I arrived at Damietta in the dark. Crossing the smelly Bucolic, or Phatnitic, branch of the Nile by a narrow road bridge, I was nearly decapitated by a rank of cabrioles, which stuck out of a donkey cart like dancers’ legs at the Moulin Rouge. For, as I quickly realized, I was in the home of that type of furniture known as Louis Farouq. An evening stroll around the city was an illustrated history of cabinet-making, taking in the later Louis, Chinese Chippendale, Regency, Empire, Biedermeier and even some Art Deco. Showrooms glittered with gilded fauteuils, canapés, commodes, bonheurs-du-jour, davenports and whatnots. There were bedsteads that were not just king- but orgy-sized, their headboards designed to incorporate quadrophonic music systems.
The ground floor of the hotel I checked into was occupied by a vast mubiliyat showroom that shone with faux boulle and ormolu. This splendour did not, however, extend upstairs. One lavatory was spectacularly blocked; the only other one was working but not inviting. As with nearly all Egyptian lavatories, the bowl was equipped with a little pipe – not unlike the mouthpiece of a bassoon – which squirted water upwards for personal ablutions. The pipe was ringed with a collar of someone else’s turd.
I hesitate to mention the subject, fearing to fall into a national stereotype of anal fixation and closet copromania; but I suspect that for more travellers than would admit it, the most poignant memories of travel originate, as St Augustine said of ourselves, inter urinam et faeces. As a child, my first sight of a squat lavatory in France spoke more eloquently of foreignness than a different cuisine or language; later, my Yemeni acculturation was completed when I abandoned bumf. I cherish many happy memories of defecation in far places – in a doorless lean-to overlooking the island-studded Sound of Harris, in the bartizan of a Yemeni castle with the wind rushing up a sheer cliff face beneath me, lashed by spray in the stern heads of a sambuq off the Kuria Muria Islands, in a wardrobe in an Ottoman mansion in Safran Bolu (the wardrobe cleverly concealed a miniature bathroom); and some less happy memories – the time my sweat-lubricated spectacles slid off my nose and into a noisome maw by the Red Sea, and the horror, the horror of a public crap-house in the outskirts of Simferopol. I have long thought that what might be termed la nostalgie des chiottes would be a fertile and only partly frivolous subject of study; after all Tartaret, a fifteenth-century scholar of the Sorbonne, is reputed to have written a treatise De Modo Cacandi. Later on in my travels I was delighted to meet a girl in Laodiceia ad Lycum who was carrying out research on this very topic, with special reference to Turkey and Eastern Europe. Mhairi, I wish you success with your scatological monograph.
To be fair to the hotel in Damietta, it wasn’t a bad place. But as I tossed, sweaty and sleepless, at 4.45 a.m. – some of the other guests were holding an animated conversation on the landing outside, a constant stream of motorized and horse-drawn traffic rumbled and clattered by in the street below, a nearby cock crew incessantly the sinister theme from The Saint – I wondered, Why am I doing this? IB’s motive, as revealed by Burhan al-Din the Lame and al-Murshidi, was compelling: he travelled because he was destined to travel. But then, would he have pursued his destiny if it hadn’t been revealed to him? My brain, flapping about for sleep like a netted fish for water, imagined a fantastical exchange on a TV travel show:
Interviewer: So, Mr and Mrs Bandersnatch, what made you choose the Algarve? Was it the direct flight? Or the childcare facilities? Or was it all this wonderful, guaranteed sunshine?
Mr B.: Well, we certainly liked the look of the place in the brochure – didn’t we, dear – but, to be honest, what really decided us was irresistible, inexorable Fate.
Of course, it’s not meant to work like that. Travel these days is one of the ultimate expressions of determinism. People travel because they choose to do so. Or so they are led to believe; for perhaps most of those looking for sun, booze and relaxation are, in a broad sense, fated to end up in the Algarve or certain other places in a closed set of destinations. Free will, as C.S. Lewis said, ‘is the modus operandi of destiny’. Fate, too, chooses one’s fellow hotel guests. I cursed mine inaudibly.
The curse worked, and the pre-dawn debate broke up. Then there was a lull in the street noise; then a horrible gurgle from the cock. Perhaps someone had wrung its neck. Merciful sleep came.
For IB, Damietta was one of the culinary high-points of his travels. He quoted a saying about the city – ‘Its wall is a sweetmeat and its dogs sheep’ – and noted that flocks of fat sheep and goats wandered freely about its streets. He also mentioned the excellence of its bananas, which Mandeville picturesquely described as ‘long apples … though ye cut them in never so many gobbets or parts, overthwart or endlongs, evermore ye shall find in the midst the Holy Cross of our Lord Jesu’.
The cultivation of bananas has declined because of cheap imports and, with all the furniture-laden lorries and carts, only the most foolhardy sheep would wander the streets of Damietta today. But the city is still famous for its sweetmeats, and as I walked about its centre the following morning I noticed many shops filled with piles of pastries and other confectionery. IB also praised the quail of Damietta, which he found exceedingly fat, as well as its buri or grey mullet and ‘various preparations of buffalo milk, which are unequalled for sweetness and delicious taste’. With all this in mind, I decided to spend the day eating.
At the Information Office I enquired about the best place for quail. A tall and skeletal man asked if I had a security permit. ‘I don’t think he needs one to eat quail,’ said one of his colleagues, rolling her eyes. She told me to follow her, and took me out of the building and up a side street to a restaurant called Bazzoom, which depending on the vagaries of Arabic etymology might mean Mighty Biter.
‘Quail are off,’ said the cook, wiping his hands on a bloody apron. ‘You can only get the farmed sort at the moment, and we don’t touch them. They’re not a patch on the wild ones, and the season for netting doesn’t start for another couple of weeks.’
Undeterred, I went to the suq. The netting of quail has a long history in the Middle East. The Hebrews of the Exodus, fed up with manna, gorged themselves on quail with disastrous consequences; further south in the Farasan Islands off the Arabian coast the inhabitants were said to have lived from early times almost entirely on the birds. Contemporaries of IB wrote that so many of them flew into Egypt on their migration that the people of the coast near Damietta could net them from their front doors. Now, I was looking for some early birds, and fortune led me to the only ones in the market, a lone brace in a wicker cage. Their owner swore solemnly that they were the netted sort, cut their throats in the direction of Mecca and dropped them into a plastic bag. As I walked back to Bazzoom, they flapped their last.
The cook gave them full marks for freshness. ‘They’re a bit on the small side, though. But they’re the first ones I’ve seen this year.’
Later, I returned to Bazzoom to find my two little birds roasted with their heads on and stuffed à la mode de Damiette with onion, garlic, hazelnuts, sultanas and cumin (there is a similar recipe for chicken, which dates from the time of Saladin); they were served on a mound of rice surrounded by stuffed cabbage leaves, stuffed baby marrows, tahinah and pickles. The customers of Bazzoom were serious, elbows-up eaters: a man sitting opposite me was tucking into braised lamb with vegetables and rice garnished with plump kidneys. There were snatches of conversation about commodes and sofas, but the main sound was that of eating. I left the restaurant with a belch, and a blessing for IB. This was inverse archaeology at its most enjoyable.
Now, I thought, for some preparations of buffalo milk, unequalled for sweetness. Nearby I found Taha Taha Fishwar’s sweetmeat emporium, where I had a plate of kanafah, buffalo cheese buried in layers of sweet vermicelli. Further along the road, at a shop called Futuh, there were great sweating truckles of the cheese, impressed with calligraphic rectangles, and bowls of buffalo-milk rice pudding strewn with sultanas. I ate two of the latter. My payment was waved away with a smile.
; A surfeit of puddings can only be cured by a savoury, and there could be few more savoury savouries than fissikh. The definitions of the verbal forms in my dictionary give an idea of how the dish is prepared: fasakh is ‘to be corrupt’, tafassakh ‘to fall off (hair of a corpse)’. Fissikh are fish which are left in the sun until they begin to blow up. Next, the gills are stuffed with salt, and after eight days the fish are put in a barrel of brine. Although strictly a departure from my Battutian menu, fissikh are a venerable delicacy of the area. The thirteenth-century geographer Yaqut al-Hamawi, writing of the then-famous textiles of Damietta, said that the genuine products always stank of fissikh as the Coptic weavers were addicted to it and never washed their hands before working; he added that the cloth was so sought-after that, in the mind’s nose of its buyers, it smelt of ambergris. A later writer, however, wrote that for those unused to eating fissikh, ‘it can cause the accumulation in the body of large quantities of putrid waste matter … which can generate many fatal diseases’. One account of the defeat of the Crusade of St Louis near Damietta in 1250 attributes it to the Franks’ consumption of putrid fish, sold to them by the local inhabitants; this might have been a form of medieval germ warfare, but to me the story has about it more than a whiff of fissikh. I had heard, moreover, that each year at the spring festival of Shamm al-Nasim, or ‘Sniffing the Breeze’, around a dozen people die of fissikh poisoning. It was therefore with some trepidation that I approached the shop of Abu Rajab.
Outside the shop was a heron, trussed to a tree stump. At first I thought it was stuffed, but it turned out to be cataleptically alive. I asked Abu Rajab if it was to be eaten, but he said it was ‘just for decoration’. Inside, a fat boy guided me around the stinking barrels.
‘I want your best quality,’ I told him.
‘Then try this,’ he said, pulling off the lid of a barrel. An almost palpable miasma rose from it; I gagged, and watched as he plunged both hands in up to the elbows and pulled out two fat sprats. He pressed his thumbs into them. The impressions stayed, as they would have done in putty. ‘You see, they’re the best quality!’ He pulled a piece off one of the fish and handed it to me. I shut my eyes and popped it into my mouth.
Like durian, the taste was admittedly better than the smell; it could hardly have been worse. I could feel myself breaking into a cold sweat, and made for the door and fresh air. Perhaps, with the quail, the kanafah, the two rice puddings and now this, I had overdone things.
The heron eyed me rheumily. Slowly, my nausea passed, but I still felt as though I’d swallowed a pot of Gentleman’s Relish in one go.
‘So, did you like my fissikh?’Abu Rajab asked. ‘It’s the best in Egypt!’
I wondered what the worst fissikh in Egypt was like. ‘Your fissikh is …’ – I searched for the right word – ‘… astonishing. How much do I owe you?’
‘It’s on me,’ said Abu Rajab, beaming.
‘May God reward your goodness,’ I said.
One more course remained. I had already, in Rosetta, eaten buri, the grey mullet admired by IB. It was delicate in flavour, as might be expected of this gentlest of fish which, the poet Oppian said, ‘never stains its lips with blood but in holy fashion feeds always on green seaweed or mere mud’. I was now keen to try its roe, considered a great delicacy. Later, I watched the roe being extracted in a village near the coast: a man gently palpitated the bellies of hen buris to see if they were pregnant; if they were, he made a neat incision with a small Stanley knife then pulled out the roe in its yellow membrane, reticulated with pink veins. This, he explained, would be salted, pressed, then dried in the sun. Finally it would be dipped in wax. Even in its unprocessed state the roe looked precious; in its final form, as batarikh – the French boutargue, the Italian, and particularly Sardinian, bottarga – it is hugely expensive. The Egyptians say of a successful businessman that mahfazatuh batrikhat, ‘his wallet has swollen with roe’.
I was forewarned of a high price by the English sign on a shop near Abu Rajab’s: SUPER CAVIARE. It was a minimalist shop, containing only a small refrigerator and selling nothing but batarikh. The shopkeeper produced a cylinder of paper from the refrigerator and unrolled it to reveal several rosewood-coloured blocks. They resembled mummified human fingers and smelt slightly of football socks. At 260 Egyptian pounds a kilo, buri caviare was almost as pricey by Egyptian standards as Beluga in London and I bought the smallest block, a couple of ounces in weight. I told the shopkeeper it was like buying dope. He looked alarmed. ‘It’s all right, it’s perfectly legal.’
After a short siesta to sleep off the excesses of lunch I took my batarikh to a bar overlooking the river. Alan Davidson, the doyen of ichthyophages, recommends eating it sliced very thin, with a simple dressing of olive oil, lemon juice and pepper. I found pickles and Stella beer a suitable alternative. Like most expensive comestibles it was interesting in texture, and the thin wax casing contained a gooey centre, richly fishy. I nibbled slowly, spinning my two ounces out over several beers, and could not have eaten more.
The coastal region near Damietta, like parts of Essex or Louisiana, is neither entirely of the land nor of the sea. It was long a haunt of hermits and dervishes, the scene of skirmishes and strange goings-on. In Tinnis, a place famous for its textiles, its catamites and for an endemic disease called the Tinnisi Death-rattle, a woman gave birth to a lamb. The town was so often raided by the Crusaders that the whole population was moved to Damietta. Nearer to Damietta itself, where the Bucolic Nile meets the sea, is a place IB calls al-Barzakh, the Isthmus. Here was a 100-cubit chain that blocked the river against the Franks, and some minarets that quivered when touched. It was also a favourite spot for ascetics, and IB spent a night there with them, ‘in prayers, recitation of the Qur’an, and liturgical exercises’.
Damietta originally stood across the mouth of the river from al-Barzakh. Like Tinnis, the city was continually raided throughout its Islamic history, by Byzantines, Sicilians and finally Crusaders; the chain deterred the Franks for a while, but in 1219 they arrived in a force of Gulf War proportions, which Egyptian sources say included a 750-foot iron-clad destroyer. The Franks cut the chain and occupied Old Damietta for two years. The Jimmy Carter of the day was St Francis of Assisi, who seems to have held peace talks with the Sultan. A less pacific saint, the French King Louis, led a later crusade in 1249 which once more captured Old Damietta. It ended a year later – possibly, as mentioned above, because of mass fissikh-poisoning – with the Franks routed and Louis in fetters, guarded by a eunuch gaoler. A popular song of the time, in the manner of ‘Boney Was a Warrior’, warned al-Fransis, le françois, that if he came back Sabih the Eunuch would be happy to entertain him again. All the same, the Sultan removed temptation by destroying Old Damietta and relocating its population to the present site a few miles upstream.
Old Damietta between the two Frankish occupations was home to the leader of one of the stranger movements in Islamic history. Jamal al-Din of Saveh, in Persia, was an ascetic from his youth, but his good looks caused a woman of Saveh to fall passionately in love with him. As IB tells the story, she enticed Jamal al-Din into her house and pressed him to break his vow of chastity. He pretended to agree, but first excused himself to go to the lavatory. He emerged having shaved off his beard, moustache, hair and eyebrows. The seductress, horrified, threw him out.
Jamal al-Din moved to Damascus, then to Damietta, where he lived in the cemetery. His followers, known as the Qalandars, imitated his shaving habits and shocked a society in which beards were the rule. In the manner of the Cynics, they also gave up other social norms, ‘abandoning polite intercourse’, a contemporary account says, ‘and attaching no importance to their appearance or to what was thought of them’. Some of them even gave up praying. This was asceticism taken to the limit, mortification not of the flesh but, as Albert Hourani put it, of self-esteem. The august Encyclopaedia of Islam compares the Qalandars to hippies; but perhaps their philosophy was closer to a sort of pantheistic punkism – the Pe
rsian kalandar, the probable origin of the name, means ‘an ugly or ungainly man’, which is not far from the original definition of ‘punk’. (Their spiritual cousins the Haydaris, another group of Persian origin, were even more punkish, practising body-piercing and in extreme cases wearing rings in their penises.) The Qalandars, predictably, got a bad name, and were accused of being dope-heads and lechers. Sa’di, the great Persian poet, said that there were two sorts of people who will always feel remorse: the merchant whose vessel has been wrecked, and the heir who has become the associate of Qalandars. Substitute for Qalandars punks/hippies/New-Age travellers, and the late twentieth-century bourgeois fear of the antinomian has been, in substance, the same.
After my Qalandar-like day – Sa’di also said that ‘they stuff till they have no room in their stomachs to breathe’ – I decided to spend the following morning looking for traces of Jamal al-Din of Saveh. I first headed for the Isthmus, with high hopes of finding a saint or two. But as I approached the sea my hopes fell: the road was lined with hotels and hoardings; there was an International Circus and a Damiettex Cinema. The architecture was bewilderingly eclectic – here a Chinese roof, there a lotus colonnade in reinforced concrete – and the whole place had the jerry-built look of somewhere that has started off temporary and become all too rapidly permanent. The bus driver took it as a compliment when I compared it to Las Vegas.
He dropped me off at the end of his route, and I walked towards the Isthmus past a string of deserted fast-food joints and the Hanging Garden Pool Room and Amusement Park. Empty hamburger boxes skittered past in the breeze. The Isthmus itself was a long, narrow promontory sheathed in concrete. At the end of it was a stubby lighthouse; opposite, on the other side of the river mouth, was another of the same design. The anti-Frank chain was, of course, gone; so were the quivering minarets, the pious brethren and their hermitages. The Isthmus, it seemed, would have gone too were it not for the great piles of caltrop-like blocks of cement designed to break the force of the waves. A man fishing with rod and line told me that there had been an old mosque here – conceivably the place in which IB stayed – but that the sea had washed it away. The blessed land of Egypt and the cursed Mediterranean used to maintain a sort of equilibrium, as the silt that came down the Nile in its annual flood made up for what the sea took. Now, since the building of the High Dam at Aswan, there had been no flood, no silt, and the sea was winning.
Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah Page 9
