The Nasnas
Yemen and Hadhramaut (the desert margins) · Medieval Arabian record, thirteenth century
The wadi at dusk had a custom. The travellers of the Hadhramaut, in the medieval Arabic record collected and transmitted by the cosmographer al-Qazwini at the close of the thirteenth century, did not give their names aloud between the late afternoon and the rising of the first stars. The custom was not religious. The custom was practical. The travellers of the dry valleys of the southern peninsula had a thing that walked the wadi at that hour, and the thing, in the records of al-Qazwini and in the older Arabic geographers from whom he took the account, asked one question of the travellers it found.
The thing was called the nasnas. The half-man.
The accounts agree on the shape. The nasnas was a man divided vertically along the line of the spine: one eye, one ear, one nostril, one half of a mouth, one shoulder, one arm, half of a chest, half of a belly, one buttock, one thigh, one leg, one foot. The cut, in the accounts, was clean. The body did not bleed at the line of the division. The body did not show the organs at the cut. The body was finished, on the cut side, as if the cut side were a face: smooth, the colour of the skin, no opening through which the inside of the body could be seen.
The nasnas did not walk. The nasnas, having only the one leg, hopped.
On the speech
The speech, in the accounts, was unaccented.
The nasnas spoke the Arabic of the region in which the traveller encountered it. In the Hadhramaut it spoke the dialect of the Hadhramaut. In the records of the merchants returning from Aden to Sana’a, it met them on the gravel of the high pass and greeted them in the voice of a man neither old nor young, the half of the mouth visible to the traveller moving exactly as the half of a man’s mouth would move at the threshold of a household.
The greeting was the standard greeting. Peace upon you. The traveller, the records say, would by reflex return it. And upon you, peace. The nasnas would then ask the second of the customary questions. And what is your name, traveller, that I may know whom I have met in the wadi this evening.
The traveller, in the records, should not have answered.
On the giving of the name
The accounts of al-Qazwini and of the later compendium of al-Damiri agree on the consequence.
The traveller who gave the name aloud was the traveller the nasnas remembered. The remembering was not a matter of the passing hour. The remembering, in the records, was permanent. The nasnas, having heard the name, would carry the name into the dry valleys of the Hadhramaut and would, in the subsequent encounters of that nasnas with the other travellers of the wadi, give the name of the man it had met before in answer to the same question put to it in reverse. The other travellers, returning to the towns of the coast, would report that they had been greeted by name in the wadi by a thing they had not met. The man whose name was carried, in the records, would in the following months be drawn back to the wadi without intending to come, would be found, by the search parties of his household, at the rim of the gravel pass, walking the line at which he had given the name, and would not, by then, remember why he had walked there or what name he had answered to.
The accounts record the recovery as partial. The man returned to the household. The man did not speak the name to which he had answered in the wadi for the remainder of his life. The household did not, after a certain interval, speak the name in his hearing.
The traveller who did not answer was permitted to pass.
On the procedure of the desert towns
The towns of the desert margin had a procedure.
Travellers leaving the coast for the inland towns left at dawn and arrived at the next watering before the late afternoon. Travellers who, by the misadventure of the camel or the slipping of the gravel, found themselves in the wadi between the late afternoon and the first stars walked on without speaking aloud. Travellers greeted from the rocks by a voice that gave the dialect of the region were instructed, in the customary teaching of the household before any first journey, to return the greeting silently in the mind, to incline the head once, and to continue walking. Not to look fully at the speaker. On no account to give the name aloud.
The instruction, al-Qazwini records, was given to the children of the merchant households of Aden and Sana’a before the children were old enough to read.
The archive holds no position on whether the half-man of the Hadhramaut hopped along the gravel of the high pass at the hour between the late afternoon and the first stars. The archive observes only that the medieval Arabic geographers and the cosmographer al-Qazwini at the close of the thirteenth century recorded the figure under the name nasnas, that the figure asked the second of the customary questions in the unaccented dialect of the region, that the travellers of the desert towns were taught in childhood not to answer it, and that the men who were drawn back to the rim of the wadi in the following months, when they were brought home, did not afterwards speak the name to which they had answered.
- al-Qazwini, Zakariya ibn Muhammad. *'Aja'ib al-Makhluqat wa-Ghara'ib al-Mawjudat (The Wonders of Creation and the Curiosities of Existing Things)*. c. 1270. The thirteenth-century Arabic cosmography that constitutes the principal medieval entry on the *nasnas* of the southern Arabian deserts.
- Lane, Edward William. *Arabian Society in the Middle Ages: Studies from The Thousand and One Nights*. London: Chatto + Windus, 1883. The standard nineteenth-century English survey of medieval Arabic supernatural beings, with the *nasnas* and the *shiqq* in chapter II.
- al-Damiri, Muhammad ibn Musa. *Hayat al-Hayawan al-Kubra (The Great Life of Animals)*. Cairo, c. 1371. The fourteenth-century zoological compendium drawing on al-Qazwini and the earlier Arabic geographers, with the *nasnas* listed under the borderland creatures of Hadhramaut.