Lunch at the Shabab Restaurant across the road knocked inverse archaeology squarely on the head, at least for the rest of the day. I chose an item on the menu described simply as ‘Birds’. At a table opposite me sat a fat red-faced man in a check jacket. He was completely bald, bearded, and had a hole in the centre of his forehead, perhaps the result of a hasty frontal lobotomy. The face was strangely familiar.
The Birds arrived spit-roast, heads, beaks and all, half a dozen of them, each about an inch and a quarter long. They were crunchy and sharp-tasting – the waiter explained that they were migrants from Russia that fed exclusively on figs and mulberries. To go with them I ordered a half-bottle of ‘Duck’ brand arak, the label confusingly decorated with a swan. Even more confusingly, battah, the Arabic for ‘duck’, appeared on the cap as bat’hah – which might have been a variant of the word for ‘swamp’ or ‘depression’ but should, strictly, have meant ‘a throwing upon the ground’. If a warning was implied, I didn’t heed it. Towards the end of the bottle the bald man’s jacket began scintillating, as checks do on a TV screen. Then, as he got up to leave, I realized in a flash of arak inspiration where I’d seen him before: in a picture-book by Rex Whistler that showed faces which could be viewed either way up.
I had only one road to cross to get to my bed at the Baron.
Next morning on my way to the Citadel, I stopped at a juice bar. A plump lady with shopping bags beamed at me. ‘You speak Arabic.’
‘Al-hamdu li ’llah,’ I said.
‘And you’re a Muslim!’
‘No, a Masihi.’
She looked concerned. ‘Of course, the main thing that separates us is that Trinity of yours.’
I remembered Upper Egypt and my theological wrigglings with the mage-like shaykh, and replied with an ‘Mm’.
‘You can’t have three people running the same firm, you know. It just wouldn’t work.’
On al-Shahba, the Citadel of Aleppo, Ibn Juzayy quoted a verse by a certain al-Khalidi – or in fact two al-Khalidis, a pair of brothers whose joint productions made them the Gilbert and George of tenth-century Arabic poetry:
Lo! on her grim and massy rock
That holds to scorn the foeman’s shock
With lofty tower and perilous steep
Majestic stands Aleppo’s keep.
For once the description is not over the top. IB wrote, awestruck, of al-Shahba, ‘the Iron-Grey’ – of its walls and deep moat, its marvellous belvederes, and of the prodigious fact that it had withstood a siege by the Mongols.
I climbed up a steep stone viaduct, over the moat and into a gatehouse. The incline continued up to a second gatehouse, a massive, intimidating barbican put up, the inscription read, by the thirteenth-century Ayyubid al-Zahir Ghazi, the Just, the Great Sultan, the Victorious, the Prince of This and That … the inscription went on and on. So did the gatehouse, within which there were three separate portals, each furnished with iron doors like the bulkheads of a battleship and guarded by fearsome stone animals. The first portal was topped by dragons with foxy heads, writhing around and nipping each other. Next came the Gate of the Two Lions, not the slim-line heraldic sort but a pair of sparring bruisers. I dog-legged upwards past a cenotaph draped in green, a shrine to al-Khadir, that energetic, mystical traveller who like IB and me had begun his journey in Tangier. Still higher, I reached the third and last portal, the Gate of the Laughing and Crying Lions. They were deployed in bouncer formation on either side of the doorway looking outwards, pudding-faced like Hogarth pussy cats. (The difference in their expressions has generated much empty speculation. To me the reason was obvious: the happy lion has four claws on each paw, the unhappy one only three.)
After all the twists and turns and talismanic guardians, I expected to emerge into nothing less than the City of Brass. But the buildings on top were an anticlimax, the view depressing. A cement suburbia stretched to the horizon, covering the vineyards and orchards which IB had seen. That epithet of the Citadel, the Iron-Grey, had slid down and clothed all Aleppo.
Late that afternoon I bumped into al-Khadir once more. Again, it happened in a gateway – Bab al-Nasr, the Gate of Victory, the northern entrance to the old city of Aleppo. (The patron saint of travel had a habit of popping up in transitional places – entrances and exits, mountains by the sea, tracks across the desert. He was for ever coming or going, arriving or disembarking.) Part of the structure had been turned into a stationer’s; al-Khadir’s cenotaph was in the other part, covered by the usual green pall and identified by a plaque. It stood in a padlocked enclosure, surrounded by lighted incense-sticks. Opposite was another enclosure. This one was empty, but I noticed a smooth block of stone with deep holes in it, let into the rougher masonry of the gate. The stone was covered in oily smears and seemed to be inscribed, but in the failing light and the gloom of the gateway I could make nothing of it.
IB hadn’t mentioned the site, but back in the Baron I turned up a reference to the stone in the pilgrim guide of al-Harawi, a native of Aleppo: ‘Set into the Gate of the Jews, also called the Gate of Victory, is a stone to which pledges are made. People annoint it with rose water and scented unguents. The Muslims, Christians and Jews have diverse beliefs about it, and it is said that beneath it is the tomb of one of the prophets or saints.’ I decided to go back. Whatever those diverse beliefs were, it seemed they were still current.
I returned the next morning and found the man with the key to the shrine, who kept a smaller stationer’s opposite the gate. He was a stately, elderly gentleman with a smooth round face and an expression of deep melancholy that reminded me of the sad lion of the Citadel. I asked him why there were two shrines to al-Khadir in Aleppo, and he told me that the saint had passed through a tunnel that joined the Citadel with the Gate of Victory, to rally the Muslims when they besieged the city in the first century of Islam.
‘And what about the stone with the holes in it?’
He hesitated. ‘Some people believe that if you have arthritis and put your finger in one of the holes, you will be cured. But health comes only from God. He cures whom He wishes.’
I asked about the inscription. The old stationer told me it was mismari, ‘nail-writing’ or cuneiform. ‘And they say that two people from the cuneiform age are buried beneath the stone.’
‘Could I have the key? I’d like to have a closer look.’
‘You … you should go to the Directorate of Antiquities.’ I was going to press further, but he continued with sudden passion. ‘Al-Khadir is still alive. And Elijah. And Jesus. They are the three who do not die! And Jesus will come on the Last Day and then he himself will die. And Elijah and al-Khadir. And …’ I looked into the smooth face and saw tears in his eyes, ‘… and that will be the end of this world.’ His voice had tailed off to a whisper.
The call to prayer sounded and he appeared to recover. He put on a turban of yellow brocade wound around a crimson tarbush. ‘You will pray with us?’
I told him that I was a Masihi. He said nothing, but took my hand for a while, then released it. He locked up the shop and left.
I went back inside the gateway and squinted through the bars at the stone. The inscription was not in cuneiform but Greek. As to what it said – whether it was Homer or a Byzantine no parking sign – I couldn’t tell. It was just too far away, too obscure. I contemplated going to the Directorate of Antiquities; then decided to leave it as a mystery. Besides, an old man talking about death by the empty tomb of a traveller had reminded me, as if I needed a reminder, that I had to get going.
*
Back in Damascus I picked up several more absolutely indispensable volumes from Hikmat. Like Dr Abdelhadi of Rabat, IB’s exclamatory editor, he gave me his salams to pass on to various scholars in Yemen and, for myself, a farewell kiss.
I then went on a final expedition with Abu Ala and Munir the topographer. We drove to al-Kiswah, a village south of Damascus where IB joined the Mecca pilgrim caravan (not uncharacteristically leaving behind an impregnated w
ife). The village sat on a rise facing the desert. There was not a lot to it – a few houses, a ruined Mamluk caravanserai containing anatomized lorries and pools of oil, and the ghosts of many departures.
I couldn’t follow IB to Mecca. Even Abu Ala, who had got me into the tomb of the Lady Zaynab, admitted defeat on that one. ‘Unless, that is, you converted.’ He gave me a sly wink.
‘I couldn’t convert just to do research! It would be …’
‘No, I mean really convert.’ Now he was looking at me unblinking. ‘We could do the Pilgrimage together in my taxi. At my expense.’
‘And I could come too,’ said Munir the topographer.
An image came to mind: of Abu Ala at the wheel of his Damascus taxi, driving out of the iron-grey north into Arabia, southward into the sun, wearing his striped tie and tweed suit.
He was still looking at me. ‘But then,’ he continued, starting the car, ‘guidance comes from God.’
I was of course heading south to catch up with IB. The other side of Mecca we would shake off our literary travelling companions, Ibns Juzayy and Jubayr, and their constant if well-turned interruptions. We would leave the Mamluk heartland and travel centrifugally – to Oman and the Coast of the Fish-eaters, to Turkoman Anatolia and the Crimea of the Golden Horde, and to Constantinople, where the long sunset had begun in a blaze of Palaeologue mosaic.
IB travelled from al-Kiswah; I from Damascus Airport which, perhaps in the apotropaic tradition of the Aleppo Citadel and the temples of the Hittites, you enter past a large stone sphinx with an Assyrian-looking gentleman on top of it. (Could he, I wondered, be the real reason behind the sphinx’s inscrutable smile?)
I checked in, then found the bar. Behind it, bottles of Black Label were spotlit in little alcoves, relics in a shrine of booze. Opposite, several dozen Iranian women in black chadors squatted on the floor, glowing quietly with the reflected sanctity of the Lady Zaynab and al-Husayn’s head. I sat in the middle, the only customer, and drank beer. It was a curious juxtaposition of elements, and over it all watched the grocerly, ubiquitous face of Hafiz al-Asad. Looking up at him, I couldn’t decide what he was: Big Brother; a new Alawi Old Man of the Mountains; or a genius at synthesis.
IB left Mecca with the Iraqi pilgrim caravan, and made a tour of Iraq and southern Persia. He then returned to Mecca and stayed for nearly three years as a ‘sojourner’, a long-term pilgrim and student. In 1330 he sailed from Jeddah to Yemen, visited the Yemeni sultan, al-Mujahid, then crossed from Aden to Somalia. After a brief hop down the port cities of East Africa he crossed the ocean to the Arabian enclave of Dhofar, then under Yemeni rule. From here he coasted to Oman.
Oman
The Coast of the Fish-eaters
‘A man that spurs his mount through empty tracts wrests wonders from the hands of Time.’
Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Haymi (d. 1737), Itr nasim al-siba
I WAS THE one who was meant to be following him. But for a moment I was sure of it: he was following me. I stopped and turned. There was nothing there – a track across a gravel plain between the mountains and the sea, but no shades.
More to the point at high noon on the Gulf of Oman, there was almost no shade; just a few crew-cut trees quivering in the heat haze. I turned off the track, made for one of them and lunched on Bombay mix in a meagre fretwork of shadow. Then I opened the Travels: ‘I turned off the road’, wrote IB of this same track, ‘and made for a tree of umm ghaylan.’
If anything was haunting me, it was the text. I couldn’t recall what an umm ghaylan was, but it sounded close enough to ‘mother of ghouls’ for discomfort. And weren’t ghouls that species of jinn that haunt graveyards and mislead travellers in lonely spots? Whatever, beggars couldn’t be … ‘Aeeugh!’ I exclaimed. A horrible sound. A dry, horrible clattering thing. A death-rattle … Right here in the tree. I slowly turned my head, and found myself eyeball to compound eyeball with a large grasshopper.
I was testing a theory: that, at this particular point in his journey, the Prince of Travellers was a wimp. In 1329 he arrived by sea at Sur, the most easterly town in the Arab world. ‘From there,’ he wrote, ‘we saw the city of Qalhat on the slope of a hill, and seeming to be close by.’ After a six hundred-mile voyage along the southern coast of Arabia, he was missing civilization. Qalhat, a sort of medieval Dubai, shimmered seductively. IB was told that the walk would take a couple of hours. He set out with a fellow passenger from the boat, Khadir the Indian, and a crew member as guide and porter.
The walk was a disaster. IB soon became convinced that the guide wanted to steal his luggage. By chance, the traveller happened to have a spear with him and every so often, he says, ‘I brandished it so the guide went in awe of me.’ After a detour around a tidal creek, they entered the plain, ‘a waterless desert, where we suffered from thirst and were in a desperate plight’. Khadir the Indian fell ill. They struggled through gullies and rocks by the shore, and six hours later flopped down for the night beneath their tree – presumably an ancestor of mine. IB didn’t sleep: ‘I stayed on watch, and every time the guide moved I spoke to him and showed him that I was awake.’ Next morning they finally arrived at Qalhat, ‘in a state of great exhaustion. My feet had become so swollen in my shoes that the blood was almost starting under the nails … For six days I was powerless to rise.’ It all sounded a bit melodramatic for a walk of eighteen miles.
To be fair on IB, my reconstruction of his walk was not entirely authentic, for I had some advantages over him: I had set out at first light, he at midday; it was now February, while IB had been here in ‘the season of heat’; and I had a pair of stout walking shoes of a type not available in the fourteenth century. I thought of giving myself a handicap and bringing my bag with its heavy travelling library, then decided that the age difference – I was ten years older than IB – was also a consideration.
The topography of IB’s route was, not surprisingly, unchanged; but its human geography had altered. Sur had grown, Qalhat – Marco Polo’s Calatu, ‘a noble city … frequented by numerous ships with goods from India’ – had all but disappeared. And there was a new toponym, al-Anji. I heard the name in Sur while asking a tug-master for directions, and rifled my memory for a mention of the place. It certainly wasn’t in the Travels, and it seemed to have eluded Ibn al-Mujawir, whose thirteenth-century anecdotal geography is the best guide to the bottom half of Arabia. ‘You know,’ the tug-master said. ‘The end of the pipeline.’ It clicked: al-Anji was ‘LNG’ – the Liquified Natural Gas terminal. And there it was, visible from beneath my umm ghaylan, a couple of giant gasometers and a lot of oversized Meccano strewn across the plain.
When I had asked how long the walk to Qalhat would take, there was something hauntingly familiar about the tug-master’s response: ‘Oh, not more than a couple of hours.’ Unless I ran all the way, it seemed wildly optimistic. All the same, I had set off at a lick along the beach, escorted by a dawn patrol of dragonflies. An occasional heron – which the Arabs call ‘the sad bird’ – contemplated the shallows. On my left was a strong smell of frankincense from the matutinal fumigations of Suri houses and, on my right, of tideline iodine. Suburban Sur ended in a line of large villas. One had pharaonic columns coloured like Edinburgh rock, another Blenheim-style iron gates, a cornflower-blue dome and no fewer than three satellite dishes.
The first humans I saw were some boys, fishing with a line. As I passed, they caught something, dropped it and scurried up the beach. Then they edged back, chucking rocks. I went to investigate and found a small drab moray eel, writhing and snapping its last. The boys called it a hawin. ‘It bites really hard,’ they told me, ‘specially when it sees something red.’ I looked at its nutcracker jaws and made a mental note never to swim in Omani waters wearing red bathing trunks.
Half an hour further along the beach I came across Rashid and Hamad, who were doing things to a boat. They invited me to their village, across the plain at the foot of the hills. In the interests of my reconstruction, I declined; then chang
ed my mind at the mention of coffee – breakfast had been a joyless pre-dawn omelette and lukewarm Nescafé. They promised to return me to this exact spot, and we drove across the plain in an old pick-up.
In an airy seaward room they brought not only coffee but also dates, apples, oranges and a Suri sweetmeat – a crunchy jelly that tasted of cardamom, ginger and Barmouth biscuits. Such Omani invitations are unrivalled in delicacy, the fruit so precisely cut, the dates in dainty containers on doilies, the coffee – in tiny cups a quarter full – to be drunk reasonably quickly and with appreciative but not over-audible slurps. Rashid instructed me in coffee protocol. ‘Only the women fill the cup. You’re slurping too loudly. No, never put the cup on the floor! And you wiggle it like this, from the bottom, after the third cup.’
They drove me back to the shore and I resumed my journey, restored. Eventually the track entered the sprawling gas terminal of al-Anji. Behind high fences sat rows of air-conditioned Portakabins, humming, inhabited refrigerators. Off-duty Indians stared at me through the wire mesh; buses filled with more Indians passed by, each time with a simultaneous turn of heads. A couple of brand-new Landcruisers also went past, driven by Westerners. They were the ones who stared hardest. Perhaps I had inadvertently wet myself, or grown a horn. Everything, though, seemed in order. The only possible explanation for the stares was that I was walking.
Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah Page 22