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

by Mackintosh-Smith, Tim

  I studied the face in the portrait – the copper skin, white beard and black eyebrows beneath a magenta, purple and orange turban. The image, so formal in pose yet so surprisingly coloured, might have been taken from a Mamluk miniature; indeed, I thought, it may be that in his magnificence, his capriciousness, in the absoluteness of his rule and his manner of achieving it (like IB’s two great patrons, the sultans of Delhi and of the Maghrib, Sultan Qabus overthrew his father) he is, of all contemporary monarchs, the one most like those of the Travels. That organist’s job needn’t be a career change: it could be a chance to do some really profound inverse archaeology. Or could have been, had not the winged chariots of mortality been bearing down on me.

  Having exhausted the possibilities of the telephone directory, I turned to my map. If I couldn’t sail down the Coast of the Fish-eaters, I would have to motor down it. This, of course, was assuming that I could find transport. Most of the coast road was classed as ‘Graded’; however, where the Wahibah Sands – a dune desert the size of Wales – meet the Indian Ocean, it became an ‘Other Track’. More worryingly, there was a short but significant-looking gap in this Other Track. Then, five hundred miles from Sur, on the shore of Kuria Muria Bay, the road reached a place called Qanawt, and ran out. In the middle of the fifty-mile lacuna before it picked up again, and marooned like an onshore island at the base of the 6,000-foot Jabal Samhan, lay the small settlement of Hasik, visited by IB. From here onwards stretched misty, thuriferous Dhofar, along the coast to Salalah, then to Raysut, Rakhyut, Khirfut, Dalkut and the modern border with Yemen, beyond which the toponymic monorhyme continued.

  Strangely, despite the gaps in the route and the uncertainties of hitching along six hundred miles (not counting the kinks) of some of the most thinly populated coastline in the world, my spirits had risen. Robert Burton was right: maps are a certain cure for melancholy. Even the small print at the bottom of this one – ‘The depiction of a road or track does not imply a satisfactory motorable surface. The general public should not attempt to travel along routes not served by maintained roads.’ – did not diminish my new feelings of, if not exactly optimism, then at least agreeable fatalistic acceptance. I almost allowed myself to wonder if I might catch up with Khalfan’s sambuq.

  *

  Next morning I crossed the creek to al-Ayjah and walked a mile or so to the bikab (pick-up) stop for Ras al-Hadd, the Arabian Land’s End where the Gulf of Oman becomes the Indian Ocean. I’d been waiting only a short time when a boy came up. ‘Are you the one who’s looking for a boat?’ he asked. I nodded. ‘Well, there’s a sambuq in the creek leaving for al-Khuwaymah.’

  The Evil Eye, according to some Arabs, has a partner called the Eye of Joy. Its speciality is disappointment. Count chickens before they hatch, and the Eye of Joy will addle the eggs. ‘You’re having me on,’ I replied, hoping the Eye of Joy had ears to hear.

  ‘No, it’s true,’ he insisted.

  As a further placatory gesture to the Eye, I left my bag with an Indian shopkeeper by the bikab stop. ‘I there is come, same-same bag half hour in sha Allah,’ I ventured. ‘There is known?’

  ‘Okey-doke,’ said the shopkeeper, wobbling his head.

  I walked back to the creek slowly, conscious that the Eye was peeled for any overt signs of optimism.

  The sambuq was indeed going to al-Khuwaymah, a small place at the end of the graded road and a whole fifth of the way to Dhofar! I returned briskly to the shop, picked up my bag and trotted back down to the creek. I hoped the short voyage would take as long as possible: my diary badly needed writing up; and there would be turtles to watch, and dolphins.

  The skipper was profuse in his apologies. There was something very wrong with the engine; the sambuq was not going to al-Khuwaymah, or anywhere else. The Eye of Joy winked lubriciously.

  I trudged back to the bikab stop, cursing the Eye, my heavy bag and my walking shoes which, out of sheer spite, had given me a Battutian blister. In consolation, a bikab arrived immediately. It dropped me twenty miles on at an istirahah, a ‘rest room’ – euphemism for a busless bus shelter – outside the village of Ras al-Hadd. There were boats everywhere, miniature hawris, bums and sambuqs on columns and triumphal gateways, mocking my travel plans as the sea had mocked the Ancient Mariner’s thirst.

  The outskirts of Ras al-Hadd were deserted. Knowing now that to travel hopelessly was the only way to arrive, I made myself at home in the shelter and contemplated the long wait ahead. As a result, a series of lifts – Keralan, Goan, Pakistani and Omani – took me down the coast with wondrous rapidity. Every so often we passed a little pavilion on the shore, in the middle of nowhere. Except that nowhere was completely nowhere: at regular intervals there were wooden shops, ‘Food Stuff Sale and Luxuries’, run by Indians. I wondered if they were victims of some dreadful inundation in Malabar, swept out to sea by the monsoon and washed up here, goods and all.

  By mid-afternoon I was in al-Khuwaymah. It was the end of the road and felt like it. With its single street of Indian-run shops, it might have stood in for Tombstone, Arizona, if Bollywood ever made a chapatti Western. There was, it seemed, no hope of transport on the Other Track that headed south between the Wahibah Sands and the ocean and which, by all accounts, was ‘very bad’. I remembered the enigmatic gap on the map.

  Down on the beach I expressed my feelings towards al-Khuwaymah by chucking a pebble at a stupid, kitschy model boat on a pedestal. Another column supported a crudely painted terrestrial globe on which Africa, Arabia and Asia were separated by blue sea. Another ritual lapidation; then violence gave way to the morbids. I felt islanded, like those drifting continents.

  Two Pakistani brothers, motor mechanics, took pity on me and fed me roti and dhal in their workshop. My depression lifted slightly as we discussed the recent débâcle of the bumpy test pitch in Jamaica (the brothers were from Sialkot, the cricket bat capital of the world), the political début of Imran Khan (which they found amusing), and Qur’anic and Biblical accounts of the Ascension (tricky in a mix of Indo-Arabic and English). Afterwards I bedded down outside the workshop, to be woken twice in the night – by a shower of rain, and by a rat scuttling over my head.

  Breakfast was roti and dhal. The brothers started working on an outboard motor, while I went and sat by the road under a matt sky. As the morning wore on, the sky took on a slight polish. I looked at my watch. The morning hadn’t worn on at all: I had been sitting there for five minutes. Time is never so elastic as when one travels. It is motion measured; when motion stops, so does time.

  At ten o’clock I made the decision to turn back; then realized that in practice it was meaningless for there was no transport either way. The Pakistanis, however, seemed keen for me to stay. They were shocked at the idea of payment, but at least I could give them English lessons and novelty value. I resigned myself to roti and dhal, to measuring out the days, perhaps the weeks, lento, in lentils.

  Then, towards noon, came the sound of approaching cars. My hopes rocketed; then fell like a spent stick – it was an army patrol. They skidded to a halt, three jeeps bulging with jerrycans and bristling with guns and aerials. The soldiers leapt off, raffish in desert camouflage, headscarves and goggles. ‘So you didn’t find your boat,’ one of them said.

  I recognized him as a taxi driver who had given me a ride in Sur. ‘No. And now I’m stuck here.’

  The soldier spoke privately to the lieutenant, who then turned to me. ‘We’ll give you a lift.’

  I almost kissed him.

  Two minutes later we were whizzing along the beach – the Other Track – under a now mercurial sky between two oceans, of sand and of water. We chased flocks of gulls, sending them shrieking and glittering into the air. It was as good as sailing. I thumbed my nose at the Eye of Joy.

  The duties of the Sultan’s Armed Forces Shore Security Patrol were not onerous. We stopped to buy a small shark from some fishermen, then to examine what looked from a distance like a piece of modernist civic sculpture. It was a lon
g-dead beached whale. ‘It is full of worms,’ said the lieutenant, as it quivered under our exploratory proddings like a great grey blancmange. I tried to imagine this inert, axungious blob alive, flexing and somersaulting through the deep ocean between Hasik and the Kuria Murias. The thought reminded me of IB’s houses made of fishes’ bones.

  Some forty miles from al-Khuwaymah we reached the gap in the map: a series of tremendous dunes like beached white whales. This last convulsion of the Wahibah Sands was banked up against rocks that fell straight into the sea, forming a barrier that looked insurmountable. The other two jeeps attempted the easiest dune, charging its flank then, before reaching the crest, sliding back down sideways.

  It was our turn. ‘Hang on with all your strength,’ the lieutenant shouted. I grasped the machine-gun mounting. ‘And don’t hold us responsible’, he yelled as the sky raced towards us, ‘for any …’ We took off. My stomach hit my tonsils.

  We landed, and glissaded elegantly down the far side of the dune.

  As if shamed into action, the other two jeeps leapt the crest immediately. While we were exchanging congratulations, I noticed a wetness about my trousers. I looked down and saw a red stain on the right leg: I must have bashed my shin as we took off. The soldiers bandaged it up deftly while the lieutenant looked on, concerned. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, as the pain came on. ‘It’ll be a fine souvenir of our trip together.’ I still have the scar.

  They dropped me off at a place called al-Shannah, a café and a quay on the margin of a mirage-haunted salt-flat. Again, the mainspring of time wound down.

  At first I was the only customer. But over the long course of the afternoon the population of the café grew as other passengers arrived – by the sensible, inland route – for the ferry to Masirah Island. One of them thought I was a Moroccan. ‘I just wondered,’ he said. ‘You look like one. And not long ago a Maghribi traveller came through here. He said he’d visited thirty countries.’ A sensation passed through me as it had on the track to Qalhat – that faint, follicular thrill that comes when you realize you may not be alone.

  The ferry came after sunset, and I boarded with the other passengers. A visit to the island would be something of a departure from IB. ‘We came next to the Island of Masirah,’ he wrote, ‘to which the master of the ship that we were sailing on belonged. It is a large island, whose inhabitants have nothing to eat but fish. We did not land on it, because of the distance of the anchorage from the shore; besides, I had taken a dislike to these people.’ IB had been put off the Masiris by their violation of an important dietary rule of Islam: earlier in the voyage, they had stopped at an uninhabited island and stocked up on edible seabirds. They killed the birds, however, not by slitting their throats but by wringing their necks, a shocking thing for a pious Muslim like IB.

  In contrast to IB, I had rather taken to the only Masiri I had met (many years before, at a performance of Humperdinck’s Hansel und Gretel). Now, curiosity was leading me to the island, but also a thread of hope. I was reasonably confident that Khalfan’s sambuq would visit Masirah on its way down the coast; even if I had missed it, there might be other possibilities. After all, the very best ancient and medieval authorities wrote of Masirah’s importance as a shipping centre – the first-century Periplus, for instance, spoke of a constant trade with the Yemeni frankincense port of Qana. ‘Yonder looms the island,’ I hummed as the ferry waddled across the straits, ‘yonder lie the ships …’

  The harbour, of course, was empty. I found my way to the island’s only hotel. It was locked and unlit, but a scrap of paper on the door said ‘Welcome. Hotel Open’. I knocked, then called into the darkness. Eventually, a sleepy Indian appeared from the shadows. He unlocked the door, found the register and motioned that I should sign myself in.

  On the Indian’s part, the transaction took place in silence. All my efforts at conversation were met with mute smiles. Finally I tried the most basic approach possible: ‘I,’ I said, pointing at myself, ‘Tim. There is name, you?’ I pointed at him.

  ‘Abu Kalam,’ he said, grinning. The Father of Speech.

  Abu Kalam showed me to a large room that had that newly unwrapped smell of wood-glue and fresh polythene. I had the feeling I might be the first tourist on Masirah.

  In the morning I could see why. Masirah was not exactly the Ibiza of the Arabian Sea. You could eat fish, as in the days of the Periplus. You could watch planes taking off from the airforce base. You could use your Visa card in the Oman International Bank, and call direct to the Windward Islands from the public phone box. You could buy a packet of Frosties in the Food Stuff and Luxuries, or a ‘tummy trimmer’ – I listened in admiration as a lady in a wet-look mask discussed its benefits with the shopkeeper in fluent Indo-Arabic. What you could not do was find a boat to Dhofar.

  Down at the quay I learned from some fishermen that I had indeed missed Khalfan’s sambuq again. They seemed to regard coasting to Salalah as a quaint and slightly foolhardy form of travel. ‘Our fathers’ generation’, one of them told me, ‘used to sail to al-Mukalla, Bombay, everywhere. Now the Sultan’s built roads and airports, and we just go out fishing around the island.’ The words of Abdullah al-Jumahi of Jabalah came back to me, not for the first time: ‘You have to remember you’re talking about a long time ago.’ It didn’t matter whether the time difference was a generation, six hundred years or – in the case of the Periplus – two thousand. In Oman, everything pre-Qabus was a long time ago.

  ‘Of course, you might be able to get a lift in the sikayfan,’ suggested another fisherman. I looked blank. ‘From the airbase,’ he explained. The exotic-sounding word, I realized, must represent something like ‘Skyvan’. It sounded most undignified.

  ‘If you want to be IB,’ the first fisherman said, ‘then you’ll have to buy your own boat.’

  On the character of the Masiris both IB and the Periplus, which called them ‘a villainous lot’, are gravely mistaken. Hamud, an employee of the bank, invited me to lunch at the house of his wife’s family. It was a series of rooms set around an airy courtyard, entered via a little gothic doorway. We ate a mound of rice and mutton – the meat slaughtered, I have no doubts, according to the strictest Islamic principles.

  After lunch Hamud’s young brothers-in-law showed me their school history textbook. It contained a chapter on ‘IB in Oman’ followed by comprehension questions and an essay title – ‘Compare and contrast today’s Oman with that described by IB, with special reference to the civilizational progress which the Sultanate has witnessed.’ It was, I told the boys, rather what I was trying to do. (I didn’t add that, being a fourteenth-century fogey, I wasn’t making the assumption implicit in the second phrase.) As we read through the text together, I realized that something was wrong: it had been censored. The grumbles about unhalal seabirds and the guide from Sur to Qalhat had evaporated off the page; suggestions elsewhere that the Omanis enjoyed eating donkeys, and that ‘their womenfolk are much given to debauchery’, had also been excised. It was a travesty of the Travels.

  I recalled a bowdlerized Egyptian edition I had come across, published in 1939 for the use of students. ‘We cannot conceal from the reader’, the introduction said, ‘the fact that IB’s pen, in unguarded moments, recorded words and expressions from which pudency should avert its gaze. We have therefore diligently sought out and erased such passages, in order zealously to preserve the modesty of students whose eyes might otherwise have fallen upon, or whose ears overheard, that which they would consider shocking.’ Sales of the unexpurgated edition must have soared.

  After lunch, Hamud presented me with an Oman International Bank diary drenched in scent. He then sprayed me and the tassel of his dishdashah, which the Omanis use as a sort of pomander, with what seemed to be a good half-bottle of eau-de-toilette. Reeking like a pair of courtesans, we set off in his Landcruiser for a tour of the island. As I had already suspected, IB hadn’t missed much. Masirah seemed to be composed of expanses of khaki gravel, set at slightly different inc
linations and dotted with occasional shack-like settlements. ‘Mainlanders always think we’re a bit of a backwater,’ said Hamud. I nodded sympathetically. ‘But we have a saying: “Masirah’s not short. Masirah is the neck of Oman.”’ He wasn’t entirely sure what the saying meant.

  That evening I sat in the hotel room and wrote up my diary. Outside, the wind sighed along the shore. I got to the end of the day’s entry, then had a thought: why not carry on writing? Mandeville had made up large parts of his Travels and so, according to recent scholarship, had Marco Polo. The hotel was cheap by Omani standards, and I certainly wasn’t going to be disturbed by the Father of Speech. On second thoughts, I realized that you couldn’t get away with it these days. The time was long past when travellers, according to the old proverb, might lie by authority.

  I looked at the map and saw that I was only a third of the way from Sur to Salalah. There was absolutely no doubt in my mind that IB, in my position, would have gone to the airbase and wheedled a lift in the sikayfan. Perhaps that was the answer. I would decide tomorrow.