The Land of Qat

It was the first jeep ever to climb those dizzy mountain passes, where the villages perch on pinnacles and figs grow in the high valleys and the king's harem more than pays for itself, by sewing uniforms for the royal army. Harlan B. Clark (born 33 years ago in Brookfield, Ohio) was in the jeep. He and the jeep together meant that no land--not even Yemen (see map) --could henceforth be isolated from the U.S.

Clark's Arab driver explained to the natives that the jeep was the offspring of the truck that followed with Clark's luggage. Yemenites, who understand heredity, understood that; they have been "electing" members of one family as their rulers since 897 A.D. The latest, Imam Yahya bin Mohamed bin Hamid el Din (76), had asked Clark to come up from Aden, where he is U.S. consul, to arrange for regular diplomatic relations between the two nations.

The Fires of Envy. The Imam's intense isolationism had at last been overcome by his avarice. A king who pays his chief of staff $153 month and his soldiers $2 could scarcely ignore the new $4 to $6 million airfield at Dhahran in the rival neighboring kingdom of Saudi Arabia, or the $6 million a year that blear-eyed Ibn Saud gets from U.S. petroleum concessions. Yahya's Yemen has no oil with which to bargain in the bazaars of international high finance, but it is strategically located near the foot of the Red Sea, across the Arabian Peninsula from the Persian Gulf, toward which Russia reaches south and east.

Thirty years ago Washington might have let the British handle the Yemen's invitation. But now the U.S. stake in the Middle East was vastly multiplied, and besides, the Imam Yahya disliked the British. He had even fought against them in World War I and subsequently managed to keep his independence, an extraordinary diplomatic triumph for a chancellery headed by a $22-a-month foreign minister.

The Imam's capital is Sana, an almost impregnable city (pop. 40,000), which had a 20-story building 19 centuries before" New York. There, in the hot morning sun, the Imam sits under the Tree of Justice before the palace gates, a soldier holding a royal umbrella over him while he dispenses direct and parsimonious judgments to his subjects. Most of them accept his word as the Koran's law but, just to be sure, the Imam keeps as hostages 4,000 sons of chieftains and bureaucrats.

The Cool of the Evening. After court the Imam rides through Sana's surprisingly wide, flowery streets in a horse-drawn coach. As the shadows lengthen in Sana men, women & children gather in the courtyards for the daily ritual and recreation--the chewing of the qat. They squat about brass spittoons (in the better homes) and tear the leaves of Catha edulis fresh from the stems. Some travelers have said that qat is an aphrodisiac, but a Yemenite philosopher has set the world straight on that point. "It brings rest to the body and ease to the mind," he wrote, "which cannot be achieved in any other way, save, of course, through religion. It does not encourage eroticism--on the contrary. The man who is far from his wife takes qat in order to help him remain faithful to her." Yemenites grow the best coffee in the world (near Mocha), but they export nearly all of it, because they like qat better. Outside the Yemenites, nobody likes qat.

The special U.S. mission to establish relations with Yemen will leave Washington this week. Its chief is Colonel William Eddy, plump, professorial U.S. Minister to Saudi Arabia. The mission will include a doctor to check up on the Imam, whose wives (4) and sons (13) sometimes worry about what his daily qat-chewing may be doing to his health.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.