Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity (2 page)

What would Jacob think if he could visit the streets of a modern American Metropolis and see his “anti-Bacchus” enjoying enormous popularity side-by-side with its very antithesis? I cannot imagine he would be altogether surprised at the results of this twentieth-century alliance. Alice Lampel, Jacob’s half-sister, writing for the
International Herald Tribune
in 1936, said of Jacob, “everything he undertakes aims at reconciling divergencies,” so I cannot imagine he would be anything but pleased.

Consciously or unconsciously, Jacob approached this theme of reconciliation, this time between the Arab and the Christian worlds, when he tackled the task of telling the tale of coffee. Just as wine is at the very foundation of the Judeo-Christian European culture, so coffee is the very hallmark commodity of the world of Islam. And just as you find wine wherever you find a Christian-based civilization, so you find coffee wherever the Arab world has made significant inroads. (It is interesting to note that until the most modern times, China remained relatively immune to both of these commodities and religions, testifying to its traditional isolationist stance.) In a sense, just as the Crusaders of twelfth-century Europe returned from the Holy Wars bringing with them an appreciation of things Arab (and forever changing the shape of things to come in Western Europe), so Heinrich Eduard Jacob sought to acknowledge and honor the “wine of Islam” which has had such an enormous impact upon the twentieth-century world.

Inasmuch as wine has long been associated with the feminine (André Tchelistcheff has compared a good Merlot to a “charming, beautiful lady”), relaxation and romance, coffee has long been viewed as masculine and equated with the world of intellectual stimulation. Jacob points out that seventeenth-century English literature was born in the London coffeehouses frequented by Johnson, Dryden, Pope, Swift, Addison and Steele. And the 1960s coffeehouses of New York’s Greenwich Village and San Francisco’s North Beach spawned a whole “beat generation” of writers. In actuality, coffee and its attendant conversation have often spelt trouble for the status quo. Jacob reports that in 1517, Khair Bey, the new viceroy of the Mecca, forbade the drinking of coffee on the premise that it “led to riots;” and in December of 1675, Charles II of England closed the country’s coffeehouses because he considered them “hotbeds of sedition and a breeding ground for subversive movements,” all of which was not far from the truth. In 1774, a letter sent by the Committee of Correspondence from Merchants’ coffee house in New York to Boston proposed the American Union. Merchants’ had been dubbed by some as the “birthplace of the Union” as well as the “true cradle of American liberty,” and in 1789, George Washington was officially greeted there as President of the United States. Jacob further describes how, on July 12, 1789, French revolutionary Camille Desmoulins mounted a table outside the Café Foy in Paris’ Palais Royale and incited the crowd to storm the Bastille! Likewise, Jacob believed that the French Revolution was born in the cafés of Paris.

When
Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity
first appeared in English in 1935, the “coffee shop” had become an American institution and the country was ready for the saga of its morning wake-me-up. As the millennium comes to a close, there is a specialty coffee vendor on every street corner in America and coffee comes from the four corners of the earth. The country is again crazy for coffee and ready for the retelling of its exciting story.

I am grateful to Peter Burford and his newly-formed Burford Books for having the good sense to recognize and publish this unique book. Its publication would also not have been possible without the generous help of my friend, Dr. Jeffrey B. Berlin, a well-known authority on the subject of early-twentieth-century German authors and keeper of a wealth of knowledge about Heinrich Eduard Jacob, his contemporaries, and his era, who has graciously shared many conversations and many manuscripts with me. In addition, I wish to thank Hans Jörgen Gerlach of Berlin, who is the executor of Jacob’s estate, and who has proven himself more than worthy of the confidence bestowed upon him by Heinrich Eduard Jacob’s widow, Dora, when she placed her husband’s works in Herr Gerlach’s care. Without his permission and generous assistance, this book could not have been reprinted in English. Thanks to Beth Hensperger and Helen Mildner for patient proofreading. And most of all, I wish to thank M., who gives heart to all I write.

—L
YNN
A
LLEY
July, 1998  

T
HE
ground, which was but a skin of lava and limestone, had little time to cool down at night. The fierce, red sun rose early and set late, so the night was short, hot, and oppressive.

By walking a few miles westward, one could reach the sea. But it was a shallow sea, tepid, and not wide. From time immemorial it had been known as the Red Sea.

Scant vegetation was to be found among the foothills of Yemen. On the flanks of the hills and in the wadies grew dense bushes. Dwarf acacias stood gaunt and motionless in the parched and torrid air. Cushions of golden and brown furze saddled the crests. The aloe was bitter, the date-palm bore sweet fruit. Across them one glimpsed the rust-coloured mountains, the terrible Jebel Shomer from which, of old, fiery streams of lava had descended. Nothing grew on these heights, and men did not visit them. Only the runaway goats, from time to time, climbed the topmost peaks. No one bade them go thither, but thither they went, moved by the lust of adventure and the longing for solitude. After weeks, they would return, lean and out of condition.

The herds of goats belonged to the monastery. The monastery, “Shehodet”—the name means “bear witness”—belonged to Allah, as everything on earth belongs to the Creator.

Between goats and men there has, since the dawn of history, been a bargain. Such was the case here. The goats supplied the monastery with milk and goat-hair; in return, the monastery provided the goats with herdsmen, watchdogs, and protection. Often enough, however, the monks broke their side of the contract. Then the goats were, in part, elaborated into morocco or cordovan. Sometimes, as parchment leaves of the Koran, they testified to the greatness of Mohammed, the Prophet of Allah—after their flesh had been devoured and their skins thoroughly dried in the baking air. Nevertheless most of the goats continued to dwell among the foothills, though they could easily have wandered beyond the reach of dogs and men.

Goatherds have little to do. That is why they have always been liars, braggarts, and intriguers. Was not Melantheus, the goatherd in the Homeric saga, a busybody; did he not reflect the covetousness and disquiet of the beasts under his care? Exceptionally false-tongued must have been those goatherds who misled Claudius Aelianus, the writer of classical Rome, into believing a quaint item of natural history: “One of the peculiar merits of the goat is the strange way in which it is able to breathe. For this animal can breathe through its ears as well as through its nostrils, and is, speaking generally, the most sensitive of all cloven-footed beasts. I do not know why they breathe thus, but merely record what I have learned. Since the goat was created by Prometheus, he alone, I presume, knows why he created it no otherwise. . . .”

The goatherds of Shehodet Monastery knew their charges well, as was meet; knew the creatures’ Promethean disinclination for peace and quiet; their fondness for climbing, for butting, and for gnawing the bark off trees; their perpetual craving for salt. The goatherds knew that goats would often take to the high mountains for a week or more, and be slow to return. But now the beasts were displaying a new characteristic, one which was troublesome to their keepers. Hitherto a goat’s day had been, like a man’s, a day of twelve hours. At sunset, they were wont to go to sleep, lying with outstretched limbs, as motionless as stone. But now the goats were affected with sleeplessness.

All night, for five nights in succession—nay, for seven or eight—they clambered over rocks, cutting capers, chasing one another, bleating fantastically. They turned their bearded heads hither and thither; with reddened eyes they gambolled convulsively when they caught sight of the goatherds, and then they darted off swift as arrows speeding from the bow.

“The goatsucker has been plaguing them,” said an old herdsman. This bird takes its name from its supposed habit of pecking at goats’ teats in the night-time, and thus driving the animals crazy.

“There is no goatsucker,” said young Hassan with a contemptuous laugh.

“What, didn’t you hear it churring out of the darkness four nights ago?”

“Certainly. I heard the call of the nightjar, but that bird drinks no milk. A fable for children! The creature is no larger than my hand. What would it stand on to pluck at a goat’s teats with its bill?”

“Idiot, could it not cling to the beast’s hair with its claws?”

Already the two men were raising their staffs against each other in their anger. Old Abdullah parted them, and said:

“Let us fetch the imam from the hill!”

The chief of the monastery came. He looked rather like a goat himself, as he sat among the goatherds: lean, with a tremulous beard, large eyes peeping forth from reddened lids, and a leathery skin. Two of the animals were brought. There was nothing amiss with their teats, no sign that a bird had been pecking.

“Your goats must have eaten poison.”

“What poison could they have found?”

“Follow them, and keep them under close watch.”

But the goats, as usual, nibbled coltsfoot, sage, mimosa leaves, broom; plundered the caper bushes. Their udders swelled with milk. All the same, they did not sleep.

“We’ve found the plant that has bewitched them!”

The imam, who was resting in the shade with his chief assistant, Daood, beside him, looked up. Before him stood one of the goatherds, holding out a spray.

It was a moderate-sized, flexible spray, that of a shrub rather than a tree, with the dark-green, firm, and shiny leaves, somewhat resembling those of a laurel. From the axils of the leaves projected short, white blossoms, closely set like those of jasmine. Some had ripened and fallen, leaving their fruit, little berries of a strange magenta hue. If you grasped one of these between finger and thumb, you could feel that it had a thick, hard kernel. The imam turned the spray over and over, much astonished. What he held resembled a
Planta universalis,
with the characters of many plants he knew, but in its assemblage of characters unknown.

“Your goats have been eating this?”

The goatherd replied that there could be no doubt of it. A coppice of this unknown shrub had been discovered, obviously devastated by the goats in their search for food.

“In what direction?”

“Towards the north.”

After climbing for more than three hours, over screes and smooth boulders, through gorse and agave and brambles, the imam and Daood, guided by the goatherds, reached the coppice. It was in a wadi, damp and hot. What remarkable trees! They ranged in height from six to twelve feet, and looked more like overgrown shrubs than trees.

No one had ever seen anything of the kind before. The imam, who wanted to try the effect of the leaves and blossoms, plucked some and chewed them, but soon spat them out. The taste was neither bitter nor sweet, neither salt nor sour nor oily—they had no taste worth speaking of. Nor had they any scent that could have allured the goats.

On the way back, Daood said that perhaps a description of the unfamiliar plant might be found in a herbal. The monastery was well provided with parchment volumes, among which were some containing all that the Arabs knew about plant lore. But the herbals were searched in vain.

“To my way of thinking,” said the imam, “this shrub is not a wild one, but a cultivated one that has escaped from a garden and run wild.”

Daood protested.

“How could there ever have been a garden in or near so desolate a spot? Even the jinn would hardly have established one in a place as inaccessible!”

“I was not thinking of a garden planted either by true believers or by the jinn,” replied the imam. “You must have heard that, centuries back, our land was conquered by the giaours. I do not mean the white Christians of the North, the Roumis and the Feringhees, those who call themselves Romans and Franks; but Christians from the West, black Christians from Africa, subjects of the monarch of Ethiopia. They crossed the narrow waters of the Red Sea, coming from the territory known as Kaffa. They brought with them domestic animals, and also their favourite vegetables and flowers. I think this is a Kaffa tree. . . .”

“If the tree has magic virtues, surely we should have heard of it?” said young Daood, dubiously. “It is but a tree like many another, and I can hardly believe that Allah would have equipped it with powers peculiar to itself.”

The skies had flushed red while Daood was speaking. A large green beetle, metallic and burnished, flew into the room from the courtyard. It circled desirously above the blossoms on the sprays the monks had brought back with them.

“The goatherds,” the young man went on, “have probably lied to us. They are habitual cheats, up to every kind of dodge. Who can tell whether they may not, wishing to humbug us, have filled the goats’ hair with stage-beetles and poisonous ticks, and whether these pests may not have kept the poor beasts awake. Now the rascals are laughing at us up their sleeves because we have swallowed their fable about Allah having made a plant which can render his creatures sleepless. It amuses them to fool the learned and the pious!”

Daood said good-night and departed. The imam prayed. Daylight quickly faded, the red sky turning to a peaceful green, which became a blue that darkened apace. The evening star shed its silvery beams into the courtyard. Deliciously soothing were its cool rays after the heat and glare of the tropical day.

Donkeys laden with goatskins full of water were being driven up the hill. They brayed as they clattered into the yard. The monastery possessed no well, and its pitchers had to be replenished every morning and every evening. The monks issued from their cells carrying vessels of unglazed earthenware, in which the water would remain fresh and sweet for hours, whereas it would soon begin to stink if stored in goatskin sacks.