‘Some women are not as you imagine,’ she said in a low voice.
She left the train at the next station; but before she did so she reached into her pocket and, without comment, handed me a newspaper cutting. It bore a photograph showing her in what appeared to be pyjamas, and the headline: ‘Only Woman in Southern Morocco with Karate Black Belt’.
Back in Tangier, the Hôtel Ibn Batouta was full, but the receptionist told me that the place across the road had vacancies. In the lobby of the other hotel I rang a bell and waited, wondering how to take a prominently displayed notice: ‘Absolutely No Guests to be Entertained in Bedrooms’. Was it simply a euphemism? Or did it mean that only conversations of a tedious nature were permitted? In a stay of one night, I would probably not be given the chance to find out.
The boy who answered the bell looked like a youthful Boris Karloff. As we climbed the stairs I told him I was writing a book about IB.
‘Many famous writers have stayed here,’ he said.
‘Really? Who?’ Remembering the photograph of IB across the road, I half expected them to include Ibn Khaldun and Sir John Mandeville.
‘William Burroughs, Allan Ginsberg … Jack Kerouac.’ He opened a firestation red door to a room that looked as if it might hardly have changed since the days of the Beats. The floor was laid with tiles in pomegranate pink, the heavy, dark oak bedsteads had brown velvet counterpanes, and green gingham covered a rickety table. A bidet squatted behind a curtain that flapped in the breeze from an open window. The room was loomed over by a very large wardrobe, painted glossy black. Surrounded by these potential metamorphs, I wrote up my notes warily. I did not open the wardrobe. It was certainly a setting to inspire, with a little metaphysic and a lot of drugs, Naked Lunch. (Further research revealed that the Mouniria was indeed the place where Burroughs, with the aid of his Eukodolmuse, wrote the novel. His room, however, was on the ground floor. Was my upstairs room the one where the Beats gathered to eat magic mushrooms, supplied by the late Dr Timothy Leary?)
Later, as I lay in bed – with half an eye on that wardrobe – I reviewed my brief visit to IB’s homeland. In one sense, I had failed signally: I had come to visit his tomb, to ask for his blessing on my journey, and had found it to be a fake – a phantasm, Dr Abdelhadi called it. But on the credit side, I had found IB’s spirit very much alive: in Khalid, for instance, the would-be traveller who could quote pre-Islamic poetry; and in Dr Abdelhadi, the far-travelled Maghribi come home to royal patronage. Moreover, IB seemed to have cult status. Apart from the airport, the street and the hotel, one of the ferries to Spain was named after him; there were seminars and conferences on him; there had been a TV series on him, an exhibition of ‘portraits’, and a Year of IB; they were planning an IB Museum in Tangier, and no doubt, one day, there will be a theme park. Further away, a German group had recorded a CD in his name; a Dutch friend has told me of an IB Scout Troop in Rotterdam; and there is even an Arabic on-line dating agency called ‘IB’.
But cults need relics. Although al-Rumi tells us to look for the dead in men’s hearts, his own tomb in Konya is one of the most revered and visited in Turkey. I had heard that they even display the great mystic’s long-johns. I could only hope that somewhere along my route between here and Constantinople – a route eccentric enough to take in the Kuria Muria Islands in the Arabian Sea – I would find something as tangibly, if not so intimately, connected with IB.
I had a long way to go. A vision came to me, that of the Residence servants in Rabat lined up by the door, waving farewell; it gave way to another – an endless sequence of economical hotels. I slept uneasily, my dreams haunted by the flushing of a nearby lavatory.
As the Tangerine dawn turned to day, I set off for the airport. I was glad not to be following IB overland from Morocco – to cross rural Algeria in his time was dangerous enough, but today it would have been potentially suicidal. The taxi driver painted a gory picture of events across the border. ‘In many ways,’ he said, not meaning to be discouraging, ‘travel is more difficult now than it was in IB’s day.’
As I paid him, he wished me a safe journey; then added, ‘You must always remember that IB wanted people to know one another. He was …’, he thought for a moment, then slipped into Franglais, ‘… il était un gentleman. May God go with you.’
He smiled broadly and patted me on the back. And there, I thought, not from a tomb but from the driver of Grand Taxi n° 158, was the blessing I had come for.
IB travelled across North Africa to Egypt. In Alexandria, he had his first intimations that he was ‘to travel through the earth’. After passing through the Nile Delta he arrived in Cairo, capital of the Mamluks – a military élite of Turkic origin who ruled Egypt and the Levant. From Cairo he followed the Nile into Upper Egypt then crossed the desert to the Red Sea town of Aydhab, intending to sail to Jeddah, the port for Mecca. Political disturbances, however, had halted shipping. IB retraced his route to Cairo.
The Delta
A Dark and Greenish Country
‘Real dream vision is an awareness on the part of the rational soul in its spiritual essence, of glimpses of the forms of events. While the soul is spiritual, the forms of events have actual existence in it, as is the case with all spiritual essences. The soul becomes spiritual through freeing itself from bodily matters and corporeal perceptions. This happens to the soul in the form of glimpses through the agency of sleep, whereby it gains the knowledge of future events that it desires and regains the perceptions that belong to it. When this process is weak and indistinct, the soul applies to it allegory and imaginary pictures, in order to gain the desired knowledge. Such allegory, then, necessitates interpretation.’
Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), The Muqaddimah, trans. Franz Rosenthal
SIX HUNDRED and seventy-one years, five months and three days after IB, I walked along Lote-tree Gate Street, by which travellers from the Maghrib entered Alexandria. ‘She is a unique pearl of glowing opalescence, a secluded maiden arrayed in her bridal adornments, glorious in her surpassing beauty.’ IB, or more likely his editor, was nothing if not flattering. Alexandria was even then of a certain age. Now she is a very old lady indeed, an empress exiled to a tenement who hardly dares to recall the days when Mark Antony came to dinner.
Lote-tree Gate Street is a sort of deconstructed Marks and Spencers, and I had to force my way between shoppers and racks of nighties (or were they housecoats? Many Egyptians exist in a quotidian sartorial penumbra, in which the division between day and night attire is blurred and grown men are to be seen in pyjamas at teatime). There were tumuli of knickers, and pyramids of bras that, given a concept, might have passed in Cork Street for feminist sculpture. More pyramids, built of watermelons with the one at the apex cut open, tottered along on horse-drawn carts whose drivers cleared a passage with loud cries. Barrows carried mounds of knobbly guavas and rupturing figs, protected from the flies by smoke from pans of incense. I bought some figs, and as I bit into one I remembered a couplet:
He said: ‘Your lips are split.’
I said: ‘Like only the sweetest of figs …’
IB made the long journey from Tangier to Alexandria by land, via Tlemsen and Algiers, Bougie, Constantine and Bône, Tunis and Tripoli, before crossing in the Libyan Desert that invisible line of longitude that divides Maghrib from Mashriq, West from East. In Bougie he caught a fever; by Tunis he had suffered a relapse and arrived at the city tied to his saddle with his turban cloth. Alone, and surrounded by groups of embracing friends, he burst into tears. But he left Tunis as qadi, judge, of the pilgrim caravan, and in Tripoli married the daughter of one of its members. In the desert before Egypt, in between avoiding nomadic bandits, he fell out with his father-in-law and divorced the girl. By the time he reached Alexandria, he had remarried.
My own journey into Egypt was less eventful. Mindful of al-Abdari’s warning that ‘the traveller, from the time he leaves the territory of Morocco until his arrival in Alexandria, never ceases to face death at the hands
of malefactors’ and of the fact that the difficulties of overlanding through Algeria and Libya were now, if anything, greater, I had flown into Cairo and caught the train. I had missed out the blunt end of a continent. But IB’s account of the journey is sparse. The wastes of Barbary were not a place in which to linger.
The other passengers on the Alexandria train were mostly well-to-do families on their way to the seaside. Slowly, we slipped between the grubby suburban fingers of Cairo into the Delta. It was astonishingly green – of a dark, furry greenness shot with irrigation channels that glistened like slug trails – and I could understand the apparent colour blindness that often, in Arabic, confuses green with black. A medieval poet described the landscape we were travelling through as
A meadow of night-dark green like the down on a cheek,
A stream of chisels worked by the north wind’s hand.
People still waved at trains. Men in earth-coloured jallabiyyahs and carrying mattocks would pause to raise a shovel-sized hand as we went past. Beamy women with trays of washing on their heads strode through the fields along slender paths. At intervals, we passed towns that had erupted into the fields in a rash of scabby cement buildings. Many of the flat roofs had sprouted sugarloaf pigeon towers of mud; the effect was a combination of the Gorbals and Timbuktu. In an utterly horizontal landscape, the tall chimneys of brickworks seemed unduly grand. Their angular inscriptions, picked out in bricks of a contrasting colour, made them into distant cousins of the Timurid tomb-towers of Samarkand.
In the station at Banha, a group of large and very beautiful women sat on the platform like earth mothers. As I looked at them, a small man with a Mr Punch face in a grey safari suit walked up to them and performed an energetic hornpipe. They quivered with laughter. In Damanhur station, the people on the platform had graded themselves according to size and shape, like pebbles on a beach: one bench was for large women, another for slimmer ones, and others were occupied by fat fellahs, thin fellahs and bent old men. Damanhur didn’t look to be ‘possessed of remarkable attractions’, as it was for IB; but few places do from a railway line.
As we approached the coast, the Delta became less bosky. The sky opened out, and increasing humidity gave it a dull pearlescence, like the inside of a mussel shell. A hush of anticipation went around the children. I could remember that feeling, from a long time ago, approaching another sea.
Egypt looks big on the map; but, with nearly all its habitable area lying along the Nile, it is in reality a thin country, thinner than Chile. As if to make up, there are many Egypts, and nowhere more so than in Alexandria. One can read Forster, Cavafy and Durrell on the city, but it is most neatly summarized in the names of its tram-stops: Sidi Bishr, Sporting, Bulkley (officially Isis), Stanley, San Stefanu, Miami, Mustafa Pasha, Glymenopoulos.
I had little idea of what remained of the physical Alexandria IB saw. Of the two structures he described one, the Pharos, was reduced to a magnificent pile of rubble after his visit. The other still stood – the great column raised in honour of Diocletian in AD 300 and known to the Crusaders as Pompey’s Pillar. In a city famous for eclecticism since the first Ptolemy set up a committee to design its religion, this at least was a stable point of reference from which to begin some inverse archaeology.
The Pillar stands as it did in the time of IB in a grove of date palms and other trees. Signs said ‘To the Pillar’ and ‘Pillar this way’ – well-intentioned but pointless: it was as if someone had put up noticeboards around Trafalgar Square to direct visitors to Nelson’s Column. The Pillar rises on a dusty hillock riddled with cisterns, vaults and passages. Reaching the top of this eminence, I came face to face with an exceedingly ugly block of flats. The days were gone when Alexandria’s buildings, as IB said, united imposing size with architectural perfection.
It was hot. The noise of Lote-tree Gate Street came on a fitful breeze like the murmur of a distant football crowd. I examined the centuries of graffiti carved into the base of the Pillar, hoping against hope to find ‘IB, AH 726’; but the base was of soft stone, now eroded, and all I could make out was ‘CICERO’ followed by ‘1822’. I was joined by a group of Indonesian tourists in the charge of a pretty Egyptian guide. She told them that the Pillar was 26.85 metres tall from the bottom of its base to the top of its capital, and that ‘it has been attributed since the Crusades’ time to Bombay, the well-known Romanian general’. Thus, I suppose, are legends born.
Like many essentially useless objects, the Pillar has generated a number of stories to explain its existence. One account of the time of IB suggests that it was part of the stoa of Aristotle; the same source gives an alternative explanation, that it was one of seven columns brought by the giant proto-Arab tribe of Thamud from near Aswan, each column carried by a Thamudi under his armpit – like the old advert which shows a workman, made superhuman by Guinness Extra Stout, carrying a colossal girder. In the Travels, Ibn Juzayy in one of his editorial asides tells another story associated with the Pillar. One of his teachers, ‘a much-travelled man’, saw a member of the Alexandrian corps of archers sitting on top of it, apparently as some sort of protest. He had made the ascent by shooting a thread attached to a rope over the capital, pulling the rope over and securing it in the ground on the other side, and climbing up it. He then threw the rope off, ‘so that people had nothing to guide them to his trick and were astonished by his feat’. Ibn Juzayy does not answer the most interesting question: How did the man get down?
An elegant lady in a small neo-classical building among the palms, who had charge of the Pillar, had not heard of the rope trick. She seemed shocked when I suggested going to the Alexandria Sporting Club to find an archer who could re-enact the stunt. But she did tell me that, in the more recent past, twenty-two people had had a picnic lunch on top of the Pillar.
For the medieval geographers, Alexandria swarmed with legends. One told how, when Alexander was building the city, each day’s work would be mysteriously destroyed during the night. A watch was posted, and it was discovered that the culprits were sea monsters. Alexander had a brainwave. He ordered his carpenters to construct a mini-submarine of wood, sealed with tar and provided with glass portholes. Accompanied by the two best court artists, Alexander was lowered into the sea in this contraption, straight into a group of ‘satans in human form, with the heads of beasts, carrying hatchets, saws and billhooks’. The artists quickly sketched the monsters and, safely back on land, turned their drawings into statues which they set up along the sea front. When the monsters emerged for their nightly spree of vandalism, they saw their own images, took fright and were never seen again.
Ibn Khaldun, rarely a willing suspender of disbelief, branded the story absurd. ‘Were one to go down deep into the water, even in a box, one would have too little air for natural breathing. Because of that, one’s spirit would quickly become hot. Such a man would lack the cold air necessary to maintain a well-balanced humour of the lung and the vital spirit. He would perish on the spot.’ The force of logic may be on Ibn Khaldun’s side; but the submarine story, apart from being entertaining, is a nice allegory for the process by which Hellenic art and science tamed the dark, irrational animal-headed gods of the Pharaohs.
The sea around the site of the Pharos was grey-green and truculent, and I could see how the imagination might people it with monsters. (In fact, a giant statue of Isis Pharia was dredged up at this spot forty years ago.) Here, legends cluster as thickly as the barnacles on the rocks. The historical Pharos was built by Ptolemy II Philadelphos in the early third century BC. One of the classical Wonders of the World, it was 450 feet high and topped by a brazier and a mirror which reflected light far out to sea. Medieval science fiction turned the mirror into a powerful reflecting telescope, through which the departure of ships from any port in the eastern Mediterranean – or, in another version, the world – could be observed. Some accounts add that the mirror was treated with special oils; others converted it into a giant burning-glass which could zap vessels far out at sea.
The mirror was smashed by a Byzantine spy; or in the version of Leo the African, who places it on Pompey’s Pillar, rendered useless by a Jewish agent who rubbed garlic into it.
More critical writers transmitted such legends with a good basting of scepticism; but the habit of retelling them created a phantom edifice of myth that outlived the physical Pharos. Travellers who saw the building in its senescence felt they had been sold a dud. The pilgrim-guide writer al-Harawi, 150 years before IB, wrote that ‘nowadays it is no longer a Wonder of the World – it is no more than a watchtower by the sea’. IB, a congenital optimist, called it ‘a square building soaring into the air’, but admitted that a whole face of it was ruined. Passing through Alexandria again, twenty-three years later, he found that ‘it had fallen into so ruinous a condition that it was impossible to enter it’.
Over a century later, the Mamluk Sultan Qayt Bey built a fine fortress from the remains of the Pharos. It still stands there, out on its tongue of land, riding the waves like a Dreadnought. I was sitting beneath its walls, just above the limpet line, mesmerized by the suck and gloop of the water, when a man with pigmentless hands came and sat beside me. I agreed with him that, praise God, it was a fine spot.
‘You are a Muslim?’
I said I wasn’t, and he gave me a brief lecture on Heaven and Hell. ‘… And when your flesh has been consumed by the fire, it is immediately renewed and the process begins again. Don’t you want to escape this punishment?’
I thought for a little. ‘I think our Hell is slightly less nasty than yours.’
Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah Page 6
