Way out in eastern Yemen lie a province, a coastline, a lunar plateau and a complex of deep-cut, green-speckled valleys called collectively the Hadramawt. Isolated on modern maps, the territory was well-known in antiquity. An oblique reference lurks in the genealogies of Genesis X. The local honey earned mention by Roman historian Pliny. Ptolemy speaks of one side valley named Wadi Dawan from which, 19 centuries later in 1934, a young man left home to seek his fortune in newly formed Saudi Arabia.

There was nothing unusual in his departure. The history of Hadradmawt, indeed of Yemen as a whole, has been one long saga of emigration. Gibraltar – “Mountain (Djebel) of Tariq” – is named for the Yemeni general who first led Muslim forces into Europe, and traces in Spain of 8th century irrigation resemble techniques still used in Yemen. The Sultan of Brunei, world?s richest person prior to Bill Gates, traces his ancestry to the Hadramawt. Wadi Dawan?s most successful son has been the 1934 migrant Mohammed bin Laden, father of Osama.

Prophet Mohammed said of Yemenis, “They have the kindest and gentlest hearts of all.” Not so, until recently, the Hadramis. One medieval verdict (from Ibn al-Mujawir’s appealingly titled “History for Those Who Would Perceive Clearly)”: “In the world of coming-to-be and passing-away, there is not a rougher people than the Hadramis. The blood of the slaughtered is everywhere.” Modern historian Paul Dresch describes conditions which the elder bin Laden left behind seven decades ago: “Many areas were paralyzed by feuds, highway robbery was common, and in some places people had not dared leave the house for years or had to reach the fields by trenches – if the fields were not in rifle shot.”

(Enter, in that same year of 1934, a remarkable British administrator named Harold Ingrams. Together with his intrepid wife Doreen, a few powerful Hadrami allies, and – it must be added – some initial RAF bombs, Ingrams transformed chronic Hadramawt chaos into welcome order … and earned the gratitude and fond memory of Hadramis even today. This column has taken London “statesmen” to task for imposing fractious borders, some of them transparently cynical, on colonial territories. But historians of Empire can point to other, more admirable personnel types. Stay tuned for “Giving Britannia Her Due.”)

Much of Osama bin Laden’s ancestral homeland looks like Marlboro country. One can fly from Yemen?s capital Sana’a direct to the spectacular wadi canyons, but we drove from the old port of al-Mukalla on what Milton called “the spicy shore of Araby the Blest.” The poet’s seaborne “Sabean odours” – from cargoes of frankincense and myrrh once controlled by the Queen of Sheba – are quickly lost as the road climbs inland across a barren plateau of rock and sand called the jowl. There’s no life save for recently constructed military encampments and oil exploration outposts. Main building contractor on the jowl: “The Saudi Bin Laden Construction Group.”

English writer-explorer Freya Stark also crossed the jowl, “a majestic and sterile plateau,” in 1934. Her trip by camel took days, rather than our Land Cruiser hours. Upon finally arriving at the fertile wadis, she wrote, “If I should be asked the most agreeable thing in life, I should say it is the pleasure of contrast.” Without warning the road zigzags down a 2,000-foot escarpment and onto a flat valley floor whose water courses, while subterranean most of the year, support palm groves, alfalfa fields, and villages of multi-story architecture. The mind has no time to adjust. It is as if some cosmic magician, far removed from any prop or bag of tricks, has waved a wand and created something from nothing.

The most startling town is called, like an incantation, Shibam. Here the typical Muslim emphasis on compactness of community has been taken to extremes. With space galore on every side, the Shibamis have created a tiny metropolis of 500 contiguous skyscrapers, nearly 100 feet tall, within a walled perimeter the size of six football fields. Described to (pre-9/11) tourists as “Manhattan of the Sands,” Shibam is like a medieval version of midtown…without any surrounding downtown or uptown, less still Bronx or Brooklyn.

At one end of the wadi system lies Yemen?s holiest monument, the tomb of Qoranic prophet Hud, great-grandson of Old Testament Shem whose father, in turn, was Noah. Shem is legendary progenitor of “Semitic” peoples which include Jews and Arabs alike. (Note, however, how the term “anti-Semitic” has been appropriated and narrowed in recent times to refer only to anti-Jewishness.) Post-diluvian Hud warned the people of ?Ad to mend their licentious ways lest Divine Wrath descend again. They didn’t; It did in a violent sandstorm; and Hud escaped the fury of survivors only by being swallowed, with his camel, into the earth. His shrine, the site of vast but brief (three day) annual pilgrimage, consists of an exquisitely proportioned white dome built over the camel’s rocky outcrop hump. For the other 362 days each year, the surrounding pilgrim town is utterly, unnervingly vacant.

Wadi Dawan, where Mohammed bin Laden was born and raised, is almost as empty. Its honey is the world’s most expensive ($47 a kilo to Saudi aphrodisiac customers), but otherwise the valley produces far too little for a population which, nation-wide, increases at an annual rate of 3.4 percent. So the men of Wadi Dawan do as Hadramis and other Yemenis have done for generations: They migrate in search of work but maintain a nostalgic attachment for the ancestral homeland.

Hence the multi-story mansions of stone foundation, mud-brick mid-section, and wooden rooftop. While not as closely packed as in Shibam, they nestle into small villages built against the escarpment walls. Electricity wires slant and droop willy-nilly, but many of the residences sport newly painted windows and brass studded doors. Our question, both general and specific: Who actually resides within?

Generally about 70 percent of working age males are outside the Hadramawt. In typical Muslim extended families, one male stays behind to look after women and children. But schools and health clinics are non-existent in most of Wadi Dawan. Some families leave altogether and organize a caretaker for the house. And some, in the course of time, never come back.

Specifically we wondered about the bin Laden lineage. Did they still have a house? Where, exactly, was it? Who, even more intriguingly, still lived in it? A French journalist, traveling like myself without a journalist visa, had recently been deported for asking exactly these questions. The special connections that had gotten us this far now made further probing impossible. A pick-up truck full of Yemeni soldiers had shadowed us, protectively but observantly, the whole way. True, their vigilance was relaxed each afternoon with the genial, unguarded chewing of qat. Each of our minders would load up one cheek with wads of the mild narcotic and, while still on duty, kick back. Even so, for fear of incident, there were questions we couldn’t quite ask.

Later, over a memorable lunch in Aden, I learned more…from the daughter of Harold and Doreen Ingrams. Like her parents, representative of Britannia’s best, she’s devoted much of her life to Hadramawt welfare. So also, she reported, did Mohammed bin Laden whose businesses employed family members, then others from Wadi Dawan, then Hadramis in general. But, so far as she knew, the father had never come back.

What about son Osama? Now on my own, I could ask a direct question: What chance that he’s hiding in one of those tall houses with brass studded doors somewhere in Wadi Dawan?

Laili Ingrams giggled. “Osama’s newest wife is Yemeni,” she said, “but I don?t know of his visits to Yemen, less still to Wadi Dawan. Anyway no one could keep it a secret. If he were there, we’d know it. This whole country’s one great bit qat chew.”

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world.