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Dispatches From Yemen

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Prime Time for the Queen of Sheba

By Elisabeth Eaves
Posted Wednesday, May 19, 2004, at 4:50 PM ET

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Yemeni architectureOn the road from Sanaa to Marib, which climbs over a mountain range and then down into the desert, we stopped at one of the roadside settlements where the local tribesmen trade food, qat, and guns. I was traveling with my friends Ramzi and Randa, who are husband and wife, and a driver, Mohammed. While Mohammed went to find qat, a crowd gathered on one side of the car, and one wild-haired young man asked Ramzi where he was from.

"Lebanon," Ramzi said.

The young man asked Ramzi how to get to Palestine. "I have 3,000 men—no, 3,500. We want to fight the Israelis. Tell me how to go."

Ramzi advised the would-be warrior to be patient and pray.

Patience and prayer are needed by tourists in Yemen as well as aspiring jihadis. Still, the government would like you to come. Yemen has few exports. Oil is one, but it will not last for long; a former oil minister told me that the current rate of production—half a million barrels a day, a paltry amount that nonetheless accounts for 50 percent of GDP—can only be kept up for another 10 to 20 years. That leaves fish and tourism as potential sources of foreign revenue. But Yemenis have watched the number of visitors decline from about 20,000 annually in the late '90s to fewer than 5,000 per year now. Tribal groups damaged the industry through their frequent exercise of "kidnapping for development," as I heard one Yemeni businessman call it: They repeatedly nabbed groups of tourists and held them as bargaining chips while negotiating with the central government for wells and roads. With a few exceptions, the kidnappings were non-lethal. But when religious fanatics started attacking high-profile foreign targets, most notably the U.S.S. Cole in 2000, Yemen acquired a reputation as a terrorist hotbed. As recently as December 2003, following the capture of Saddam Hussein, a lone knifeman prowled the streets of Sanaa, stabbing foreigners. The U.S. State Department warns travelers to stay away.

The Tourism Promotion Board's hopeful brochures, though, are not entirely misguided. All of them note that Yemen is "the ancient land of the Queen of Sheba." Along with weird and gorgeous architecture and nearly 1,200 miles of pristine coast, the biblical monarch is one of Yemen's great touristic hopes. It was to a Sheba-related site that we were headed when we met the Hamas fellow-traveler by the side of the road.

Marib is a no-frills outpost in Yemen's Wild East, which has prospered since nearby oil discoveries in the '80s. One of the roads into town is lined with shops selling machine guns, and residents wear their AK-47s slung around their chests. In the middle of town, bustling stores spill auto parts and bright-colored housewares into the street. At the restaurant where we ate lunch, Ramzi pronounced the bathroom "worse than a Lebanese prison" and passed around his package of wet wipes. But we weren't there for the facilities; the most significant archeological sites in Southern Arabia are located just outside of town. The kingdom of Sheba, or Saba, began around 1000 BC and lasted for more than a millennium. The Queen of Sheba, who controlled a major frankincense trade route and did business with King Solomon of Israel, ruled from about 950 to 930 BC. Her formal name, Bilqis, is a common girl's name in Yemen today.

There are several sites around Marib—including a dam built in 1986—that a conspiracy of guidebook writers and Yemeni tour operators has determined foreigners are supposed to see, but only two are really worthwhile. One is the ancient Great Dam of Marib. Most of it is gone, but the two giant sluices that remain are conceptually impressive—more than 2,500 years ago, they supplied a vast area of fields and orchards with water, allowing the Sabaean empire to exist.

The other exciting spot is known as the Mahram Bilqis, or Temple of Bilqis. We drove up to the makeshift fence surrounding the site, and a Yemeni archeologist let us through and showed us around. A team of local tribesmen moved sand in wheelbarrows, and the ground shifted under our feet as we climbed into an entrance hall marked by eight giant pillars. The top of a partially excavated wall curved away, outlining an enormous oval hall, and I came across another archeologist bent over a panel, slowly tracing an impression of the ancient Sabaean alphabet onto a plastic sheet. It seemed that the temple, dedicated to a moon god, was literally rising out of the sand in front of my eyes.

A number of dubious sources claim that the original excavator of the Mahram Bilqis, an American named Wendell Phillips, was the real-life inspiration for the movie character Indiana Jones. Like all the best stories, this is more believable than it is necessarily true. Given to wearing a checkered Arab headscarf, cowboy boots, and a Colt .45 slung low at his waist, the twentysomething Phillips launched the first expedition to unearth the temple in 1951. In 1952, he and his team fled the site, hotly pursued by a local sheik who thought the foreigners were hunting for secret treasure. (Phillips went on to search for the lost city of Ubar in Oman and to prosper in the oil business before an untimely death at the age of 42.) It wasn't until 1998 that excavations at the temple began again, under an international team assembled by Phillips' sister Merilyn Phillips Hodgson. The organization she leads, the American Foundation for the Study of Man, promises on its Web site—perhaps for the benefit of the Yemeni government—that uncovering the Sabaen ruins will lead to "the creation of a world class tourist attraction" comparable to the pyramids of Egypt or the Parthenon in Greece.

Before it can become the next Parthenon, the government will have to do something about getting from Sanaa to Marib and back. In order to discourage tourist kidnappings and the consequent bad press, Yemen tries to monitor foreigners' movements, but the results are haphazard. To make the three-hour drive, we had to get a permission slip from the Ministry of Tourism, then rally on the outskirts of the capital with all the other cars ferrying tourists to Marib that day. The idea was to travel in a convoy, with a military escort taking up the front and rear.

While we waited to depart, a guide from Universal Travel and Tourism, one of the biggest travel companies in Yemen, wandered over to our four-wheel-drive vehicle and stuck his head in the window. He was surprised to find two Americans, Randa and myself, in the back seat. "Americans don't come here at all," he said. "I feel sorry for them. This is a beautiful country." He said he was guiding several cars full of Greek Cypriots and that he frequently led groups from Japan and South Korea. "The Japanese go anywhere. They came even during the civil war." He was not happy about the escort system. "It's just for appearances. You wait and see. They make a big deal about leaving in a convoy, but you come back by yourself." Sure enough, about 30 minutes into our drive, we zipped past the Greek Cypriots. Our lead military vehicle had disappeared, and we didn't see another tourist for the rest of the day.

We saw plenty of soldiers. There are no fewer than 11 military checkpoints between Sanaa and Marib, and just when we thought we were going to make it through the day without an escort, a bored and opportunistic officer insisted on getting in the car. He consumed all the water, cigarettes, and qat we had on hand, and then demanded a ride to his village—and a tip. In case we had believed that he was protecting us, as he claimed, he abandoned the vehicle at dusk, just before we headed back over the mountain pass.

Yemen is not quite ready for prime time. For it to get there, the threat of shakedowns as well as kidnappings will have to recede. But by the time that happens, if it ever does, ropes will hold visitors in check at the temple to the moon god, and it will no longer shimmer like a mirage on the sand.

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