Into the 19th Century?

The Arab world's month-long is-he-or-isn't-he about Yahya of Yemen could now cease. In his dusty fortress capital of Sana, Imam Yahya lay dead. His successor as absolute ruler of Yemen's 3,500,000 Bedouins and oasis-dwellers: Ahmed el Wazir, rich Mocha planter and onetime adviser to the old Imam. Two of Yahya's nine recognized sons had somehow died the same day as their father.

Beyond those bare announcements, little news had crackled to the outside world over Sana's lone radio transmitter. But there was still plenty of yackety-yack over what had actually happened in Yemen.

One rumor: that Yahya, who has long been ailing with hemiplegia (paralysis of one side of the body), two of his sons, his Prime Minister and his secretary had been shot down by assassins.

Another: that just before his death the aged (77) Yahya, knowing that El Wazir hoped to grab the throne, had taken a gold hoard of $40,000,000 from the palace cellar, packed it off to the desert (on the backs of slaves) to be buried. The story went that the slaves were killed, as in Captain Kidd legends, lest they tattle; but that El Wazir had tracked down the hoard, returned it to Sana.

In Cairo, Arab League Secretary Abdul Rahman Azzam Pasha heard that civil war had broken out, with three of the dead Yahya's sons opposing the new government. The league sent a plane to buzz Yemen. It would drop 10,000 pamphlets enjoining Yemenites "to be quiet and avoid bloodshed."

To find out what really went on, the league sent a two-man delegation to Yemen. They might see one change. Eagle-eyed Imam el Wazir was rather less isolationist than Imam Yahya, who once said: "I and my people would rather live in poverty and eat grass than allow foreigners to enter the country. . . ." Last week an American who knows Yemen said: "Yemen might rush into the 19th Century from the 13th. . . ."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.