Free Wanderlust by Elisabeth Eaves Page A

and I turned to look inside it. I don’t know who was more surprised, he or us.
    A few days later we caught a group taxi going from Sanaa to Manakha. It left just as the sun started to go down. We’d secured the front seat, which we thought was the optimal position, with knee room, window control, and a safe barrier between us and the other passengers. I got the window—it was my turn—and Mona took the center.
    It got dark, we drove into the hills, and Mona dozed on my shoulder. Sometime later I noticed that our driver was grunting. I turned on a penlight, pretending to read, and then turned it in the direction of the driver. My suspicions were confirmed.
    â€œEnough!” I yelled. We ordered him to stop the car. We yelled at him, hurling insults. (“You’re ugly! You’re a dog!” were among the few in our linguistic range.) We got out and looked around. We’d stopped in remote mountains, so storming away was not an option. We ordered two young men into the front seat and joined the oldest-looking one on a rear bench. The car of eight riders accepted the proceedings with mysterious equanimity. No one spoke up in our defense, but no one argued with us, either. While the car reorganized itself to meet our demands, several passengers stood and stretched their legs, looking resigned, as though patiently waiting out a flat tire. I felt like a ghost, able to affect events in the world of the living, with a rattle here or a knock there, but never really believed to exist.

    In Manakha one of the other passengers, now cordial and helpful, showed us where to find the only open hotel. It was in an old family home. We bargained with the proprietor, Ahmad, and he led us
up a steep, narrow, uneven stairwell, until we reached the very top of the house, the room called the mafraj, with windows to take in the tower view. I woke with the sun streaming onto me in different colors, shining through the blue and red stained glass. Outside our door I heard the rhythmic swishing of someone sweeping a straw broom across stone. The sweeping went on for so long that it seemed impossible that the small landing could be that dirty. Jumpy about lurkers, I decided to open our door and meet the suspicious party. I found a girl. She straightened and stared directly at me, as if to ask what had taken me so long. She called down the stairs for our breakfast, then approached the room and peeked in. Her eyes paused on every object: sleeping bag, backpack, hiking boot, camera. She said her name was Faiza.
    Mona and I took breakfast on the roof, seeing the town by daylight for the first time. It was built into the mountainside in the cradle between two peaks. There were no power lines, no cars, and no roads other than the one we had come in on. The buildings were rough-hewn versions of those in Sanaa: sand-colored with white patterns painted on, zigzags and diamonds and crosses. Below and around the town, terraced rice fields had sculpted the hills into jumbo steps. Stairs for a fairy-tale giant, or a god. Once again, my visual perspective was thrown off. Things were not the right size.
    After breakfast we set off. We climbed through the terraced fields, passing hamlet after hamlet, each one balanced more precariously than the last. It was as though, in the absence of roads and power tools, the local builders had developed a single skill: how to make a village as inaccessible and well-defended as possible.
    When shadows started to slice across the hillsides, we looked down and saw a sea of white mist below us. The clouds climbed as we descended, so that soon we were enveloped in their cool vapor. During
the rest of our descent, the veil parted and closed, each time revealing something different: a hamlet, a valley, a bend in the trail.
    Faiza, sister of Ahmad, cooked and served our dinner. There were other family members present, a mother and another sister, but it was Faiza who toiled the most. She was fifteen years old