We joined a group around Qahtan’s chief, Shaykh Musallam of the Qazzoz subsection of the al-Bahr section of the Khawar sept of Bayt Kathir. At first we talked about jinn; then the shaykh steered the conversation on to Mubarak bin London, the traveller Wilfred Thesiger. In Arabian Sands, Thesiger grumbled at the Khawar for banning him from their territory in the late 1940s. Recently, the book had been translated into Arabic. ‘He called us avaricious,’ Shaykh Musallam said. ‘Nothing but praise for our neighbours; but we Khawar are avaricious!’
It was around midnight when Qahtan drove me home. On the way I reflected that, just occasionally, a character in a travel book could turn critic. It was a sobering thought.
The following day I turned to another item on my Battutian checklist, tambul. In his description of Dhofar, IB included a page-long ethnobotanical excursus on Piper betel. ‘The specific property of its leaves’, he wrote, ‘is that they sweeten the breath, remove foul odours of the mouth, aid digestion of food, and stop the injurious effect of drinking water on an empty stomach; the eating of them gives a sense of exhilaration and promotes cohabitation … I have been told, indeed, that the slave-girls of the sultan and of the amirs in India eat nothing else.’
I had originally assumed that the plant was brought to Dhofar by the Rasulids, who were responsible for introducing so many Indian species to Arabia. In fact it had arrived long before, as I discovered in the Plains of Gold of the tenth-century geographer and historian al-Mas’udi: ‘In our time,’ he said, ‘betel has overtaken all other breath-fresheners and is quite the fashion among the people of Mecca, the Hijaz and Yemen.’ (The information was an aside in a passage on Indian self-immolation. On his way to the pyre and bliss in the afterlife, al-Mas’udi wrote, the suicide parades through the markets. ‘He first has himself scalped, then places live coals, sulphur and juniper resin upon his head. Thus does he walk, the crown of his head smouldering, surrounded by the odours of his roasting brain, chewing betel and areca nut the while.’)
Habibah told me at lunch that she had invited a friend over for the evening, an expert on betel. First, though, I wanted to do some fieldwork. The obvious place to start was in the coconut groves and gardens across the road. There, I followed a track until I came to a little drystone cottage and byre. Outside it squatted a couple of Pakistanis. When I asked if they grew betel they looked surprised, but nodded. One of them led me to a fenced-off plot about thirty feet square. Inside this, palm trunks supported a trellis, thickly covered by shiny, ribbed leaves with sharp points; they would have made an elegant pot plant. IB’s description was accurate: ‘Trellises of cane are made for it, just as for grape vines, or else the betel is planted close to coconut palms, so that it may climb upon them as the pepper climbs.’ The Pakistani plucked some leaves for me, choosing the smaller, yellowish ones. Again, IB was spot-on when he said that the best leaves are yellow.
Back at the cottage I was surprised to see a large American car, and a prosperous-looking Omani sitting on a bed next to the byre. He called me over and explained that he was the owner of the farm. ‘In fact, I was born in this very house.’ He asked me where I was from. ‘Ah, I thought so …’ he said. Then, to the Pakistanis, ‘Be careful. This is a British spy.’ He twirled his camel-stick. ‘And where did you learn Arabic?’
‘Oxford,’ I said.
‘Hah! The university of spies!’
‘No,’ I replied. ‘That’s Cambridge.’
I had caught him off guard; but he went straight back on to the offensive. ‘You British have two vices.’
There was something alarming in his gaze. ‘What are they?’ I said, swallowing.
‘I’m not going to tell you. But I can judge you by your face.’ He scrutinized me more closely. ‘Hmm. Not bad. Half okay.’
He smiled, and apologized for the ribbing. ‘You see,’ he explained, ‘we are lazy men with nothing to do. I come here every day at four, waste a couple of hours, then go to the mosque.’
‘So you’re what we would call a gentleman farmer.’
‘“Gentleman farmer …” I like that.’
My host took me to see the cow in the byre, a miniature Dhofari with a tiny calf. He sniffed. ‘Ughh. What an awful smell!’ I said I thought it was a perfectly natural smell, but he told the men to light some frankincense. ‘It keeps away germs. And al-shaytan, Satan.’
He confessed he hadn’t the slightest idea about betel. ‘What use is it?’ he asked. In reply, I read him IB on the properties of the leaf. ‘Utter nonsense,’ he exclaimed. ‘Take my advice and don’t touch the stuff. Personally, I keep off all harmful substances. I hardly even drink tea. You do, I suppose. Well, have you ever seen your innards?’ I admitted I hadn’t. ‘Just take a piece of fresh beef and put it in some tea. It does this …’ he made a horrible, gurning face and blew a raspberry. ‘Your guts’, he said portentously, ‘are like that meat.’
That evening Habibah’s friend came to instruct us in tambul mysteries. After dismissing her chauffeur she entered the room, removed her veil, and smiled – a meteor-burst of flashes passing over a round, dark moon of a face. At first, Thumna was self-deprecating. ‘It’s my aunts who are the real authorities on tambul. One of them chews it as soon as she gets up in the morning.’ But, encouraged by Habibah, she produced a little bag of ingredients – she called it her mudayghah, her ‘little masticatory’ – and began work: two leaves one on top of the other, glossy sides down, a few chips of kusayr (areca nut), a scraping of kat (catechu – an astringent extract of acacia), a few dabs of nurah (paste of caustic lime), all folded into a neat green package. She worked with dexterity and a touch of drama, like a barman mixing a Singapore Sling.
Thumna took the first wad and popped it into her mouth. She had used the leaves collected on my afternoon expedition, and she pronounced them to be of excellent quality. As she chewed she looked saucily from one of us to the other, as if caught at a midnight feast. I heard the crunch of areca nut. The next wad she gave to me. The leaf was spicy, as one might expect from a member of the pepper family. Almost immediately I felt a slight contraction of the oesophagus; this was followed by a liquefaction in the mouth and a visit to the lavatory to spit out a quantity of tomato-red saliva. Soon, all four of us were chewing. Thumna was celebrant of the tambul eucharist, Habibah, who brought a smoking incense-burner, thurifer; Muhammad, master of the music, obeyed a subliminal urge to pun and put on ‘Sergeant Pepper’. By the third wad I, the bemused neophyte, began to feel faintly trippy; but perhaps it was the Beatles rather than the betel.
Talk turned inevitably to the supernatural. I recounted my strange experience on the bus at Edfu, Habibah a stranger one with a statue of Amenhotep III in Luxor. Then Thumna spoke: ‘When I was a child,’ she said, ‘I caught polio and my leg withered up. The British doctors said there was no hope. But the late Queen Mother took me on. She had me locked up in a darkened room and made me eat gazelle meat for forty days. She also sent me poultices for my leg, made from the powdered skins of snakes and chameleons.’ She shivered at the memory; I thought of Macbeth’s weird sisters, and Ibn al-Mujawir’s sorceresses (like them, the Queen Mother was Dhofari). ‘I was really scared. But my family would come and whisper to me through the shutters and tell me not to be afraid.’ She paused, and smiled distantly. ‘And then my leg got better. It … grew back.’
It was late when Thumna left. Muhammad was already in bed, and Habibah about to join him. As she bid me good-night, I asked her a question that had been on my mind. ‘Ya Habibah … do you think IB was right about tambul promoting, er, cohabitation?’
She gave me her hermetic look. ‘I’ll tell you in the morning,’ she said, and winked.
It was useful to have a research assistant.
*
I found the descendants of the Rasulid sultans of Yemen and Dhofar, as one does, by chance. The sign stopped me in my tracks: ‘Al-Ghassani for Domestic Appliances’ was as much of a surprise as ‘Plantagenet Hardware’ would be in England.
The Ghassanids were a noble Arabian tribe who migrated northward from Yemen in the third century AD. They ended up in Syria, where they founded a small but exquisite kingdom with its capital near Damascus. According to themselves and their court historians, the Rasulids were descended from this ancient stock: al-Mujahid, IB’s host in Yemen and ancestor of my friend Hasan, billed himself as ‘head of the oldest dynasty in the world’. Admittedly their immediate forbear Muhammad ibn Harun Rasul al-Ghassani had more than a touch of the tarbush; but they made no secret of their ancestors’ marrying into the Turkomans. It was the male line that mattered.
More recent commentators have axed the noble Arabian ancestry and given the dynasty an unadulterated Manjik Turkoman pedigree. If they are right, perhaps the Rasulids were only emulating the fictional Abu Zayd al-Saruji. This lovable wide-boy, the direct ancestor not only of numerous fake counts but also of Tristram Shandy, Baron Munchausen and the Reverend Jimmy Swaggart, ‘claimed at times to be a Sassanid, at others a Ghassanid’. As I entered the shop, I reflected that even if I had discovered a dodgy Ghassanid, I might still have turned up a blue-blooded Rasulid.
Ahmad al-Ghassani, the owner of the showroom, confirmed my expectations: he was, it seemed, a descendant of IB’s reclusive Sultan al-Mughith. He had a somewhat badw look to him; but when he showed me a picture of his cousin, the head of the family Shaykh Abdulqadir al-Ghassani, there was little doubt in my mind: the elderly gentleman distinctly resembled Hasan’s father in distant San’a. The branches of the family had separated seven hundred years ago, and yet those lusty Rasulid genes had conquered time.
Ahmad and a cousin, unable to show me their dead sultanic forbears in the Ribat Palace grounds, led me to a nearer graveyard and a more recent ancestor. It was Shaykh Abdulqadir’s father, ‘the Pious and Erudite Shaykh, Salim ibn Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Sayl al-Ghassani’.
‘Why “al-Sayl”?’ I asked, reading the tombstone. It was an unusual name: the Flash-flood.
‘It’s the flood at Marib mentioned in the Qur’an,’ the cousin elucidated, obscurely. ‘The Ghassanis are a very old family.’
Somewhere, a bell was ringing.
It was only later that I realized where I had come across Flash-flood: in Bertram Thomas’s Arabia Felix. ‘Next to me sat old Salim al Sail, another merchant, a God-fearing man and a Solomon among his kind. Human frailty made him claim descent from the noble Bait Ghassan, while all men whispered that he was a foundling child of low Shahari origin that a mountain torrent had swept down in a summer freshet.’ There was a further, charming insight into the pious shaykh: ‘Salim’s eyes, as became his eighty years, were growing dim, though were still capable of a twinkle when he begged in secret for an aphrodisiac.’
As I pondered the questions raised by Thomas’s revelation I realized that, despite the whispering campaign, logic was on the side of old Flash-flood. A burn in the Qara Mountains sounded only marginally more likely an origin than the left-luggage office at Victoria Station. More important, if the rumours were a fact, why advertise it on your tombstone? It would be like Wilde’s Jack having his card engraved ‘Mr Ernest Handbag-Worthing’. All the same, I wasn’t entirely convinced by the Rasulid pedigree of the Salalah Ghassanis. God, of course, is the most knowing; for the rest of us, genealogy is more art than science.
Then came another chance encounter of a different sort. Qahtan took me one day into the foothills behind Khawr Ruri, the spooky lagoon where Dhofari witches park their hyenas. Before us lay a most unexpected object – a wall, over a mile long and perhaps five hundred feet high, spanning the gap between two hills. ‘That’, said Qahtan, ‘is the Abyss of Darbat.’ As we drew nearer, the feature grew less wall-like and began instead to resemble the business-end of a grubby glacier. We stopped the car and approached on foot through dense scrub. Close up, the true nature of the Abyss became apparent from the little trickles of water that ran down it and continued through the undergrowth. I noticed that the stream-beds were lined with a greyish, calcareous deposit. The Abyss of Darbat was limescale on a grand scale.
We returned to the car and drove up a track beside the escarpment. Above it we emerged into a broad flat valley bordered by cave-riddled cliffs; one of the higher caves pierced the rock-face entirely, revealing a patch of sky beyond. The valley floor was covered with close-cropped grass, and dotted with cabin-like dwellings and huge trees. Shepherdesses tended flocks, boys milked camels, cattle mooched and munched, and all this busy hanging garden echoed with bleatings and grumblings. Further along the valley we came to a long meandering lake, not unlike the Serpentine and strewn with heron, coots, moorhens, duck and geese; lakeside trees rustled with doves and egrets. Here the andante pastorale of the lower valley gave way to an aleatoric allegro – hoots, coos, burbles, chirrups, twitters and clatters of weedy take-offs. Darbat was justly famous for its bird life. (I heard later – from a trustworthy person, as IB would say – that when the Sultan came to visit, art improved on nature: the birds of Darbat had their wings clipped.) Qahtan told me that the place was famous for its profusion of jinn.
While we were strolling along the lake, we came across a bus and a group of about twenty men sitting in a circle, silent and motionless, under a Ficus vasta. We greeted them hesitantly; they returned the greeting in unison. Qahtan and I looked at each other, then the men began to announce their names, one by one, as if they were about to take part in some bizarre team game. The last three names and their owners were recognizably non-Omani. ‘We are from the Arabic Department of the Teacher Training College,’ one of them explained, ‘and we are engaged in an educational expedition.’ I looked at him with awe: here was a man who spoke with case-endings.
We joined the circle. I dusted off my inflections and explained what had brought me to Dhofar. One of the foreign-looking men smiled. ‘We, that is my two colleagues and I,’ he said, ‘are from the Maghrib. I, like IB, am a native of Tangier …’
I stared at him. In Wadi Darbat, a migrant Tangerine was almost as improbable as a passing penguin.
‘… and’, he continued, ‘I am the author of two papers on my illustrious fellow citizen. “The Subjective and the Objective in the Travels of IB” explores the continuous narrative interplay between IB’s internal reactions to the alien environment, to what one may term the Other – the aja’ib al-asfar, the “Wonders of Travel” of his full title – and his reportage of external phenomena – ghara’ib al-amsar, the “Marvels of Cities”. My second paper focuses on the latter aspect, c’est à dire l’aspect miraculeux des Voyages. I am firmly of the opinion that it is a grave mistake to dismiss the miraculous, as some commentators are prone to do; indeed, we must contemplate miracles more closely, for they are an integral part of the Travels as a valid historical document.’
I realized that he had paused, and that the circle was looking in my direction. ‘Oh, me too,’ I said wholeheartedly. For a while I spoke of my own, relatively sublunar approach to IB, of my search for physical and human survivals from his world. Then one of the other professors looked at his watch and whispered something to the Tangerine.
‘You must excuse us,’ he said. ‘We have a very full programme.’
The group rose simultaneously, bade us farewell and bumped off in their bus.
‘Well, that was a coincidence, no?’ I said to Qahtan.
‘One of the wonders of travel,’ he replied.
As the afternoon waned, we too left Darbat to its shepherdesses, its birds and its jinn. Qahtan pulled off the track that descended by the Abyss and prayed the sunset prayer on an eminence. I watched a layer of orange light – concentrated orange, tangerine in fact – floating on the humidity of the plain, and thought about the meeting. It was certainly a coincidence; but, like the infrequent transit of planets in different orbits, there was also a fatedness about it.
The light had gone. Qahtan folded his Michelin Man prayer mat, and we set off for Salalah.
That night Qahtan and I joined some of his Khawar kinsmen on the beach. We smoked
apple tobacco, and for a time conversation revolved again around Mubarak bin London’s attack on the Khawar in Arabian Sands. Then, by popular request, Qahtan’s nephew began telling a story: ‘Uncle Qahtan’s family are called Ba’ir.’ He tapped my knee. ‘You know the meaning of “Ba’ir”? Yes, that’s right, a camel. Just checking. They’re called this because their immediate ancestor was incredibly strong. He could kill a man just by throwing a sharpened flint at him. Now Sa’id Ba’ir (Uncle Qahtan’s father and my maternal grandfather) once found himself in Kuwait and short of money. But he was a clever man. He borrowed some cash from a Palestinian and went to the printer’s. He ordered fifteen thousand passports – well, pieces of paper that said: “Government of the Ba’iri State. Temporary Travel Document.” Then he sold these, to Indians and so on. He covered his costs, and made quite a bit on top.’
I thoroughly approved of a blow struck against the tyranny of passports; but it all seemed an unlikely tale. Then Qahtan said, ‘I once met a Sudanese in Kenya. When he heard my family name was Ba’ir, he said, “You’re not by any chance related to Sa’id Ba’ir?” I said, “Yes. He’s my father.” Then he said, “Well, your father sold me a bit of paper in Kuwait. A Ba’iri State passport.” God, I was worried when I heard that. Then he said, “And I travelled all the way to Sudan on it. Nobody ever questioned it.”’
Everyone laughed. They must have heard the story many times, but it was one that would never grow stale – like the stories of Abu Zayd al-Saruji, the fake Ghassanid.
The pipe was charged with more apple tobacco. Qahtan’s nephew drew on it. The sea sucked at the sand. ‘Tell the one about the bisht,’ they said.
‘Ah, the bisht.’ He tapped my knee. ‘You know what a bisht is? Yes, that’s right – a kind of cloak. Just checking. You see, the bisht is important to the story. Well, Grandfather had a particularly fine bisht. No one else had one as fine. Anyway, when he was in Kuwait he kept bumping into this Mahri. The Mahri coveted Grandfather’s bisht. He wanted it more than anything else in the world. On top of this, the Mahris and the Khawar are not the best of friends, and the Mahri kept slagging Grandfather off. One day he said, “You Khawar, you’re nothing but slaves.”’ He drew on the pipe. ‘Now Grandfather was wandering about, feeling really pissed off by all this. Then he spotted this slave, hanging out in the suq, a really big black man. Well, to cut a long story short, Grandfather went up to the slave and said, “Come and shag me on the beach.”’ I noticed a general turn of heads among the neighbouring groups of beach-bums. ‘“Tonight. I’ll be sleeping in such-and-such a spot” – he described the place exactly – “and I’ll be wearing this bisht. You can’t mistake it. There’s a full moon, and there isn’t another bisht like it in the whole of Kuwait. Oh, and when you come, don’t say anything. Just get on with it as quickly as possible.”’
Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah Page 27
