The Salt Market

Lapiz Luzuli

The terrible tragedy unfolding in slow motion in Afghanistan reminded me of gems on sale in the open air markets of Yemen. In this week's Camino a Ítaca, I look back at the Afghan stones that were so valuable and the near hysteria of right-wing conservatives, desperate to declare their deity somehow more reasonable than others. Click over to the original version published in Spanish in El Hoy or read the English translation below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

The souk al-Milh, or Salt market, is one of the biggest and perhaps oldest open-air markets in the old city of Sanaa, Yemen. Here time isn’t marked by passing centuries but instead in millennia in what is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities on earth. The massive doors to the walled city are still shut every evening and until relatively recently you could find the severed hands of thieves nailed to the wood, underscoring the Old Testament vision of law observed here. Under the shadows of these tapia tower houses, the adjective ‘biblical’ outplays ‘medieval’ in any attempt to describe the sights, sounds and smells. Images that evoke the thousand and one nights more vividly than any sterilized Hollywood production could ever hope to.

Traders offer everything from cardamom from the highlands of Kerala across the Arabian Sea in India, to Iranian saffron from across the Persian Gulf to highly coveted handguns from the Basque Country. Frankincense and myrrh are still commonly traded day to day commodities. If you delve deeper into the market, you come to the jewelers selling gold, silver, ceremonial daggers, ambergris and Red Sea corals.

But what always fascinated me among all the traditional jewelry were the prized royal blue gems that looked like they had somehow been extracted from folds of cloth in paintings by Michelangelo and Botticelli. These were some of the most expensive items for sale and when I asked the traders why they would quote a proverb, “If you do not wish to die, avoid the Valley of the Kokcha River, the valley where Lapis Lazuli is mined.” And just where is this valley? In one of the most remote, difficult to reach areas of the planet, the Badakhshan Province in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan, the cemetery of empires, has been back in the headlines as tribal leaders from all sides gave the Americans and their allies a history lesson that is bound to be repeated (China?). Attitudes have shifted wildly since the Taliban waltzed out of the mountains and into the capital. Many pacifists have now changed their tune with a renewed interest in protecting the women who have experienced a modicum of freedom, at least in Kabul, for the past 20 years. Precisely, thanks to the military intervention they had always been against.

But the most confounding takes on the debacle have come from conservative western commentators observing this slow-motion tragedy with such zealous schadenfreude. They can’t seem to contain their delight in underscoring the barbarity that comes with the reimplementation of Sharia law and the backwardness of basing a country’s laws on iron-age texts created by men without any notion of something as basic as germ theory.

And here they are completely right.

A country’s laws must be based on reason, not faith. Laws must be argued, questioned and adapted. Religious scrolls are, by their very nature, immutable. They are dictates from a celestial dictator that cannot be questioned and perhaps, only with time and social pressure, can be ‘interpreted’. I only hope that, out of such a tragedy, they realize that the flaw isn’t a matter of which religious text is chosen to base laws, but the fact they are chosen at all.

How Many Horsemen were there?

 It's hot...well, it's always hot in Spain during the summer but this week has been particularly hot. This week's Camino a Ítaca circles the globe and looks at why some have such a problem with the axiom of Climate Change. Click over to read the original article in Spanish in el Hoy or read the English version below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

Imagine drawing a straight line that circles the globe, crossing such diverse places as Lille in France, Mainz in Germany, Prague in the Czech Republic and the extraordinarily restored Krakow in Poland. Then continue the line east through the land of my paternal grandfather in Lviv, Ukraine and then across the arid steppes of Kazakhstan and Mongolia before you cut the enigmatic Russian Island of Sakhalin roughly in half before finally reaching the open Pacific. Cross the ocean and you make landfall just north of the beautiful port city of Vancouver before crossing the Rocky Mountains that give on to the great Canadian plains. Under those never-ending, enormous skies, you then pass through the delightfully named, yet slightly stodgy, Winnipeg before running out into the ocean again. The line you would have drawn is approximately the 50^th parallel.

The cities that connect those dots, each with their own identity, all conjure up images of birch tree forests, thick brown breads, heavy cuisine with lots of butter and pickled everything. What doesn’t necessarily come to mind are sunburns and scorching temperatures, but that is just what has happened. This summer we have seen temperatures hit fifty degrees on the fiftieth parallel. Entire towns burned in places near where I spent my summers as a child in British Colombia, Canada. Temperatures that I would have then only associated with things like toaster ovens and car engines. Just over the pole in Siberia, the Russian one that is, temperatures have also been reaching the forties, melting the permafrost that has held its secrets in stasis for millennia. These aren’t cyclical events as some might claim; this is the planet sending us a very sharply worded message that needs no translation.

It’s not only the far north. Half of California is on fire once again and a good part of the classical world in Greece and Turkey is also ablaze. As you read this, temperatures are also soaring to record highs on this side of the Mediterranean. True, high temperatures are not abnormal here in Spain, but what about the frighteningly low levels of the reservoirs. Reservoirs, I might add that not only provide us with drinking water but also help power our prohibitively expensive fans and air conditioners.

On the other extreme of the climate spectrum, devastating floods have ravaged India while torrential rain, the likes of which hasn’t been seen in a thousand years, has devastated central China. Japan is suffering a similar fate. Much closer to home here in Europe, Germany and Belgium have seen tragic losses of life during the flash floods that recently swept through the area. 

And it’s only the ides of August.

What is it about climate change that gives those who ‘have their doubts’ hives and nervous ticks? Do those who flat out deny its existence have a longer, more insightful view of the history of the planet than the rest of us? Is it the sheer cost that it’s going to entail to try and at least palliate the coming armageddon that drives them to refute such obvious signs? Or is it something less tangible, something less rational, something more divine? The bushes are indeed burning. What is needed are prophets brave enough to take concrete actions to divert the coming apocalypse that some so desire.