"It's dangerous up there," said the man from Government House. "We don't think you should go. The country is in turmoil. Nobody knows what's happening. The last plane that flew from here just vanished.
"You could be robbed or taken prisoner. They throw people in dungeons, you know. You might," he grinned, "even get beheaded."
He was talking about Yemen. Not the Yemen of today, with its five-star hotels in the cities, tennis courts and fitness centres, supermarkets and package tours (although the occasional tourist gets kidnapped by tribesmen).
This was the Yemen of 1962, when there were no hotels, no tourists, not even a road to the capital, only a rocky track for trucks and camels. Flush toilets were unknown. So was paper money — you had to carry a sack of Maria Theresa thalers, big silver coins first minted in Vienna in 1741. And the few foreigners allowed into the country needed the personal permission of the ruling Imam.
The man from Government House was leaning across the bar of the Rock Hotel in Aden, the British colony a few hours south across the desert from the forbidden country. He was talking to six frustrated foreign correspondents itching to get into Yemen, where the Imam had just died and his son had been toppled by a revolution that ended 1,100 years of monarchy.
(The six were all Brits except me, a Canadian. I was sharing a hotel room in the Rock with the correspondent from The Observer, Kim Philby.
This was the same Kim Philby who disappeared from the Middle east four months later, turned up in Moscow and was revealed as Britain's "Third Man," the most famous spy the Soviet Union ever had. But that's another story.) For days we had been sending telegrams to the leader of the revolution in Sana'a and at last we had a reply: we could cross the border into Yemen.
So, despite the warning from Government House, we hired a big Land Rover and its driver and set off for the Land of the Queen of Sheba in darkest Arabia. With us we had a newsreel cameraman from Jordan, thank God; he spoke Arabic, which none of us did.
It was six hours of jolting along dusty tracks, with half-joking forebodings about the Yemenis throwing us into a scorpion pit. We lurched past little stone forts, softly plodding camel caravans and lines of women carrying kerosene tins of water on their heads. The car boiled beneath the embroidered blue quilt that covered its hood.
A few more kilometres of rocky wadis and mud villages and there was the dreaded frontier: It consisted of a single plank across the track, balanced atop a wooden crate.
Beside a row of thatch-topped tea houses stood an antique armoured car and a barefoot Yemeni army sergeant in a sarong, underwear shirt and turban. Two ballpoint pens were tucked beside the dagger in his belt.
The jig was up, we thought. But the sergeant cried a cheery "Ahlan" (welcome), leaned into the car to shake hands with all of us, ignored our passports and waved us through.
Down we drove into a scene of unveiled women working in lush fields, blindfolded camels turning slowly around the water wells, startling bright flowers, men on donkeys or on foot, every one of them carrying a rifle or a musket, and no army patrols. Not a sign of the revolution. Too easy to be true, we thought, and we were right.
Forty-five minutes later we bounced into our first village, through a great wooden gate into a rock-walled courtyard. As we entered, the gate swung closed behind us. A crowd of squatting tribesmen picked up their rifles, tugged at their turbans and formed a straggling line that looked ominously like a firing squad.
Then they all smiled and chanted "ash al sha'ab" (long live the people), clapping to the beat. The crowd grew so thick we couldn't get out of the Land Rover. By the time we scrambled onto the hood to take photos, much to the distress of the driver, who said we were soiling his quilt, they had produced banners with pictures of Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser and Yemen's new revolutionary leader, Abdullah al-Sallal.
