Yemen: The Desert

"And is Europe far from Ma'rib?"

The voice of the Bedouin woman came out of the darkness. Around us stretched the sands of the Empty Quarter, a vast tract of Southern Arabia. We had arrived at the camp a little earlier in three jeeps, led by our Bedouin guide who could navigate the emptiness even by night, even when, like now, there were no stars.

The woman had come to greet us, grasping our soft hands in her hard dry ones, pecking us lovingly on the neck. She had spread a mat on the ground for us to sit on and brought a kettle of sweet tea which we drank out of little glasses, a torch our only light.

The menfolk had gone off to the camel races held to commemorate Yemen's National Day and she was alone at the camp with her daughters. She was full of questions, translated by our tour leader, Youssuf. Were we married? Yes, some of us were. So had we married within the tribe? No, we had to say we had not. But that was good too, she indicated, building bridges between families. As we helped her wash out the glasses, rationing the precious drops of water, we felt as far as we could be from our comfortable Western lives.

We had more tea for breakfast, and bread and fruit, and tasted camel's milk, thick and strong-flavoured. The Bedouin woman spread out jewellery and scarves for us to buy. Much of it was tawdry but there were some ancient pieces of silver, which we bought not so much because we wanted them but because she had been so kind.

Under the rapidly warming sun, she was revealed as small and dark, in multi-coloured but dusty clothes. A loose veil hung over her nose and mouth but unlike the city women who wore black from head to toe and whose eyes were the only visible part of their faces, her forehead was bare and broad, her oiled hair teased into little curls under her scarf. Her tone of voice in talking to the men was without deference, a woman sure of her position, the matriarch.

This desert adventure was for me one of the high points of the trip, although it hadn't been part of the original plan. From Ma'rib, once capital of the pre-Islamic Sabaean empire, we had raced west across the desert three days earlier. We had picnicked in the ancient city of Shabwah, an important stop on the old frankincense road, its structures made of mud bricks looking as if they had grown from the sand to which many of them were now returning. We had journeyed along Wadi Hadramawt, the longest valley in the Middle East, mentioned in the Bible and the Koran, famed for incense, honey and the fertility of its land regularly flooded during the rainy season. We had made the obligatory tourist pilgrimage to Shibbam, nicknamed the "Manhattan of the desert" by the intrepid explorer Freya Stark because of its seven- and eight-storey high buildings that dated back to the fourth century.

But we craved the desert and so, instead of continuing to travel east under a relentless sun that made sightseeing an ordeal, we persuaded our tour guide to change the itinerary, which was how we had come to spend the night at the Bedouin camp. 

A guest tent had been provided but most of us opted to sleep outside. I awoke a few hours later to find the Milky Way bright above me and counted three shooting stars. Later, I saw the half-moon rising above the horizon like an alabaster dish. And I awoke finally to the sunrise, as it unveiled our surroundings: the scattering of tents, the women milking the camels in the distance or leading out the goats to graze on the coarse grass that grew up through the sand. And I thought to myself, Yes indeed, Europe is very far from Ma'rib.