Beyond al-Anji the hills met the sea, and the track rose. Up ahead was a cuboid building, the first sign of Qalhat. After a mile or so I passed through the city wall and entered a vast area of scrub and ruins – more walls, vaulted cisterns and tombs with collapsed domes like breakfast eggshells. The whole place trembled minutely: Qalhat was covered with locusts. My solitary grasshopper must have got left behind. It was an apocalyptic scene – this noble city in ruins, infested by millions of rustling, nibbling insects – and I recalled a story I had heard in Sur. The last ruler of Qalhat was having an affair with his daughter. His advisers dropped hints, but he shrugged them off. ‘Why’, he asked, ‘should I give to others the ripest fruit of my own garden?’ So the city was destroyed, Sodom-style, in a fit of divine wrath. (The agent of ruin is variously said to have been an earthquake, a tidal wave, or the Portuguese.)
I wandered about the site, treading at almost every step on shards of jade-coloured celadon ware. When IB was here Qalhat’s citizens were ‘traders who live on what comes to them from the sea’; the smashed luxury porcelain underfoot, imported five thousand miles across the Indian Ocean, was the fruit of their commerce. IB also noted Persian tiles covering a mosque built by Bibi Maryam, a saintly lady who ruled the city until a few years before his visit. The mosque has disappeared, but Bibi Maryam’s tomb-chamber still stands, the cuboid building I had seen from the road. As recently as the 1830s, Lieutenant Wellsted of the Bombay Marine reported that the mausoleum was also covered with tiles ‘on which are inscribed, in rilievo, sentences from the Koran’. Now the tiles are gone, the dome has caved in and plaster is falling off the coral stone walls.
The tomb, however, seemed to be a locust-free zone, and I lay down in the shade of the wall. I was weary from the walk, although hardly in need of six days’ bed-rest. IB clearly was a wimp. But then, I thought as I dozed off, I bet he wasn’t frightened of grasshoppers.
Still half asleep, I became conscious of a whirring sound. It was closing in. A headline flashed across my mind – ‘Killer Locusts: Writer Nibbled to Death’ – and I opened my eyes apprehensively. Bibi Maryam and I were surrounded by a dozen foreigners taking photographs. I escaped into the tomb and darted lizard-like glances at the tourists – Germans – from behind the door jamb. Their Italian gruppenführerin joined me.
‘I hope you’ve told them about IB,’ I whispered to her.
‘Er … Please remind me of him.’ I gave her the Travels in a nutshell, which she then passed on in German. One of the tourists, I was pleased to see, took notes on the grosser mittelalterlicher Weltenbummler. I felt I had done well by IB; perhaps even made up for poking fun at his blisters.
I cadged a lift from the Germans – who might themselves have been termed gross middle-aged worldbummers – to IB’s next destination, the village of Tiwi ten miles up the coast. My own feet were in fair shape, but the time for heroics was over.
IB described Tiwi as ‘one of the loveliest of villages and most striking in beauty, with flowing streams and verdant trees and abundant plantations … They grow the banana called marwari, which in Persian means “pearly”.’ It was still an accurate description of the wadi behind the village. With its pea-green pools, tumbling streams and terraces of bananas and dates, the scene was a total contrast to the waterless waste between Sur and Qalhat.
Under an old gnarled tamarind I questioned some old gnarled men about the marwari banana; they didn’t know it, but made up by listing the other types that they grew – billi, faridi, abu baraghim, ahmar and aghbari. Then one of them thrust a bunch of whitish stems in my face. I sniffed them. ‘Er, lovely,’ I said, not knowing what reaction was expected.
The man laughed. ‘They’re palm penises. We climb up the trees and stick them in the female parts. You see, the Prophet said, “Be generous to your paternal aunts, the palms.” He used this term to describe them because, it is said, the palm was created from left-over clay when God had made Adam.’
I later came across the same tradition in al-Qazwini’s Wonders of Creation, together with the following useful tip:
If a palm fails to bear fruit, you should take an axe and approach it, saying aloud to another person, ‘I want to cut down this tree because it doesn’t bear fruit.’ Your companion should reply, ‘Don’t do that. It will bear fruit this year.’Then you must say, ‘No it won’t. It’s good for nothing,’ and give it a couple of light blows with the axe. Your companion must then seize your hand and say, ‘Leave it alone. It’s a good tree. Give it one more chance. If it doesn’t bear fruit this year, then do what you like with it.’ If you follow this procedure, the palm will produce an excellent crop.
The technique, surely the ultimate in talking to plants, is said to work equally well with other fruit trees.
The afternoon was getting on but I had no difficulty hitching back to Sur, thanks to a Pathan scrap merchant, a group of Keralan caterers and, finally, a PR man from al-Anji. Adil, a native of Sur, offered a solution to a small geographical query. At the beginning of the walk to Qalhat, IB’s way had been blocked by a tidal creek. He saw some men swimming across it, and the guide indicated that they should do the same. But he and Khadir the Indian smelt a rat – ‘we were convinced that he meant to drown us and make away with our garments’ – and insisted on walking inland to look for a ford. The Omani historian al-Salimi identified the creek as Khawr Rasagh, an inlet not far from the north end of suburban Sur. This, however, was such an insignificant channel that I had almost missed it on my walk that morning. ‘I suppose the configuration of the shore could have changed,’ I suggested.
‘It’s possible,’ said Adil. ‘But I think IB was talking about Khawr Sur, the Sur Creek itself. I reckon he didn’t land at Sur proper, but at al-Ayjah on the other side of the khawr. People used to swim across if the ferry wasn’t working, with their clothes on their heads. If IB had walked up to the ford he would have added quite a bit to his journey.’ The blisters were beginning to make more sense. I felt increasingly guilty about scoffing at IB.
We reached the outskirts of Sur in the furry light of late afternoon, and to the unexpected thwack of cricket balls. It was the start of the weekend, and Indian matches were taking place on wickets of dust. Adil dropped me off at Khawr Sur by the Fat’h al-Khayr, a fine ghanjah – a large sailing ship – dating back to the 1950s and now preserved on dry land. I looked up at the prow, carved with an elegant kiss-curl, and wished that such vessels were still sailing. Still, a humble diesel-engined sambuq would do to take me to Dhofar, down what the first-century Periplus called the Coast of the Fish-eaters. I would be reversing the direction of IB’s voyage; but bureaucracy had insisted I begin my visit to Oman in Muscat, and the word there was that Sur, not Dhofar, was the place for boats.
A moment of elementary reasoning would have revealed that if any coasting vessels actually did sail from Sur to Dhofar they would be obliged, barring shipwreck or global circumnavigation, to return by the same route. Somehow the syllogism escaped me.
*
Bureaucracy has its advantages. The Omani Ministry of Information put me up at the Muscat Gulf Hotel and Resort, a place designed for a thoroughly different class of traveller from me. Over the next few days, big silent American cars took me on a round of official visits.
Muscat has changed since IB passed through. Then, it was a fairly insignificant fishing port. Little was different even as late as the 1960s. Now, under the ‘Renaissance’ presided over by Sultan Qabus, Muscat has become not so much a city as a consuburbation linked by gleaming freeways, where the residential areas are traffic-calmed into a state of permanent weekend hush. The Omani capital was once notoriously filthy; today you can be fined for driving a dirty car.
A process of architectural homogenization is going on. Villas sprout vestigial crenellations, machicolated air-conditioner surrounds and castellated plastic water tanks. Bus shelters and telephone kiosks are also designed in the Omani-baronial taste. At the same time, old Omani forts have been restored so thorou
ghly that they resemble the villas. It is all rather like making sandcastles with those cheat buckets that mould a perfect one every time. And the deception goes further. I met a man in Fez who had worked as a fort restorer in Oman. ‘We workers were all Moroccans,’ he said. ‘But if any journalists showed up, they hid us away and brought out Omanis, who pretended to work for the cameras.’
When it comes to road beautification, however, the designers’ imagination breaks free. Vast incense-burners jostle for attention on roundabouts with outsize coffee pots and rosewater-sprinklers; fibreglass oryxes, Bambis and merry-go-round horses prance over verges; pirate chests brim with hoards of fake treasure, and giant oysters gape, disclosing nonsuch plastic pearls. I recently noticed a review of a book called The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience. The title took me straight back to Muscat.
Some highway art, however, transcends the kitsch. In the north of Oman, I saw a roundabout near Suhar with an apparently simple decorative concept – a circle of concrete palm trees. What made it remarkable was the context: all around were acres and acres of real palms. I could only assume that the concrete palms, like Meret Oppenheim’s furry teacup, were making some metaphysical statement about form and matter.
The theme park theme overspills the Capital Area. The city’s surroundings, described by an early traveller as ‘vast and horrid mountains’, are an ideal setting for leisure pursuits like rock-climbing, and wadi-bashing – which one does in a plush jeep, very carefully, so as not to jolt the ice-box unduly. One can even go on a guided tour to Umm al-Samim, Thesiger’s dreaded quicksands.
To stock up for a wadi-bash, a single visit to the supermarket is sufficient. Here, the only indication that you are in Far Arabia is the separate Pork Room. Living in porkless Yemen, the first time I saw one I found the display of naked flesh and huge mottled salamis as shocking, as fascinating as a sex-shop. I ogled; IB would have fainted on the spot.
My official visits over, I got in touch with a friend of a friend, a man of shaykhly lineage. He suggested meeting that evening at the Ghala Wentworth Golf Club. Although it was my first experience of a golf club, I imagined the ambience of the place – the honours boards and trophies, the personal tankards above the bar, the bonhomie – to be pure Surrey. The members, however, were more exotic. Portly scions of the ruling houses of Muscat and Zanzibar held court and stood rounds; a heroically pissed Irishman was, he said, ‘keeping an eye on things for, hic, shecurity reasons’.
Here in the Royal and Ancient – or rather Sultanic and Modern – of Muscat, we dined splendidly on mussels, beefsteaks and cherry pie. The claret was, according to one member of our party, an experienced courtier in a navy and cream co-respondent dishdashah, most acceptable. ‘You see,’ he said, swirling and sniffing a sample from yet another bottle, ‘I am what is called un bon viveur – or does one say vivant?’ The question provoked heated discussion. Then, as the bottles emptied, we began swapping poetry and jokes. The only one that has survived the night’s oblivion concerned a certain Gulf ruler. During a television interview, he was asked what his favourite leisure activity was. ‘Fucking,’ he replied. ‘Cut! Cut!’ cried the Minister of Information, one of the ruler’s sons. ‘Father, this is a family show. Can’t you say something nice? Reading, for instance.’ Take two: ‘And what is Your Highness’s favourite leisure activity?’ ‘Reading …’ the shaykh said, ‘about fucking.’
Some time after midnight, my companion and I followed the courtier back to his house. Gilded gates glided open automatically, and we parked inside next to a Bentley. We entered a gorgeous salon, all marble and glass, hung with nineteenth-century orientalist oils and echoing with Sinatra. A silent Indian cupbearer kept us supplied with burgundy. Thereafter I remember only fragments: a line of empty bottles; peeing wildly at a lavatory decorated with tiny hand-painted roses; the courtier’s voice saying, ‘Aaah! Savour those plums …’
I awoke late next morning fully clothed, down to my walking shoes, back in the house of the British friend who was putting me up. Beside me was the evidence, the Cinderella’s slipper that proved the night had not been a fantasy – a large box of Romeo y Julieta Churchills. My head was remarkably clear, and occupied with a single, nagging thought: not much inverse archaeology is getting done.
Not much could be, here in Oman proper. After his disastrous walk from Sur to Qalhat, IB had made only a brief excursion into the interior before crossing the Strait of Hormuz to Persia. The bulk of what he wrote on what is now the Sultanate of Oman concerns its southern province, Dhofar, and the adjacent coasts and islands. My Battutian checklist for the region was varied: it included betel, frankincense and dried sardines, houses made of fishes’ bones and, a very long shot, a saint’s cell in the Kuria Muria Islands – one of the most out-of-the-way spots in the history of eremism.
*
Sur, then, was the place for boats. The morning after my hike to Qalhat, I walked down to the creek. Clearly the place to start was over in the skippers’ suburb of al-Ayjah, which I now believed to be IB’s landing place.
‘Yesterday,’ the ferryman told me, ‘Khalfan’s sambuq left for Salalah.’
This was promising news. I was quite happy to wait for the next one.
‘It’s a pity you missed it. The last time anyone did the trip was, oh, years ago.’
This was appalling news. I dismissed it at once.
Al-Ayjah was a salty old place. Rocky outcrops rang with the blows of shipwrights’ hammers. Down on the shore the swelling bellies of sambuqs grew plank by plank from munaybari, Malabar teak. Old sailors sat in doorways carved in the manner of Calicut and Zanzibar, wearing dishdashahs with embroidered yokes – the Omani equivalent of the Aran sweater; like Superman they wore their underwear, a checked waistcloth, on the outside, to protect the skirt of the robe from fishy stains. Everyone confirmed that Khalfan had sailed for Salalah the day before; no one held out any hope of another Dhofar-bound boat. My plans drifted steadily up the creek.
‘The trouble is’, said the ferryman on the way back, ‘no one does the long distances any more. They just put out at night to fish and come back in the morning.’ I stared, disconsolate, into the reflective waters of the creek, thinking of the days when Sayyid Sa’id had ruled a seaborne empire of cloves and slaves; when, between them, the Omanis and the British had controlled the western Indian Ocean. ‘You could try the new harbour,’ the ferryman suggested, sensing my despair.
The new harbour was still being built. In the works office I called on the Project Manager, a bearded Keralan in his fifties. He gave me his card: MR K. JOHNSON ITTY IPE. (I never discovered whether the last two elements were part of his name, or his professional qualifications.) On the wall of the office hung charts detailing shapes and sizes of accropodes – which sounded like some species of Gulf crustacean, but are in fact large T-ended concrete lumps used for building moles – and a quotation from the Letter to the Hebrews, ‘Follow peace with all men’. Mr Johnson implemented the advice with a stream of workers, cantering nimbly between Malayalam, English and Hindi. When the stream slackened we went to the harbour.
The mole was growing slowly, like an immense three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. ‘It’s my fifth,’ Mr Johnson said as we walked along it. We talked of IB’s visit to Kerala – Mr Johnson remembered studying the account from the Travels at school, in Malayalam – of God and His role in Mr Johnson’s escape from al-Khafji when the Iraqis invaded, and of his career. ‘I wanted to be a film director,’ he told me, ‘but my father made me study engineering.’
I looked at the harbour, at the huge and expensive equipment, the disciplined workforce. ‘Don’t you think directing a harbour is rather like directing a film?’
Mr Johnson’s eyes shone. I couldn’t imagine him as a Bollywood type. He seemed more of an individualist, a Werner Herzog, perhaps, of the mole-building business.
We hailed a man on a tug and asked where it was going. ‘To al-Anji,’ the man called back. Further off lay another vessel,
a fine wooden bum. I looked at it across the bright water, shielding my eyes from the sun, and saw a gleaming brass-sheathed prow and brass portholes. Again, illogically, my hopes rose: if any vessel were going to Dhofar, this had to be it. Mr Johnson summoned a Maldivian boatman, and we puttered over the water to the bum. It was about to sail: for Dubai, on the return leg of a businessmen’s outing. My hopes sank like a heaved lead.
On the way back into town, I reflected that while the old patterns of travel seemed to have disappeared, some things hadn’t changed. A Maldivian boatman, an engineer from the coconut coast of India, teak from Malabar – the network of Indian Ocean ramifications IB had known was still in place. Here in Sur, Gujarat was closer than Salalah, and not only in terms of cartographic distance. Knots of Indian subcontinentals loitered in the late-afternoon sun; others crowded into moneychangers’ shops, busily remitting their earnings home. In the fourteenth century, Arabs like IB had headed for the Sultanate of Delhi, drawn by its immense wealth. In the twentieth, however, the demographic tide turned: the Gulf is now as much Indian as Arab.
A by-product of this vast movement of labour has been the appearance of a new language, Indo-Arabic. Vocabulary is slimmed down to an anorexic minimum, and the vigorous branches of the Arabic verb pruned to a binary fi (‘in’ = ‘there is’) / ma fi (‘not in’ = ‘there is not’) + infinitive. (A neat example is that of an Indian Muslim who passed a graveyard. His version of the traditional memento mori – ‘You [the dead] are those that precede; we are those that follow’ – came out as, ‘You there is go; I there is come.’) Omanis seem to be bilingual; I never quite got the hang of it.
That evening, my plans in tatters, I could face neither my diary nor any of the books I had brought. The only other reading matter in the hotel room was the telephone directory. It began with the Green Pages, which list members of the Sultan’s family and other dignitaries. I considered brightening the evening up by paging a princess, or even ringing the Sultan himself. Then a thought struck me: I had heard that Qabus employed a court organist, whom he summoned from time to time in the small hours to play a chorale prelude from Bach’s Orgelbüchlein. I was still on the right side of that career Rubicon, forty, and it wasn’t too late for a change … I had been an Oxford organ scholar (admittedly not at one of the more musically famous colleges) and, briefly, organist of a Levantine cathedral; perhaps I could insinuate myself into what sounded like a pleasant sinecure. The Sultan would surely thrill to my organ arrangement of Mozart’s ‘Adagio and Rondo for Glass Harmonica’. And who knew where it might lead? In the 1920s Bertram Thomas, another amateur musician and Arabian traveller from Bristol, had virtually run Oman as vizier to Qabus’s grandfather. The Sultan’s personal number, however, was listed neither in the Green Pages nor under his portrait at the beginning of the directory.
Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah Page 23