conquered Yemen, coffee from Mocha was being drunk throughout the Islamic world. When the first English trader visited the port, in 1606, almost half a century before Europe’s first café opened, he reported that there were over thirty-five merchant ships from as far away as India crowding the harbor, all waiting for the bags of coffee that cluttered the docks. In a pleasant reversal from the present currency exchange, the English merchant John Jourdain wrote that Mocha was full of “all kinds of commodities that are so deare that there is no dealing for us…. at the rates they sell them to the merchants from Great Cairo.” Coffee palaces lined the harbor, and princes sat on gold cushions, fanned by hordes of slaves. There was even a private army whose job was to ensure that no infidel stole one of the precious coffee plants.
By then, the long-dead hermit al-Shadhili had been dubbed the patron saint of coffee drinkers, and his tomb, located in a local mosque, had become a destination for Islamic pilgrims. I’d seen the minaret while we were being held in the harbor, and as soon as the authorities let me go, I headed for it. Modern Mocha turned out to be the grubbiest, most fly-infested hellhole I had ever seen. Men in rags, their feet black with oil, lounged about on the vulture-picked motorcycle carcasses that made up the local taxi fleet. There were a few fishy smelling cafés and a funduq hotel with thirty men crammed into a single room. The monsoon wind that had harried our ship was still blowing, only here it kicked up a small sandstorm. Within a minute I was covered in rivulets of sand and sweat that slowly dripped down the inside of my shirt.
When I finally reached the old part of the town, a quote from a book I’d seen in India came to mind.
“The city presented itself as a very beautiful object,” Jean de La Roque wrote in his Voyage to Arabia the Happy. “There were many palm trees and palaces… The sight much rejoiced us.”
It had been written three hundred years ago. I realized things might have changed. But this, I thought, standing at the end of the town’s single road, this was unbelievable. As far as the horizon stretched a sandy plain dotted with ruined mansions. Immediately to my left stood the shattered walls of a coffee merchant’s palace straight out of The Arabian Nights, replete with elaborately carved friezes and balconies and onion-shaped windows. Further afield stood a crenellated tower that must once have been the corner of a small fortress. The ruins—some little more than a shattered wall—appeared to stretch for miles. In between them were dozens of small hills of sand that, I later realized, hid the remains of even more buildings.
The only sign of life was an ancient man squatting next to a crumbling wall, apparently unaware of my presence.
“Salaam,” I called out. He continued sucking on his hookah. Perhaps he’s deaf, I thought, and went to stand in his line of vision. Nothing. Now, I’ve seen some grisly characters before, but this guy took the cake. His clothes hung in oil-stained rags that looked like they’d come straight from the mechanic’s shop, and his turban was so caked with grease and dirt it must have held its shape in perpetuity. His skin looked mummified, a violent, sunburnt brown splintered into a spiderweb of wrinkles. The sweat pouring down from under his turban left tracks in the sand clinging to his face. His hookah matched him to a tee, being an ingenious contraption of rusted pipes stuck in a broken water bottle, with a sardine can standing in for the pipe’s bowl.
I pointed to the mosque inquiringly. “Al-Shadhili?”
I could hear his pipe gurgle as he took another hit. Still no reaction. I wandered over to the mosque to see if I could find a way in. It was a cluster of six low-lying domes from the midst of which leapt a forty-foot-tall white minaret covered in the elegant geometrical carvings of the Zabid school. (Zabid is a nearby village where algebra was born.) I went around to the other side and found a wooden door covered with brass knobs. Before I could knock, however, an old fellow popped out. He gave me a grin, whirled on his heel, slapped a padlock in place, and disappeared into the sandstorm before I could so much as hiss, “Baksheesh!”
I studied the mosque for a second. Then the ruins. The old man smoking the hookah. Through the wind I caught a whiff of something rank. It was me. I hadn’t taken a shower in a week. I was starving and weak, and my head was pounding from what felt like a shattered tooth. The sandstorm was so bad I had to keep my hand over my glass lenses to keep them from being destroyed. I decided to leave.
“Bye now,” I said. “See ya later.”
The old man took another puff from his hookah and stared straight ahead. I set off into the sandstorm to find a way out of al-Makkha.
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