Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [105]
Pearl and Marvin insist I take the one closed room and string up their mosquito net on the tiles. I drag my things into my room and cover the tiny, thin mattress with my sheet. The small bed, adrift in a desert of linoleum, depresses me, making me feel acutely single. I lie down for a nap. It is stifling, nearly too hot to sleep, but I manage to slip into a tropical torpor for a bit before waking around noon. We all take quick showers to cool off and walk into town for lunch. It’s so hot I have trouble making my legs move. The dusty main street is deserted. It feels like the American Wild West at high noon.
We find a restaurant at the other end of town. Lunch is cold slices of fish, rice, and tea. This is all there ever will be for lunch on Soqotra, unless you want meat, rice, and tea. There is almost no agriculture on the island, so fruits and vegetables don’t appear in restaurants. But as it is my first meal, I enjoy it. We sit and talk and swelter. Marvin tells me more about the livestock project.
After lunch, we walk (slowly, as the sun is still burning down) to the small souq, where we peer into the shops. Goats are everywhere. They are not happy or healthy goats. Their fur is matted, their bellies bloated, and their tails coated with excrement. In the souq, several are tied under tables, ready for slaughter. In one of the small shops, I buy a light cotton dress for $3; everything I brought feels too warm. I wash it as soon as we get home and hang it on a line in the courtyard. A half hour later, it is dry.
Desperate for a swim, we all pile into the SUV and head to a beach on a protected little peninsula with two pointed rocks at the end called Di Hamri. A few camping shelters have been set up here, with an open-air shower.
The men wander off, to preserve our modesty, and Pearl and I drop our things on a sheltered stretch of rocky beach. After waiting for the men to disappear from view, I strip to my swimsuit and hurl myself into the water. It’s crystal clear. I put my goggles on and am awestruck. Coral mushrooms up from the ocean floor, fanciful kinds of coral I could not have dreamed up—my previous encounters with coral being limited to jewelry shops. There is bloated round coral, branchlike coral, brain-shaped coral, and hundreds of kinds of fish. There are black-and-white-striped fish with yellow tails, black fish, long blue fish, and tiny little fish too small to eat. I have never been scuba diving or snorkeling and have never swum in water so clear. I am deliriously happy. I swim out and out, until men on the shore begin waving their kerchiefs at me to come back. But I can’t stop, luxuriating in my newfound floatiness.
The sun begins to set around the corner on the cliffs, and I stay in the water until it dissolves. When I emerge, I feel near-human. On the beach, I shower in a little palm-frond-shaded booth on the rocks and talk to Pearl while I comb out my hair and pin it back up with chopsticks. It seems that last year, a couple of tourists swam out a bit too far and were caught in a riptide. Their bodies washed up the next morning.
“That is why those men were waving you in,” she says.
The only thing missing from the afternoon is a stop at a roadside ice cream stand. In this climate, ice cream feels critical. But there is no ice cream on Soqotra. There is hardly any refrigeration, and what little exists is usually on only after dark, when the island’s few generators are turned on.
We drive back past tiny villages of stone walls and palm-thatched roofs. Once we’ve changed, we eat dinner at the same restaurant where we had lunch. None of the restaurants have names; even the Soqotri can’t tell you what they’re called. They simply say “the restaurant of the Taj Hotel” or “the restaurant across the street from the Taj.”
Dinner is ful and fasooleah with bread, and some sheep for the sheep eaters. Afterward, Pearl and I walk over to the Taj Hotel so she can show me where “all the cool people hang out.” Most of the expats and tourists eat at this one