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

by Mackintosh-Smith, Tim

  Perhaps he himself was a poet who had run out of similes. I said the first thing that came into my head: ‘A woman giving birth?’

  He looked closely at me. ‘How did you know? My wife’s in hospital. She’s just had a baby. A boy. I must go.’

  ‘Congratulations …’ I called to him, as he slipped away into the dark. I stood there, listening to the music of the wooden spheres at heavy-metal volume and thinking about the strangeness of the encounter.

  The following morning, I went to look for Abu ’l-Fida’s tomb. I crossed to the right bank of the Orontes, where there was a garden with giant plastic toadstools and, nearby, the carbuncular Cham Palace Hotel (the French-style transliteration was a wise choice – ‘Sham Palace’ would have been accurate in more senses than one). On the opposite bank was an orchard, dense, tangly and hiding houses and domes. My path gave out and I recrossed the river by an old bridge and followed a lane where guinea fowl pecked in the dust. Another old bridge took me back to the right bank and Abu ’l-Fida’s mosque – Masjid al-Hayaya, the Mosque of the Serpents.

  I spotted them immediately. In the centre of a double arched window overlooking the river was a column in the form of intertwining ‘snakes’, so deeply cut that it seemed plaited, not carved. The door was locked, but two bearded carpenters from a nearby workshop found the key. Together we visited Abu ’l-Fida’s tomb, in a chamber beneath a small lemon-squeezer dome. It was plain but elegant; so too was the prayer hall of the mosque, a white space relieved only by a dado of rare marbles and a gilded inscription band. Clearly, the Sultan was a builder of taste. But the best part of the building was the view through the snake window.

  One of the carpenters pointed out the sights of Hamah – the bridges, the citadel hill, the giant Muhammadiyyah noria. As he spoke he fondled the snakes, already burnished by generations of caresses. ‘That garden’, he said, indicating a jungly orchard that disappeared around a bend in the river, ‘is called Tin al-Dahshah.’ The Figs of Amazement. Abu ’l-Fida was right: it was a delectable spot.

  I thanked the carpenters and continued downstream towards the Figs of Amazement. There, I found myself in a scene described by Ibn Jubayr in sensuous rhyming prose, ‘a place of secret, hidden beauty. Wander, penetrate the shade, for there are gardens whose boughs overhang the banks like soft, dark hair, while the river winds through its lair among the shadows.’ Fig trees intertwined with pomegranate and apricot. A little noria turned arthritically, irrigating the gardens. Frogs rasped in the water-channels. A tortoiseshell cat eyed me from the undergrowth. A dog barked, sending a flock of white doves flickering out of the branches.

  I followed a lane that twisted through the orchards between mud walls, then crossed the river by an ancient bridge of many arches. Here there was a confusion of weirs, some to work mid-stream mills, others norias. The biggest wheel of them all was the giant I had seen through the snake window. Once every revolution it came to a stop. Then it seemed to psych itself up; it would shudder, gasp, emit a few loud reports, and spasm into action again.

  I sat by the wheel, opened the Travels and turned to an appropriate verse:

  Many a noria, compassioning my sin,

  As from afar she saw my fell intent,

  Tenderly wept and voiced her grief – enough

  That even the timber weeps ‘the Impenitent’!

  The Impenitent is al-Asi, ‘the Rebel’ – the Arabic name for the Orontes. ‘It is said to have been called by this name because it seems to one who looks at it as though its flow were from down to up,’ said IB obscurely. An early theory claimed that the river was contrary because it dared to flow from Islamic Syria into Christian Asia Minor. But the usual explanation is that, unlike other Syrian rivers, the Orontes flows from south to north.

  I began trying to memorize the verse, thinking that it might come in useful if I bumped into any more riverbank poets.

  ‘Allah!’ said a voice, right in my ear.

  I jumped.

  ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.’ I turned and saw a young man. He had been reading the verse over my shoulder. ‘I just liked the poem. I’ve got another one like it,’ he said. He frowned, then recited,

  The Rebel, in contrition, bared his breast,

  Grief-stricken like the elegists of ancient years;

  Heart pounding like a noria in his chest,

  He shed upon the stones his penitent tears.

  ‘Allah!’ I exclaimed. The young man recited several more noria verses. I realized I could never compete with the poetical Hamawis.

  Ahmad was in his last year at school. His father owned a fig orchard beneath the noria. ‘They’re the best figs in Hamah,’ he told me. ‘Better than the Figs of Amazement.’

  ‘I can see why,’ I said, as I watched a cow tethered beneath a tree release a sputtering stream of premium organic fertilizer into the mud.

  Ahmad showed me an inscription on the aqueduct that led away from the noria. We made out ‘for the Great Mosque … in the year …’ The date was illegible, but there was a very fourteenth-century-looking Mamluk blazon. I wondered if the Muhammadiyyah was one of the norias IB had seen, revolving like spheres. Materially, of course, the wheel wasn’t the same. Its timbers had been renewed over the years, piecemeal, as they rotted. But perhaps its peculiar timbre, and that complex rhythm of creaks and sighs, had endured – like a piece of inherited poetry.

  We walked to the Great Mosque. Ahmad told me it had been a pagan temple, then a church. ‘Like the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus,’ he added, with unconcealed Hamawi pride. Much of the building, however, seemed newly built. We went through a door – an aluminium one that said ‘Push’ on the handle – into the tomb-chamber of one of Abu ’l-Fida’s ancestors. The interior, too, looked recent; the cenotaph was a makeshift thing like a packing case.

  The ancient Great Mosque of Hamah, I realized, was one of the victims of 1982. In that year, the city was taken over by militant orthodox Muslims opposed to the ruling junta’s even more militant autocracy. President al-Asad responded to the rebellion in the Syrian Bath, Abu ’l-Fida’s Islamic Parnassus, by bombing much of it to bits. At least eight thousand Hamawis were killed, and possibly three times as many.

  In the prayer hall, Ahmad pointed to a tablet set in the wall. I was surprised to see that it was inscribed in Greek. ‘Can you read it?’ he asked. ‘No one here knows what it says.’

  I said I’d try. I squinted, and read: ANΔPAMOIENNEΠE …

  I stopped. Here on a stone which, unlike most of the building, had survived the bombing, were the opening words of the Odyssey.

  Ahmad looked at me. ‘So what is it?’

  ‘It’s a poem,’ I said. ‘A very old one.’

  Later, I had lunch in the shop of a butcher called Abu Husam (the Father, by coincidence, of a Sharp Blade). He showed me his newly hatched canary chicks while my kidneys sang and hissed on a spit. Abu Husam’s boy served them, sprinkled with cumin, at a table between hanging split carcasses. And as I ate I puzzled over the verse from the mosque, which I had transcribed. Beyond those first words it was not the Odyssey; that was as much as I could tell. I mourned the death of my Greek.

  *

  The following morning, Abu Firas the taxi driver and I breakfasted from the boot of his 1963 Mercedes on mountain figs and crystallized pumpkin. The Orontes plain lay below; directly above was a castle, raggedly outlined against a very blue sky.

  Masyaf is one of a chain of fortresses which, IB wrote, ‘belong to a sect called the Isma’ilis. None may visit them save the members of their sect. They are the arrows of Sultan al-Nasir, by means of whom he strikes down those of his enemies who have taken refuge from him … They have poisoned knives, with which they strike the victim of their mission.’ Masyaf was the mother of these castles and headquarters of the Nizari Isma’ilis, popularly called Assassins. Their mountain territory was a semi-fictional world where the medieval imagination ran wild. Picture a plot by Frederick Forsyth, enacted by members of the Branch David
ians on drugs, then translated into troubadour Provençal, and you will have a fair idea of how the Middle Ages viewed the Assassins and their leader, the Old Man of the Mountains.

  I left Abu Firas and went to explore the castle. Masyaf was a mazy, introverted pile thrown together like a stork’s nest. At the top of it all was a polygonal turret chamber with thick walls and arrow slits. Despite the Bishop of Acre’s description of the Old Man’s hideouts as locis secretis et delectabilibus, Masyaf was hardly secret – it could be seen from miles away – and it would have needed a hefty interior-design budget to make it delectable.

  A miniature from the fifteenth-century Livre des merveilles shows the fantasy version of Masyaf, a turreted enclosure set among tusk-shaped mountains. Outside, human-headed deer prance or flop on the grass and a simpering harpy flaps through the air. Within the walls gormless-looking youths and damsels dance before an elderly king. The king has just raised his finger to point at the nearest youth; the dancers stare at him, frozen in mid-movement.

  The picture, one of the most vivid images of the Orient in the post-crusading mind, illustrated a pervasive legend: the Old Man lured innocent youths, doped them out of their minds on hashish (hence hashshashin and ‘Assassins’), and gave them a taste of paradise with the girls in his secret garden. Every so often he would pick one or more of the young men to go into the outside world and assassinate an enemy. The killers couldn’t lose: if they got away, they would be readmitted to the garden; if they were killed they would take the short cut to heaven. Within the Old Man’s perverted hortus conclusus are all the elements of the stereotypical cult – a megalomaniac leader, seduction and brainwashing of the young, membership of the elect, paradise guaranteed. As with a Hollywood script, successive writers gave a tweak to the more filmic features or, if they didn’t exist, made them up. The biggest name in the credits is that of Marco Polo.

  The reality, like the beige walls of Masyaf, was less highly coloured. Drugs and orgies were probably no more a feature of Nizari life than were-deer and harpies. Admittedly, the Nizaris were a missionary organization, with various stages of initiation into esoteric knowledge and with total obedience to their leader. They occupied mountain fastnesses which, if not paradises, were well provisioned – in the other main Nizari region south of the Caspian, one of their castles survived a Mongol siege for fourteen years. And, being a temporal as well as a spiritual power, they naturally disposed of opponents. Like the umbrella-wielding Bulgarian secret service in the 1970s, they just did it more neatly and publicly than anyone else.

  The assassinations were not always successful. One of the more celebrated failures was the attempt on the future King Edward I of England, at Acre in 1272. With him was his favourite writer of romances, Rustichello of Pisa – who, as fate had it, landed up a quarter of a century later in a Genoese gaol with Marco Polo. It would be a fair guess to assume that Rustichello’s memories of Acre, mixed with Polo’s garbled second-hand knowledge of other north Persian sects who undoubtedly did use hashish, produced the farrago of the full-blown Assassin legend. The story assured the two Italians of a goggling readership.

  At the time IB was travelling, the Nizaris had long ceased to be a political power. Sultan al-Nasir, however, used them occasionally as contract killers; one of his targets was Qarasunqur, a Mamluk cold-war defector to the Mongols. ‘Al-Nasir sent suicide killers against him time after time,’ IB wrote. ‘Some of them gained entrance to his house, but were killed before reaching him; others hurled themselves at him as he was riding, and were struck down by him.’ One contemporary account says that eighty Assassins lost their lives; another doubles the figure. Had the fabled jackals become a bunch of bungling pink panthers? Probably, to some extent; but the sensible Qarasunqur ‘used never to leave off his coat of mail, and never slept except in a room built of wood and iron’. Then, in 1328, the Mongols and the Mamluks agreed to a mutual extradition of defectors, or at least of their severed heads. Before he could be arrested Qarasunqur, in the best tradition of the spy story, ‘took a ring of his, which was hollowed out and contained a deadly poison, wrenched off its stone, swallowed the poison and died on the spot’. A less melodramatic historian than IB says that Qarasunqur died of diarrhoea.

  It took me some time to find my way out of the castle. Abu Firas was sitting on the bonnet of his car, looking out over the plain. We were joined by an old lady, who wore a corsage of wild flowers and nattered at us. When she had gone, Abu Firas said, ‘They’re a funny lot, you know, these Isma’ilis. When a man leaves his house to go to work, he first kisses his wife’s, um … her you-know-what, and he says “Out of you I came, and into you I shall return.”’

  I could see the old lady picking flowers as she walked down the path from the castle. She looked, I thought, a bit like Miss Elsie, my piano teacher – and about as likely as Miss Elsie to submit to having her you-know-what ritually osculated.

  We left Masyaf and drove higher into the mountains, following minor and diminishing roads in what we hoped was the direction of al-Ullayqah, ‘the Bramble’. The castle had eluded medieval geographers – even Abu ’l-Fida, who lived twenty miles away and determined the co-ordinates of towns in China, hadn’t mentioned it. At every junction, Abu Firas would stop, mutter ‘Bismillah’, then make a divinely inspired guess. We saw no other vehicles and only a few sparse, crofter-like villages. People were windblown and ruddy and stared at the car; there were girls with freckles and men with Hitler moustaches. We asked for directions perhaps a dozen times, but the responses were always halting and equivocal. ‘You see,’ said Abu Firas, ‘they are afraid.’

  ‘Afraid of what?’

  ‘Of everything.’

  We passed into a region of chalk-white limestone, then into one of cracked and patinated karst dotted with wind-gnawed boulders. In the bigger cracks huddled tiny terraces of red earth, separated by white walls and planted with tobacco. There were occasional patches of myrtle and oak scrub, dwarfed by the huge effort of growing.

  We came on al-Ullayqah unexpectedly. It sat on a little pap of rock surrounded by bare and silvery walnut trees, like a wen in an old man’s beard. I left Abu Firas and climbed up tobacco terraces that had invaded the outer walls, then through the main rampart via a breach defended by a thorn bush. I emerged bleeding but victorious. On the summit, all the flat spaces were cultivated. A hole in a field led into an underground cistern, and other shafts disappeared into mattamores and oubliettes. A few arches still stood, but most of the masonry had collapsed, prised apart by the roots of sumac and terebinth. The fortress was slowly reverting to its landscape, crumbling like a sandcastle in an incoming tide of vegetation.

  The Bramble was certainly a secret place. But on the far side of the summit there was a surprise: I had climbed up a pimple and now found it to be a crag beetling over a deep and shaggy valley. In the extreme distance I could see a town with puffing factory chimneys and, beyond it, the sea – which, by some trick of perspective, seemed to go uphill.

  Abu Firas joined me, unscathed, having found the easy way up. ‘That’s Baniyas,’ he said, pointing to the town. ‘And that wadi down below us is called Jahannam.’

  Gehenna. It seemed apt that one of the Old Man’s paradises should overlook a valley called Hell.

  We drove down towards Baniyas, passing signs advertising holy men’s shrines, little cubes topped by ping-pong-ball domes and set among stands of holm oak. Abu Firas explained that they belonged to the Alawis. I was hoping to find out something about this secretive sect, to which President al-Asad and the ruling junta belonged, in the coastal town of Jabalah. For the moment, however, we were on a different diversion.

  During his excursion along the coast IB passed by another castle, al-Marqab, ‘a mighty fortress on a lofty mountain, which was captured from the hands of the Christians by Sultan Qalawun; his son al-Nasir was born close by’. Qalawun, wrote a contemporary Egyptian historian, mustered the latest ordnance from his makhazin and dar al-sina’ah (the two terms have given
us ‘magazine’ and ‘arsenal’); it included Frank- and Devil-class mangonels, iron projectiles and flamethrowers. Surrounded by this high-tech weaponry, with sappers gnawing at the foundations like rats in the wainscot, the Christians – Abu ’l-Fida’s ‘Ustibar’, the Knights Hospitaller – sensibly sued for peace. From IB’s viewpoint, these events had happened only a generation before; but, like the Cuban Missile Crisis from ours, they belonged to a closed chapter of history.

  We dropped down to the coastal plain and drove south. Soon, Abu Firas pointed upwards to al-Marqab. I could see where the name came from – a marqab is a look-out post. Turning off the coast road, we wound up to the castle and passed beneath its fat black rump. The view from the top was stupendous: there was Baniyas in a wide arc of bay with a bleary Mediterranean behind and, to the south, mile after mile of plain on which polythene greenhouses glistened against the dark green of olives.

  The Hospitallers’ basalt command-centre seemed unreasonably massive and fascistical. Compared with the Old Man’s untidy mop of a castle at Masyaf, and the creeping alopecia at al-Ullayqah, this was a piece of sheer skinhead effrontery. Alone, I explored the interior, beating paths through acres of scrub and brambles, then feeling my way into vaults so dark that only the echo of my footsteps gave any impression of size. In the inner court there was a hole with a can on a rope next to it. I let the can fall, watched the rope uncoil, then heard a slap and a long, ringing reverberation. I hauled the can up and drank, then let it drop again and timed the echo: a full fifteen seconds. I was standing on a cathedral of water. A doorway off the court led into the Hospitallers’ chapel. Inside, an endless column of wind poured through the window of the apse and left by the west door, setting off a faint aeolian plainchant. It was a coldly beautiful interior, perfect for soldier-ascetics.