I

I’ve just returned from the fabled island of Socotra, at least I think I have. I can’t be absolutely sure; locating it is like visiting platform 9 ¾. Marco Polo records that the islanders ‘were the most expert enchanters in the world’ and others that the Socotri could make the island disappear at will, leaving invaders to scour an empty ocean.

Is it even really there?

The island is a psychedelic dreamscape, its plateaus dotted with mushroom-shaped flying-saucer trees. If you were high on opium penning a tale for One Thousand and One Nights you would invent Socotra, and yet it exists – or does it? On again, off again, it’s sometimes accessible and then suddenly not; because of conflict or because there are simply no flights. Perhaps, in such times, it just disappears back into the sky like the floating island of Laputa from Gulliver’s Travels.

Seasonally it is smashed by the khareef, a tendril of the same monsoon that rakes the ghats of India between April and October, boiling the surrounding ocean (such that Gujarati sailors, punning on the island’s name, call the seas ‘sikotro sinh’, the ‘lion that roars’), meaning that for part of the year it’s genuinely off the map.

If you tell someone you’ve been to Socotra, the reply is invariably - where?

The land forgotten by time, and the world – described by Herodotus as the place where the immortal phoenix came to be reborn twice every thousand years – is situated in the Arabian Sea at the tip of horn of Africa between the Scylla of Somalia and the Charybidis of Yemen. And Yemen is at war (again). It is another Shia-Sunni conflict which also presents itself as a larger proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, backed by the West. This Civil War, nominally between the Houthi movement and the Presidential Leadership Council, the internationally recognised government, is an iteration of a conflict that has died and been reborn various times over the last six decades. Given this context, and its position in the world’s most infamous pirate lane, why would anyone want to go there, to this magic carpet that Sinbad is alleged to have used as a refuge?

The trees.

The magical allure of its trees.

II

Salim prods the fire. Around it, he’s placed petrified corals.

He is sitting cross-legged on the beach opposite the flames, his checkered keffiyeh wrapped about his head. In his lap, he holds a large empty five-gallon water bottle, one of those that stands upside down on the pillar of an office water-cooler.

He starts to bash its belly with the heel of his hand. At his introduction, a companion from the local fishing village of Irsal – a somewhat unfortunate name for the village at the bottom tip of the island - begins to ullulate, and the rest of the circle clap in time to Salim’s empty water-drum.

We’ve spent the day out fishing with the villagers, throwing a lead-weighted line into the rough sea for grouper. Salim had sat in my dhow. I watched him squash a square of lead with his fingertips into a cylinder to grip the line and then cast it into the water. The remains of the nylon was wound around a piece of wood. After a time, queasy, he had handed the ‘rod’ over to me. I only succeeded in having a fish swallow the precious lead and didn’t manage to find gold. Finally, the pilot – who both cast the line and orientated the boat with a pole while balancing on the stern - caught two.  Elated, we re-entered the bay, prow tossed high by the outgoing swell. 

The fish have always been plentiful here, I’m told, but that is changing now that factory ships from the UAE are encroaching into the waters that have been left for centuries to the Socotri and hoover up the shoals that they’re tracking by radar. Having eaten the fish roasted on the open fire, I’m now sitting listening to the villagers, sing-sighing their favourite tunes. The sounds drift through the darkness, syllables caught in the throat, somewhere between a gargle and a hum, often interrupted by laughter or the translation of the song’s meaning.

A lover has run away.

The dawn is coming with the goats.

An unempty sea has wept its silver tailings.

We’ve set three tents on the beach, protected from anyone else coming to camp here through an arrangement with Sheikh Abdullah, the village chief. We’ll travel from this hub during the day to rove around the island before moving for three nights up onto the forest plateau at the foot of Hajhir mountains, and then spending a final night in the capital, Hadiboh, where there are the island’s only guesthouses.

There is zero infrastructure. We defecate and bury it in holes. But not every tourist is so assiduous, and sometimes the neon tents that throng the most used camping areas become filthy.

Socotra is a precarious place. The duty to travel responsibly here is more vital than in any place I’ve ever been.

It is a precious, unique, tiny, lost-found, innocent warred-over pearl. 

And each person that sees it alters it forever, bringing another footprint of erosion. And yet, soon, it will be gone and so the urge to bear witness to it for everyone that comes is overpowering.

The island has no written history. Partly, this is because it has no written language. So, any poetry is oral, sublimated into song.

The islanders consider themselves Socotri, whatever flag is flying above their heads, and are proud of their dying language, experimenting with transcribing it using a modified Arabic and a sequence of dots and dashes – like a binary programming code – in order to render its unique sounds. And so the language is turning virtual, as the island may also one day. The little we know of Socotra is from eccentric references by visitors or from snatches of appearances of the place - or a romantic approximation of it - in literature, such as in Kipling’s origin myth How the Rhinoceros Got its Skin. 

And we know of the people that come here because of the scourge of graffiti; visitors eager to appropriate it, to etch their names on to the bark of its unique trees or on the rocks of its caves. This story, my defacement. People feel compelled to say: ‘I was there’, demonstrating the continued romance of the human urge to usurp the timelessness of the island.

Can you call it graffiti if it was left in AD 258? And on a separate tablet of wood deep within one of the world’s largest and longest caves? The mouth of Hoq cave is a two-hour uphill hike under a blazing sun. The rock is sharp and black. It looks igneous, though Socotra is not volcanic and split from the Gondwana landmass some 20 million years ago; more recently than the candle-wax pillars inside. I assumed the cave would be just a dank overhang, aromatic of goat scat, whose purpose was to afford shade and a vantage point to regard the undulations of the coastline or the bewildering variety of endemic trees that score the ascent. 

I had no idea what was actually there, because there had been no hype. I didn’t even have a head-torch, Salim kindly lending me his.

And I had come for the trees, not the caves.

Swollen, bulbous cucumber trees cling to the side of rocks and, through alchemy, extract water from stone. A crimson-winged Socotri starling settles on the stunted limb of a frankincense tree shaped like the sculpture of Alison Lapper in Trafalgar Square. The plateaus that precede the fanged peaks of the Hajhir mountains are naturally seeded with frankincense from which trees the wisemen are reputed to have gathered their gifts for a new-born God. The name ‘Socotra’ is derived from the words for ‘souk’ (market) and ‘qotra’ (drop), for its trade in its dripping resins.

Seventeen and a half centuries before me, another stranger made this climb.

He, would also have been mesmerised by the frankincense’s pink-flowering desert rose, reminiscent of the topsy-turvy curio of a baobab. And the candelabra branches of the thick-trunked sterculia, that stud the understory of thorns and jatropha.

It is a land of extraordinary textures; coral bricks, dragon-blood bark, tree-beards, frond-tentacles. The cliffs of Socotra that hang about me are almost albino in places. At first, I take it for guano, then a mineral staining like lime. Now, as I reach the heights of the first plateau, I see that it is lichen as white as paint. Lichen is one of the building blocks of life, a collaboration between algae (that photosynthesises) and fungi (that can break down rocks to consume the minerals). It is so resilient that it can survive on meteorites, and therefore even colonise other planets. Without it rocks could never turn to soil. Here on Socotra, it is another unique holobiont, nearly as ancient as the planet, writing the story of time on its cliffs in living paint.

I enter Hoq cave and aeons pass in a muffle of psychedelic splendour.

Stalactites kiss stalagmites to form pillars as ancient as the extinction of the dinosaurs.

If only Gaudí had seen this, his free-flowing architecture would have been even more spectacular.  

The drip-fed columns are metallic, echoing if tapped.

I travel past mile upon mile of surreal sculpture garden; sheep, horses and lions in a vault larger than Köln cathedral and almost completely unknown. We know the traveller’s name because, one and a half miles inside the cave, he left a calling card written in Aramaic, saying: “In the month of July, day 25 of the year 569 [1], I, Abgar, son of Absmaya, came … to this place”.

Like the island itself, however, the cave again disappeared from the imagination and, deterred by the legend of a giant snake (a guardian that I imagine to be not unlike Humbaba [2]), the locals neglected it. It was only earlier this century that a team of Belgian cavers established there was no minotaur lurking inside and so discovered the tablet.