Tradition and change

This tradition of women's all-day rituals has continued undisturbed. Today, however, the bolts of discarded cloth reveal slinky silk dresses and startlingly sexy underwear.

After hours of scouring, steaming and kneading, Saffron's beauty treatment left me limp and pliable. I was touched by the bath aide's willingness to share her beauty secrets with a stranger. However, we arrived at an impasse when she tried to pull the hair off my legs. Glaring ferociously, she dumped gallons of water over my head and marched me off down a sultry, sloping tunnel to an adjoining chamber.

Murmuring women leaned against stone troughs ladling water on each other. Others were busily examining their bodies for ungodly hair. Islam determines even the details of personal hygiene. It is considered a sin to have hair on one's private parts. Numerous dipilatory concoctions have been invented over the ages, and some women were applying the current favorite, a candylike paste of lemon juice, water and sugar.

Naked women and children drifted out of the mist from an adjoining subterranean passageway and kissed my hands in the traditional Yemeni greeting. I became the center of attention, and the source of much amusement, when the women discovered my lamentably hirsute condition.

The one-woman battalion of the hammam flopped her arms up and down, shooing away the women around me. Like a magician, she produced a bowl of hair-eating paste from under her many petticoats, intent on performing my last purification. My hysterical and pathetic Arabic stopped her. She threw her hands up in disgusted resignation and disappeared into a foggy tunnel.

A series of domed rooms led into a vestibule, where the women rinsed, relaxed, discussed personal issues and world affairs.

With a lot of laughter and cackling, we exchanged cosmetics and perfumes. After covering their faces and bodies with yards of black fabric, one woman was indistinguishable from another. I followed the dark figures up a musty granite corridor to the vaulted stone entrance of the hammam, and we stepped back into the outside world.

On the street, women become ghosts again. Heads are bandaged in cloth to the eyebrows. A dark stretchy gauze covers them from neck to nose. Others wear all-enveloping enormous black cloaks with matching scarves through which they can see without being seen.

To hard-core feminists,Yemen resembles a throwback to the Neanderthal ages. Yet there have been notable exceptions to the general rule of female anonymity and subservience. The queen of Sheba set out from Yemen on her legendary journey to visit King Solomon. In 1091 Malika Arwa became head of state and ruled for 47 years. She held the royal title, Al Sayyida Al-Hurra, meaning "the lady who is free." Historians claim that Arwa never made an important decision without first visiting the bathhouse.

In 1990, with a stroke of a pen rather than a streak of bullets, the former North Yemen and the Marxist-Leninist South Yemen unified.

Aneesa Ghanem, herself something of an anomaly as a Yemeni feminist writer and activist, observed that "the unification of the two Yemens has been good for the country. But previously achieved gains for women in their former south have been compromised. The new Family Law has set women back centuries. Now, I must get the written permission of my husband, father or close male relative in order to travel," explained Ghanem.

"When it all gets too much, I run to Hammam Ali for a good steam," she said.

No one can determine how many wars have rolled over the country's volcanic terrain and desert dunes, but the periods of warfare exceed the passages of peace.

Remarkably, life in the public bathhouses remains unchanged and untouched by war. With peace relatively secure, the government has launched a reconstruction program designed to promote tourism. Europeans have already begun to identify Yemen as another French Riviera, and German families flock to San`a during the Christmas holidays for its healthy climate.