I read Awfit IB’s account of his visit to Jabal Lum’an. ‘“Lum’an”?’ he said. ‘I’ve never heard of it.’
‘Well, there’s nowhere else that would fit, except for one of the Kur … the Hallaniyat,’ I said. ‘I mean, the Hallaniyat do seem to have had several other names. Like the Islands of Bani Ghalfan.’
‘“Bani Ghalfan”? What is this “Bani Ghalfan”?’
I looked at him in surprise. ‘Bani Ghalfan were the Mahri tribe who lived on the islands, probably for centuries.’
‘Who told you this? Who was it?’
I was taken aback. ‘I thought it was common knowledge. Sayyid Sa’id called them the Islands of Bani Ghalfan when he gave them to Queen Victoria,’ I said. Awfit grimaced. I had put my foot in it. ‘And the name’s in Luqman’s History of the Islands of Yemen.’ Squelch went the other foot.
Awfit was looking at me like the aghast chorus in an H.M. Bateman cartoon. I was the Man Who Talked About The Past. ‘I represent the state in the Hallaniyat. All information comes through my office alone. Anyone giving false information will be made to bear the responsibility!’ He rose and glided out of the yard. I hadn’t realized inverse archaeology could arouse such passion. I sat there, wide-eyed and shaken: Awfit was my equivalent of that fifteen-foot mako.
‘Wow!’ Steve exclaimed. ‘What was all that about?’
‘History.’
‘He can be a bit sensitive, Awfit, especially about this name business. Evidently there was a Sultanic Decree that made it an imprisonable offence even to say …’ he lowered his voice ‘… “Kuria Muria”. I didn’t know about it. We were originally called the Kuria Muria Expedition. I had a load of writing-paper done. Had to bin the lot and start again.’
Awfit was too young to remember much of the pre-Qabusian era, but I had heard that the old head islander was still alive – the one who had worn a navy surplus tunic to receive Sir William Luce. That evening I found him, a handsome man in his eighties, sitting on the gravel in the gateway of one of the villas and wearing a swish dishdashah.
Shaykh Sa’id seemed to be expecting me. I had hardly introduced myself when he began a short but vehement speech. ‘These are the days of blessing! Before, we had only hovels and caves to live in. Now we have progress! God bless His Majesty the Sultan! If you meet him, give him a kiss from me, from Shaykh Sa’id bin Muhammad!’
I tried to nudge him into the past, but he had nothing more to say. As I rose to leave, his son spoke: ‘You must only write good things about us.’
On the way back to the guest-house it crossed my mind that Shaykh Sa’id might have been nobbled by Awfit. Then again, how could I assume that the old man would have wanted to talk about the past? The houses of fishes’ bones and seaweed may have represented an unbroken architectural tradition that went back to IB, and presumably long before; but there was no denying that they must have been hovels. I began to understand why the islands had been renamed. To call the Kuria Murias the Hallaniyat was, in effect, to claim that their inhabitants no longer lived in the same old place; that they had moved on, progressed in a more than metaphorical sense. They had been resettled in a new and improved island – one that incidentally occupied the same co-ordinates as their former home. None of this boded well for inverse archaeology.
The Kuria Murias being the Arabian equivalent of Rhum, Eigg and Muck, one might imagine them to be a tranquil spot. Next morning, however, I found myself simultaneously eating breakfast with some of the divers and being videoed by others, interrogated by the Deputy Governor, and videoed and interviewed by a journalist from the Moral Guidance Department of the Omani Ministry of Defence. The power breakfast had also attracted a crowd of about thirty onlookers who murmured a commentary in rapid Shahri.
‘“Kuria Muria” is a British invention.’
‘Could you pass the jam? No it isn’t, it’s in al-Idrisi.’
‘We’re making this short film, and we’d like some impressions of the islands.’
‘Twenty-five people have been imprisoned for using the name “Kuria Muria”.’
‘I’m a bit short on impressions. I only got here yesterday afternoon. I haven’t seen anything yet. Look Awfit, “Khuryan and Muryan” is in Ibn al-Mujawir as well.’
‘… some impressions, please, Mr Makuntush?’
‘I said I’ve only just got here.’
‘Ten of them were imprisoned on the island, fifteen on the mainland.’
‘… impressions?’
‘Would “jewels of ever-changing hue set in a placid sea” do you?’
‘Have a banana.’
Eventually the film crew went back to the airstrip, the divers went off to dive, and I told Awfit that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. It lost something in translation, but he seemed to appreciate the sentiment.
I moved the conversation on to the safer subject of birds. Awfit told me that the Hallaniyat were a paradise for ornithologists.
‘And not just ornithologists,’ I said. ‘I’ve heard that the cormorant, and the eggs of the dagh, the booby, are particularly delicious.’ Awfit frowned; a ripple of silence passed around the chorus of islanders. ‘I mean,’ I went on, floundering, ‘gulls’ eggs are served in some of the best London restaurants, and I wondered …’
‘I am not aware’, said Awfit tartly, ‘that any of the present generation has eaten these things. Perhaps the islanders did, long ago.’
Again, the locked door of the past. I approached my major topic with no great hope of success, and read out IB’s account of his meeting with the holy man – diplomatically omitting the name ‘Lum’an’. There were a few expressions of wonderment. ‘Now,’ I went on, hesitantly, ‘it’s just a thought, but I wondered if the hermit might have been buried at the site of his cell.’ It was dangerous ground: the past, and faith. ‘I don’t suppose there are any tombs of holy men on the islands?’
To my amazement, the question released a flood of information. Awfit told me the names of seven holy sayyids, six buried on Hallaniyah and one on Sawdah. ‘We think they all came from the mainland, some of them a long time ago. And I’ve got an idea. Your traveller says he didn’t understand what the hermit was saying. Perhaps he was speaking in Shahri.’ Or, I thought but didn’t say, Mahri.
I smiled at Awfit. At last we were getting somewhere.
*
Broadly speaking, the sea was blue. It was also blue-green, green-blue, jade, navy, purple and gold – little worms of colour that wriggled around the slender hull. Sa’d and his brother Ahmad spoke occasionally to point things out: a cave, an osprey, a trickle of water on the cliff face. As we neared Hallaniyah Head the cliffs rose higher, tier upon tier of galleries like a collapsing Colosseum. The sea became more boisterous. Wriggle, kiss and tickle turned to slap then, around the point, to head-butt. The water went blue-black, like a bruise.
IB recalled climbing up to visit his hermit. I had therefore eliminated five of the seven holy tombs, since they were at or near sea-level. This left two, Sayyids Ali Hajj and Sa’id, as candidates for the traveller’s holy man. With Awfit’s permission, I was going to the far end of the island to visit them.
Island hermits appear from time to time in the records of Islamic mysticism. That prototype traveller and solitary, al-Khadir, would occasionally appear from an island in the Atlantic to guide ships in distress. IB’s contemporary Ibn al-Khatib wrote of a Berber holy man who had journeyed ‘to one of the islands of the western sea, impelled by divine command to devote himself solely to God’. IB himself came across other island hermits, at the head of the Gulf on Abbadan – at the time an island and a sort of Islamic Athos – and off the coast of India. The only fully authenticated hermit of Hallaniyah was later in date. The man, a retired Iraqi brigadier, was ‘living in a stone hut in the village for which he paid rent’, the British Consul in Muscat reported in 1954. ‘He seems a very simple and harmless type and is perhaps a little mad.’
The Consul would probably have described IB’s he
rmit in similar terms. ‘On top of the Hill of Lum’an,’ the traveller remembered, twenty-five years after his visit,
is a hermitage built of stone, with a roof of fish bones, and with a pool of collected rainwater outside it. When we cast anchor under the hill, we climbed up to this hermitage, and found there an old man lying asleep. We saluted him, and he woke up and returned our greeting by signs; then we spoke to him, but he did not speak to us and kept shaking his head. The ship’s company offered him food, but he refused to accept it. We then begged of him a prayer on our behalf, and he kept moving his lips, though we did not know what he was saying. He was wearing a patched robe and a felt bonnet. The ship’s company declared that they had never before seen him on this hill. We spent the night on the beach, and prayed the afternoon and sunset prayers with him. He continued to pray until the hour of the last night-prayer. He had a beautiful voice in his reciting of the Qur’an. When he ended the last night-prayer, he signed to us to withdraw, so, bidding him farewell, we did so, with astonishment at what we had seen of him. Afterwards, when we had left, I wished to return to him, but on approaching him I felt in awe of him; fear got the better of me, and when my companions returned for me, I went off with them.
Awe – the conflict in IB between fascination and fear – had given a minor encounter on an insignificant island all the remembered intensity of a recurring dream. But while IB recalled the hermit with filmic clarity, the topographical details are far sparser, edited by time: the person was, as usual, more important than the place. I had little to go on, and my idea that the hermit might have been buried at the site of his cell was no more than wild conjecture. And yet I had to look, even though I sensed I was looking for something intangible.
Soon after passing Hallaniyah Head we reached a small bay called Ahawl. The swell was too big to land, so Ahmad dropped the anchor and Sa’d and I jumped into the water. It came up to our chests. We waded ashore and climbed up a bluff above a small wadi. Sayyid Ali Hajj’s grave was a boat-shaped pile of stones within a larger oval enclosure. Inside this was what looked like a wooden post-box. Sa’d said it once contained cups, ‘so that visitors could drink coffee’. He also told me that anyone who removed anything from a sayyid’s grave would be punished. ‘Even if you just took a pebble, your boat would be wrecked.’ While he recited the Fatihah, I scanned the surroundings. Those three clues – the beach, the climb up, the pool – were all I had to follow; the only distinctive one, in a steep island with many sandy bays, was the pool. There was no trace of one.
We swam back to the boat and continued south, Sa’d and I shivering in our sodden clothes. At the bay of Ahalt we were able to beach the hawri, and all three of us climbed upwards through rocky gulleys. Sa’d picked up the skeleton of a bird. ‘It’s a dagh,’ he said. A booby. ‘We sometimes catch them on al-Qibli, then skin them and salt the flesh.’
We climbed on, well out of sight of the beach. My hopes fell. The putative hermitage had to be in sight of the shore: how else would IB have known of its existence? Eventually we reached an eminence of decaying granite. From here the low eastern point of the island was visible, and beyond it al-Qibli, the island of boobies. And directly below us to the south-east lay a shoreline fringed with sand. I felt – was it because I wanted to feel it? – a faint cognitive stirring, like the twitch of the rod in a dowser’s hand.
We took off our footwear and approached the grave of Sayyid Sa’id, a low pile of fractured rocks topped by a couple of bleached shells. Slowly, Sa’d and Ahmad walked around it, stroking the stones and kissing their hands. After they had recited the Fatihah, we sat down in silence. Next to us was a shallow depression in the granite where, in time of rain, the water would collect.
‘Who was Sayyid Sa’id?’ I asked them, breaking the silence.
‘God gave us the sayyids,’ Ahmad said. ‘There were many jinn here. The sayyids protect us from the jinn and from all evil.’
More silence. Then Sa’d spoke: ‘A man from the island was captured by people from the north. They tied his hands and feet and threw him into the sea, off Shinas - that’s the small island we could see from Sayyid Ali Hajj’s grave. But the man called out, Ya Sayyid Sa’id! The next thing he knew, he was sitting here where we’re sitting, safe and sound. The pirates’ boat was destroyed – bang! like a torpedo hitting it – and they were all drowned. Except for a slave, who swam all the way to Sawqirah. After that everybody knew that if they harmed us, a curse would fall on them.’
‘The sayyids are very powerful,’ Ahmad said. ‘You can only visit them if they want you to.’
As we left the grave, I wanted more than at any previous time on my travels to raise the ghost of IB and ask him, Was this the place?
Ahmad and Sa’d took me to an old site nearby, called Akhruf. We poked about in the remains of a round structure of big granite pebbles, and found some ancient cane-like netting. ‘This is what they used to hold down the seaweed on the roof,’ said Ahmad. Sa’d pointed out a flat stone which he said was used for ladies’ make-up. It all seemed immensely ancient, like Skara Brae. I said I was impressed by the brothers’ knowledge of the past. They smiled, and told me that the house was where their parents had spent the summer months, before Sultan Qabus and popular housing.
We had a snack lunch of sisan, dried spinefoot, then a nap in a cave. As I dozed, I was visited by doubts. The scholarly Gibb had been certain that Lum’an was Hallaniyah; but might it be another of the Kuria Murias? Then, could there be some coastal rock elsewhere, too small to appear on the maps? To go into all the possibilities I would need the resources of a major expedition and to be, like the Iraqi brigadier, perhaps a little mad. In short, I would never know if I had found IB’s island, let alone his hermit.
I thought back to that depression in the granite, and wished IB had left just a few more clues. Should I return to the grave, and scrabble around for something carbon-datable? But then, I could take nothing away. Except something intangible, insusceptible to calibration and rational investigation: awe.
*
I left Hallaniyah the following morning with Maurice, Khalil, the tentative blessings of Awfit and five tons of fish. Again we passed Sawdah, the Black Island – not so much black as rusty – then the smaller, lower Hasikiyyah. In my imagination, every protruding rock on them became a grave or a ruined hermitage.
The sea simmered with activity. Something slick and black shot out of the water and fell back with a slap. A long slender fin rose above the surface, like Excalibur, then disappeared. All around there were other intriguing surfacings and bubblings in the rich bouillabaisse of the coastal waters. ‘The sea’, wrote the traveller Abu Hamid, ‘has a greater share of wonders than any other part of creation.’ As we reached the mainland at Ras Nus I wrote in my notebook: ‘Sea still full of aja’ib, even if wonders now = e.g. whale songs.’
Precisely on cue, Khalil nudged me. Only yards away from the sambuq a prodigious head was emerging. It lingered, dead still above the water, black, barnacled, beautiful as sea-born Venus. Ponderously, it sank. There was a jet of water. Then a tail appeared – a great glistening V that stood for a moment then slid, slowly, vertically downwards. For all its size, it left hardly a ripple.
Next morning I passed Ras Nus again, in another sambuq – the Sea-Lion of Captain Rashid of Salalah. The whale was there too, with a friend. They were both whacking the water with their tails. Perhaps my timing was bad, but I told Captain Rashid a story from the Wonders of India of Captain Buzurg about a ship in the Red Sea getting rammed by a whale. When it later put into Jeddah, they found the whale’s head in the hold, broken off and neatly plugging the hole it had made in the hull. Rashid capped Buzurg’s tale with one about a sambuq that had entered Dubai, ‘not long ago’, with a whale impaled on its prow. (I had already heard the story in Muscat, with the whale demoted to a whale-shark. Unlikely though even this sounded, it was told by no less an authority than the Director of the Muscat Natural History Museum.)
The Sea-Lion was on
its way from Sad’h to Hasik, my final Battutian destination in Oman. Hasik is as much of an island as Hallaniyah for, although on the mainland, it is inaccessible by motor transport and even by radio telephone, marooned under the massif of Jabal Samhan. IB wrote about Hasik’s two products, frankincense and sharks, and remembered that like the island hermitage its huts were built with fish bones. By probably no more than delightful coincidence, the root of the name is connected with spiky things – hasak is a thistle, a grappling-iron, or a fish bone.
We bounced along, throwing up a fine and drenching spray over the bows. To port, the sea cliffs of Samhan trailed shreds of cloud like the scarves of an exotic dancer. Rashid pointed out a tiny footpath that wiggled along the cliff, used in the monsoon when Hasik was cut off even from the sea. The walk to the roadhead at Hadbin, he said, took seven hours. Just after Ras Nus there was a long bay, a thin line of sand at the base of a towering escarpment; at its far end were a few small buildings. Rashid explained that they housed visitors to the tomb of Bin Hud, invisible in a nook among the rocks. Whoever Bin Hud is – and some think he is the Prophet Salih, son of the Prophet Hud – he has gained a reputation for irritability rather like that of the old Irish saints. Rashid said he was prone to wrecking ships: as if in proof a large cargo vessel lay aground nearby, looking like a bit of jetsam against the backdrop of the escarpment. (I heard later, however, that since the beginning of Qabus’s reign Bin Hud has generally been quite affable.)
Five hours out of Sad’h we reached Hasik, a line of long boxy houses and a stubby minaret. The roads shone with leaping dolphins, and among the five sambuqs at anchor there I recognized one: that of Khalfan the Suri.
I now knew that Deputy Governors, like holy men, are not to be trifled with, and approached the chief citizen of Hasik with appropriate awe. Fortuitously, Ali al-Shikayli was a grandson of the owner of the Wolf, that old sailing sambuq I had seen at Sad’h. When I showed him the transcript of the prayers carved on its stern, he beamed: it was his father, he said, who had done the calligraphy. He spoke nostalgically of the Wolf’s voyages, carrying frankincense to Aden, Basrah and India, and lukham, dried shark, to East Africa. These were the very products IB had mentioned; but I learned from Ali that in recent years they had declined. Hardly any frankincense was collected these days; and dried shark had been superseded by abalone, that rubbery restorer of the lost youth of Hong Kong businessmen, and by frozen fish. With its new freezing plant Hasik entered the Ice Age, and the trade of centuries, perhaps millennia, disappeared.
Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah Page 29
