# Yemen

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/tim-mackintosh-smith/yemen/9780719597404

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![Yemen](https://quivercdn.com/covers/john-murray/tim-mackintosh-smith/yemen_978-07-1959-740-4.jpg?v=2026-05-16%2014%3A28%3A01)

- Book: [Yemen](https://www.bookquiver.com/tim-mackintosh-smith/yemen) ([Yemen.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/tim-mackintosh-smith/yemen.md))
- Authors: [Tim Mackintosh-Smith](https://www.bookquiver.com/tim-mackintosh-smith)
- Publisher: John Murray
- ISBN: 978-07-1959-740-4
- Published: 2007-12-13
- Language: en_GB
- Binding: Softcover

## Description

Our ideas of the Arabian Peninusula have been hijacked: by images of the desert, by oil, by the Gulf War. But there is another Arabia. For the classical geographers Yemen was a fabulous land where flying serpents guarded sacred incense groves. Medieval Arab visitors told of disappearing islands and menstruating mountains. Vita Sackville-West found Aden 'precisely the most repulsive corner of the world'. Arguably the most fascinating but least known country in the Arab world, Yemen has a way of attracting comment that ranges from the superficial to the wildly fictitious. In Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land, Tim Mackintosh-Smith writes with an intimacy and depth of knowledge gained through over twenty years among the Yemenis. He is a travelling companion of the best sort - erudite, witty and eccentric. Crossing mountain, desert, ocean and three millennia of history, he portrays hyrax hunters and dhow skippers, a noseless regicide, and a sword-wielding tyrant with a passion for Heinz Russian salad. Yet even the ordinary Yemenis are extraordinary: their family tree goes back to Noah and is rooted in a land which, in the words of a contemporary poet, has become the dictionary of its people. Every page of this book is dashed - like the land it describes - with the marvellous.