Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes Read Online Free PDF Page A

disgrace) is a key tribal word - to tackle head on. But tribal custom law, urf , dictated that some form of revenge had to be taken. Hostilities were duly opened by way of a minor provocation; a sheep belonging to the shepherdess’s tribe was slaughtered and Walid’s kinsman blamed for killing it. Unfortunately, even this expedient escalated alarmingly into a land dispute, the most serious of all kinds of dispute, in which the sheikhs of both tribes became involved, at great expense to both communities. Every year for a decade, Walid told me, the two tribes would go to war for two or three days. He himself had fought in two of those mini campaigns. ‘We used to climb into the mountains at night, about a hundred of us, wearing camouflage, and just bang away at anything that moved. For all I know the dispute’s still unresolved,’ he said, ‘and the sheikhs still profiting by mediating, although I do know for a fact that the man involved is dead and the shepherdess long married.’
    Yemen would be much better off without her tribes, he told me, before changing the subject to gloomily forecast that we would be lucky to clear the first checkpoint on the edge of town without acquiring the tiresome encumbrance of an armed police escort, and he was right. After an hour or so idling at the checkpoint, we learned we would be sharing such an escort with a group of elderly Taiwanese tourists who were headed to Marib too, to view the meagre vestiges of an engineering wonder of the ancient world, the eighth-century BC Marib Dam. As soon as a blue and white Toyota pick-up complete with a posse of police and a mounted heavy machine gun appeared, we were all on our way again. Under a clear blue winter sky, only our strange caravan and the odd stray donkey moved. In that craggily lunar landscape coloured a uniformly Martian russet, nothing grew. It seemed to me that a hardiness honed by a determination to survive in this, the land their forefathers had inhabited, coupled with an imperative drive to avail themselves of the resources to be found in the kinder southern highlands and Tihama coast, were the keys to the Zaydi highlanders’ centuries-old supremacy in this corner of south Arabia.
    The descent from the mountains to the Marib desert was sudden enough to set my ears popping. We were both hungry and Walid almost visibly twitching for his daily qat by the time we arrived in the town of Marib, the province’s capital. The place where we had arranged to meet Mohammed Salih Muhsin’s young nephew, Ibrahim, was not so much a restaurant as a canteen - a large, strip-lit room with white bathroom-tiled walls and ceiling fans where serving boys who looked no more than ten hurled burning hot flat-breads and battered tin plates of bean stew onto Formica-top tables that were littered with newspaper and pestered by flies. Men, only men, gestured angrily at them, barking their orders above the already deafening background roar of the furnace oven.
    A personable young man with a gentle smile - emphatically not a stony-faced northern highlander like Walid - dressed in a dazzling white thowb , embroidered belt and jambiyah , Ibrahim lowered his gaze like his uncle and proffered only his wrist on greeting me, but the English he had learned at a college in southern India was good and his demeanour towards me otherwise relaxed and perfectly friendly. Although in full-time employment with America’s fourth-largest oil company, Oxy, which had taken a large bloc straddling the old border between the two Yemens, he confirmed he was free to assist me because he had just completed a run of night shifts so, while Walid drove off in search of the town’s qat market, we drank glasses of sweet black tea and tried to converse.
    ‘I’m wondering how people around here feel at the prospect of the oil running out - by 2017 or so, isn’t it?’ I shouted above the deafening roar of the oven. The question was a stupid one. It was hard to imagine how much