Among the Dragon's Blood Trees

The Diksam plateau sits at the island's high heart, a rolling limestone table several hundred metres above the coast.

Dragon's blood trees (*Dracaena cinnabari*) grow nowhere else on Earth. Their canopies spread flat and wide — an evolutionary response to the fierce Indian Ocean monsoon — giving them the silhouette of an open umbrella, or a mushroom cloud caught in slow time.

We arrived in the late afternoon, when the light turns the rock a deep amber and the shadow of each tree stretches twice the tree's own height. Walking among them is to understand that Socotra is not merely an island with unusual plants; it is an island that belongs to a different chapter of the world's history.

The red sap — the 'blood' — seeps from any cut in the bark and was prized by ancient traders as a dye, a varnish, a medicine. Locals still use it. To see it ooze in the afternoon heat is to hold a thread that reaches back four thousand years of commerce.

Stay until sunset. The silhouettes against the fading sky are the best reason there is to be here.