The old man paused to get his breath back. No one spoke.
‘Now, it is forbidden to see the face of the Prophet. So who did al-Mursi see? What do you think he saw?’
Everyone looked at me. I looked at the old man.
‘He saw al-Shadhili’s face,’ his voice was cracking, ‘al-Shadhili burying himself!’
In the long silence that followed, I imagined the raw drama of the telling processed into a footnote (‘Among the popular accretions to the account of al-Shadhili’s death …’). It would be a folkloric curiosity, a datum, transfixed on paper like a moth on a pin. While they went and prayed, I took out my notebook and began the slow business of transfixion.
The café keeper cooked a supper of beans. After we had eaten, he turned on his radio. The news was grim. Earlier in the day, nine German tourists and their driver had been burned to death in a coach outside the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. According to the report, an escaped lunatic and his brother had petrol-bombed them. I made a bed on a cement bench that ran along the wall of Sidi Salim’s tomb. Ali Id spread a mat on the ground beside me. ‘I shall guard you,’ he said.
Soon after I had turned in, I heard a distant howl, then an answering bleat from one of Hajjah Layla’s sheep. My mind went straight to IB’s night at Humaythira – ‘infested with hyenas … continually occupied with driving them off …’ Ali was still awake, investigating sleeping positions on the hard ground. ‘Ya Ali,’ I whispered.
‘What?’
‘That bit I read out about IB and the hyenas … What was that noise?’
‘What noise? Anyway, there aren’t any hyenas now.’
I lay on my back, between the saint and Ali Id, looking up at the Milky Way. It looked solid, like a stroke of whitewash. I had never seen it so bright.
Something woke me. I froze: I could hear a frenzied lapping nearby. Then heavy panting, and the footfalls of a prowling beast. Ali had said there weren’t any hyenas; he had also said there weren’t any mosquitoes, and there was one whining right by my ear. Slowly, I turned my head. The moon was up, the desert electroplated with light. An animal was padding away from Hajjah Layla’s trough. Even without my glasses I could see that it was, incontrovertibly, a dog.
In the small hours I was awoken again, by growling monsters. Sidi Salim had turned into a truckstop, and the café keeper was serving the drivers beans and tea. When they had eaten, they climbed into their cabs and the lorries set off for the sea, snorting and farting. I was beginning to doubt Ali Id’s abilities as a bodyguard; despite the din, he hadn’t stirred.
It was in the morning that he proved himself. I got out of my sheet sleeping-bag and was about to put my left foot on the ground when Ali, who was already up and drinking tea, shot across the café forecourt and whacked the gravel with his stick, inches from my bare toes. I put on my glasses, and saw a small and very squashed scorpion.
Beyond the periphery of the café, the surface of the desert seemed to have come alive. The movement came from large numbers of partridge, busy in the early sunlight. Before long, Hajjah Layla emerged from the tomb with her ovine cortège. Then, at about eight, a minibus arrived from the Humaythira road. The passengers, mostly women and children, stood giggling and chatting by the roadside while the driver went to the shop. One of the children spotted me, scuttled across the yard with a curious scissor gait and shook my hand. He seemed to be suffering from some form of paralysis. Then he turned and fell flat on his face. I picked him up and he hobbled back to the bus, laughing. We waved to each other as the vehicle drove away. ‘People are always happy when they visit al-Shadhili,’ Ali Id explained.
The day was heating up, and I retreated to the shade of the café. There was no sign of a lift; I began to wonder whether al-Shadhili was having second thoughts about my visit. And then, towards ten, an empty pick-up came. Uncomplaining, we paid £E70 – double our best offer of the day before – and set off. Ali and I had been waiting twenty-two hours, the teacher two days and the old men an unspecified ‘very long time’. I watched the domed tomb of Sidi Salim grow smaller over the tail-gate. As saints go, he might lack the charisma of al-Shadhili; but when he had guests, he held on to them jealously.
Before us, the plain was narrowing and the rocky hills closing in and growing into mountains. Here and there amid clumps of thorn bush stood a shelter, somewhere between a shack and a tent, with a camel or two or a few goats foraging beside it. Ali told me that the encampments belonged to the Ababidah tribe, and said they were a’rab, ‘Arabs’, or nomads.
The pick-up entered a series of low passes, a tract of rock nibbled clean by the wind, bleached and ossified by the sun. I tried to picture IB, riding with his a’rab through this hyena-haunted waste; and al-Shadhili, seventy years before, travelling with his graveclothes. For the saint, it was an appropriate landscape in which to die. A hardened transcendental trekker, he once recalled camping in such a spot, surrounded by prowling beasts, as ‘the most delightful night of my life’. Clearly, al-Shadhili was made of different stuff from IB and me.
On the route we were following, however, pilgrims like IB and al-Shadhili were the least of the traffic. ‘We saw so much pepper going along this road’, Ibn Jubayr wrote, ‘that we imagined it to be no more valuable than sand.’ The pepper and other spices were shipped from the Malabar coast of India, via Aden, to Aydhab; from there they were carried inland, across these passes and through the desert to the Nile, then downriver to Lower Egypt, to the Maghrib, and across the Mediterranean from Alexandria to Venice and the markets of further Europe. The cosmographer al-Qazwini was amazed by the vast extent of trade in his time, the thirteenth century. In an entry on Maghanjah, ‘a city in the land of the Franks on a river called “Rayn”’ (probably Mainz), he wrote: ‘It is astonishing that, although this place is in the Far West, there are spices there which are to be found only in the Far East – pepper, ginger, cloves, spikenard, costus and galingale, all in enormous quantities.’ Looking over the cab of the pick-up, it was hard to believe that through these narrow cols, like sand through the waist of an hourglass, flowed the most valuable trade of the Middle Ages; that this road ensured the success of a tajine in Marrakesh or a Rhenish wurst.
Humaythira was a surprise: a cluster of government-built houses, a school and some long low buildings which Ali explained were accommodation for al-Shadhili’s visitors, all in a depression ringed by low hills of rock. Ali led me past al-Shadhili’s tomb chamber, a modern polygonal structure like an oversized seaside kiosk, and into the police post. He introduced me to the commander, Captain Ibrahim, then disappeared. It was the last I saw of him.
The captain noted down my name and nationality, then asked if I would be joining him for Friday prayers. I shook my head. He led me to one of the guest blocks, then excused himself. After the day at Sidi Salim with Ali Id and the other travellers, it seemed abnormal to be alone. The call to prayer sounded. However far I followed IB, there always remained that one last step.
A boy of about ten appeared in the doorway, saw me and ran across the room. He shook my hand vigorously. ‘Have you come to visit al-Shadhili?’ he asked.
‘Of course.’
‘Me too. My name’s Baha.’
‘My name’s Tim.’
‘Teem … That’s the name of a drink. It’s a kind of lemonade. Aren’t you coming to the mosque? We’ve got to hurry.’
He was still holding my hand. ‘Not today,’ I said.
The boy looked puzzled. ‘Well, see you later.’ He ran off and collided in the doorway with a woman.
‘Baha!’
‘Sorry, mother.’
The woman smiled at me. ‘Was he being a nuisance?’
‘Not at all. He’s charming … ma sha Allah,’ I said, adding the phrase to avert the Evil Eye.
She laughed. ‘You can have him if you want!’ The Evil Eye was fully averted: what jinn would want Baha when his own mother was prepared to give him away?
Baha’s mother was followed by about thirty women, gir
ls and younger children. As they entered, I realized with growing panic that the captain had taken me to the ladies’ quarters. By some dreadful accident I had realized the old orientalist dream – penetration of the seraglio – and could see it turning into a nightmare.
The women were advancing. I grinned disarmingly. ‘Well, I’d better be on my way …’
There was an arpeggio of laughter. ‘Where are you going?’ asked Umm Baha. ‘You’re our guest.’
She came and squeezed my hand; all the others followed her example. A toddler waved at me and threw a kiss. The greetings over, the women ranged themselves around the hall, untroubled by the stranger in the harem, and nattered polyphonically. They were all pleasingly plump, chocolate-dark and gorgeously wrapped in bright floral prints.
Umm Baha told me that they were from Luxor. ‘But we’re originally from south of Aswan, from Nubia. Our family had to move when the High Dam was built. You see, we’re all cousins.’
I asked her what had brought them to Humaythira. Again, she laughed. ‘Oh, we just like to come here. In fact, we come whenever we can afford to. We visit the saint and spend a couple of days here as his guests – I mean, you can give a donation if you want, but you don’t have to. And’, she confided, ‘someone else does the cooking.’
I sat listening to the musical Nubian voices. For somewhere that owed its existence to death, Humaythira seemed remarkably lively. It was a place of both devotion and recreation – a sort of Islamic Butlin’s. My own reasons for being here were not a matter of discussion; but one of the cousins asked Umm Baha, in a whisper, if I was a Muslim.
‘How should I know?’ she said, then turned to me. ‘Are you a Muslim?’
I said I was a Masihi, a follower of the Messiah.
‘Oh,’ said the cousin, ‘one of iyal ammana.’
One of our cousins.
The men came back from their prayers and we sat down to a meal of rice, mulukhiyyah and fat mutton. After lunch, they all left for the long journey back to Luxor. The hall was empty again; but no longer silent – the Nubian cousins seemed to have set off some harmonic of the place, and their laughter lingered behind them.
I went to the tomb, and found I was the only visitor. Everyone else in Humaythira was enjoying a mutton-fed siesta. It was the slack time for tomb-going. Feeling, for the first time in my sepulchral travels, a distinct sense of melancholy, I left the saint and went to look for a ride in the direction of Aydhab.
*
‘And what of the third person of your Trinity, the Holy Spirit?’ The shaykh spoke with the precise little twangs and pops peculiar to speakers of the most elevated Arabic. His pharynx seemed to conceal a miniature skiffle group.
To many Muslims, the idea of the Trinity smacks of rampant shirk, polytheism. I was hardly the best person to defend it. I could remember my infant self pondering the subject during sermons at Mattins. God was 3 in 1, like that brand of oil my brothers put on their bikes. God the Son was easy: He was shown all over the place on His cross and, this being the 1960s, looked like the latest issue of curate. God the Holy Ghost was more difficult, but perhaps to be found in the attic, which was where ghosts lived. The real poser was God the Father. An early burst of logic dismissed the old-gentleman-on-a-cloud version: wouldn’t He fall through the cloud? Perhaps God as a whole was very small – the winds and whales of the Benedicite had to magnify Him, which is what my grandmother did to read the newspaper.
To be frank, my understanding of the triune deity had developed little since childhood. Now, I longed to change the subject to something straightforward like the virgin birth, to admit that I had failed Divinity ‘O’ Level. But the shaykh was waiting for an answer. He smiled quizzically from a face as dark as bog-oak that rose out of a horned moon of beard. It was the face of a mage, or a mesmerist. ‘Uhm … I think that in the gospels Jesus said that another comforter would come after him, and the comforter is the Holy Ghost. Or something like that.’
‘This is another case’, the shaykh said softly, ‘of deliberate alteration to the Injil, the Evangel. The original text is in the Holy Qur’an, in which Jesus says,’ he touched my hand in emphasis; on one of his fingers glittered a balas ruby the size of a hazelnut, ‘“After me there will come a prophet whose name is Ahmad.” Ahmad is, as you know, an alternative name for Muhammad. Jesus the son of Mary predicted the coming of our Prophet, may God bless and preserve all three of them. What do you say to that?’
There was no point arguing with the literal word of God, so I said, ‘Mmm.’
The other passengers in the pick-up, the shaykh’s followers, looked disappointed at my response. They wanted more. From the cab, a dhikr cassette broadcast its rhythmic, unitarian mantra: ‘La ilaha illa ’llah, There is no god but God.’ I looked out of the whizzing vehicle on to a landscape as blurred and arid as my brain. I could think of nothing except a silly but apposite joke about a Cairene traffic policeman.
The policeman had been posted to the desert, and was desperate to get back to the city. He had to book someone and prove himself, but for months not a vehicle had appeared. Finally, one day, a Christian priest rode up on a motorcycle.
The bike was in perfect condition; the priest was even wearing a crash helmet. The policeman’s heart sank. All he could do was issue a mild word of warning: ‘Father, don’t you know it’s dangerous to travel alone in the desert?’
‘But I’m not alone,’ said the priest. ‘I travel with the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.’
‘Hah! I knew there’d be something,’ the policeman exclaimed, pulling out his notebook. ‘Four on a motorcycle. You’re booked.’
I told the joke. There was the briefest of hiatuses; one of the passengers laughed sotto voce. The shaykh fingered the knobbly wooden rosary that hung around his neck. ‘Perhaps’, he said, ‘we can say no more about the true nature of God than the statement of His Prophet: “Consider creation, and do not consider the Creator. For minds cannot attain Him, nor sight encompass Him.”’
I nodded enthusiastically, and sighed inwardly with relief. My inquisition was over.
Like me, the shaykh and his companions had visited al-Shadhili and were now on their way to the coast. As we turned east at Sidi Salim, my thoughts turned to Aydhab. Compared with the more illustrious pepper ports – Mangalore on the Malabar coast, Aden, Alexandria, Venice – Aydhab was the poor relation. Gibb’s footnote in the Travels sounded bad enough: ‘Its ruins have been identified by G.W. Murray, Geogr. J., LXVIII (1926), 235–40, “on a flat and waterless mound” on the Red Sea coast, 12 miles north of Halaib, at 22°20′ N., 36°29′32″ E.’ But the note concealed the true awfulness of Aydhab in its heyday. Ibn Jubayr wrote that pilgrims were forced to pay outrageously high taxes. For those who refused, the port authorities ‘devised various inhuman tortures such as suspension by the testicles’. Only one letter, he noted, separates ‘Aydhab’ from adhab, ‘punishment’. Things improved when Saladin abolished uncanonical dues; but travellers still had to contend with Aydhab’s fake holy men, randy landladies and, most notoriously, rapacious skippers. Their vessels leaked through their coir stitchings and stank of shark oil and bilge gas. Into these, Ibn Jubayr says, the pilgrims were packed one on top of another ‘like chickens in a cage’. If anyone complained, the response was, ‘You look after your soul, and I’ll look after my hull.’ The sea was dreadful, a warren of reefs with names like ‘the Shoal of the Devil’s Mother’ and home to ravening sharks. The Persian traveller Nasir Khusraw, stuck in Aydhab for three months, heard of a camel which died at sea and was flung overboard. A shark swallowed it whole, all but a leg which remained sticking out of its jaws. Then came an even more monstrous fish that swallowed his smaller cousin farci de chameau.
Ibn Jubayr made it across the Red Sea, but only just. On several occasions he heard the heart-stopping crunch of hull striking coral – ‘We died and were resurrected many times,’ he recalled. Disembarking queasily at Jeddah, he resolved to return overland via the Levant: Crusaders were
a minor worry compared with the skippers of Aydhab, ‘a place which, if at all possible, it were best never to set eyes on’.
One hundred and fifty years later, IB didn’t even make it aboard. As today, there was a dispute about who actually owned the port. A third of it belonged to Sultan al-Nasir and the rest to the Bejas, a local and only partly Islamized tribe, ‘black-skinned people, who wrap themselves in yellow blankets’. Arriving at Aydhab just as the joint rulers had fallen out, IB discovered that the Beja chief had sunk all the ships in harbour. As the holy man of Hu had predicted, he turned his back on the sea and retraced his steps to Cairo. Continuing territorial squabbles put traders off the port, and within a few decades of IB’s visit commerce there had all but fizzled out. Since then, Aydhab has been forgotten – and perhaps deservedly – by all but a few scholars of medieval geography.
The pick-up began to descend a long, narrow valley. I noticed a hint of salt in the air, and peered over the cab roof into the buffeting wind. In the distance, just visible between mustard-coloured rocks, was a dab of royal blue – the Red Sea. I asked the shaykh if he had heard of a place called Aydhab.
He looked surprised. ‘Aydhab is in our territory. It belonged to our ancestors …’
‘So you’re Bejas!’ Fragments of reading on these strange people rushed into my mind: camels trained to sniff out prey like gun-dogs, ritual excision of the right testicle, a female subsection of the tribe who lived as Amazons. European writers identified the Bejas with the Blemmyes, that freakish race whose faces were on their chests. I scrutinized the shaykh more closely: admittedly, his face was in the customary position; but he did have a rather short neck. He also looked taken aback.
‘The Bejas’, he said testily, ‘are a people who wear sticks in their hair. We are Bishariyyah. Our ancestor was that great warrior and scholar, the Prophet’s companion al-Zubayr ibn al-Awwam, may God be pleased with him.’
Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah Page 15
