Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [110]
Our guide becomes noticeably nervous as we near the top and falls behind. You can’t see the black maw of the cave until you are right upon it. Then it opens before you, a wide dark gash in the mountain’s side. I pause, panting, and turn to look down at the sea below. The mountainside falls away dramatically, and the sky is just turning pink over the water. Rasheed catches up with me and we stand gazing down.
“I’ll wait outside,” the guide says in Soqotri. “There are jinn.
Jinn are mentioned in the Qur’an. As my friend and Arabic teacher Hamoudi explains: “Before the God made humans, he had only angels and jinn. Iblees was the king of the jinn, who were all made of fire. God made the jinn of fire and the angels of light. The God then said, ‘I will make a human, Adam, from mud, and everyone should pray to him, just once.’
“Iblees, the king jinni, was the first person to say no to the God. He said, ‘No, I will not worship humans, because they are mud and we are fire. We are better!’
“God said, ‘Go away.’
“The jinn said to God, ‘Then we will make humans do bad things.’ … God said, ‘Go, and try to make humans do bad things. But if they do, you and they will both be in hell.’”
Muslims believe the jinn can enter a person’s blood and force him to commit terrible crimes. A human can either follow the jinn to hell or choose a higher path. A human possessed by a jinni often requires an exorcism, which involves an imam reading the Qur’an over the afflicted.
Not all jinn are evil, however. There are Muslim jinn, who have been convinced of the righteous way. But these are apparently not what our guide is worried about encountering in the cave.
There is no sign of any other tourists, and we have no flashlight. I fish around in my purse and find a lighter with a tiny bulb at the end. Rasheed and I step into the cave.
“Here, jinni jinni!” he calls, to torment the guide.
We pick our way across the uneven rock floor, skirting pools of water. “Look up,” says Rasheed.
Stalagmites of astonishing length hang everywhere, like Stone Age chandeliers. A thousand dripping daggers of stone hang over my head. I’ve never seen anything like them. Around us crowd accidental statues and gargoyles in a Gothic sculpture garden. Pools of water form in bizarrely symmetrical basins. Cathedral ceilings stretch away into blackness. It is the Notre Dame of caves. It catches up all of my breath. Silently, Rasheed and I pick our way as deep into the cave as is possible with our tiny light.
When I stop again to gaze up at the magnificent stalagmites, Rasheed whispers, “Turn out the light.”
We stand in the total darkness, listening to the drip of the water and the silence in between and our breathing and the rustle of—bats?
I want to go all the way to the back of the cave, but we do not have enough light or time. It is nearly dusk, and we still have a long climb down the mountain. “I promise, the next time you come, we will go to every cave on Soqotra,” says Rasheed. “We will do the all-cave tour.”
Our guide is pacing anxiously outside. We join him and hustle down the path. I take the lead, full of renewed vigor. We race the sun down the mountain and emerge from the scrub at the bottom just as the sky turns deep blue and the first few stars wink on.
After dropping our guide at his village, we stop to visit a friend of Rasheed’s mother’s. The sky is heavily salted with stars when we arrive at the little stone hut by the sea. A woman comes out to greet us and ushers us into a small courtyard. As we settle ourselves on mats laid on the ground, the family gathers around us, friendly and inquisitive. A pot of a reddish fish stew is set before us, and we dig in. It is delicious, the fish falling apart in our fingers. It must have been caught just hours before. We follow this with fresh flatbread and the usual milky sweet tea. Afterward, I am offered a bowl of sour milk. I expect