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chest with open drawers overflowing with papers. On the floor,
all
around the Imam, were piles of papers of every size and shape. The
Imam went through these papers quickly, signing them and writing
a few words on them and then tossing them to two or three scribes
who were squatting on the floor in the middle of the room. These
scribes stamped the papers with stamps which they dipped into two
jars full of red and blue ink. At a certain point, a servant entered
carrying a basket full of silver dollars. After being shown to
the
Imam, the money was piled up in heaps on the floor.
"So for an hour we remained in complete silence, before the King,
while more and more bundles of papers were carried into the room
in
endless procession, rapidly taken care of by the Imam and then carried
away again. Once the Imam looked up from his work and then I took
advantage of the moment to thank him for having permitted us to
visit the country. Occasionally, the Imam stopped signing papers
to
drink some water from a bottle wrapped in a wet cloth (to keep it cool).
With every swallow, he shouted loudly: 'W'al Hamdu Lillah' (God
be
praised) . . . Finally he rose staring fixedly ahead and screamed at
the top of his voice, 'In the name of God, the compassionate' and
left the room."
To this portrait we can only add the fact that the Imam remained
on the throne for forty years, during which Yemen was not only
maintained in the conditions in which the Turks had left it (and it
is
known that the Ottoman Empire had been already immobile for at
least two centuries), but probably, the Imam being much more re–
actionary than any Turkish governor, even slipped several steps back–
ward. Atrocious stories are told about the Imam Yahya, most of them
false, all intended to emphasize his tyrannical, capricious and fanatical
character. We will limit ourselves to observing that he was in every
way similar, with a few whims more or less, to any feudal lord of any
Arab country during the Middle Ages. The Imam's only problem was
that he was the perfect feudal lord of the Middle Ages in the middle
of the twentieth century. In other words, the Imam was an anachronism,
or a splinter of dead wood thrust into the live flesh of the present.
This
splinter paralyzed Yemen. Now, through the convulsion of Salla!'s
revolt, it has been cast out.
Therefore, Yemen was not, until yesterday, one of those backward
countries, partly modem, partly old-fashioned, a depressed area
in
which there were both the disadvantages of a dying Middle Ages and
those of a misunderstood and premature modernism. It was, instead, a
fossil in an excellent state of conservation; and the customs and usages
