Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [105]
You camel men, go, abuse each other,
At As-Sallalah go meet your lover.
Passing through the tiny town of Khon, the pilgrims sang:
O Khon, no girl in Khon is chaste,
Where married and unmarried women fornicate.5
Through As-Sallalah and on through Khon we drove. We turned off into the Wadi 'Aidid, a tributary of the Wadi Hadramaut. Far ahead, set on a rise at the foot of a towering red rock cliff, we caught sight of a glistening white dome. As we drew closer, we saw that the tomb overlooked a fair-sized town, which proved to be immaculately well tended and clearly prosperous—but totally deserted. No dog barked, no bird sang, no retainer looked after things. It was inhabited but three days a year, during the pilgrimage.
From the white, silent town, a broad staircase led up to an open-air prayer hall built around a giant boulder. A further flight of stairs ascended to the tomb itself, a graceful dome in which was enshrined a whitewashed, squared-off rock, split by a fissure. It was the sarcophagus of the prophet Hud. He was evidently a very tall man, for his sarcophagus extended beyond the confines of the building and a good ninety feet up the hillside behind it. The tomb's walls were speckled with colored dots, wads of paper conveying the prayers and pleas of recent pilgrims.
Though augmented by buses and pickups, this year's procession from Tarim, we had been told, was much as Serjeant had described it in the 1940s. Passing an outcropping called the Rock of the Infidel Woman, pilgrims shouted, "God curse you, infidel woman," and, better yet, peppered it with bursts of rifle fire. Their arrival at the town had prompted chanting, shouting, and more shooting. The atmosphere was festive, harking back to the great fairs of pre-Islamic Arabia, where the people of the desert and the cultivated lands, herdsmen and farmers, gathered to exchange goods, race camels, and honor not only Hud but, as a present-day Hadrami has written, "invoke peace on all the prophets of importance, the four perfect women, the archangels, and the gardener of Paradise."6
Close by holy Hud's town, water gushed inexplicably from the barren desert (a phenomenon that may have made this a place of pilgrimage long before its identification with him). The devout made their ablutions here, in the belief that they were bathing in the waters of a river of Paradise. Then they joined a long, slowly moving line that ritually retraced Hud's last days.
Hud, they believed, was pursued into the Wadi 'Aidid by a pair of wild and godless horsemen. He rode up the gully beyond the town (where there is now a wide staircase) and leapt from his faithful she-camel—a beast that God immortalized by turning it into a great boulder. Cornered and hard-pressed, Hud said to an oblong rock before him, "Open by the permission of God!" The rock opened wide. He entered, and the rock closed behind him, though it did not close entirely. A fissure remained through which, it is said, only the virtuous can pass.
Though pilgrims have demonstrated their virtue by squeezing partway into the fissure, what lies beyond it is holy, not to be seen. In the 900s, the Yemeni historian al-Hamdani offered the report of an informant from the Hadramaut: "As I went in, I saw stretched on a bier a man of dark brown complexion with a long face and thick beard. The corpse was dried up and felt hard to the fingers. I saw beside his head the following inscription in Arabic: 'I am Hud who believed in God. I had compassion upon 'Ad and regretted their unbelief. Verily nothing can forestall what God has ordained.'"7
In this far corner of far Arabia, we had come to a precinct that pilgrims held "so sacred that a stick