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

by Mackintosh-Smith, Tim

  Some lukham is still produced for home consumption, however, and Ali sent for a piece from an old fisherman. It had the appearance of an old boot sole, and the texture. ‘Lukham needs good strong teeth,’ the fisherman told me, ‘and a woman afterwards.’ As I had neither I gave the object no more than an experimental nibble, and decided that fish-freezing plants were a good idea.

  Soon after my arrival Ali was called away from Hasik to a family funeral, and left me the run of the deputy-gubernatorial residence. Indians brought me trays of rice and fish of monstrous size. I wrote up my diary. And I watched satellite TV. A random sampling of Arabsat produced: a debate on medical treatment by Qur’anic recitation (Sudan); a twenty-minute ad for an anti-insomnia pillow (Orbit Shopping); a traffic police docu-soap (Dubai); a discussion on fitted kitchens (Qatar); three old men, drumming and chanting, near to tears (Sudan again); an ad for a tummy-trimmer (Orbit again); a Qur’anic pronunciation class, then Colonel Qaddafi – looking ever more like one of the Rolling Stones, or a mixture of all of them (Libya); and finally the call to prayer, with stills of my home, the old city of San’a (Yemen).

  Arabsat was meant to bring it all closer. Instead, it magnified the immense isolation of Hasik. I sympathized with the Dong, far away on his shore, gazing, gazing for evermore.

  *

  IB got it wrong. ‘The frankincense trees’, he wrote, ‘have thin leaves, and when a leaf is slashed there drips from it a sap like milk, which then turns into a gum.’ Shaykh Musallam bin Sa’id al-Naqsh Thaw’ar al-Mahri showed me how it was really done, two hundred feet up the side of Wadi Hadbaram behind Hasik. With both hands, he gripped his chisel-like manqaf and with a few downward strokes sliced off a patch of bark to reveal a pistachio-green layer beneath. More strokes left a wound the colour of raw beef. Slowly, beads of white began to appear on the wound, like pus. Musallam called the operation tawqi’, a word which can mean ‘to gall a camel’s back’.

  ‘You mustn’t cut to the bone of the tree’, he explained, ‘or you’ll kill it. But you can come back and make more tawqi’s in the same spot. The more you do it, the more the tree produces. It’s like a cow milking better the more calves she has.’ The frankincense would take several weeks to seep out, but Musallam had already given me a bag from last year’s harvest. This was the hawjiri variety praised by Radiyyah in the Salalah scent market, the aristocrat of gum-resins.

  Apart from the obvious benefits of smelling nice and driving off demons, frankincense can be used as a tooth-filler, a crack-sealant and a depilatory. According to the Rasulid Sultan al-Muzaffar’s book of simples, it heals wounds, staunches blood, clears darkness of vision, burns phlegm, strengthens a queasy stomach, cures diarrhoea and vomiting, expels wind, eases palpitations, protects against the plague and warms a cold liver. Employed as a pessary, it halts vaginal discharge; chewed, it reinforces the teeth and gums, eases speech impediments and combats forgetfulness (of this I took special note, as according to some authorities one of the main causes of amnesia is ‘over-attachment to reading the inscriptions on tombstones’). Overdosing, al-Muzaffar warns, can bring on headaches, melancholy, scabies and, in extreme cases, leprosy. I also found in an eighteenth-century Yemeni book on bathing that a mixture of frankincense, olive oil, nigella oil and honey taken in the bath is ‘an excellent stimulant of libido in the hundred-plus age-group’.

  After the demonstration, Musallam shouldered his hunting rifle and led me down the side of the gorge. Above us on the cliff tops sat a layer of mist, and I remembered the description of the Frankincense Country in the Periplus – ‘a land mountainous and forbidding, wrapped in thick clouds and fog’. And there was that other, more fanciful mention: that of Herodotus, who thought the frankincense groves were guarded by flying snakes.

  Musallam was ready to return to Hasik, but I said I would explore further up the gorge.

  ‘Watch out for leopards,’ he warned. ‘And snakes.’

  I smiled. ‘I bet they’re flying snakes.’

  ‘Yes. They jump out of the samur trees.’

  I walked up Wadi Hadbaram into a silence broken only by the rustle of reeds and the beat of pigeons’ wings high up on the rock face. I saw some leopard spoor; the samur trees I gave the widest possible berth.

  *

  I wondered if IB had also got it wrong when he wrote about the fish-bone houses of Hasik; perhaps he had been misled by that near homonym, hasak. But how could I find out? I had thoroughly explored the village, and found not a vestige of anything pre-Qabus. Al-Habshi, a man who worked in the Deputy Governor’s office, explained the reason: Hasik had moved.

  Together, we visited the old site of Hasik, a couple of miles to the west. Most of the structures were converted caves in the bank of a dry watercourse, walled in with stone. I had a good poke around but found nothing to indicate a date.

  ‘Let’s go to Old Hasik,’ al-Habshi said.

  ‘I thought this was it.’

  ‘It is. But there’s an older one further west. It’s full of remains.’

  A short distance along the coast, we came to a large expanse of ruins overlooking an anchorage. Beside the shell of the mosque were some fine inscribed gravestones, which I began to read with growing excitement. None, however, dated to earlier than the eighteenth century. We rooted around the ruins of houses and found shards of Chinese porcelain. Most of them were blue-and-white: post-IB. There was none of the celadon ware in which the site of Qalhat had been so rich; and there were no fish bones. It seemed that Hasik had come up in the world in the centuries following IB’s visit, and that all traces of the settlement he saw had been swept away or built over.

  We went and sat on the rocks by the sea. I asked al-Habshi if we would find any sufaylih, abalone. To lunch al fresco on this most rejuvenating of shellfish would, I thought, be partial recompense for not finding any relics of IB’s Hasik.

  ‘We used to eat it when I was a boy,’ he told me. ‘You could buy a sackful for next to nothing. Then they started exporting it. Do you know how much it fetches? Dried, 270 riyals a kilo.’ About £200 a pound. A snip when you think of the cost of tiger penises. ‘Even the women collect abalone nowadays. At first they’d just wade in and feel around for it in the crevices in the rocks. These days they go diving, like the men. Fully clothed, of course.’ I had a thrilling vision of the lady abalone divers, formerly mere ticklers, of Hasik, dripping like Ophelia and clattering with aphrodisiac univalves.

  Instead of eating abalone we feasted on rock oysters and chitons. The latter look like something from the earlier stages of creation – flattened armoured slugs that move very slowly across the rocks. You pick them off, snap them and gouge out with your thumb a pink, tongue-like médaillon of crunchy flesh. Al-Habshi said that oysters and chitons, zikt and shanah as he called them in the Mahri tongue, were an old staple of the coast and islands. I grazed off the rocks until I could eat no more; I was making up for missing out on those other old favourites, cormorants and boobies.

  Al-Habshi then remembered that there was yet another old site, further west and over a headland. We crossed the rocks and came to a small bay, dead still, dead quiet. Above the beach there were several boat-shaped graves, one with an outer enclosing wall like that of Sayyid Ali Hajj on Hallaniyah. There were also a number of ruins which looked like the remains of dwellings. I hunted in vain for celadon; then, scrabbling among the stones, I found IB’s fish bones: plaster-white, pitted and brittle, piles and piles of broad flat fragments half covered by blown sand.

  Time which antiquates Antiquities, and hath an art to make dust of all things, hath yet spared these minor Monuments. They were less than minor: they were minimal. But, for a moment, I felt I had unearthed a colossus.

  *

  Back in Salalah, Qahtan, his shaykh, a goat and I went for a picnic on a mountainside from which only three of us returned. (I shall put it in writing: contrary to Sir Wilfred Thesiger’s statement in Arabian Sands, the Khawar are a noble clan and generous to strangers.) My mention of th
e leopard spoor in Wadi Hadbaram elicited a long story from Qahtan about a three-hour wrestling match between a leopard and a Mahri. It ended with the Mahri sticking his hand down the leopard’s throat and ripping out its gorge, which he carried in triumph to hospital. The man, however, soon tired of newfangled treatments and discharged himself. He stewed his victim and plastered his wounds with leopard lard.

  I was reluctant to leave, reluctant to wear trousers again (for most of the past month I had lived in waistcloths), reluctant to say farewell to friends. But I was in danger of becoming a stationary thing, of little worth. As we parted, Habibah told me I’d be missed; not only by her, Muhammad and Nadia, but also by several Dhofari ladies of her acquaintance who had been discussing, she said, the exceeding whiteness of my legs.

  On second thoughts, perhaps it was time to get back into trousers.

  After performing the Mecca pilgrimage once more IB left Jeddah by sea, bound for India; ‘but’, he wrote, ‘that was not decreed for me’. He ended up instead at Aydhab, from where he retraced his earlier route, via Cairo, to Syria. From the Syrian port of al-Ladhiqiyyah he sailed to Alanya, and began a tour of the Turkoman sultanates of Anatolia.

  Anatolia

  Hajji Baba, the Skystone and Other Mysteries

  ‘When he attended the sema, the dome of the mosque would rise into the air and he would see the revolutions of the angels.’

  al-Nabhani (d. 1931), Jami karamat al-awliya, on the dervish

  Sumbul al-Rumi

  AT THREE O’CLOCK in the morning my neighbour the travesty artiste made an intimate suggestion on the balcony of the Yayla Hotel (‘Cheap and Comfort’). Half Turk, half Greek, male during the day and female when he performed, as he did nightly, at the Banana Club, he was way beyond the brief of inverse archaeology. I politely declined the suggestion.

  Sleep was not among the few amenities on offer at the Yayla. Since midnight the hotel had shaken to an incessant, seismic beat – boom-shagga-boom-shagga-boom – from Pub 13 across the road. ‘What are they doing?’ I asked the travesty artiste, as a stream of young men went in.

  He sighed. ‘Dancing, and looking for girlfriends.’

  We sat and drank raki and talked about cleavage simulation. At four o’clock I went to my room and lay down. The bedsprings rattled to the disco beat, like drumsnares. Finally, at five, Pub 13 fell silent. In the stillness, rock gave way to Prufrock, and I asked myself what I was here for. It was not my first existential crisis; but nowhere had it been as profound as here in Alanya.

  Mediterranean Turkey was doubly foreign. Like IB, I had left the Arabophone world; unlike him, I also seemed to have entered one where they spoke an entirely different cultural language – a sort of Euro-Teutonic. Most of the tourists in Alanya were ur Germans but even some of the Turkish visitors affected rimless spectacles and gemütlich lapdogs. Sauerkraut was served with everything; every other building seemed to be a disco. One nightclub, the Whiskey Go Go, offered ‘Sex on the Beach’. To be fair, it was not an activity but a pop group; but it seemed to sum up the ineffable crassitude of the place. Where was the Alanya of IB?

  Gone.

  So it appeared, anyway, as dawn broke. But later that morning, swimmy with lack of sleep, I climbed the road to the headland and came to another Alanya. It began with a gateway, the entrance to IB’s ‘magnificent and formidable citadel, built by the exalted Sultan Ala ’l-Din’. As I wrote down the inscription above the gate I wondered if IB had also stood here with pen and notebook.

  Ala ’l-Din, the Seljuk Sultan of Rum, was keen to leave his mark. He gave the ancient Coracesium not only a new citadel but also a new name – al-Alā’iyyah, after himself. (An inexplicable Turkish aversion to voiced pharyngeals, glottal stops and geminate semi-vowels soon deformed this into ‘Alaya’; the intrusive n is probably part of a process by which the place will eventually become ‘Almanya’, or Germany.) At the same time, according to a helpful information board at a café beside the gate, Ala ’l-Din was busy with the traditional Turkish sport of Armenian-bashing: ‘He purifies the coastal regions from Armenians,’ it said, in a frisky historic present surrounded by winking fairy lights.

  IB arrived in Alanya a century later, in 1331. The glorious line of the Seljuks of Rum had ended twenty years earlier when the last sultan, pressed by creditors and by the Tatar Ilkhan of the Two Iraqs, took poison. That other great Turkish dynasty, that of the Ottomans, was still in its infancy. The Ottoman baby was rapidly turning into a hyperactive toddler; but for the moment it shared Anatolia with nine other statelets, founded by rival Turkoman chieftains among the ruins of the Seljuk sultanate. Western European travellers thought the Turkomans uncouth and bestial; Ludolph von Suchem went as far as to call them ‘in all respects mean, and with the same customs as Frisians’. IB, however, was among co-religionists; moreover, he now had a taste for princes, however petty or newly Islamized. In Turkey he was in for a multiplicity of sultans. I had little idea of what remained from their short-lived princedoms. I knew there were plenty of Seljuk and Ottoman remains; but what had the Karamanoğulları, the Aydınoğulları, the Candaroğulları (or İsfendiyaroğulları) and their fellow Turkoman dynasties left behind, other than their very long names? In the annals of Anatolia they were little more than a parenthesis.

  Alanya, away from the sauerkraut and Sex on the Beach, was magnificently Seljuk. I explored the citadel, contouring with its walls around the headland and losing myself in lanes loud with the racket of crickets. Down at sea-level a fat Seljuk tower loomed over the harbour like a giant biscuit barrel. Nearby was a vaulted dockyard. It squatted in the water, solid as a Victorian viaduct, each arch big enough to admit a Seljuk warship; the inside eddied with light and shadow, part grotto, part undercroft and slippery with seaweed.

  IB arrived here from al-Ladhiqiyyah on a Genoese merchantman. ‘We travelled with a favouring wind,’ he remembered, ‘and the Christians treated us honourably and took no passage-money from us.’ Earlier writers had also praised the Genoese mariners, who enjoyed a virtual monopoly on Mediterranean shipping. ‘They are a dark-eyed people with the same colouring and finely shaped noses as the Arabs,’ wrote the twelfth-century geographer al-Zuhri. ‘Indeed, they are the Quraysh of the Christians,’ he went on, paying them the highest possible compliment – Quraysh are the tribe of the Prophet. For their part the Genoese occasionally gave their sons orientalizing names like ‘Turco’ and ‘Soldan’, so the admiration must have been mutual.

  Now, though, a different sort of Frank dominated the Mediterranean. I sat in the dockyard and watched them jet-skiing, parascending, and bungee-jumping off a crane across the bay. In a way I envied them - not their frantic forms of relaxation, but their conviviality. I faced a prospect of one-night cheap hotels, empty raki bottles and no company save the shade of IB and my diary, mute tyrant of my evenings. IB himself had come to Turkey with a rafiq, a travelling companion, a Tunisian called Abdullah al-Tuzari. (He was to remain with him until his death in Goa a dozen years later, a dim figure of whom, beyond the slender facts of his name and the time of his demise, we learn next to nothing.) I could have done with my own flesh-and-blood rafiq, someone with whom I could speak the same language.

  *

  Antalya, along the coast, was less furiously touristic. Ottoman houses, and streams – ‘springs of excellent water,’ IB wrote, ‘sweet and very cold in summer’ – tumbled down the hill to a perfect harbour. Looking on to the town from above, I could make out bits of the walls which according to IB had divided the various communities of the port – Franks, Byzantines, Jews and Muslims. Now, fragmented, they made a dot-to-dot puzzle within the scattered jigsaw of gardens and pantiled roofs. Above all this rose Sultan Ala ’l-Din’s Yivli Minare, the Fluted Minaret, like a chunky propelling pencil.

  As usual, IB was more interested in people than in buildings, and he remembered a meeting on the second day of his stay in Antalya. A young cobbler came up to him, ‘wearing shabby clothes and a felt bonnet’, and invited him to di
nner. Despite his appearance, the man was leader of the Akhis, a sort of cross between a guild, a dining society and an Islamic YMCA. IB was duly treated to ‘a great banquet, with fruits and sweetmeats, after which the Akhis began singing and dancing’. The welcome was to extend across Anatolia. IB praised the Akhis not only for their hospitality, but also for their ardour ‘to restrain the hands of the tyrannous and to kill the agents of the police’. Strange as this may sound, in fourteenth-century Islamic cities the constabulary were a byword for corruption, and no figure was more hated than the copper’s nark.

  The Akhi network disbanded not many decades after IB’s Anatolian visit, but I was pleased to discover near the harbour a small mosque built by a certain Akhi Yusuf. The imam showed me the founder’s tomb. I wondered if I had discovered IB’s shabby and generous cobbler, but found out via the imam’s Qur’anic Arabic that Akhi Yusuf had lived a good eighty years too early. It was a curious conversation, full of long pauses and verilies – the Islamic equivalent of talking Latin with a pre-Vatican II priest.

  Still in search of Akhi memorabilia, I tried a different tack. IB described the furnishings of the Akhis’ hospice with unusual precision. Among them were ‘five candelabra of the kind called baysus, each in the form of a brass column with three feet, which supports a brass lamp with a tube for the wick’. A visit to Antalya Museum, however, while it turned up candlesticks Roman and Ottoman (and exotica such as mystical flagellation aids and Santa Claus’s jawbone) produced no baysus. It also reminded me how much had happened in Asia Minor: a lot, and much of it far longer ago than the fourteenth century. The quantity of classical statuary alone was astonishing: beneath a portico stood a long line of emperors and demigods, all facing the doorway to the restoration workshop. It was the first time I had seen a museum where the exhibits, and not the visitors, queued. That parenthesis in history in which IB had visited Anatolia was, I now realized, a mere interjection.