The following morning I sat in a café eating fried eggs and delaying the decision. In the event, it was made for me. I had been complaining to the only other customer about the lack of boats, when he told me he was about to leave for a village on the mainland to pick up some fish. ‘It’s a couple of hundred miles nearer Salalah. Why don’t you come along?’
I studied him for a moment. With his insouciantly tied headscarf, thick beard, gold teeth and nascent paunch, he had the look of a podgy pirate. He also looked highly amused by the mere idea of the trip. ‘Why not?’ I said.
He regarded me quizzically; then, as if he had just got a punchline, burst out laughing.
On the way to the quay, Khamis explained that he had a boat at the distant village, together with half a dozen fishermen and a pick-up with a giant ice-box on the back. When the ice-box was full, he would drive across the desert and sell the catch in the Emirates. For the moment, we would be hitching.
To cross to the mainland we boarded a launch which they called a stimah, pronounced ‘steamer’. Seconds after it had got going, Khamis began waving his arms and shouting, in English, ‘My snake! My snake!’ We returned to the quay. Khamis had forgotten his camel-stick. After the false start, we flew across the waves. The twenty-mile crossing, an hour and a half in the ferry, took twenty minutes. I now understood why I had seen launches with names like MIG Fighter.
Our first lift dropped us at a small settlement where Khamis had relations by marriage. We went to their compound and found a group of solemnly beautiful men sitting around a mat. Greetings were badw-style, a long fluid concatenation of prayers and inquiries after health, punctuated by a delicate meeting of the tips of noses – the southern Arabian kiss – and ending in, ‘Is there news?’ ‘No news.’ ‘Is there information?’ ‘No information.’, after which the news and information, such as they were, were exchanged. We took our seats around the mat and a boy poured coffee. Then a masked lady arrived and extended her hand to each of us. The hand was covered in the gauziest of veils. I grasped and shook it; then noticed that the others were merely brushing the tips of her fingers. With shocking clarity, a comment of Bertram Thomas’s came to me: ‘For a man to squeeze a girl’s hand, or clasp it as in a European handshake, is to make an improper overture, for which the girl’s relations may take blood.’
Later, waiting by the side of the road, I asked Khamis about the blunder. ‘You shook it?’ he exclaimed, horrified. He made a sickening throat-slitting gesture, then collapsed in laughter.
A short way into our next lift, in a lorry driven by a Goan, Khamis asked if I wanted a drink. I said I wasn’t thirsty, but he reached into his bag and pulled out something which confirmed, in his case at least, IB’s thoughts about the impious Masiris: a bottle of ‘Major Gunn’s’ Scotch whisky. The bottle was followed by a flat object of curious shape, like a symmetrical ink-blot. It was a small shark, split, boned and dried. We bounced along, swigging scotch and eating shark, Khamis tearing at it with his gleaming pirate’s teeth. The Goan turned down the offer of a drink; he kept glancing at us and drove as fast as possible, as if wanting to be rid of these obviously dangerous passengers.
I asked Khamis about IB’s Island of Birds, which lay off the coast somewhere along our route but which was invisible from the road. Khamis agreed with Gibb’s suggestion that it was an island called al-Humar. ‘It stands straight up in the sea, like a pillar,’ he told me, ‘and it’s covered in birds.’ I had found out from an article by Michael Gallagher, the doyen of Arabian ornithologists, that these are Socotra cormorants. Khamis shuddered when I asked if he had tried his ancestral delicacy, and took a hefty slug of Major Gunn’s to take away the imagined taste. When I told him that I looked forward to sampling cormorant in the Kuria Murias and, with luck, the masked booby – another island dainty – he looked away and muttered, ‘Crazy man’.
Around sunset we had a lift with a large Sikh in the construction business, Mr B.S. Mann. Much of the whisky had been drunk, and I gave in to an inexcusable fit of the giggles.
Khamis elbowed me. ‘Crazy man! What are you laughing about?’
I got a grip on myself. ‘It’s … it’s the pickwickles.’
‘What are “pickwickles”?’
‘I don’t know. Mr Mann, what are these pickwickles you’ve been talking about?’
‘You are English,’ said Mr Mann, surprised, ‘and are not knowing pickwickles? They are JCBs, artics, etcetera etcetera.’
‘“Big vehicles”,’ explained Khamis, who was fluent in English, Hindi, Urdu and their various mutations.
It was late when we arrived at the one-roomed blockhouse where Khamis’s fishermen lived, and we tiptoed unsteadily across the yard. The door was open. A couple of the men were asleep in the dark corners of the room. In the middle, the others were playing cards by the light of a lamp: they were bare-chested, onyx-eyed, aware of nothing but the game. Khamis was about to speak, but I raised my hand to stop him. I wanted to watch the card-players, far away on their tiny continent of light.
In the morning we launched the boat, four of the fishermen and I, and motored south for an hour or so. We rounded a headland where currents clashed and threw up sharp, short-tempered waves, then anchored in the calm of a wide bay. Talk ceased. The only sounds were the hiss and plop of lines, and of the sea as it nudged the hull, gently but insistently, like a hungry cat rubbing against its owner’s legs. The men worked with a rhythmic grace: a flash of hennaed palm, a gleaming parabola across the water, a quick twitch as the fish bit.
We lunched on tinned pineapple and cigars, then the fishing resumed. My diary records the catch:
Sardines, for bait; shurī, which I ate on Masirah (where they call it ) with sky-blue squiggles; a big one called kanāfah, subaytī or maryūm (maybe marjūm – hard to tell); speckled naqrūr; ruddy , grouper I think – Jum’ah catches one a yard long that looks surprised as it comes over the edge – big lips, old and grey, something like Kingsley Amis; long silvery sayf randūh; black-hatched bint al-nawkhadhah (lovely name! [‘the captain’s daughter’]) with orange stripes; qishbīb, with gold anodized backs; takwah; afrāh; also plenty of inedible (they say) , those sickly looking moray eels, which they treat with great caution. Marzuq hooks something huge. They don’t know what it is until it appears above the waves: a turtle, which they call missah. It breaks the line and disappears. Much distress that they haven’t been able to pull it in, extract the hook and release it. At one point a large shark’s fin circles us.
If we caught a shīr māhī, the fish on which IB lived during his voyage through these waters, we caught it under a different name. Now, as I lay between the fishermen, within four parts of silent harmony, four lines so sinuously plied, it hardly seemed to matter. The fourteenth century was far away, and so was the twentieth, as we bobbed in the eternal present on Sawqirah Bay.
*
My sea fever had been cooled by the day’s fishing, and I knew I had to get on. Khamis and the fishermen told me that the Kuria Murias were best approached from the Dhofar end, and that the prospects of transport along the coast were slender. The following morning I headed reluctantly inland.
The day began with the greatest imaginable rarity of Arabian travel, an unalloyed mirabile, a hen’s tooth, a mare’s nest: a lift with a woman. She wore a gold mask and treated the straight road and horizontal plain like a downhill slalom. She dropped me somewhere in Jiddat al-Harasis, an East Anglia of gravel where gazelles leap under an immense sky. Another lift, then several hours in a place called al-Aja’iz, the Old Women. On the main Muscat-Salalah road, I was comfortably benighted in the Quitbit Resthouse.
Next morning a lorry of excruciating slowness took me across a minimal, almost a nihilistic landscape – a mere joint between earth and sky, both the colour of plaster. The rare verticals, a milepost or the odd lone bush, assumed enormous significance. At Thumrayt I boarded a minibus.
The change was sudden and disorientating: one minute a Venusian desert, the next, green and ro
lling moors, cowpats and fat cattle. Then, just as my vision had adjusted, we began to drop down to a shining plain, down to the ocean and Salalah, whose name means the Glittering One.
Dhofar
The Importance of Being Rasulid
‘“Are you quite sure you are pure-bred?”’
Bertram Thomas, anthropologizing in Arabia Felix
THAT NIGHT, SALALAH glittered. Two society weddings were in full swing, and troupes of plump women and thin girls tottered from one party to the other wearing gilded platform sandals, long-tailed dresses with the trains gathered over one arm, and what looked like the entire stock of the Salalah gold suq. The women rattled audibly above the thump of amplified nuptial music; Indian maids shadowed them, like bum-boats in a convoy of treasure galleons. But there was something even more arresting than this mass movement of bullion: the women’s faces. Each was thickly plastered in white, the eyes bordered by black lines that swept upwards, geisha-style; three green dots descended the chin, with more green along the jawline; other lines swept back on either side of the nose, which was finished off with large spots of boot-polish black on each nostril lobe. At first sight, it looked as if a game with a make-up box had gone horribly wrong. But seen en masse, together with all that gold, the maquillage suggested the splendid as much as the sinister – the Thesmophoriazousae, perhaps, on a shopping spree in Ophir.
I watched the spectacle from a café, wide-eyed. My neighbour, however, was from distant Muscat and was not impressed. ‘They are slaves,’ he said, looking at the ghostly faces. ‘Why can’t they resign themselves to their allotted fate of blackness?’
Next morning, Habibah admitted that she often felt a bit underdressed when out and about in Dhofari society. ‘They don’t put on all that stuff every day, though,’ she explained. ‘Only for a ladies’ dance called al-tabl.’ (Joyce Grenfell came to mind:
So gay the band,
So giddy the sight,
Full evening dress is a must,
But the zest goes out of a beautiful waltz
When you dance it bust to bust.)
Habibah was the perfect hostess. She was a keen collector of Dhofari lore and gossip, and a talented cook. In Salalah I grew fat on chickens in mulukhiyyah, mutton with garlic and okra, and the fish called Sultan Ibrahim, fried and dipped in sesame paste. The mulukhiyyah always took me back to Cairo and our first meeting, in the City of the Dead, in a house full of sisters and bewitching smells near the mausoleum of Qayt Bey. Muhammad, a friend originally from Birmingham, had fallen in love with – inter alia – Habibah’s nose. He took me to plead his case with her father. My speech was finely honed, thickly honeyed; he consented, they married. They worked in Cairo, England and Hungary, and were now living in a villa in the coconutty suburbs of Salalah. From here, Muhammad inspected schools while Habibah explored areas of local culture which few outsiders have penetrated. Who else could have told me that Dhofari men like hair on a woman’s legs?
‘Don’t expect us to drink your bathwater,’ she had warned me when I arrived.
‘I’m sorry?’
She picked up a book – a Lebanese edition of the Travels – and opened it at a marked page: ‘“When we washed our hands after the meal,”’ she read, ‘“one of the sons of Shaykh Abu Bakr took the water in which we had washed, drank some of it, and sent the servant with the rest of it to his wives and children, and they too drank it. This is what they do with all visitors to them in whom they perceive indications of goodness.”’ She shut the book. ‘You see, I’ve been doing my homework.’
I was impressed. Habibah went on: ‘The tomb and hospice of Shaykh Abu Bakr, where they entertained IB, are a bit of a problem. They’re somewhere inside the Ribat Palace complex, so they may be difficult to get to. The same goes for the tombs of the Rasulid sultans. But you’ll be pleased to know that we’re almost next door to al-Balid.’
Again, she had thrown me: al-balid means ‘the silly man’. ‘Who’s he?’
Habibah gave me a hermetic look, suggestive of ancient wisdom. ‘Al-Balid is a local pronunciation of al-Balad, “Town”. In other words IB’s City of Zafar, where he stayed with the preacher Isa ibn Ali. I think’, she said, smiling, ‘I have passed the test to be your research assistant.’
My list of Battutiana for Zafar, or Dhofar, was long, and I could do with help in tracking them down. The list was also varied. Fourteenth-century Dhofar was a cosmopolitan place which belonged not so much to the Arabian Peninsula as to the monsoon. Now far from the familiar central Islamic lands, IB was confronted by the new and the strange: coconuts, dried sardines as animal fodder, slave women running the suq, and elephantiasis and scrotal hernias ‘from which God preserve us!’ All of these I intended to investigate, together with various sites mentioned by IB. It was unfortunate that the hospice and tomb of IB’s holy host were out of bounds inside the Sultan’s palace; but, as it happened, I had already found the saint’s tomb, or part of it, without even trying.
In England several months before, I had happened to ring up an old friend, an historian of Islamic art. We chatted about my travel plans. ‘I suppose you’ll go looking for that Dhofari holy man IB mentioned,’ Venetia said.
‘I didn’t know you were a fan of IB.’
‘Oh, I dip into him now and again. And I co-authored an article on his shaykh’s tombstone. It’s in London. In the V&A.’
And so, by a fluke, was I, ringing from a public phone in the basement.
The tombstone is covered in dense and accomplished script and decorated with deeply carved mosque lamps. As Venetia points out in her article, it is Gujarati work, probably from Cambay. Also in the Victoria and Albert Museum are two similar stones from the tomb of al-Wathiq, the Rasulid governor of Dhofar and a very great-uncle of my Yemeni friend Hasan. All these monuments had been seen by IB, who noted that the tombs were places of refuge for criminals and discontented soldiers. He would of course have been utterly appalled by their removal – and no less amazed that they should have ended up in a wonder-house in the distant, barbaric island of Anqiltarah.
The arrival of IB’s ship at the city of Dhofar took place in state:
The sultan’s slaves come out to meet ships in a sambuq, carrying with them a complete set of robes for the owner of the vessel or his agent, and also for the captain and the kirani [Anglo-Indian ‘cranny’], who is the ship’s clerk. Three horses are brought for them, on which they mount and proceed with drums and trumpets playing before them from the seashore to the sultan’s residence, where they make their salutations to the vizier and the amir jandar [the commander of the army]. For three nights, hospitality is supplied to all who are in the vessel. These people do this in order to gain the goodwill of the ship owners, and they are men of humility, good dispositions, virtue, and affection for strangers.
The sultan of the time, al-Mughith, was a grandson of al-Wathiq of the V&A tombstone. IB was staying next to the palace but did not meet him personally. Al-Mughith, he says, was only seen at Friday prayers; when he emerged from the palace at other times, he always travelled in a camel litter ‘covered with a white curtain embroidered in gold; the sultan and his familiar ride in it in such a way as not to be seen’ – the medieval equivalent of a limousine with tinted windows. Moreover, anyone caught gawping was severely beaten: ‘Consequently the inhabitants, when they hear that the sultan is at large, run away from his route.’
Dhofar had been incorporated into the Rasulid state of Yemen by al-Muzaffar, the great-grandfather of IB’s reclusive sultan. I have quoted this energetic sovereign on the aphrodisiac properties of the skink; he was also a prolific author on other subjects as diverse as Islamic jurisprudence and the science of stain removal. Despite his busy writing schedule, he still found time to conquer Mecca and extend his rule in other directions. When, in 1278, the Hadrami ruler of Dhofar impounded a ship from Aden, al-Muzaffar had a perfect pretext for an expedition. The Rasulid force took so long on the road that al-Muzaffar grew thin from worry and the rings dropped of
f his fingers; but in the event Dhofar fell after a brief resistance. ‘Our troops’, he said, ‘took five months to reach their goal, and five days to take it.’
The city prospered under the Rasulids, and IB saw it at the height of its wealth. The dynasty, however, fizzled out early in the fifteenth century. As Muhammad and I left the villa to explore the medieval town, I wondered what had happened to the descendants of al-Muzaffar, al-Wathiq and al-Mughith. Judging by my experiences so far, I half expected to bump into a late-twentieth-century Rasulid; then reminded myself that it was all a long time ago.
We came to a break in the coconut groves and a large fenced-off area. Inside was a high mound, the site of the palace which IB called ‘the Castle’ and an earlier traveller, Ibn al-Mujawir, ‘al-Qahirah’ – Cairo, the Victorious. We climbed the tell, passing incongruously new-looking walls, and stood in the breeze on the summit. Before us lay a tufty ruin-field that ran down to the shore and the creek, now silted up, where IB had arrived from Africa. Behind, beyond a shining empty interspace lapped by coconut palms, rose the Qara Mountains. This inland vista resembled some imagined geography – the great Gromboolian plain, perhaps, and the Hills of the Chankly Bore.
Towards the shore we found the remains of the dog-legged Sea Gate through which the ships’ masters and merchants, crannies, supercargoes and IB had come to Cairo-on-Sea, brought by the monsoon, greeted by fanfares and splendid in robes; now it is lost in a waste of tussocks, smashed bottles, rotting limestone and windblown sand. The mosque, however, presented a different picture: much of the masonry of its walls had been plundered, but the interior had sprouted a small forest of brand-new polygonal columns. Here we were joined by a European archaeologist, who enthused about the process of consolidation which was, he said, only just beginning. He had a gleam in his eye, and clearly belonged to the Knossos school of archaeology.
‘I thought archaeologists were meant to dig down, not build up,’ said Muhammad after the man had gone.
Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah Page 25