In the Land of the Dragon's Blood Tree
There are few places left on earth where aeons past feel so alive. One such spot is the island of Socotra. Herodotus wrote of it, as did Marco Polo, and the frankincense that burned in the temples of ancient Greece and Egypt was harvested here. Andrew Cockburn takes a trip back in time. Pssst! There's now one flight daily . . .
Halfway up the rocky path to the ancient cave, I had a sudden glimpse of how the world must have looked twenty million years ago. Stark against the skyline was a strange mushroom-shaped growth about fifteen feet tall, with tangled branches and a canopy of spiky green leaves. It was a dragon's blood tree—born, according to legend, from blood shed in a battle between an elephant and a dragon. In a distant age, ancestors of the tree (botanists tell us that it is in the same taxonomic order as lilies and tulips) carpeted the earth from Russia to Morocco.
Those great forests are long vanished. But here on the island of Socotra, bounded by the Arabian Sea to the north and the Indian Ocean to the south, the dragon's blood still mantles the high plateaus and the misty valleys, hidden between the crags of the Hajhir Mountains.
Since the earliest times, people have known Socotra as a place apart. Herodotus wrote that this was where the immortal phoenix came to be reborn twice every thousand years. The frankincense burned in the temples of ancient Egypt and Greece grew here, guarded, so it was believed, by flying snakes. Marco Polo reported that the islanders were "the most expert enchanters in the world," adept at controlling the winds. Others recorded that the Socotrans used spells to make the island disappear, leaving invaders to search an empty sea.
At every step on my hike up the cliff, I passed reminders that this is not like anywhere else on earth. Tripping and landing on a sharp rock, I cut my wrist badly, but the sap of Jatropha unicostata, a leafy shrub unique to the island, stopped the bleeding. A few yards on was a bottle tree, a surreal object with a bulbous trunk that tapers abruptly to little tufts of branches sprouting delicate pink flowers. Another turn revealed a cucumber tree, its trunk obscenely gorged with water and out of all proportion to its branches. Farther off a frankincense tree waved angry branches. Under a rock I spotted a begonia, common to window boxes across Europe—and all sourced to a sample retrieved from Socotra by a British scientific expedition in Victorian times.
Fisherman from Qalansiyah
Sap from the dragon blood's tree was sought by Roman gladiators as a cure-all for wounds.
the Arher cliffs in the distance[#image: /photos/53ea85addd4d6a0b75ef503e]||||||
Tea at the Detwah Lagoon lodge
Far below, I could see the beach where I had slept last night, waking before dawn to a breakfast of warm fresh bread and honey from the guest lodge kitchen operated by the nearby village. A solitary fishing boat glided along the aquamarine sea. On the horizon, 250 miles away across the Arabian Sea, lay Yemen, where the sixth cease-fire in a recurring civil war had just been declared.
Roughly the size of New York's Long Island, Socotra is officially part of the Republic of Yemen, but in almost every respect it is sui generis. Just as the dragon's blood tree offers a glimpse of a primeval landscape, the local language, Socotri, unrelated to Arabic, is a living relic of otherwise vanished south Arabian tongues. Long accessible only when monsoon winds permitted, the island now has daily flights to and from the mainland. Nevertheless, it retains its aura as a haven surrounded by a turbulent world—neat piles of firewood on a roadside were needed for cooking, I was told, because the island had recently run out of cooking gas for two months. The supply ship wouldn't sail because of pirates.
Panting as the morning sun warmed my back, I could see my goal, the dark opening of Hoq Cave. Seventeen and a half centuries ago, someone else had made this climb. He could easily have heard the same chorus of doves echoing along the mountainside. The vast stalactites and stalagmites looming out of the darkness in the light of my torch would have grown little since his day. We know this man's name, and the day he visited, because a mile and a half inside the cave he left a recorda wooden tablet, discovered only ten years ago, written in Aramaic, a language spoken across the Middle East at that time: "In the month of July, day 25 of the year 569 [a.d. 258], I, Abgar, son of Absmaya, came to the country of Nysy, to this place. I ask the blessing of the god who lives here on you who leaves the tablet in place." Nearby was an altar, as well as incense burners and a picture of an oared ship.
Perhaps it was a busy place of pilgrimage in those days, but sometime after Abgar's visit the cave reverted to darkness and silence for centurieslocals kept clear in the firm belief that Hoq, like the many other caves that honeycomb the limestone island, was inhabited by a giant and unfriendly snake. "We would just come to the entrance to get water," confirmed the young man from the village who led me up the hill. "I didn't go inside until I was fifteen." Only in 2001, when a team of Belgian cavers established that Hoq was giant snake-free, did they begin exploring it for themselves. Now visitors such as I are obliged to hire someone from the community to escort them, part of an admirable effort to give the locals a stake in environmentally friendly tourism. I was glad to hear that one of the Socotrans who discovered Abgar's tablet respected his plea and reburied it in the cave. "That was his wish," he said.
The fact that the visitor from a.d. 258 made his pilgrimage in July indicates that he had time on his hands; he was without doubt stuck on the island for at least another three months. April through October brings the southwest monsoon, when the wind comes tearing up the east coast of Africa and hits the mountains that form Socotra's central spine. After crossing the summit, it turns into a tumultuous vortex on the north side of the island, strong enough to lift children off their feet and whipping the sand from the shore into enormous dunes that climb up the thousand-foot cliffs walling the inland plateaus. Ships cannot land, fishing boats are pulled onto the shore, food runs short, and there is no rain. On the high plateaus, people, birds, and animals crouch down in the deep ravines, away from the tearing blast.
This recurrent inaccessibility and scarcity has proved a useful defense against outsiders. A few scattered stones on a bluff outside Hadibo, the island's main town, are all that remain of the fort built by the Portuguese when they took over the island early in the sixteenth century. "The Socotrans simply retreated to the hills and left them to starve," Yemen's environment minister, Abdul Rahman al-Eryani, told me approvingly. The British thought of turning it into a refueling base in the 1800s but opted instead for Aden, on the mainland. During the Cold War, a myth took hold in Washington that there was a secret Soviet base here, though how the Red navy could land supplies during the monsoon went unexplained. It is the fervent wish of contemporary islanders that the same phenomenon will ward off the possibility of a rumored American outpost. Queried on the issue, the United States Central Command declined comment, as did the American embassy in Sana'a.
Whether or not on account of their natural protection, Socotrans seem to have a gentler disposition than their Yemeni fellow citizens. Arriving fresh from the fractious mainland, where a man feels undressed without a curved jambiya stuck in his belt and, if possible, an AK-47 at his side, I found it instantly relaxing to sit among Socotrans carrying nothing more lethal than a short knife for routine household tasks and greeting each other by touching noses and foreheads.
"The sea protects us," remarked Dr. Saad Ahmed Alkaddoomi, the director of the island's hospital, as we ate fresh-caught grouper on the beach while a gentle surf (this was February) lapped the stones a few yards away. He had invited me to join him and his colleagues for lunch as I strolled by. "But," he added ruminatively, "it can also be a prison." He had been one of the few to escape the particularly rigorous isolation of the years between 1967 and 1990, when Socotra was controlled by the sternly Socialist government of South Yemen. Almost all travel to and from the island was banned in those years, but the revolutionaries firmly believed in education and sent my friend, the son of a poor fisherman from the western end of the island"There were no roads, everything was dark"to the Soviet Union for seven years of medical school.
That era ended when North Yemen unified with the Socialist south in 1990, ushering in an age of unrestricted travel, commercialization, and a flood of Islamic missionaries dispatched from the north to impress on Socotrans that traditions in their mode of Islam, such as unveiled women, mixed wedding parties, and poetry competitions, were haram—forbidden. The campaign paid off; the mixed poetry competitions and other free and easy features of a pre-unification Socotra disappeared. Strict observance of conservative Islamic customs is now universal.
With the end of isolation and the advent of regular flights, Socotra's unique aspects were clearly under threat from the outside world, though the 2009 visitor count of five thousand hardly qualifies it as another Cancún. I asked Ismael Mohamed, my guide around Socotra, an inexhaustible authority on the culture of his beloved island, if his grandchildren will speak Socotri. "They will speak it badly," he replied sadly, citing the inevitable consequence of an Arabic-only school curriculum and TV programming. Even so, I met many Socotrans active in sustaining their heritage. A newly instituted Socotran poetry competition now draws dozens of entries and an eager audience at the finals. The institution of protected areas around the island, where development is prohibited but visitors can camp in locally managed lodges, gives people a stake in preserving their botanically extraordinary environment—more than three hundred of the eight-hundred-plus plant species found on Socotra are unique to the island.
"As a matter of fact, the true number is 307, maybe 308," Ahmed Adeeb told me. "I think I just found another one." Ahmed, a member of a remarkable family that created and maintains, more or less unaided, an entrancing botanical garden and nursery for the island's endemic plants, was showing me his beds of dragon's blood seedlings, identical to tufts of coarse grass, along with specimens of many of Socotra's other botanical riches. "I'm trying to collect them all," he said.
One plant that will certainly not be found in the Adeeb nursery is khat, a leafy green shrub. Most mainland Yemenis spend their afternoons sociably chewing this mild stimulant, with disastrous economic consequences, not least because growing it consumes forty percent of the country's fast-declining water supply.
Until encroaching civilization brought regular air service, Socotra was khat-free. Unfortunately, the habit—particularly expensive here on this poor island in view of the air freight costs—has been catching on. A recent attempt by the government to ban its import fell apart because Yemeni army units based on the island threatened to mutiny unless supplies were resumed.
I appreciated the urgency of the issue the day Ismael and I stopped to buy bread at an army base on the south coast. Our offer of money was refused—"it is an affront to God to charge for bread!"—while an officer invited us to wait for the day's khat supply, due any minute, and chew with him. We politely declined and set off up the boulder-strewn track that would lead us across the island to the north coast. A few miles on, we saw a Toyota Land Cruiser bouncing urgently toward us. Two vehicles meeting on a Socotran road usually stop for an exchange of greetings and news, but this one sped by without even a wave, driver and passengers looking grim and determined. "Aha," said Ismael, laughing, "it's the khat car, very late. Can you imagine how crazy the army must be getting!" The boulders and crevasses of the track gave way to a level surface, and shortly thereafter we were cruising one of the smooth tarmac highways that Yemen's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, has been determinedly lacing around the island. Not everyone approves, especially when these roads plow through environmentally precious areas such as the dragon's blood groves on the Diksam Plateau, west of the Hajhirs. I can understand the indignation, though I have to say that once we drove off the highway onto the stony track leading into a deep canyon, the irritations of civilization rapidly fell away. Passing frankincense, adeniums, and cucumber trees, I came to a stream shaded by a palm grove, with deep, cool pools to swim in. Socotran starlings, their wings slashed with crimson, darted through the trees, while yellow-crested Egyptian vultures, the island's ever-industrious litter cleaners, hovered on perpetual patrol.
In most parts of the world, fast roads cut off contact with local life. Not so on Socotra, at least not yet, since foot travelers proceed on the well-founded assumption that any passing car will stop and, after the obligatory handshakes and inquiries as to everyone's health, carry them on their way. Hence my Land Cruiser was usually full, though not always as full as the day I was visiting Qalansiyah, a village on the western end of the island, and encountered an extended family of thirteen who had just arrived from Samha, a small island west of Socotra (and also part of Yemen) where a hundred people eke out a living from the sea. They had come in their narrow, sharp-prowed fishing boat—three hours across open water—and were anxious to get to Hadibo, where a sick relative was in the hospital. After we pulled their boat high up onto the beach and performed miracles of people-packing, all fifteen of us set off for Hadibo. Some of the women had never seen camels before and cried out in alarm when a mother and calf approached the vehicle. With Ismael translating the rapid Socotri, I asked one of the young men if he would ever consider moving to Socotra. "Never. My home is Samha," he replied firmly. "You should come and visit us there." Seeing the look on my face, he added, "No pirates."
Sometime in the future, those of us in search of timeless isolation may have to bypass Socotra and head through dangerous waters to Samha. To listen to some locals, that time may be fast approaching. Visiting the south coast, Ismael introduced me to Abdullah, a friend of his who spends his days tending his herd of goats. We found the old man sitting contentedly in the shade of the entrance to a cave known as "the cave of dripping water," resting from the afternoon heat. Later, Abdullah would climb to the plateau above us to check on his animals. We discussed the lineage of his "treasure goat," descended from a line that had long been in his family. "How many goats do you have?" he asked, as he brewed tea in a large tin can over a fire of grass and twigs. Then, at Abdullah's request, Ismael recited the winning entry in the 2008 all-island poetry competition, a lament for the island as it was only forty years ago: "Will I tell people what Socotra was, / The time when there was no asphalt street / And no big buildings. . . . / The time when people will call you to their houses, / And would not feel happy until they slaughter the treasure goat for you."
"How much was the prize?" Abdullah asked.
"A million rials" (a little more than $4,000).
"He deserved it," said the old man firmly.
As I sipped my tea in the cave entrance, with no sound but the starlings and the drip of water into scattered pools, it seemed to me that there was no need to head to Samha just yet.