An Arabian Journey by Levison Wood

Author:Levison Wood [Wood, Levison]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802147332
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2018-05-05T16:00:00+00:00

The following morning we left at dawn. Driving along the road, we left Salalah behind and with it the morning glow of the streetlights and campfires of the Indians making their brew. The road wound up over undulating hills, until soon we were back in the mountains, flanked by vast cliffs, and to the north the bluffs disappeared into the mist that engulfed the upper reaches of the great forests of acacia and groves of frankincense. Abshir had advised me to try to blend in, so I’d come dressed in my best impersonation of a Yemeni – beige Kashmir turban, black skirt and a green check shirt. My beard was two months old now, and with a deep suntan, I looked in the mirror and could barely recognise myself.

Abshir laughed. ‘You’ll fit in better than me.’

We rounded a bend and the road took a downhill turn towards a forested ridge. ‘That’s the border there.’ Abshir pointed towards a ramshackle checkpoint, where some military vehicles and a few lorries were parked up. We pulled up alongside them. ‘Wait here,’ said Abshir, as he got out and whispered something to the border guards. He came back five minutes later and got back into the car. We drove around the queue of lorries and a soldier lifted up the barrier and we drove through and out the other side.

‘Is that it?’ I said, astonished. ‘No passports or anything?’

‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘No stamps here. We won’t use names either. From now on, you simply don’t exist.’ He looked serious. ‘We’ll meet our escort over there.’

Abshir pulled over at the side of the road in a lay-by under the shade of a big tree, where three vehicles were waiting to travel with us in convoy. They were all 4x4s and rough-looking men with machine-guns and radios milled about smoking cigarettes and chewing khat leaves. We didn’t hang around. A fat soldier got into our vehicle and squeezed in next to me, resting a rusty AK-47 into the footwell. He didn’t take his sunglasses off and looked rather like a hamster, since his mouth was full of mushed-up khat. The lead jeep roared off, and Abshir followed on. Sayeed looked around and grinned. ‘Marhaba. Welcome to Yemen.’

As the road wound back down towards the coast, I felt as if I’d arrived in another world. If I thought Salalah resembled the south of India, here in the aftermath of the khareef, you could be forgiven for thinking you’d been transported into the rainforests of Central Africa. The whole mountainside was covered in a thick, green jungle and colossal baobab trees reached from the canopy high into the sky. Only rising columns of smoke coming out of the forest indicated that it was inhabited at all.

‘They’re the Mehri people,’ said Sayeed. ‘The same Jebalis you were with in Oman, but here they never left the mountains – they still live like cavemen.’

We took a mud track into the mist and passed by little huts that seemed to

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