ALBERTO MORAVIA
towers around which, with the usual ability of oriental crowds to fonn
a picture or even an oleograph, swann street-peddlers, passers-by, soldiers,
idlers, women and boys, and wandering about apparently free and
without masters are dogs, sheep, goats, donkeys and even camels.
The double-door of the gateway which, until two or three months
ago, was kept closed and bolted from sunset to dawn, is wide open;
it looks ancient, its warped and worm-eaten planks studded with old
iron knobs. Once in the city, the similarity to Venice is confinned.
These little streets that wind in shadow between high, hanging fac;ades
recall, in fact, the narrower and more secret canals of Venice. Only
that at San'a, the canals are filled, not with water, but with a soft
yeIIow dust in which you sink up to the ankle, with every step raising
stinging clouds that catch at the throat and make the nostrils ache.
Venice of dust, San'a, equal to the Venice of the lagoon, also has its
plazas and small squares, or more precisely, irregular spaces at times
vast and spread out, at others, narrow and intimate, around which the
palaces are arranged with casual, yet always supremely picturesque,
views. And finaIIy, as in Venice, between one palace and another,
sprout the green tufts of trees from the thick gardens closed between
the walls. San'a, evidently, is famous for these gardens which the
Yemenites speak of as if they were the most delicious and perfect
places. However, it is true that in such praise imagination also plays a
part; the imagination of a people like the Arabs to whom, with their
vast collection of deserts, even a scrubby, dusty oasis seems a voluptuous
paradise.
You wander endlessly through the obsessive labyrinth of these
serpentine streets; looking up at the taIl fac;ades, on every floor you
can see swaying flowers arranged on a vertical groove that goes from
the roof to the sidewalk. Through these grooves the dirty water from
the houses runs down; and, in fact, there is a stench in the streets
and here and there the dust becomes an impure slime. But the doors
of carved wood with their padlocks and bolts; the multi-colored glass,
blue, red, yellow, green, of the windows; the flight through these
streets of girls wrapped in black veils; the scene in the plazas of groups
of camels kneeling in the dust; the gardens and courtyards that are
glimpsed beyond the doors console you for these medieval inconveniences.
Finally, after much wandering, one of the streets flows into the
canal
grande
of San'a: a wide, deep, waterless bed brimming with dust and
rocks, its steep earthy banks guarded by two rows of towering and
illustrated palaces. The
canal grande
of San'a, after having divided
