‘Ya, hadha huwa an-nar!’ I exclaim (I’m piling on the decibels in my eagerness to ingratiate myself). ‘Oh, this is the fire!’
Jadullah’s grunted reply is less expressive than any of the sounds he has directed at the camels.
Crawling away, all-fouring through the sand, he digs around in the thorns and comes back with a handful of droppings the size of pecan nuts. The fire turns them dry and crozzled, like the tips of matchsticks. It is not until he jerks his head at the bush and grunts the first word I understand from him – jamal, camel – that I realise what they are: camel turds, adding fuel to the fire. With their high ammonia content, they make for excellent tinder.
The rice is scooped in calloused handfuls out of a painted goatskin bag. It cooks in a pot, lifted a few inches over the flame by a forked stick from the bushes, while Lamina separates the embers to form a second, smaller fire for the teapot. Waiting for the pot to boil, he unclasps a leather pouch and shakes out a few grains of snuff. His nostrils quiver and he presses the skin with the pads of his fingers, like a potter putting the last delicate touches to a rim. I watch him a little too closely (I’m not sure if there is a protocol about gawping when someone is taking snuff) and he looks up. For the first time, our eyes lock. The flames conjure shadows across his face and give him a potent, supernatural aura: a campfire king.
‘What is your country?’ he asks.
His voice is slower now, his expression relaxed – soothed, I suppose, by the snuff. I think of al-Idrisi’s description of England in the Book of Roger, written for the King of Sicily in the twelfth century: ‘This is a great island, shaped like the head of an ostrich … the winter there is permanent.’ But I’ve been away for nearly half a year. Here, among people I barely know, in a landscape I haven’t the knowledge to interpret, I feel a cloying nostalgia. I talk of sheep on chalky hills the colour of mint … of mighty cities full of commerce … of fairgrounds and theatres and the rowing boats in Battersea Park …
‘But it is very cold,’ I add, remembering al-Idrisi. ‘Sometimes the wind blows so hard and the air is so cold you can see the steam coming out of people’s mouths.’
‘At night?’ asks Lamina.
‘No, in the daytime too.’
Now I’ve got their attention. I tell them about ice and hail and snowball fights, floods in the West Country when people slide off their roofs into the rescue boats. I am laying it on pretty thick, but hey, they live in the Sahara. They are used to extremes.
‘May God preserve us!’ Lamina turns to Jadullah, explaining what I’ve told him, and they both wrap themselves in their arms. They’re looking at me differently. In a strange way, I think they’re impressed. If the toubob can survive such intemperate conditions, maybe he isn’t a complete dolt. Even if he doesn’t know how to saddle a camel.
After tea, Lamina points me to the spot where the fire has burned. This is the best place to lie, cosy as a mattress with a hot-water bottle. I stretch myself into the warmth, enjoying the mild ache in my thighs, the pleasure of fatigue. Dangling above me, the starfield is low and close, a barrage of light so intense it is hard to identify any of the constellations, like trying to pick out a friend in a bustling crowd. A meteorite flashes in a clot of stars, then winks out of existence, like an alien SOS from thousands of years ago. I immerse myself in the stars – an unworldly relief from the mental effort of conversation, and a distraction from all my anxieties. All those bandits I’ve heard about, smugglers and hostage takers, who haunt the sands like the djinn and ghosts that scared off travellers in earlier centuries, or the tribesmen who did for explorers like Major Laing. But when I turn my head to the sand, the worries trickle back, so I shift round to Lamina for reassurance.
He is sitting upright, his turban laid across his lap, tweezering burrs of cram-cram from its wrinkly folds. With his high bald forehead and his aquiline nose, he has a look of honesty about him, like a guide in a storybook: the White Rabbit or Mr Tumnus. Someone who can teach me all the lessons I need to absorb. Today, we’ve touched on saddling and baggage. But there are many more to learn; he has intimated that tomorrow we will focus on my riding. I have only known Lamina a few hours, and I still hardly know him at all, but there’s something about him. For all the scary talk in Timbuktu, I feel sure he is one of the good guys.
Well … A voice prickles at the back of my mind, like the burrs of cram-cram snagging on our clothes. Of course you trust him. You’re out in the desert now – what choice have you got?
Part Two
City
[T]he goal of civilization is sedentary culture and luxury. When civilization reaches that goal, it turns toward corruption and starts being senile, as happens in the natural life of living beings.
Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah
4
The God-Blessed Lair of Pigeon Shit
A PIGEON WHEELED OVER MY HEAD, ITS PURPLE-TINGED FEATHERS SPARKING like metal in the late afternoon light. I was standing on a rooftop in Fez, 1200 miles north of my destination. Black smoke puffed out of chimneys fuelled by olive pits and a hinged line, like a V or an Arabic seven, resolved itself into a swoop of swallows. Sunlight gilded their wings and splintered against the sandstone walls, sinking behind the broad green hills that hugged the city on every side.
‘Look!’
A saffron-stained finger arrowed towards the sky. Standing beside me was the sahib dukkan (‘shop master’ or boss), head of a tanning collective in whose factory I found myself an unlikely apprentice. Describing an arc with one arm, he took in the moon pearling over the hills, the oily light and the skins laid across the roof around us, fastened with saffron dye.
‘You see? The moon is the colour of the skins when they come out of our vats, and the sun is the colour when we put the dye on them. You understand what this shows us? It shows we are doing God’s work!’fn1
From the material point of view, it was hard to imagine a place less demonstrably blessed. Squatting at the back of a zig-zag of wood-scaffolded, flaking-plaster alleyways as organically decrepit as Hieronymous Bosch’s hell, the Ain Azletoun tannery may well be the stinkiest place in the whole of Fez. To reach it, you tilt off the Tala’a Kabira (literally ‘Big Street’, the old city’s principal thoroughfare) and delve into a matrix of alleys. Pressing yourself to the mud-brick walls, you breathe in to let the hide-laden mules pass. The thickening reek is your guide: a ureic stench so heavy it feels like something solid is foraging in your nostrils. No wonder visitors to the tanneries often carry sprigs of mint or rosemary under their septa.
The tannery itself squats, fortress-like, at the back of its maze. Goat hides pile against walls of crumbling brick, festering among disembodied heads and rancid offal, like the remains of slain adventurers outside a dragon’s lair. Inside, dust-lagged cobwebs sag from wooden joists and gaps in the roof suck down the sky, spotlighting whoever is standing below, like an unwitting stage performer, before they crab up the ledges, levering onto the catwalk above.
Here you have the best view of this antique factory: a honeycomb of more than 40 concrete pits, filled with lime and dyes and speckled with goat hair. You keep back from the edge, watching for anyone tilting out of the tiny work cells around you – knowing the slightest stumble will knock you into the pits. And that is definitely something to avoid: the men have good reason to go about in knee-length waders.
The tanners were tough, thick in the shoulders and thighs, which were clearly visible under stained vests and crinkly leather shorts. They had the concentration of masculine energy I had witnessed among desert nomads like Jadullah and Lamina. But their posture was cramped and their movements jerky. During intervals of pipe smoking, they never settled into the graceful calm of my nomad companions.
Splashing the hides together, scraping off the last tangles of wool with pieces of tile, then gathering more hides out of the weaker vats, they were at it all day, from dawn till dusk. Once a batch of skins had been depilated, they carried it over to the ghaseel (washer), a wooden b
arrel that looked like a giant’s beer keg. An electric pulley turned the barrel, while a pipe at the back filled it with water.
Loading the barrel was one of the simpler jobs on the site – judging by the fact it was allotted to me. I worked with Najib, a rap-dancing alley cat with hair the colour of a tabby, who always had a few balls of keef (marijuana) in his back pocket. I had been pestering him for weeks to bring me to the tannery, and slowly we thrashed out a deal: I funded his social excursions and paid for presents for his ‘girlfriends’, and in return he acted as my gateway. By the end, I think we were friends.
The tannery is run as a co-operative, with a couple of cells for Najib and his team. As soon as you burrow inside, the light is sucked out behind you. Cobwebs dangle overhead and you have to duck to avoid the pelts hanging from nails in the wooden beams. Sitting next to Najib, I held a Supermax razor blade and pierced the pelts with slits. We pulled ourselves up from the greasy debris and brown scrapings to hang the hides from the nails, while Najib’s colleagues ‘broke’ them with a knife, slicing rough edges, buffing them to creamy leather on a mushroom-shaped stool. It was tiring work, and you didn’t slack unless you fancied a bollocking from the boss. But every so often, Najib would chuck me a smile and whisper: ‘Only be patient! Soon is the sitting time!’
All being well, I was hoping to return to Timbuktu in a couple of months. It had been whipped by recent history, battered on the front line of a triangular war between Tuareg secessionists, Islamist militants and a French-led, pan-African army. Whenever I thought of my last days in Mali, my head bristled with martial imagery: tank tracks in the sand outside Timbuktu; hobnail boots poking out of rickety pick-ups; mounted guns shuddering over sun-bleached helmets. But it fluttered, too, with memories of the nomads I had travelled with – Lamina and Jadullah and little Abdul-Hakim, the adventure they had taken me on and the lessons they had taught me: not only saddling but the different skills they dealt out every day, from tracking and navigation to drawing water and pitching camp.
In the intervening two years, I had heard only rumour; I hoped now to find out what had happened to them. Timbuktu was free again, or so the authorities claimed. For several months I had been laying plans for my return. Fez was a good starting point. It was Leo Africanus’s old hometown, a twin to my destination and his, a place that never stopped intriguing me. I felt I could live here for a hundred years and only ever scratch the surface.
Alongside Timbuktu, Fez is the most magical and mysterious of North African cities, an ‘enchanted labyrinth sheltered from time’, in Paul Bowles’s phrase. It was founded in the early ninth century by Moulay Idriss, a sharifi (a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed) whose family had been massacred in a battle near Mecca. Hotfooting it across North Africa with his servant, swapping clothes to avoid detection, he set the breadth of the continent between himself and his enemies, and gathered a following among the local Berber tribes. In doing so, he grafted the ancestry of the Prophet to the early shoots from which the Moroccan nation would grow, rooting Islam in the fresh soil of the Maghrib – ‘the land of the setting sun’.
This union was symbolised in the person of his son, Moulay Idriss II, whose mother was the daughter of a Berber chief. Building across the river from his father’s original settlement, Idriss II established Fez as a city of many parts, a labyrinth whose structure is both an antidote to the desert and its mirror (in Arabic, the word for labyrinth, mataha, derives from the same root as tih, a desert waste). Migrants from Andalusia and Tunisia filled the different flanks of the medina (city), bringing their skills in craftsmanship and scholarship. Mosques and zawiyas (shrines) scythed the sky with crescents. Minarets shot up like trees, brambled in exquisite calligraphy, between green tiled domes as lush as the hills that frame them.
Scholarship – the great provision of the Tunisian refugees – flourished at Kairaouine University, which predates the first Oxford college by four centuries. Founded, like the Sankoré mosque in Timbuktu, by a woman (although as patriarchal as all the universities that followed), it hosted some of the greatest minds of the medieval era. It was here that Maimonides composed his commentary on the Mishnah (the collection of Jewish oral traditions), the Sufi philosopher Ibn Arabi experienced some of his most powerful revelations, and Pope Sylvester II learned about Arabic numerals.
Wandering around the old town, you can easily imagine you’re in some pastiche of The Thousand and One Nights. A Berber herbalist stuffs your nostrils with a twisted ball of black anise, promising it will ease your mind and stop you snoring. You pass a door lintel smeared with blood to beseech the supernatural blessing of the djinn on the night before a circumcision. Crocodile scutes shadow a poky dispensary, where tortoises are pulled out of mesh-grilled cages, to be sold as ingredients in traditional medicine. Snapping open and shut like hungry mouths, or muzzled by heaped carts and sliding gates, passageways redirect you around the medina depending on the time of day. A crack in a wall yields an alley, flattening you between wooden scaffolds, ripping open to hurl you onto a sun-kissed square, then hoicking you between walls that are hell-bent on slicing off your elbows.
What all this bustle reinforces – in a physical, visceral and in the best sense medieval way – is that Fez is still a place where things get made. If my stinky mornings at the tannery taught me anything, they taught me that. It is a city of artisans, a giant workshop, where every turn reveals someone busy at craft. A cotton spinner hooks his yarn across the width of an alley, like vines on a trellis. A wood carver slices a panel, soaked in the perfume of fresh cedar. A silk weaver works his needle under shelves that glisten with freshly made gowns, while his friends sip tea at the edge of his cell.
This prodigious trade was all recorded by Leo Africanus, who grew up here around the turn of the sixteenth century, son of a landowner and nephew of a court favourite. ‘A world it is to see,’ he wrote, ‘how large, how populous, how well-fortified and walled this city is.’ Here, more than anywhere else – where the bath-houses still run on the system he described, brides continue to be carried about in ‘a wooden cage or cabinet … covered with silk’, and the dealers in perfume and books (traditionally the most valuable merchandise) still operate close to the mosques – I was surrounded by the vestiges of his world.
People find different ways of approaching the past. Back in the 1920s, it was all about séances and spiritualism. This was how WB Yeats made acquaintance with Leo Africanus. Through an American medium and several sessions of automatic writing, the great Irish poet exchanged a series of bizarre communications with the long-dead traveller (among other matters, Leo apparently advised Yeats on the thorny subject of Irish nationalism). Leo became Yeats’s ‘daimon’, drawn to him because ‘in life he had been all undoubting impulse’, whereas the poet himself was ‘doubting, conscientious and timid’. Over the coming weeks, I would often find myself stricken by uncertainty, especially in the bandit-infested tracts of Northern Mali; I hoped Leo could be my daimon too, spurring me on and lifting me whenever my confidence flagged.
The place in Fez where I was able to channel him – my equivalent to a 1920s séance, I suppose – was the Henna souk. I enjoyed drifting among the stalls selling sandalwood incense, amber-coloured deer musk and black hammam soap made from the kernels of olive nuts, smelling my way to a calmer world than the acrid bustle of ‘Big Street’.
‘Perhaps you know about this place?’
A chatty stall owner lifted me out of my diary. Bushels of walnut bark (for cleaning your teeth or staining women’s lips) brushed against his head, while rows of soap and aromatic stones clustered on the wooden counter in front of him.
‘A little,’ I said. ‘I read a book by a man who used to work here.’
‘Then you know about Hassan? Oh, the times have changed, for pity! When he lived, Islamic civilisation was the greatest in the world. Now look at us! All the young people take drugs, the civilisation is ruined.’
Hassan was my Leo. Born to a Muslim family who fled the fal
l of Granada in 1492, he grew up as al-Hassan Ibn Mohammed al-Wazzan, ‘Hassan son of Mohammed the weight-master’. But a few years after his journey to Timbuktu, he was kidnapped off the Algerian coast, sold as an exotic gift to Christendom and baptised by Pope Leo X, whose name he took. In a revealing passage, he tells of a ‘wily bird’ who was ‘so indued by nature, that she could live as well with the fishes of the sea, as with the fowls of the air’. Not only is this a modus operandi for Leo’s own life, it is a fair objective for any traveller. After my turbanned disguise in Mali, it certainly felt like something to aim for.
It was during his Italian sojourn that Leo collected his travelling experiences together and wrote the book for which he is remembered. Describing his journeys across North, East and West Africa, the tribes he met on the way, their customs and trade, and sprinkling his account with enough legendary matter and titillation to ensure a healthy box office, he remained essential reading for anyone with aspirations in Africa well into the nineteenth century. He may not have been the first writer to describe the continent, but he was probably the most influential.fn2
Behind us was a building that Leo knew intimately. With its rust-smeared window grilles and the warping on their hoods, the hospital of Sidi Frej doesn’t exactly bask in historical glamour. Still, I was intrigued, imagining the ‘frantic and distraught persons’ who used to dwell here. Half a millennium earlier, Leo would have advised me not to step too close: the inmates were liable to ‘call out to passersby, take hold of them and defile them with dung’. And he should know, for he moonlighted here, earning three ducats a month as a notary.
Time wasn’t going to oblige me at the Sidi Frej. The building hasn’t been a medical institution since 1944. When I stepped inside the keyhole-shaped gateway, instead of finding myself beside a sixteenth-century clerk I was rubbing shoulders with polyurethane mannequins in silk dressing-gowns. Leo’s asylum is no more: it has morphed into a store for household goods and lingerie.
The Timbuktu School for Nomads Page 5
