Word: yemen
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Into the sun-hammered compound of Aden's Government House one day this spring ambled two mean, dusty camels, bearing on their backs 1,200 pounds of coffee for Governor Sir John Hathorn Hall. The coffee was a gift from the Imam of the Red Sea state of Yemen. Connoisseurs call the Mocha coffee of Yemen the finest in the world, but Sir John had an even better reason to be grateful for the gift...
...Arabia a present of coffee is a pledge of friendship stronger than any written pact, and for years Britain has courted the friendship of fanatically religious, 65-year-the old Yahya ibn Hamid-ed-Din, Imam of Yemen. A notably independent, notably stingy monarch, he for years nursed a boundary grudge against the British Government, listened attentively to the blandishments of Italy's would-be imperialists. But his camel loads of coffee meant that at last he was on Britain's side...
Cholera, which he caught during the 1912 uprising in Yemen, made him deafer, but that deafness has often been, and is today, his greatest asset as a statesman. He hears what he wants to hear. After failing to hear something he does not want to hear he has been known to remark: "Allah be praised, I am deaf." If he is not in perfect health otherwise, there is no sign of it in his daily routine...