The Limes of Shidyt

October 18, 2008

I'm sitting 1,300m up the northern slopes of the Jebel Kawr, squeezing limes into my bottles of water, licking the juice off my fingers as one dries under the sun.

Shidyt is so remote the military sends helicopters there to help out, not just for medical emergencies but also to airlift their most precious commodity — limes — to civilisation. For anything less urgent there're always the donkeys braying in the gardens when not clambering down to the village of Sant below, where the road ends three hours of hiking away. There is no road in-between, and never will be.

Shidyt is tucked away in a nook of the mountains you cannot see until you are at least an hour into your hike. It first emerges in the distance as a patch of dark green against the expanse of bare rock face, brought to life by the thousands of date palms and lime trees that are crammed onto its ancient, man-made terraces that cling to the side of the jebel. Perhaps a thousand years ago someone had walked up the wadi, looking for the source of water that still flows out of rock today. It is so high there isn't much flat ground around, so rocks had to be put into place, building up the walls and lower layers of terraces, while soil, scraped from the surrounding landscape over centuries, filled the fields and allowed vegetation to take root. The water was channelled into a falaj, which runs through the gardens today.

Shidyt was deserted as I walked in, except for the drums of chemicals lying in the midday sun — pesticide, insecticide or fertiliser — sacks full of limes and a single rooftop carpeted with the fruit, baking in the sun. Everyone, it seemed, had gone downhill, to the roads and electricity of the plains. Shidyt could have been a ghost town, eerily silent until one of its four donkeys started braying: a deep call that echoed off Jebel Kawr and the plateau beneath, over the falaj of Sant and the concrete of Sint and the ancestral homes of the Hinai tribe right till Jebel Gibeel on the other side.



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