2007 - Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (22 page)

We take our time wheeling the shopping cart around the vast cavern, goggling at the flatscreen TVs we cannot afford, occasionally tossing some minor luxury into the trolley that we can afford but not justify.

I suppose shopping in Tesco on Sunday morning is in itself a sort of meditative experience: in some way a shared moment with the hundreds of other shoppers all wheeling their shopping carts, and a shared moment with Mary, come to that. Most of the people I see shopping on Sunday morning have that peaceful, dreamy expression on their faces that I know is on ours. That is our Sunday ritual.

Now, I am in a different country, with a different woman by my side. But I feel as if I am in more than just a different country; I am in another world, a world where faith and prayer are instinctive and universal, where not to pray, not to be able to pray, is an affliction worse than blindness, where disconnection from God is worse than losing a limb.

The sun set lower in the sky, and the dome of a mosque was dark against its glare.

§

Saturday 19 November

This country was not made for salmon.

Today we drove into the mountains of the Heraz, to the Wadi Aleyn.

The mountains of Heraz rise in huge ramparts above terraced slopes where farmers eke out a basic existence growing millet and maize. From below it looks impossible for anyone to penetrate the mountains on foot, let alone in a vehicle. But, as we had noticed before, cunning tracks made their way round the side of huge shoulders of hillside, snaking between boulders the size of churches, careering down loose and crumbling slopes and up the other side. Harriet had her eyes tight shut most of the time on the drive in, and I could hardly bear to look out of the window myself. An error of six inches by the driver would have had us off the edge of the track, bouncing down on the roof of the car into the valley below. But our driver, Ibrahim, a tall bearded man in a maroon turban, check shirt and jeans, drove one-handed while he smoked incessant cigarettes with the other, and the wheels of the Toyota scraped the edges of the track but never quite went over.

Suddenly we went from bright sun into thick mist, and drops of water covered the windows and windscreen. We could hardly see twenty yards in front, but then the mist began to clear. In front of us we caught glimpses of a fortified village standing on a prow of rock.

‘Al-Shisr,’ said our driver.

Al-Shisr is the sheikh’s ancestral home.

We drove up the track to the village. Perhaps a hundred tower houses stood on top of a cliff, with another cliff above the village soaring up into the mist. It made me think of some forgotten, hidden world from a childhood story. We drove through a gate in the walls surrounding the village, and along narrow lanes of sand and gravel. It was as if we had travelled back in time hundreds of years. The streets were empty, but occasionally a child would peer at us from a darkened doorway. A few chickens scattered before the wheels of our Land Cruiser. We turned uphill up another lane and came to a set of beautiful carved wooden gates set in a high wall, which opened inwards as we approached.

Inside the whitewashed walls was a garden of paradise, cool and mysterious. Water rippled from a fountain and splashed over the edge of a basin, cascading into marble channels that formed a grid of running water going backwards and forwards across the garden. Palms and almond trees provided shade, and a spiky grass grew everywhere, with bougainvillea climbing the white walls, and oleander and euphorbia and other shrubs, the names of which I do not know, planted here and there alongside the channels of flowing water.

It is a magical place.

Beyond the garden an arched colonnade led to the interior of the house, and along it came white-robed men, to greet us and collect our luggage. Beyond the colonnade we entered a marble hall of infinite coolness and grace, clad in tiles of intricate geometrical designs, where the sheikh awaited us.

In the afternoon, when the midday heat had passed and the sun was sinking in the sky, I left Harriet behind at the sheikh’s villa, and set off with Ibrahim down the hill from the village and into the Wadi Aleyn. There was another way into the wadi than the perilous tracks along which we had come. A graded track, the red sand scraped smooth by earth movers, ran alongside the wadi, and along it rumbled huge Tata lorries and dumper trucks, churning up clouds of dust which coated our vehicle in grit. Soon we could see the construction site where the holding pens for the salmon are being built. Gangs of Indian labourers were spread all over the site, where three large basins have been excavated in the side of the mountain and are being lined with concrete. Two tanks will hold freshwater. The third will hold saltwater.

From the first freshwater basin a spillway has already been built down to the edge of the wadi. When the summer rains come, the gates of the holding tank will open, and the salmon will swim down the spillway, and run the waters of the wadi. At least, that’s the plan, anyway.

Ibrahim drove up to a line of Portakabins and stopped. I got out and was greeted by a large man wearing orange overalls and a hard hat. ‘Hi,’ he said, extending a hand and speaking with a Texan accent, ‘Dr Jones? I’m Tom Roper, and I’m the project engineer here. You want a look around?’

We went into the Portakabin and Tom showed me a huge wallchart with the project plan mapped out on it. He went through the timetable. It looked to me as if we were on schedule.

‘Sixteen weeks to completion of the holding tanks. Then four weeks to plumb them into the aquifer and start filling them with water, to test the integrity of the lining and the sluice gates and check our oxygenation kit is working. Then we wait for the salmon to arrive, and the summer rains to come.’

We went through everything in detail, and then I looked out of the window at the activity across the site. There must have been several hundred people spread about the hillside, digging, laying concrete onto wire mesh or unrolling huge coils of Alkathene pipe.

‘The guys are working well,’ said Tom. ‘We haven’t had any major problems on site. It’s just a very hot and dusty job. I’m working a month on, a week off.’

‘Where do you go on your week off?’

‘If I can get up to Dubai, I go there, but the flight connections aren’t great. Otherwise I just sit in the Sheraton in Sana’a, drink a few beers and lie around the pool. There’s nothing to do here; there’s nothing to see except rocks and sand.’

I thought of the beautiful village of Al-Shisr, the ancient mosques and even older pre-Islamic buildings and tombs we had seen on our drive through the mountains, and wondered at his lack of curiosity, but said nothing.

I told him I wanted to walk down to the bed of the wadi for a closer look at what the salmon would have to cope with. ‘Yes, do that,’ said Tom. He laughed and said, ‘I guess those fish will just fry and die. You know that, don’t you?’

‘Well, maybe they will. We’ll try and avoid that if possible.’

Tom Roper shook his head and laughed again. ‘It’s not my business what y’all do with your money. I’m a project engineer; 1 do what I’m paid to do. I’ve built stuff in oilfields. I’ve built dams. I’ve built airstrips. I tell ya, I’ve never built fish tanks in the desert before now. You might as well take a heap of dollar bills and burn them as build all this. Your fish will just fry and die. But, hey, I’ll do what you pay me to do.’

I left Tom in the cabin. He might be an excellent engineer, but I am not especially interested in his views on salmon. I am the fisheries scientist, and it is my considered opinion that we will achieve something here. He should stick to digging holes and lining them with concrete.

I walked the few hundred yards downhill to the bed of the wadi. By the time I got there, even though it was dry heat and late afternoon, I was dripping with sweat.

The wadi bed was a mass of boulders, small and large. A trickle of water ran through it, and as I scrambled along I saw that in some places stone channels had been cut to ease the flow of water. There was just about enough flow in the wadi at the moment for a couple of minnows to swim along. Upstream, the wadi ran through a date palm plantation where I knew that the water would flow through irrigation gutters hewn out of the stone. Beyond the plantation I could see where the wadi came down from the hills. The gradient was not as steep as I had feared, and I could see no obvious obstacles to salmon running up when the wadi filled with water.

Turning the other way I could see a few blue pools lying under cliffs so steep and tall the water was in shade all day long. The permanent shadow prevented complete evaporation of the water coming down the wadi. There had been no rain here for twelve weeks, so this water was likely to be coming from the aquifer. It dried up altogether in the heat of spring and early summer, and then filled again in the heavy summer rains.

I leaned back against a boulder, closed my eyes, and tried to shut out the noise of lorries and bulldozers, and men’s voices from the hillside above. I tried to imagine darkening skies and the rain falling. I tried to imagine the first heavy drops sputtering in the dust, leaving minute impact craters wherever they fell. I tried to imagine the rain falling faster, little rivulets forming, running down into the wadi. I tried to imagine streams of water running down the surrounding ravines, and the trickle in the wadi turning to a stream, then to a river, then to a brown and boiling torrent.

I could half picture this in my mind if I tried hard enough, and forgot about the sun that was now reddening my face and neck and burning my forearms. Even in November the heat here is more than I am used to.

Then I tried to imagine the gates of the holding tanks opening, and a bow wave of water coming down the new concrete spillway a few hundred yards away, and waves slapping together where it met the water of the wadi. I tried to imagine the salmon slipping down the spillway, finding the waters of the stream and, following the instincts of tens of thousands of years, heading upstream to spawn. I could not imagine it.

§

This evening I sat beside Harriet in the dining room in the sheikh’s villa. My face and arms were smothered with Aftersun, but I could still feel the heat in my skin. I drank copious amounts of cold water, which a servant poured from a copper jug into copper goblets. We ate
selta
, a kind of vegetable broth with lamb, fresh-baked Arab bread and
hummus
, and a spicy mixture of garlic and tomatoes and other vegetables I could not identify. The sheikh was in a humorous mood. ‘So, you have walked along the Wadi Aleyn, Dr Alfred. What do you think of our project now?’

I shook my head. ‘It will be very difficult. I must confess, Sheikh, I am very daunted. It is one thing to plan this project thousands of miles away and another thing to see the rocks and sand of the wadi.’

‘And another thing to feel the heat,’ added Harriet, looking rather pointedly at my sunburned nose and cheeks. Under the sheikh’s influence her mood has improved a little since we came here. She is more cheerful, although from time to time a sad, inward look still crosses her face.

‘No one who has not seen the wet season can imagine it, what it is like, how the rains fall so swiftly; just as no one who has not been here in the dry season can imagine the heat and the dust that brings. You shall see. Yemen is not just desert. There are green pastures and fields in the Hadramawt, and at Ibb and Hudaydah. Have faith, Dr Alfred, have faith!’ And the sheikh smiled and shook his head, and laughed to himself as if amused by something a child had said.

§

Harriet and I have been put in a guest wing at the far end of the house, away from where the sheikh and his retinue sleep. There are half a dozen bedrooms here, all large and luxurious with big comfortable beds and marble floors, with prayer mats laid out and a green arrow set in mosaic tiles, pointing the way to Mecca. The bathrooms have huge sunken baths with (I think) gold fittings. Bowls of fruit and flowers are set out and iced water can be poured from a giant Thermos. Sometimes someone lights frankincense in a burner in the central courtyard, and its strange and exotic scent pervades the whole house, making me think of church again in a distant childhood.

As I made my way along the corridor to my room just now, I passed a half-open door and heard the sound of someone weeping.

I stopped. Of course it was Harriet. Gently, I pushed at the door. She was sitting on the edge of the bed. There was just enough moonlight coming in through the filmy curtains to see the glint of tears running down her cheek. I stood there tentatively, my hand still on the door, and said, ‘Harriet? Is something the matter?’

Of course there was something the matter. What an idiotic question. She mumbled something in a choked-sounding voice. I could not make out the words. I stood there awkwardly a moment longer and then instinct took over, and I sat on the bed beside her and put my arm around her. She turned and buried her face in my neck and I could feel the moisture on her face against my skin.

‘Harriet, what is it? Please tell me.’

She sobbed for a while longer and my shirt collar became damp. It was a curious feeling, holding her in my arms like that. It didn’t feel wrong. It felt right.

She said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m being pathetic.’

‘No. Tell me what has upset you.’

‘It’s about Robert,’ she said in a trembling voice. ‘I keep thinking something dreadful has happened to him.’

Harriet had told me about her engagement to Robert Matthews, a captain in the Royal Marines. She never speaks much about him, and I never think much about him as a result, although if I do, it is with an odd, irrational twinge almost like jealousy.

‘I haven’t heard from him for weeks and weeks,’ she said. ‘I’m so worried. It’s like an ache, all the time.’

‘Perhaps he’s somewhere where he can’t answer letters,’ I suggested. ‘I imagine the communications in Iraq are difficult.’

‘It’s worse that that,’ she said into my shoulder. ‘Promise me you won’t tell anyone, if I tell you.’

I promised. Who would I tell?

She told me how the letters she had been receiving from Robert had at first been almost obliterated by the censor and then had ceased to come altogether. What was worse was that she had been contacted by something called the Family Support Centre, and all the letters she had written to him had started being returned. Then she hinted that, in some way she did not make clear, she had received information that, wherever Robert was, he was in serious danger. I tried to think of words to comfort her, and she clung to me for a moment longer, but then she became calmer and sat up straight and I removed my arm.