Читать книгу Deadline Yemen (The Elizabeth Darcy Series) - Peggy Hanson - Страница 15

CHAPTER 11

Yemen Mocha could be considered the most exotic cup coffee in the world. It has strong character and amazing complexities, smooth and pleasantly pungent. It is heavy bodied and has unique flavors and gives out a lingering aroma.

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I walked on to Bab al Yemen, the market gate to the old walled city. Halima’s house was near here, somewhere. Her family was an aristocratic bastion of society in the Old City. Which multi-storied mansion was theirs? They all look much alike.

The market itself lay deep within a warren of mud brick palaces, all boasting lacy white gypsum designs around stained glass windows. My nose caught the whiff of dried human and animal waste, somewhat sanitized by the dry air and high-altitude sun.

I took off the face-covering burqa, though I still wore the balto and black headscarf. In spite of the outfit, every person on the street, man or woman, could tell from afar that I wasn’t Yemeni.

Two women in black flitted gracefully ahead of me, stopping to check out wares at a cloth shop. I caught a glimpse of trim ankles framed by jeans. Looking over my shoulder, dark eyes sparkled between the slits in their burqas and I heard giggles, as the women were embarrassed and eager at the same time. It’s not true that every woman swathed in black is meek, or lacking in mischief.

Now little shops appeared in some of the walls. This was the tin and copper section of the souq, clustered near the big main mosque.

Lethargic metallic pounding broke into what had been a quiet walk. I pulled out my camera and was rewarded by shots that could have come from the Middle Ages: tin-, brass- and coppersmiths wearing loose turbans of black and white kaffiyahs, once-white shirts meeting sarong kilts, held together by hand-cured leather belts with sheathes for each man’s most sacred possession, his deadly curved jambiya. Some of the handles were works of art: finely-wrought gold, silver, and jewels resting on a bed of rare, forbidden rhino horn from across the Red Sea in Ethiopia and Somalia. The other end of each little dagger was all business. I thought of the dance from last night.

By tradition, when a Yemeni man takes out his jambiya, he must use it—one of those macho principles, unfathomable to women—of the tribal warrior society. Of course, since everybody now carried an AK-47 from the age of twelve, the jambiya was more for show than business. Or so I assumed.