Paul Torday: Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

Of course, Harriet told me, most of their clients are very wealthy, and are fond of often quite ambitious projects to improve the properties they buy. Then she said, ‘We have one such client who has been with us for a number of years. His wealth derives in part from oil, but if there is such a thing as a typical oil sheikh, he is not it. He is a most unusual, visionary man.’

Harriet paused to refill our cups with fresh coffee, and I found myself reluctantly admitting to myself that however foolish the project was, there was nothing foolish about this woman.

She added, ‘I am not going to attempt to describe what my client’s motivation is. I think it is important you try and understand it, if you decide to help us, but it is for him alone to tell you about that part.’ She continued, ‘He is a man we hold in great respect in this firm. He is an excellent steward and landlord of the properties he has bought in this country, an employer everyone would want to work for, but people like working for him because of his personal qualities and not because he is enormously wealthy. Moreover, he is an Anglophile, which is perhaps less usual in the Yemen than in some other parts of the region, and his prominence in his own country means he is viewed as a key potential ally in Yemeni councils by the Foreign Office here.’

‘Ah,’ I said.

‘Indeed, Dr Jones. I think you are aware there is a political dimension to all of this.’ She did not attempt to call me Alfred. ‘I know you will have had some pressure brought to bear on you from within government. Believe me, it was not of our doing and I very much regret it. We would rather you took on this job, impossible as it may seem at the moment, of your own free will, or else not at all. And that will certainly be the view of our client.’

‘Ah,’ I repeated, and then when she appeared to have stopped speaking, ‘Well. You were speaking about introducing salmon into the Yemen.’

‘And salmon fishing. I believe it is intended to be fly-fishing only, no spinning.’

‘No spinning,’ I repeated.

‘Are you a salmon fisherman, Dr Jones?’ asked Harriet. For some reason I blushed again, as if I was about to admit to something covert and slightly sinister. Perhaps I was.

‘As a matter of fact, I am very keen. Perhaps not as unusual amongst us fisheries people as you might think. Of course I nearly always put back any fish I catch. Yes, I enjoy it very much.’

‘Where do you fish?’

‘Here and there. I like to try different rivers. I’ve fished the Wye, the Eden and the Tyne in England; the Tay and the Dee and a few smaller Scottish rivers. I don’t get much time for it nowadays.’

‘Well, if you take this project on I’m sure my client will ask you to fish with him at his place in Scotland.’ Then she added with a smile, ‘And perhaps one day you’ll fish on the Wadi Aleyn, in the Yemen.’

I saw where this was going.

‘Well, there are a few problems with that idea,’ I suggested. This time Harriet crossed her legs, a movement that somehow caught my eye, and clasped her hands around her knees and looked at me critically, just as I had tried to do to her a moment or two earlier.

‘Let’s go through some of them,’ she suggested.

‘First, water,’ I said. ‘Salmon are fish. Fish need water.’ Harriet only looked at me when I said that, so I had to continue. ‘Specifically, as I said in my letter, salmon need cool, well-oxygenated water. The temperature should ideally not exceed eighteen degrees Celsius. The best conditions are rivers fed by snow melt or springs, although some varieties of salmon can live in lakes if they are deep and cool enough. So there’s a fundamental problem, right there.’

Harriet stood up and went across to her desk, took a file from it and then sat down again.

Opening the file she said, ‘Water. Parts of the Yemen have up to 250 millimetres of rainfall a month in the wet summer season. It is brushed by the monsoon, like parts of the Dhofar region in the south of Oman. On top of surface water run-off from the summer storms, there is constant recharging of the groundwater. People didn’t use to think there was much groundwater in the Yemen but since they started looking for oil they have found one or two big new aquifers. So, yes, water is a huge problem, but there is water there. The wadis become rivers, and pools and lakes form in the summer.’

This was surprising.

‘Then there is the question of water temperature. I suppose you’re going to tell me the Yemen isn’t that hot, but if it is, the oxygen will leave the water and the fish will die.’

Harriet looked at her file again and said, ‘We’re thinking mountains. That’s where the rain is, and the elevations in the central highlands go up to over 3000 metres. At that height the temperatures are bearable. The night-time temperatures go down to well below twenty Celsius even in the summer. And Pacific salmon get as far south as California -as long as the water is aerated, they seem to be able to survive. I don’t mean to be telling you your business, Dr Jones; just that it might not be as open and shut as you first thought.’

I paused, and then said, ‘Salmon parr feed off certain types of fly life, and if we introduced salmon from English rivers they would only recognise food that came from those rivers.’

‘Perhaps that can be introduced along with the fish? There are plenty of flies in the Yemen, at any rate. English ones might adapt if the local fly life didn’t taste good.’ She closed her file with a snap and looked at me with a smile.

‘Then,’ I said with mounting irritation, ‘the salmon parr grow up into smolts, and the smolts want to find the sea, and the particular part of the sea they want to find is just south of Iceland-at least if the fish broodstock comes from an English or Scottish river. How do you suppose these fish will get there? Through the Suez Canal?’

‘Well,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘that’s one of the problems you would have to solve, of course. But if it was me, and of course I’m a completely non-technical person, I’d think along the lines of constructing holding ponds at the bottom of the wadis seeded with salmon, keeping the water cool, injecting it with oxygen if necessary, and confining the salmon there for three or four years. I read somewhere that in Canada salmon stay in the lake systems for that amount of time.’

‘And what then?’

‘Catch them all, then start again?’ She stood up, looking at her watch. ‘Dr Jones, I’ve taken up far too much of your time already. I’m very grateful indeed for you coming and listening to all this. I know how outlandish it is. But please don’t dismiss it here and now. Take a couple of days to think about it, and then I’ll call you again, if I may. Remember, all you have to commit to at this stage is a feasibility study. You’re not going to be putting your reputation on the line. And remember too, if you will, that my client can commit very large financial resources to this project, should they be needed.’

And then I was back in the reception area, shaking hands and saying goodbye, almost without knowing how I got there. She turned and walked back to her office, and I couldn’t help watching her as she went. She did not look back.

17 June

Last night I gave my talk to the local humanist society. My theme was that if we believed in God, we immediately created an excuse for tolerating injustice, natural disasters, pain and loss. Christians and other religionists argue that God does not create suffering but the world in which suffering occurs, and suffering allows us to rediscover our oneness with God.

I argued that such an approach stood logic on its head. All disasters, all loss, all suffering, demonstrate that there cannot possibly be a God, for why would a deity who is omnipotent create a universe so prone to disaster and accident? Religious faith, I argued, was invented in order to pacify the grieving multitudes and ensure they did not ask the really difficult questions, which if answered, would tend to lead to progress.