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AFRI CA
fitted. On their feet, they wear the traditional Yemen sandal with the
square sole; and over their shoulders, they carry an old rifle, a ninety–
one model. Both have one smooth cheek and one swollen one as
if
suffering from a tumor. It is the gat, a small green plant whose leaves,
when chewed for a long time, produce a euphoria not unlike, though
less intense than, that caused by hashish. I indicate the swelling to the
soldiers, and then, smiling, touch my cheek. Immediately, they both
laugh; and then an expression of ingenuousness and gentleness appears
on those fierce faces, correcting the first predatory impression.
Later, after leaving my suitcases at the rest-house, I go out for my
first visit to San'a. The rest-house is at the end of one of those immense
irregular dusty spaces which are the plazas of Arab cities; spaces
imitated by the desert that surrounds the city and made purposely for
the slow erratic advance of the camels, for the uneven trot of the
donkeys and for the tumultuous migrations of the sheep. At the end
of the plaza, like an ancient altar-piece representing Jerusalem or
Byzantium, rise the walls of San'a with the round towers and the
gateway and beyond the walls, the famous palaces. I say "famous"
because San'a, until yesterday forbidden to foreigners, is one of the
architectural myths of the Orient ; as far as I know, it is impossible to
see buildings such as these in any other country of Arabia.
Well, there they are: the famous legendary palaces. They are very
tall, five or six floors, square, massive, thick, almost towers or fortresses;
constructed of bricks of dry mud, they have a uniformly brown color
against which white decorations made with lime and stucco stand out.
In these cornices that look like spun sugar, in these rosettes laid out
like certain Italian playing cards above prison-like windows, in these
arabesques like hand-made lace, there is nothing of the geometrical
rigor of great Arab architecture, but only a witty and crude Bedouin
parody.
They are really hand-made palaces, simple, mixed from mud and
straw, constructed without a plumbline, with walls sometimes oblique
or bulging, decorated with an artisan improvisation, according to a
crude and rustic tradition. And now I recall those houses and palaces,
also old and crooked and decorated with openwork designs, that are
lined up along the canals of Venice. Yes, San'a is a small Bedouin
Venice built in the middle of the steppe on the Yemen plateau, like
Venice in the middle of the waters of the lagoon. The same oriental
imagination concerned with decorative and fairy-tale effects seems
to have conceived both these cities.
I enter the city through the gate called Bab-al-Yemen, between two
