Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah

by Mackintosh-Smith, Tim

  ‘I heard one of the mutawwifs speaking to the gate-keeper in Arabic. He was of the race of the visitants and his speech was barbarous and incorrect. I asked him which place he came from in the territory of the Afranj, and he said: I come from Barr Man Jahum. Ibn Juzayy adds: I have read that this place is part of the Island of Anqiltarah [England]. And God is the most knowing.’

  (Translator’s note: ‘Barr Man Jahum’ is literally ‘the land of him that presented a doleful countenance’. An obscure phrase to say the least, it may be a corruption of ‘Birmingham’. This alone would be enough to raise suspicions about the authenticity of the account. Indeed, the whole curious passage, with its glaring anachronisms, is surely an interpolation from the pen of some pseudo-IB …)

  A day in Luxor had got to me. Tourism had made it a pseudo-place, like Eurodisney or Riyadh, to which one could fly direct from Barr Man Jahum. A pseudo-reaction seemed the only one possible.

  *

  The previous morning, as the train rumbled over the bridge from Cairo to Giza, the Nile had looked particularly mucose. It moved sluggishly, exhaling hanks of mist. I remembered the story of an alchemist who could, it was said, weave tents from its water. The skyscrapers along the banks were spectral; a two-man scull slid through the vapour. It was going to be another smoggy day. But I was heading south.

  A tiny man moved slowly along the train, begging alms in rhyming prose. Hawkers also walked up and down, throwing their goods into our laps. Each specialized in a particular line – newspapers, combs, sticking-plasters or keyrings. If you didn’t want to buy, you handed them back when their owners came past again. The only one who seemed to sell anything was an old lady who had diversified: she sold copies of the Qur’anic Chapter of the Merciful, and chewing-gum.

  As we left Giza station I thought of the Pyramids and the Sphinx, invisible from the railway line. The thought set off an old ditty, ‘The sexual life of the camel is stranger than anyone thinks …’ I tried to make mental notes on the landscape, but the rhyme kept intruding, to the rhythm of the train. ‘For during the mating season, it tries to bugger the Sphinx …’ What was that stuff in the fields like giant rhubarb? ‘But the Sphinx’s anal orifice is blocked by the sands of the Nile …’ I must do something about my abysmal knowledge of botany … ‘which accounts for the hump on the camel …’ Note: palm trees ‘… and the Sphinx’s inscrutable smile.’

  It was no good. I gave up on the landscape and opened the Travels.

  IB left the Convent of the Relics some time in May 1326, heading for Mecca. He travelled down the Nile, passing through Luxor, then turned east at Edfu. For fifteen days he crossed the desert between the Nile and the Red Sea, calling in on the way at the tomb of al-Shadhili, the greatest of the Maghribi Alexandrian saints and author of the Litany of the Sea. And then, at Aydhab, the port for Jeddah, he got stuck. He only had himself to blame. Earlier, in the Nile town of Hu, he had told a local holy man of his pilgrimage plans. ‘You will not succeed in going to Mecca on this occasion,’ the saint told him bluntly. ‘Go back, for you will make your first Pilgrimage by the Syrian Road and no other.’ Two months and 1,500 miles after he had left it, IB found himself back in Cairo. He had made the elementary mistake of ignoring that inexorable tour operator, Fate.

  Inexorable, inscrutable … The Sphinx was threatening a comeback. But a sobering realization laid it to rest: I didn’t know quite where I was going. The Nile section of the journey was straightforward; the problems started after Edfu. Humaythira, the remote desert location of al-Shadhili’s tomb, was according to IB ‘infested with hyenas, and during the night of our stay there we were continually occupied with driving them off’. In the morning, he found that one of the creatures had stolen a skin of dates from his baggage. If the hyenas were not bothersome enough, I had also heard that the tomb might lie in a military zone. The port of Aydhab was more of a problem. I knew where it ought to be – if, that is, anything were left of it – but I didn’t know what country it was in. At the bottom right-hand corner of Egypt is a wedge-shaped bit of desert, roughly the shape and size of Sicily, which couldn’t decide whether it was Egyptian or Sudanese. Aydhab was in the south-eastern extreme of this disputed territory. Where IB was blasé about destiny, I’d ignored a twentieth-century irritation: borders.

  As the train entered Minya, I reflected that at least IB – ‘I’, the authorial persona so elusive in Cairo – was back on form. ‘One day I entered the bath-house in this township, and found the men in it wearing no covering. This appeared a shocking thing to me, and I went to the governor and informed him of it.’ At IB’s instigation, a by-law was immediately drawn up to prevent nude bathing. (An alternative if more impractical method of avoiding being shocked was devised by a later Islamic scholar: you should enter the bath, he said, with two coverings – a waist-cloth and a blindfold. Such precautions were necessary. An early wit, al-Jammaz, described having sex in the bath as one of the three greatest pleasures in life. The other two are ‘pissing in a washing bowl, and slapping a bald man on the pate’.) I didn’t investigate whether IB’s law was still in force; I assume it is, as Minya is now famous for its militant puritans. Toby and Rachel had been there recently and had wandered around the place escorted, they said, by a tank. Younger boys seemed to be exempt from anti-nudity laws. Numbers of them were enjoying an otter-like existence in the canals that criss-crossed the cultivated land; one mooned at the train.

  The intense green of crops was broken here and there by a house or hamlet, distempered in a pumpkin yellow that matched the dates ripening in the palmeries. The city of Mallawi, I noted, could not be said today to be ‘of pleasant appearance and elegant construction’, as IB described it; neither could any of the other riverside towns, which all seemed to hide their charms behind a necrosis of concrete. Suhaj, however, had a few remnants of tropical baroque and was set on a pleasing arc of the Nile. At Naj’ Hammadi, 300 miles from Cairo, the train crossed back to the right bank, heading for a line of violet cliffs. As we travelled south the light thickened. An opaque, African dusk was flowing slowly upstream, heading for the Delta. We arrived at Luxor, like Edward Lear,

  when the sun sinks slowly down

  And the great rock walls grow dark and brown,

  Where the purple river rolls fast and dim

  And the ivory Ibis starlike skim …

  Before I did anything else, I wanted to get a travel update on Humaythira and al-Shadhili’s tomb. According to IB, the desert road there was ‘totally devoid of settlements but’ – except for the hyenas – ‘perfectly safe for travelling’. Bedouins and dromedaries, he said, were available for hire on the right bank of the Nile opposite Edfu. My notes from Ibn Jubayr confirmed this, and added that passengers rode in sociable two-man camel litters, playing chess or reading. Ibn Jubayr himself finished memorizing the Qur’an as he swayed across the desert to Aydhab. I reckoned that the Luxor office of Thomas Cook would know if one could still visit al-Shadhili in a caravan with a good book, or if – as I suspected – the old road had been taken over by hyenas and soldiers.

  They didn’t. The apologetic manager could do pharaohs, feluccas and son et lumière, but medieval saints were not much in demand. ‘I think you’ll need a permit,’ he added ominously. ‘Why don’t you ask the Tourist Police?’

  The Tourist Police were equally unenlightening. One of them hadn’t heard of al-Shadhili; another thought his tomb might be in Aswan. When I told them that it was in the desert east of Edfu, they had a brief conference. ‘We think’, the senior officer said, ‘that it is forbidden for foreigners to go there. Why don’t you try al-Mukhabirat al-Askariyyah?’

  I thanked them for their advice and left under a cloud. It was compounded of three elements: ‘permit’, ‘forbidden’ and ‘al-Mukhabirat al-Askariyyah’ – Military Intelligence. The idea of going to some Upper Egyptian spook for permission to visit a long-dead saint seemed faintly ridiculous. I decided, for the moment at least, to leave my travel plans in the more reliable hands
of Fate.

  I wandered around Luxor in a bad mood, responding to the touts’ English in my tetchiest Arabic. Karnak and the Avenue of the Sphinxes could go to the jinn. ‘Hey, mister,’ a boy called out, ‘pleased to meet you. My name’s Sambo. You want to go on Nile boat trip?’

  I glared at him. ‘Hear, O … Sambo, what the poet said:

  Men ask but do not always find,

  Like vessels in a contrary wind.’

  Sambo looked puzzled. ‘Sprechen sie Deutsch?’

  Word must have got around. No one else tried to sell me a trip while I was in Luxor.

  In the Horus Hotel I took refuge on the balcony and anthropologized. The tourists who passed by on the road below fell into two main categories according to trouser length. Among the Shorts two sub-groups were identifiable, the hearty Large Rucksacks and the more earnest-looking Vestigial Rucksacks. The second main category, the Longs, was much smaller. Its members might also be termed Death on the Nilers – several of the women wore chiffon harem pants and little turbans. They were probably staying at the Winter Palace, or wishing they were. I then turned my eye on myself, and saw a misfit in a double-breasted Aquascutum jacket from the Second-hand Suq in San’a.

  The tourists had their destinations; I seemed to be busily getting nowhere. Perhaps I should forget about al-Shadhili, hire Sambo’s felucca and sail south, down Friar Symon’s famous and interminable river to the Land of Prester John.

  Then I remembered that at least I had a saint here in Luxor, IB’s pious ascetic, Abu ’l-Hajjaj. He had arrived from Mecca in 1193, seeking solitude among the ruins, and remained until he died. In one of those strange architectural marriages the Egyptians go in for, like building mud dovecots on apartment-block roofs, the saint’s tomb had been slapped down on the peristyle of Rameses II’s temple. It was right in front of me, across the road from the Horus Hotel. The minaret poked up above floodlit columns; over it hung a full moon like a truckle of buffalo cheese.

  The following morning, I found the entrance to Abu ’l-Hajjaj’s mosque-tomb with the help of a policeman. While it was bang on top of the biggest tourist attraction in Luxor, it seemed in every other respect as far from it as possible. It might have risen out of some distant village, inhabitants and all, flown to Luxor and alighted on the temple roof. Peasants caressed the wooden lattice that surrounded the saint, murmuring prayers. A woman steered her child to the tomb and whispered to him, ‘Look! There’s Abu ’l-Hajjaj!’ The child grinned and waved through the lattice, as though he had spotted a rarely seen uncle. Among the usual holy appurtenances, there was a nice touch – an electric fan, pointing on to the cenotaph as if to cool the saint beneath it.

  Abu ’l-Hajjaj’s minder sat in a corner reading a Qur’an. It struck me that he might know about the desert route to Humaythira. I waited for him to come to the end of a chapter.

  ‘You want to visit al-Shadhili?’ I nodded. ‘It’s a long way. First,’ he said, tracing a map on the carpet with his finger, ‘you take the road from Edfu towards the coast. Then you turn right at Sidi Salim – he’s another saint – and go south for about 120 kilometres. It’s asphalted all the way. You wouldn’t believe the crowds that go there! Al-Shadhili’s in the middle of nowhere, but he gets as many visitors as our Abu ’l-Hajjaj.’

  Encouraged, I thanked the guardian.

  ‘Come and tell us if you get there,’ he said.

  Outside the tomb I met the policeman who had given me directions. ‘Did you pray?’ he asked.

  ‘Well … I’m not a Muslim.’

  He thought for a moment. ‘That’s not a problem. Saints are common property.’ Then he patted me on the back.

  Having paid my respects to Abu ’l-Hajjaj, I walked around the perimeter of the giant temple enclosure to visit his rather grander undercroft. IB had omitted to notice it; but he was not entirely blind to pharaonic monuments. Down the Nile at Akhmim he had described briefly the carvings on the ancient temple. ‘People tell a number of fanciful stories on the subject of these images’, he concluded, ‘over which it is not necessary to linger.’ Other travellers and geographers were not above recounting yarns about buried gold, booby-trapped vaults and curses on mummies; they knew their box-office value. A few took a more scientific interest in the pharaonic past. The physician and historian Abdullatif al-Baghdadi, for example, went into raptures over the ancient Egyptians’ knowledge of anatomy displayed in their sculpture, and branded vandals and tomb-robbers ‘ignorant idiots’. More often, visitors saw the monuments not in terms of aesthetics, but of morals. The guidebook writer al-Harawi, contemplating one of the colossi at Luxor, came up with an Ozymandian verse –

  Where are the giants and emperors of old?

  They and their treasure-houses none could save.

  The void itself was straitened with their hosts,

  As they lie straitened now within the grave.

  – then went one better than Shelley, by inscribing it on the statue’s chest. Beneath the lines he added a colophon: ‘May God have mercy on him that pondered, and drew a moral.’ There could be few more elegant graffiti.

  I paid the entrance fee and entered the pylon of the temple between seated colossi. There was a board showing a plan of the site: I noticed that while the other features were labelled simply, ‘Pylon’, ‘Peristyle Court’ and so on, the mosque had an adjective: ‘Imposing Mosque of Abu ’l-Hajjaj’. It seemed strange: the mosque was relatively speaking a loft extension, dwarfed by the structure on which it perched. To call it ‘imposing’ one would have to suffer from the sort of spatial delusion that plagues estate agents. And yet, as I explored the temple, something happened to my own sense of space. The temple managed somehow to be both vast and claustrophobic. Down among the forests of papyrus columns I felt like a mouse trapped in the works of an organ. Nearly every wall was covered with inscriptions and gods, a fearfully complex and crowded pantheon. The mosque was dedicated not just to a single deity, but to the Empedoclean god whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. It was, in theological terms, immeasurably imposing.

  I was beginning to understand how IB had not seen the temple, at least in his memory’s eye, and how conversely the tourists of today could give Abu ’l-Hajjaj’s tomb little more than a passing glance. It was partly fashion: in the West, eighty years after Howard Carter, Tutmania is still in; Islam is more out than at any period since the Crusades. More important, the whole idea of travel has changed.

  In IB’s time, the Islamic Age of Aquarius, siyahah – now simply ‘tourism’ – had the specific sense of mystical, transcendental travel. Would-be mystics had to keep on the move, not only to visit holy men but also to avoid spiritual stagnation. In the Maghrib, that land of itchy feet, siyahah was part of the higher education curriculum: promising students were taught chronology and astronomy so that they could calculate the time and direction of prayer, then packed off to the desert to wander around, eat lizards and browse through the infinite library of the Cosmos. Some authorities believed that the shortest period of spiritual outward-bound for a dedicated mystic should be twenty-four years.

  Travel was seen as a sort of incubation. As well as providing encounters with Sufi gurus along the way, constant nomadism enabled the embryonic mystic to hatch out into a higher state of consciousness. Through travel, wrote the great dervish-master al-Rumi, a certain holy man had reached the state where he could ‘see in a drop of water an ocean, a sun enfolded within a mote’. Few had the stamina for this sort of travel; those who did often attracted derision. People looked at al-Rumi’s Blakeian mystic and muttered, ‘The brain of this poor wretch through long melancholy and austerity has turned rotten, like an onion.’ But, rather like the pioneering hippy-trailers seven centuries later, the few genuine spiritual hard-nuts were followed by more earthbound overlanders, part-time mystics like IB.

  Later, transcendental tourism got a bad name. Al-Maqrizi wrote of mystic travellers in the early fifteenth century:

  From Sufis in this age and
day a mere six vows are due:

  To swank and sing, to dance and booze, to eat hash-cakes, and screw.

  Or, as a later poet put it, sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll.

  Lurking among the columns of Luxor Temple and observing contemporary siyahah, I recalled a piece of advice given to the Persian scholar Edward Browne by a Persian gentleman: ‘Do not, like the majority of Firangis, occupy yourself with nothing but dumb stones, vessels of brass, tiles and fabrics; contemplate the world of ideas rather than the world of form, and seek for Truth rather than for curiosities.’ But perhaps tourists too, from time to time, when their gnostic faculties are sharpened by Stella beer and Nile sunsets, have Ozymandian intimations or see the world in a grain of sand. I certainly couldn’t pass judgement: my search for IB made me, more than any tourist, a seeker after the material.

  That evening, near the hotel, I noticed a sign: ‘DANTE BAZAAR JEWELLERY – We Write Your Name in Hieroglyphic’. My defences were momentarily down – I’d had a couple of Stellas – and I allowed myself to answer a siren call from within. At least, I thought, I could investigate whether any of the medieval Arab beliefs about hieroglyphics had survived.

  The conversation, however, took a different turn. The owner admired the ring I was wearing, a large agate with white spots, and I explained that it had been examined on a sort of mineralogical ouija board in the Great Mosque library in San’a. Following various incantations, it had apparently slid by itself into a section of the board marked ‘To Cure Styes, by the Will of God’. Since I had started wearing it I had never suffered from a single stye. ‘Not’, I added, ‘that I ever did before.’