Audacity of homes at dizzying heights…

     The picture we conjure up in our minds when we hear the word "home" is usually not far from the conventional roof-over-our-heads. However, it can hardly be stranger than what tribesmen of Habla once called their home. You might have seen an eagle perching its eyrie on rocky cliffs at a high altitude, or wild honeybees suspending their giant beehive in the armpit of a gigantic mountain cliff. But do men do the same? Maybe biomimicry is not as new as we thought it was – even though my natural inclination would be to resist the idea even if the girl I was madly in love with insisted on it. 

Please excuse my camera for not being my own substitute pair of eyes, let alone for those who know Habla only through hearing or by reading about it. I understand I am doing an injustice to things I am talking about by showing a picture which is necessarily reductive, detracting from Habla’s true magnificence. However, it is a compromise; less is certainly better than nothing in this case.

The word “habal” is an Arabic word meaning “rope”. The people living down below used to use a long stretch of rope (about 300 yards) to go up to sell or barter the things they made in exchange for the things they needed. Honey, hides, food grains, and their flours were a few among the commodities they had on offer. A few “badhu” families lived there for generations. Acrophobia was clearly something unheard of among them, as they couldn’t have had any fear of heights.

Bedouins, or badhu, as they are locally known, are not uncommon in the cities of the Aseer region today. Their dress code is distinctive from that of modern-day Saudis. They still live in the remote villages, mainly herding sheep or collecting herbs and honey. They seldom wear a “thobe” and “godhra” but a kind of floral “iqaal” instead. This is a garland worn around the head, braided with flowers and herbs, dried or fresh, available locally.  They are seen in colorful lungi (a garment similar to a sarong) fixed with a wide belt around their waist extending to their ankles. They also wear an ornamental dagger across the belt.

 I have no idea why exactly the tribesmen chose to call such mountainous, seemingly inhospitable, terrain home. The Aseer region certainly has no shortage of land. Maybe they felt threatened by more powerful neighboring tribes or aggressive nomadic ones. It has also been suggested that they were fleeing from Turks during the time of the Ottoman Empire.

Habla is undoubtedly a peak which seems to many people like the end of the world - literally. Nowhere else in the Al Sarwat mountain range, where I work in Abha, a tabletop city, have I seen topography like this. Abha richly deserves the title “Capital of Arab tourism”, not least for its topography.