.
We bought a chestful of Maria Theresa silver thalers, the only currency acceptable in the Yemen, provisions for a week and boarded the first dhow bound for the Red Sea. Every aspect of the voyage was attended by uncertainty, and at the back of the mind there was always the nagging statistic that ten per cent per annum of such ships depart on voyages from which they never return. The captain, establishing his viewpoint with the remark that only God could be sure of anything, said that according to the winds, it could take anything between three days and three weeks to reach Hodeida, and warned us that he would not sail on Fridays and holy days. He insisted that we should accompany him if at any time he decided to interrupt the voyage to take part in some local pilgrimage. Having carried all our gear aboard and settled where we could find space to await the hoisting of the single lateen sail, we found ourselves suddenly, with all the rest of the passengers, ordered ashore again. A canoe coming alongside had brought an invitation to the captain, and all who voyaged on the ship, to attend a wedding in the family of an old friend from the Hadramaut to the east of Southern Arabia, now settled in Aden. ‘You must go with us, too,’ the captain said to us. ‘Now you are my brothers. We shall eat together, and then we shall dance until dawn. Tomorrow it is my intention to set sail, and if not tomorrow, the day after that.’
There was nothing for it. We disembarked and were conducted to a great tent that had been put up on the town’s outskirts, there at an all-male party — the bride and her friends being elsewhere — to feast and dance the night away. The food was varied and exquisite, but above all strange: great saffron-flavoured lucky dips of rice and meat to be searched with the fingers, camel’s-hump fat, lamb’s testicles, delectable innards in batter, lurid fish from the coral reefs, locusts en brochette, great bustards as big as turkeys baked in clay, skewered ortolans. All-pervasive was the suggestive aroma of ras el hanut, compounded of dried rose-buds, pepper and Spanish fly, supposedly aphrodisiac, and certain if consumed to excess to provoke severe irritation of the urinary tract. After the inflammatory food, plenty of good healthy exercise, leaping and cavorting to fife and drum, while a flying fugleman brandishing a stick rushed up and down the lines of the dancers to whack out at the evil spirits attracted to such festivities, with an occasional shout of triumph whenever he managed to flatten one that had settled with predatory interest upon some part of a guest’s anatomy. Prudently such parties ended, as this one did, with communal chewing of large quantities of qat leaves containing a mild narcotic which instantly quenched the fires lit by the ras el hanut, exorcized improper visions, and turned the mind to spiritual themes.
At daybreak we went down to the dhow, and with this demonstration of the righteousness of patience the voyage began, and in this spirit of tolerance and resignation it continued. There were thirty-two passengers on this small ship, Arabs of every condition plus a trio of Yemeni Jews, and for the purpose of this journey we were all to become members of a united family. In a moment of emergency when the main sail was torn to shreds in a brief squall, able-bodied males gave a hand to the crew. When we were becalmed for days on end and food began to run short, there was a voluntary distribution of private provisions, shared out in the most scrupulous fashion, although sometimes with difficulty, for how in compliance with this desert protocol did we set about the division of a fruit into thirty-two pieces?
Nothing could have been more gracious, more diverting or more generous than the company with whom we travelled on the dhow; and the considerable drawbacks to the voyage, unsuspected when we set out from Aden, would have been brushed aside by any seasoned traveller. The dhow carried, like some receptacle filled to the brim, an ancient odour investing its timbers with the cargoes of decades, many of them of hides and of dried fish. Harder to endure were the assaults by innumerable mosquitoes, forcing us at night — despite the great heat — to cover ourselves completely by blankets. When the breeze fell away we lay motionless in the dark in a sea glittering with a great hoar-frost of phosphorescence, and for days on end the sun showed us a slow heave of oiled water clogged with the opened umbrellas of millions of jellyfish. The presence of familiar landmarks on the Yemen coastline, a rocky outcrop, a tower, reminded us that our position on the map had remained unchanged. Every day the ship’s baker baked unleavened bread. This we washed down with kishr, a greenish, pungent-flavoured concoction boiled up from coffee husks, preferred in Southern Arabia to coffee itself. It was a combination which produced unappeasable indigestion.
A single incident stands out from the doldrums of this experience. The majority of our fellow passengers were from the interior of Arabia, and few had seen the sea until they reached Makalla or Aden to board the dhow. Fortunately however for us, when reduced to a diet of unleavened bread, we were carrying two sailors for Bahrain, originally pearl-fishers who now worked the coast, transferring from dhow to dhow and receiving in lieu of regular wages a very small percentage of the sale of the cargoes they handled. Despite a lack of proper tackle, these men set themselves to fish and caught a large and ferocious-looking barracuda destined to be cooked and divided up in the usual way. The big fish was left to leap and twist on the deck, and Ladislas, horrified at the violence done to it, pleaded for it to be thrown back into the sea. I remembered that he objected to the taking of animal life, living virtually on eggs, but he was the first man and probably the last I had ever known to be deeply distressed — on the verge of tears — at the plight of a fish on the hook.
In the end Hodeida was reached, a crystalline sparkle of dwellings on the dun Arabian shore, and soon a canoe paddled out to us bringing out a splendidly jewelled and be-daggered harbour master who announced that His Majesty the Imam Yahya had ordered a house to be prepared for us in the town, and that a committee of notables would shortly come out to take us ashore. They had been delayed by their civic duty to witness a public execution about to take place in a space reserved for this purpose on the sea front, clearly visible from the dhow. The delay had arisen, as we learned, over the necessity to obtain a confession of guilt before an execution could be carried out. This, it was explained to us, was always forthcoming as the accused man’s penis was tied up and he was induced to drink water, while the waiting headsman and the notables passed the time playing a simple game of chequers invented to combat the tedium of such occasions.
We were anchored rather more than a quarter of a mile off shore, from which distance little was to be seen other than the confused comings and goings of the crowd of onlookers that had gathered. Our captain who believed that attendance at such spectacles was a pious observance to be bracketed with a visit to the mosque, asked to be allowed to raise anchor and move the dhow in a couple of hundred yards closer to the shore. Most regretfully the harbour master told him that this was a request it was beyond his power to grant.
We watched, seeing nothing of the drama concealed by distance, and could judge only that it was at an end when, restless and sated, the sea-front crowd began to disband. Shortly a boat left the shore, making in our direction. It carried four motionless white-robed figures, and was moved by six negro slaves. In a moment the three dignitaries of the reception party, with their accompanying interpreter, were helped aboard, and settled themselves on the banked-up cushions ready on deck. They wore turbans curled like elaborate caracols, moved in a slow, almost dreamy fashion, and their skin was of that absolute pallor of people living in hot climates who never uncover themselves to the sun. The interpreter intoned a verse from the Koran, and this was followed by silence while the notables watched us a little sleepily, with thin, measured smiles, and an odour of camphor spread from them as they fanned their nostrils with delicate white hands to disperse the fetor of the dhow.
Kishr was brought; we sipped it and waited, while the notables summed us up slyly and caressed the jewelled hilts of their daggers, then at a sign from their leader the interpreter posed a direct question. Where were the articles we had brought? His employers were ready to inspect them.
Articles? There seemed to be some mistake. We had brought no articles but our personal baggage. A muttered conversation followed between the four men, and the interpreter tried again. The articles ordered by His Majesty, he insisted, for which a price had already been agreed, payment to be made as stipulated in golden sovereigns.
Now it was clear enough that we were the victims of a terrible confusion. The Yemeni had expected a cargo of arms, and the permission we had received to go to Hodeida had been intended for someone quite different. The harbour-master’s face became clouded with coldness and suspicion. Further questioning by the interpreter had produced no motive to justify our presence there. We had no machine-guns for sale, we had shown no interest in hides or coffee. We desired to exploit no mines. What, then, did we want?
The notables and their interpreter rose to their feet, unfolding their bodies with the suppleness of cats. They pressed our hands and, drawing folds of lawn with gestures of exclusion across their faces, turned away. The slaves who had been swimming with a vigorous dog-paddle round the dhow struck out for their boat, clambered in and were ready with the oars.
We knew that we should never enter the Yemen.
Never, to sum up, was a journey richer in experience, and the fact that the avowed object of the expedition remained unfulfilled was of little importance, because such was the scope of power of Ladislas’ imagination that he wrote a fairly convincing account of his adventures in the Yemen all the same (The Riddle of Arabia, London, 1939). For more than two months we had lived in the dazzling simplicities of the Middle Ages, and I had learned to do without all those things that distinguished modern times from the long past. In addition I was forced into an encounter with Arabic, filled immediately with a respect verging upon awe for the richness and subtlety of its vocabulary and the brilliant mathematics of its grammatical construction. The form spoken in Aden was rustic and deformed and sullied with many intrusions, yet it awoke the desire for a closer acquaintance. I came back with a great collection of words with no currency in any other Arab country. In an attempt to remedy this and introduce some order into confusion I began a course at the School of Oriental Studies, always realizing that there would never be time enough to explore more than a corner of this vast linguistic tapestry.