Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (12 page)

I stood there as the sun fell and thought about IB’s dream of far travel. For medieval metaphysicians, dreams came not from some spidery Freudian crypt of the psyche but from that bright world of spiritual intellection where events and places are parallel. Ibn Khaldun explained the oneiric mechanism: in sleep, the veil of the senses is lifted and the soul seeks contact with this spiritual world. Detached from the body, it becomes a ‘spiritual essence’ in which the forms of events past and future have actual existence; but on its return to the body these events appear as allegories, which need interpretation. Ibn Khaldun quoted from an earlier scholar some dream words which, uttered before sleep, prepare the soul for visions:
tam
ā
ghis
ba’d
ā
n yasw
ā
dda
waghd
ā
s nawfan
ā
gh
ā
dis
. From the same source, he passed on a recipe for enabling a man to tell the future: put him in a barrel of sesame oil for forty days and feed him on nothing but figs and nuts, ‘until his flesh is gone and only the arteries and sutures of the skull remain’; then expose him to the air to dry out. (To me, this seems a long-winded way to achieve the same result as trepanation, which these days can be performed in seconds with an electric drill equipped with a suitable bit and, of course, a steady hand.) The recipe, Ibn Khaldun rightly warns, is ‘detestable sorcery’.

Six hundred years on from Ibn Khaldun a Moroccan scholar, in the same fusive tradition that made translations of the Greek work on dreams by Artemidorus popular among medieval Muslim savants, has applied to IB’s dream a Jungian-Sufi reading: the great bird is the
simurgh
, for Sufis a symbol of divine revelation; the air it flies in stands for illusion; in the dark and greenish country darkness symbolizes primeval origins, greenness – as in the green palls on saints’ tombs – Islamic salvation; the land where IB arrives is ‘the real and solid truth’.

I used to dream IB’s dream, with certain differences; we probably all have dreamed it. My version came to me recurrently when I was a child: I would fly in a telephone box over nomad encampments set in desert and steppe, and along mountain ranges. I can’t remember ever landing, which in Jungian-Sufi terms must condemn me to a life of spiritual dilettantism. Anyone who watched British television on Saturday afternoons in the 1960s and later will immediately put the telephone box down to the influence of
Dr Who
, which came on after the wrestling and the football scores and whose eponym travelled through time and space in a police-box called the Tardis. I am inclined now, perhaps not entirely flippantly, to wonder whether the Tardis and the
simurgh
are in fact one and the same, travelling in the same metaphysical space-time continuum, and whether Dr Who, the Time Lord, is the archetypal Wise Old Man, who like the Qur’anic traveller al-Khadir is immortal and who, in at least one of his incarnations, appears in the patched robe of the Sufi master or of Joseph, the prototypical interpreter of dreams …

But I have strayed into the primordial sludge of the collective subconscious, Nilotically fertile for poets and madmen, a sprite-haunted quagmire for the rest of us.

*

The following day I left Rosetta, or Rashid, to travel across the hypotenuse of the Delta to Damietta, or Dimyat, where I hoped to find traces of the depilating dervishes known as Qalandars.

Slowly, rice fields gave way to cotton. At a place called Kafr al-Shaykh I got into a minibus and waited for it to fill up. So far the only other passenger, sitting in front of me next to the driver’s seat, was certainly no depilating dervish; he was what the imam of al-Murshidi’s mosque-tomb would have called a Bearded One. The term ‘fundamentalist’ is often used by the press, but it is a misnomer: since the principal revelation of Islam came in the text of the Qur’an and Muslims are all by definition fundamentalists, the bearded ones are perhaps better termed puritans. The puritan beard is immediately recognizable: it has a vegetal, weedy quality like the beard of a Roman river god. I was about to make conversation when he looked into the rear-view mirror and began delicately arranging the tendrils of his beard. As I watched him, I thought of the Regency beaux who would spend much of a morning tying their stocks so as to achieve an unstudied appearance. As in this, and in the Japanese art of ikebana, real art lay in concealing art. Other examples of puritan chic include the clipping of the moustache so that it cannot catch and retain particles of food, and the crucial length of the midi-
jallabiyyah
– long enough to cover the unseemly knee, short enough not to be bemerded by the various forms of
najasah
, substances which would nullify the state of ritual purity required for prayer. For puritans of whatever faith, God is in the detail.

I arrived at Damietta in the dark. Crossing the smelly Bucolic, or Phatnitic, branch of the Nile by a narrow road bridge, I was nearly decapitated by a rank of cabrioles, which stuck out of a donkey cart like dancers’ legs at the Moulin Rouge. For, as I quickly realized, I was in the home of that type of furniture known as Louis Farouq. An evening stroll around the city was an illustrated history of cabinet-making, taking in the later Louis, Chinese Chippendale, Regency, Empire, Biedermeier and even some Art Deco. Showrooms glittered with gilded
fauteuils
, canapés, commodes,
bonheurs-du-jour
, davenports and whatnots. There were bedsteads that were not just king- but orgy-sized, their headboards designed to incorporate quadrophonic music systems.

The ground floor of the hotel I checked into was occupied by a vast
mubiliyat
showroom that shone with
faux boulle
and ormolu. This
splendour
did not, however, extend upstairs. One lavatory was spectacularly blocked; the only other one was working but not inviting. As with nearly all Egyptian lavatories, the bowl was equipped with a little pipe – not unlike the mouthpiece of a bassoon – which squirted water upwards for personal ablutions. The pipe was ringed with a collar of someone else’s turd.

I hesitate to mention the subject, fearing to fall into a national stereotype of anal fixation and closet copromania; but I suspect that for more travellers than would admit it, the most poignant memories of travel originate, as St Augustine said of ourselves,
inter urinam et faeces
. As a child, my first sight of a squat lavatory in France spoke more eloquently of foreignness than a different cuisine or language; later, my Yemeni acculturation was completed when I abandoned bumf. I cherish many happy memories of defecation in far places – in a doorless lean-to overlooking the island-studded Sound of Harris, in the bartizan of a Yemeni castle with the wind rushing up a sheer cliff face beneath me, lashed by spray in the stern heads of a
sambuq
off the Kuria Muria Islands, in a wardrobe in an Ottoman mansion in Safran Bolu (the wardrobe cleverly concealed a miniature bathroom); and some less happy memories – the time my sweat-lubricated spectacles slid off my nose and into a noisome maw by the Red Sea, and the horror, the horror of a public crap-house in the outskirts of Simferopol. I have long thought that what might be termed
la nostalgie des chiottes
would be a fertile and only partly frivolous subject of study; after all Tartaret, a fifteenth-century scholar of the Sorbonne, is reputed to have written a treatise
De Modo Cacandi
. Later on in my travels I was delighted to meet a girl in Laodiceia ad Lycum who was carrying out research on this very topic, with special reference to Turkey and Eastern Europe. Mhairi, I wish you success with your scatological monograph.

To be fair to the hotel in Damietta, it wasn’t a bad place. But as I tossed, sweaty and sleepless, at 4.45 a.m. – some of the other guests were holding an animated conversation on the landing outside, a constant stream of motorized and horse-drawn traffic rumbled and clattered by in the street below, a nearby cock crew incessantly the sinister theme from
The Saint
– I wondered, Why am I doing this? IB’s motive, as revealed by Burhan al-Din the Lame and al-Murshidi, was compelling: he travelled because he was destined to travel. But then, would he have pursued his destiny if it hadn’t been revealed to
him
? My brain, flapping about for sleep like a netted fish for water, imagined a fantastical exchange on a TV travel show:

Interviewer
: So, Mr and Mrs Bandersnatch, what made you choose the Algarve? Was it the direct flight? Or the childcare facilities? Or was it all this wonderful, guaranteed sunshine?

Mr B
.: Well, we certainly liked the look of the place in the brochure – didn’t we, dear – but, to be honest, what really decided us was irresistible, inexorable Fate.

Of course, it’s not meant to work like that. Travel these days is one of the ultimate expressions of determinism. People travel because they choose to do so. Or so they are led to believe; for perhaps most of those looking for sun, booze and relaxation are, in a broad sense, fated to end up in the Algarve or certain other places in a closed set of destinations. Free will, as C.S. Lewis said, ‘is the
modus operandi
of destiny’. Fate, too, chooses one’s fellow hotel guests. I cursed mine inaudibly.

The curse worked, and the pre-dawn debate broke up. Then there was a lull in the street noise; then a horrible gurgle from the cock. Perhaps someone had wrung its neck. Merciful sleep came.

For IB, Damietta was one of the culinary high-points of his travels. He quoted a saying about the city – ‘Its wall is a sweetmeat and its dogs sheep’ – and noted that flocks of fat sheep and goats wandered freely about its streets. He also mentioned the excellence of its bananas, which Mandeville picturesquely described as ‘long apples … though ye cut them in never so many gobbets or parts, overthwart or endlongs, evermore ye shall find in the midst the Holy Cross of our Lord Jesu’.

The cultivation of bananas has declined because of cheap imports and, with all the furniture-laden lorries and carts, only the most foolhardy sheep would wander the streets of Damietta today. But the city is still famous for its sweetmeats, and as I walked about its centre the following morning I noticed many shops filled with piles of pastries and other confectionery. IB also praised the quail of Damietta, which he found exceedingly fat, as well as its
buri
or grey mullet and ‘various preparations of buffalo milk, which are unequalled for sweetness and delicious taste’. With all this in mind, I decided to spend the day eating.

At the Information Office I enquired about the best place for quail. A tall and skeletal man asked if I had a security permit. ‘I don’t
think
he needs one to eat quail,’ said one of his colleagues, rolling her eyes. She told me to follow her, and took me out of the building and up a side street to a restaurant called Bazzoom, which depending on the vagaries of Arabic etymology might mean Mighty Biter.

‘Quail are off,’ said the cook, wiping his hands on a bloody apron. ‘You can only get the farmed sort at the moment, and we don’t touch them. They’re not a patch on the wild ones, and the season for netting doesn’t start for another couple of weeks.’

Undeterred, I went to the
suq
. The netting of quail has a long history in the Middle East. The Hebrews of the Exodus, fed up with manna, gorged themselves on quail with disastrous consequences; further south in the Farasan Islands off the Arabian coast the inhabitants were said to have lived from early times almost entirely on the birds. Contemporaries of IB wrote that so many of them flew into Egypt on their migration that the people of the coast near Damietta could net them from their front doors. Now, I was looking for some early birds, and fortune led me to the only ones in the market, a lone brace in a wicker cage. Their owner swore solemnly that they were the netted sort, cut their throats in the direction of Mecca and dropped them into a plastic bag. As I walked back to Bazzoom, they flapped their last.

The cook gave them full marks for freshness. ‘They’re a bit on the small side, though. But they’re the first ones I’ve seen this year.’

Later, I returned to Bazzoom to find my two little birds roasted with their heads on and stuffed
à la mode de Damiette
with onion, garlic, hazelnuts, sultanas and cumin (there is a similar recipe for chicken, which dates from the time of Saladin); they were served on a mound of rice surrounded by stuffed cabbage leaves, stuffed baby marrows,
tahinah
and pickles. The customers of Bazzoom were serious, elbows-up eaters: a man sitting opposite me was tucking into braised lamb with vegetables and rice garnished with plump kidneys. There were snatches of conversation about commodes and sofas, but the main sound was that of eating. I left the restaurant with a belch, and a blessing for IB. This was inverse archaeology at its most enjoyable.

Now, I thought, for some preparations of buffalo milk, unequalled for sweetness. Nearby I found Taha Taha Fishwar’s sweetmeat emporium, where I had a plate of
kanafah
, buffalo cheese buried in layers of sweet vermicelli. Further along the road, at a shop called Futuh, there were great sweating truckles of the cheese, impressed
with
calligraphic rectangles, and bowls of buffalo-milk rice pudding strewn with sultanas. I ate two of the latter. My payment was waved away with a smile.

A surfeit of puddings can only be cured by a savoury, and there could be few more savoury savouries than
fissikh
. The definitions of the verbal forms in my dictionary give an idea of how the dish is prepared:
fasakh
is ‘to be corrupt’,
tafassakh
‘to fall off (hair of a corpse)’.
Fissikh
are fish which are left in the sun until they begin to blow up. Next, the gills are stuffed with salt, and after eight days the fish are put in a barrel of brine. Although strictly a departure from my Battutian menu,
fissikh
are a venerable delicacy of the area. The thirteenth-century geographer Yaqut al-Hamawi, writing of the then-famous textiles of Damietta, said that the genuine products always stank of
fissikh
as the Coptic weavers were addicted to it and never washed their hands before working; he added that the cloth was so sought-after that, in the mind’s nose of its buyers, it smelt of ambergris. A later writer, however, wrote that for those unused to eating
fissikh
, ‘it can cause the accumulation in the body of large quantities of putrid waste matter … which can generate many fatal diseases’. One account of the defeat of the Crusade of St Louis near Damietta in 1250 attributes it to the Franks’ consumption of putrid fish, sold to them by the local inhabitants; this might have been a form of medieval germ warfare, but to me the story has about it more than a whiff of
fissikh
. I had heard, moreover, that each year at the spring festival of Shamm al-Nasim, or ‘Sniffing the Breeze’, around a dozen people die of
fissikh
poisoning. It was therefore with some trepidation that I approached the shop of Abu Rajab.