If the Romans named Yemen "the Happy Land of the Arabs," and if the ancient Arabs named it "Green Yemen," people in this age have grown used to saying of it that it is "the Unknown Land of the Arabs."

And this is true, for people still know very little of Yemen's past and of its present.

And there is surely nothing in Yemen so unknown as the Yemeni woman, who still hides behind a thick curtain of question marks.

I do not recall having read about the Yemeni woman more than a chapter or two, in which imagination prevails over fact. And no wonder: nearly everything published about Yemen down to this day has come from the pens of men who were strangers to it, who could not penetrate its public life — let alone the life of its women.

And it makes me happy to be the first Arab woman to speak of her Yemeni sister, after it was given me to mingle with her and to test her customs and her characteristics for myself.

I cannot keep to strict accuracy unless I distinguish between the Yemeni woman who lives in the mountain regions and the Tihama woman who lives in the towns and villages lying on the western slopes of the mountains of Yemen and scattered over the heavy sands of the Tihama plain, which stretches along the eastern shore of the Red Sea.

I shall speak first of the Yemeni woman who lives in the mountain regions, and then return to speak of the Tihama woman.

The Yemeni woman who lives in the mountain regions is distin-guished by being, in general — and above all in the cities, such as Sanaa and Taiz — short of stature and slight of body. Her features are fine, her lineaments soft.

Dazzling beauty may be rare in Yemen; but ugliness is all but nonexistent.

Perhaps the most beautiful thing about the women of Yemen is their eyes. In their black eyes there is a piercing attraction, and a radiance of vitality, intelligence, and purity of soul.

The Yemeni woman is, on the whole, dark. But she is not so very dark as some imagine. Rather she is — above all in the cities — pale, with a pallor that lends her a special softness and calls to mind the ostrich eggs to whose color the poets of the Jahiliyya used to liken the complexions of their beloveds.

There are also — above all in Sanaa — a number of fair-haired, light-eyed women, in whose veins there usually runs Turkish or Circassian blood.

The Yemeni woman goes with face unveiled in the villages, like all the village women of the Islamic world. But in the cities she casts over herself veil upon veil and wrap upon wrap, like the husk upon an ear of yellow corn.

The village woman in Yemen contents herself with wearing trousers whose legs reach down to the ground, and over them, and over the undershift, a robe with sleeves down to the wrists, hanging nearly to the feet, called in Yemen the "zanna." On her head the village woman puts a white covering with which she binds her hair, and over it the "qarqush" (the qaf is pronounced in Yemen like the Egyptian jim), a garment for the head that hides the forehead, the hair, the ears, and the neck, and leaves only the face uncovered.

In the cities the headdress of the married woman differs from that of the maiden. The maiden wears the "qarqush" alone; the married woman puts on her head the "masr," which is a scarf of large size, and sets over her brow an "usba," a band which she ties over the "masr" at the back of the head. Nor does the Yemeni woman who lives in the cities, whether married or maiden, content herself with all this: if she wishes to go out of her house she puts on her head the "sitara," a large square covering with which she veils her face. And over all of the foregoing she puts on the "sharshaf," a covering like a bed-covering, large and square, in which she wraps herself from the crown of her head to her feet, holding