bagpipes.
Near the Holiday Inn, a crumbling ruin not far away, archaeologists had found the remains of the place acclaimed by Marco Polo as a “fine and great and noble city.” The Queen of Sheba had sent her dhows from here, my guide said, to Egypt and Jerusalem and Rome, bearing frankincense at a time when it was worth more than gold. Her castle was now remembered by a pile of stones.
In the lobby a Canadian engineer sat alone, looking out into the mist where the GIs organized games of touch football without a ball.
Four days later, following the so-called Incense Coast, I came to Aden, the largest port of southern Yemen, which once had seemed a center of the world, the place where every ship from Britain to India stopped for refueling. The last time I had been here, at the age of two, in 1959—my mother was taking me back from the Oxford where I was born to the Bombay that was her hometown—Aden had buzzed with the slightly illicit excitement that attends a port, groups of touts out to meet the tourist ships and promise everything that is possible when West first touches East. Aden, Victoria’s first imperial acquisition, was the largest harbor in the world then, outside Manhattan.
Now, in the summer of 2001, the town was a biblical wasteland. Goats foraged outside the broken shops and old women, at occasional red lights, came and hammered on the windows of passing cars, skinny arms extended. I saw no shops or restaurants or anythings in Aden; the children played in the street because there was nowhere else for them to play. It seemed as if the whole city was sitting on debris, waiting to see what the next wind would blow into town.
I took myself to the Crescent Hotel, near Steamer Point, where a replica of Big Ben tolled the passing hours. But when I walked into the old British haunt—a black-and-white portrait of Queen Elizabeth, when young, peering out through the unlit lobby—I quickly realized this was no place to stay. “We have a new Crescent Hotel down the street,” the young boy at the desk offered, and I followed him to a marginally less dusty place where an aged retainer offered me a crisp military salute.
The new hotel on the beach seemed more promising, though just to walk into the lobby I had to walk through a security machine of the kind you see at airports. Going out onto the sand—pristine, and opening onto a silent, lovely bay—I noticed that I was the only person there. Then I looked more closely and saw armed soldiers on both sides of me, standing against the wall, protecting me, I could only imagine, from Aden.
When I walked out of the hotel, a sad-eyed man, apparently Indian, slouched up to me. He said hello in a fluent, almost swallowed English, and I learned that his father had been an Englishman, though born here. The man before me had applied for a passport, and the chance to live in England, but Her Majesty’s Government had refused him because his father, though entirely English, was born in Aden. “Do you want to see the cemetery?” he said.
We drove a few hundred yards to where a clump of head-stones sat in the wasting heat. Their inscriptions were in German, Greek, Russian, or Chinese; Aden had once been known as the “entrance-hall of China and the warehouse of the West.” Most of the inscriptions, though, were in English, recalling forgotten Gwendolenes and Despinas, flying officers and telegraphists. OH FOR A TOUCH OF THAT VANISHED HAND. AVE ATQUE VALE.
“We used to see them every time we went to church,” my new friend said. “Getting buried. One or two a week.” Now St. Mary’s was shuttered, and Christians such as he could worship only in secret if at all. The English had left, quite literally overnight, in 1967, the Russians had come in, and then they too had given up on Aden, leaving it to a civil war. Though technically reunited with the northern parts of the country in 1991, it had been through a two-month siege in 1994. The Frontier Hotel, burned out,
Near the Holiday Inn, a crumbling ruin not far away, archaeologists had found the remains of the place acclaimed by Marco Polo as a “fine and great and noble city.” The Queen of Sheba had sent her dhows from here, my guide said, to Egypt and Jerusalem and Rome, bearing frankincense at a time when it was worth more than gold. Her castle was now remembered by a pile of stones.
In the lobby a Canadian engineer sat alone, looking out into the mist where the GIs organized games of touch football without a ball.
Four days later, following the so-called Incense Coast, I came to Aden, the largest port of southern Yemen, which once had seemed a center of the world, the place where every ship from Britain to India stopped for refueling. The last time I had been here, at the age of two, in 1959—my mother was taking me back from the Oxford where I was born to the Bombay that was her hometown—Aden had buzzed with the slightly illicit excitement that attends a port, groups of touts out to meet the tourist ships and promise everything that is possible when West first touches East. Aden, Victoria’s first imperial acquisition, was the largest harbor in the world then, outside Manhattan.
Now, in the summer of 2001, the town was a biblical wasteland. Goats foraged outside the broken shops and old women, at occasional red lights, came and hammered on the windows of passing cars, skinny arms extended. I saw no shops or restaurants or anythings in Aden; the children played in the street because there was nowhere else for them to play. It seemed as if the whole city was sitting on debris, waiting to see what the next wind would blow into town.
I took myself to the Crescent Hotel, near Steamer Point, where a replica of Big Ben tolled the passing hours. But when I walked into the old British haunt—a black-and-white portrait of Queen Elizabeth, when young, peering out through the unlit lobby—I quickly realized this was no place to stay. “We have a new Crescent Hotel down the street,” the young boy at the desk offered, and I followed him to a marginally less dusty place where an aged retainer offered me a crisp military salute.
The new hotel on the beach seemed more promising, though just to walk into the lobby I had to walk through a security machine of the kind you see at airports. Going out onto the sand—pristine, and opening onto a silent, lovely bay—I noticed that I was the only person there. Then I looked more closely and saw armed soldiers on both sides of me, standing against the wall, protecting me, I could only imagine, from Aden.
When I walked out of the hotel, a sad-eyed man, apparently Indian, slouched up to me. He said hello in a fluent, almost swallowed English, and I learned that his father had been an Englishman, though born here. The man before me had applied for a passport, and the chance to live in England, but Her Majesty’s Government had refused him because his father, though entirely English, was born in Aden. “Do you want to see the cemetery?” he said.
We drove a few hundred yards to where a clump of head-stones sat in the wasting heat. Their inscriptions were in German, Greek, Russian, or Chinese; Aden had once been known as the “entrance-hall of China and the warehouse of the West.” Most of the inscriptions, though, were in English, recalling forgotten Gwendolenes and Despinas, flying officers and telegraphists. OH FOR A TOUCH OF THAT VANISHED HAND. AVE ATQUE VALE.
“We used to see them every time we went to church,” my new friend said. “Getting buried. One or two a week.” Now St. Mary’s was shuttered, and Christians such as he could worship only in secret if at all. The English had left, quite literally overnight, in 1967, the Russians had come in, and then they too had given up on Aden, leaving it to a civil war. Though technically reunited with the northern parts of the country in 1991, it had been through a two-month siege in 1994. The Frontier Hotel, burned out,
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