Al lubban: olibanum. One who festers, weeps. Its bitter-tasting resin tears aren’t to be trusted; they’re believed to spread infection and sadness. From the skin outward, al lubban is a poor tree, no life, no beauty, barely a memory. Under its skin its true nature isexposed, that of a flayed man. It’s always been there, not far from Goat Foot, but its insignificance made it go unseen. Until now. On this freezing night, she looks, she sees. Eager for warmth, she breaks off branches, bundles them, and lights them for a fire.
The fire works its alchemy. It burns the wood, frees its spirit, and that’s when it happens: Fragrant, narcotic smoke spirals up to fill the night, anointing it with an oily balm, like copal or myrrh.
“We’re dying of hunger and squalor while sitting on a gold mine,” Goat Foot says.
She shares the secret she’s just discovered with the local people, persuades them to cultivateBoswellia sacraand harvest its resins, which they will give the names of olibanum, frankincense, and true incense.
Little by little, through tests and trials, Goat Foot, who is Sheba, finds several uses for that startling matter: It cures swelling and diarrhea, seals ulcers, disinfects wounds, stops vomiting, revives sexual appetites, promises to be the base of fine perfumes, and, as if that weren’t enough, repels snakes, spiders, mosquitoes, and bad spirits. The Hadhrami, who’d always been nomadic, now root to the ground so they can grow these redemptive plants, harvesting more and more from them to meet demand. They find that, just like beasts of burden, these trees respond to punishment and yield more when they’re insulted. When they’re hurt by night with many-tailed whips, they weep more copiously and fester through the breaks in their skin, and it’s enough to scrape their trunks at dawn to get a good load of curdled milk tears. Hadhramaut, the stony hollow, turns into the Valley of Balsam.
But there is still more that will come to pass. Business takes off quickly when frankincense rises to the sky and pleases the gods, who find it sweeter than honey and more intoxicating than wine. It drives them wild to inhale its smoke, and they go off the deep end, leaping naked into the sea to delight in swims, games, and orgies. Gérard de Nerval aptly deciphered the inner workings of that process: Whentrue incense pours, the gods fuse the real with the delusional, expanding their realms and feeling more ethereal, gorgeous, and powerful than ever. More generous too. Grateful for the new offering, and moved by it, they decree that from this moment forward, the earth shall receive the clear, ingenuous waters that make deserts blossom. But there are conditions; they respond to praise in mysterious, elusive ways. They don’t grant water when people need or ask for it, but when their own divine whims choose. And not in the desired amount, but very little—a few drops immediately swallowed by the sand—or, if not, too much: enough to flood the world. Largesse and avarice are both traits of the gods, givers of everything or nothing.
Humans, being needy by nature, deduce that they can hook the gods on olibanum and thereby keep them trapped. They won’t only ask for water, but also another even more longed-for blessing: forgiveness from sin. To wash their guilt, they burn huge amounts of incense in the gods’ honor.
Purification ceremonies, libations, and initiations spread. Altars and temples rise up throughout the desert and beyond. The gods are avid beings, and the more they receive, the more they demand; the more valuable the offering, the more generous the pardon. A crowd begins to form around olibanum, seeking salvation, or at least solace, troubled souls who’d rather blame themselves for their own wrongs than accept that perhaps the source of wrong was really those very gods before whom they grovel for forgiveness. Stockholm syndrome, perhaps, this honoring of your tormentor, since, as the Italian writer Bufalino said, sin was invented by men to deserve the sentence of living, so as not to endure punishment for no reason.
The olibanum of Hadhramaut turns into the epicenter of a growing trade of indulgences and pardons. Over the centuries, it will become so valued that, along with gold and myrrh, the Three Wise Men will offer it to the King of Kings soon after his birth.
For the time being, frankincense transforms the Hadhrami, with Sheba at their head, into the richest people on earth.
The Exquisitely Old
The city of Sanaa is the most monumental of apparitions. Time immemorial has passed through it like light through crystal, without leaving a mark or stain. Its stunning beauty rises from the pages ofOne Thousand and One Nightsonly to land directly in the sights of Eurofighter Typhoon planes and Predator and Reaper drones. There are three secret cities that embed themselves forever in your dreams. The third is Machu Picchu. The second, Varanasi.
The first is Sanaa.
Bab-al-Yaman, the main entrance to Sanaa’s Old City, is the threshold into a lost era that’s taken root here, a Muslim medieval dreamscape rife with the scent of sewage, spices, and incense that refuses to leave because there’s no one to tell it that times have changed. There’s no room left in our world for Sanaa’s tall clay towers delicately adorned with white adobe friezes, nor for the fresh green breath of its orchards, nor for its courtyards where blind camels circle around stone mills. And yet, it all remains here, in the middle of Sanaa: The mirage refuses to disappear.
I take to this city with the zeal of a man possessed by impossible love. Like a thousand-year-old woman who stays forever young thanks to veils that hide her: That’s Sanaa, unreachable. Wars,disease, religious intolerance, and blood feuds keep the city inaccessible to me. I’m here thanks to a miracle, and that miracle won’t come again. I don’t understand how Sanaa can still exist; at any moment a plague of locusts, a dust storm, or a coalition air attack could erase it from the map.
But she persists. Sanaa, the exquisitely old, lives on in the midst of disaster. Despite her war wounds, she is still the most beautiful of all. I roam her quickly, running behind Zahra Bayda, who’s picked me up at the airport and now has some shopping and other errands to attend to. I cling to Zahra Bayda like some Theseus, she’s my Ariadne’s thread—or maybe my very Ariadne—and the possibility of losing her scares me, for without her this labyrinth would swallow me whole.
“How long has it been since you’ve eaten?” she asks, and at a table in the crowded market, we’re served lamb kebab and coffee with ginger, pepper, and cinnamon, hot and sweet. I eat with an orphan’s hunger.
Zahra Bayda walks very fast, setting the rhythm, I can’t slow down to look around and have to settle for filling my memory with visions that whirl by from one instant to the next. Stores and towers, fragrant gardens, street vendors offering khat leaves or precious stones. Men with sharp daggers at their belts. Women fine as shadows who have me imagining the beauty hiding beneath their many veils.
At an elevation of 2,340 meters—7,677 feet—in the mountains of Djebel Ayban, Sanaa is one of the highest capitals in the world, after Bolivia’s La Paz, Colombia’s Bogotá, and Ethiopia’s Addis Ababa. A living anachronism, a remake of biblical times, Sanaa was founded before the spread of people and of tongues, its patriarch was Shem, son of Noah, and it was populated by the sons of Shem, who were called Elam, Ashur, Arphaxad, Lud, and Aram, and later by his grandsons, Mash, Uz, Hul, and Gether, and after that by many more, all the way to the proud men who today carry loads or trade camels and goats as they chew khat, curved butcher’s knives at theirwaists. Were they all born spontaneously, from nothing? How did so many males sprout into being, when the Yemeni annals mention no women in the original Sanaa? Might there have been a queen, slave, mother, prostitute, priestess, or female baker? No, not one. Recording female lives was not of interest to the scribes of those times. With one single, notable exception. The tradition speaks of one woman. Only one: her.
She who didn’t have to be a saint, nor virgin, nor poor, nor whore to earn a place in the pages of the Testaments. To be recognized, she didn’t have to behead anyone, like Salome or Judith; it was enough for her to be herself, the woman of Sheba, in power and wisdom. She, the slippery one. She, the mystery.
And what if Sanaa was the kingdom, and the Lady of Sheba its queen? Two in essence, with a single head and body, bride and lover: Sanaa, the fortified city and its unattainable queen. Her. I’ve come here to seek her name and the letters of her surname, for her I’ll write a bolero song, a noir novel, or a Viennese waltz. I want to tell her truths and air out her lies. I’m going to find out whether she defeated Solomon in their contest of wisdom, whether she stole his heart in bed or spurned him, and I’ll also learn of her other loves, wars, sorrows, children if she had them, the pain she experienced, and the joys. The color of her favorite outfit, the weapon she used, what languages she spoke, how she braided her hair, whether she was savage or refined, whether she abused her power or was respected by her people, whether she rode a horse or camel. Whether she put pepper, ginger, or cinnamon in her coffee, whether she took it sweet and hot on a corner like this one.
In an empty alley, a small being sits against the wall, a human lump. She’s a beggar with her hand outstretched to passersby, of which, in this place, there are none. The stubborn hand keeps begging. The woman barely breathes under her tangled rags, so still and absent she seems asleep. They say that, on a street in Turin, an exhausted horse once got a brutal beating. Nietzsche embraced the horse’s neck,wept, and collapsed. I do not embrace this beggar in Sanaa. Nietzsche would have done so, he would have been able to close the distance, he would have known there was no distance because he too was the beggar, he too was the horse. Me, I only give this woman a few coins, which she thanks me for with her hand at her breast: In exchange for my coins, she offers me her heart.
The panhandler of Sanaa goes still again, as if dozing beneath tattered cloth, and I ask Zahra Bayda to ask her what she’s dreaming. Zahra Bayda gives me a strange look, as if to say, What is wrong with this guy? But she assents.
“She says she dreams nothing,” she translates for me. “She says she came to this city full of dreams, but she has none left anymore. She says there’s only one, a tiny dream, the daily one: She dreams of somebody giving her a coin.”
We leave Sanaa’s Old City the way we came, through the adorned archway of Bab-al-Yaman. Beyond the city walls, another song awaits: an abrupt return to the present, and to the suffocation of a run-down, overpopulated, dirty, disjointed modernity, of slow internet and rampant traffic. Beasts of burden and ancient cars and trucks move through a jungle of telecom towers, and, on the sidewalks, piles of trash yield food to dogs and pigs.
Zahra Bayda. There’s something fascinating about her, some “black magic woman” quality, bringing that song to mind. She declares that she’s got one more thing to do and asks me to come with her.
“I’ll go anywhere with you, ma’am,” I say.
“Don’t call me ma’am.”
“I’ll call you whatever you prefer.”
“Don’t call me anything if you don’t want to.”
