Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (13 page)

Outside the shop was a heron, trussed to a tree stump. At first I thought it was stuffed, but it turned out to be cataleptically alive. I asked Abu Rajab if it was to be eaten, but he said it was ‘just for decoration’. Inside, a fat boy guided me around the stinking barrels.

‘I want your best quality,’ I told him.

‘Then try this,’ he said, pulling off the lid of a barrel. An almost palpable miasma rose from it; I gagged, and watched as he plunged both hands in up to the elbows and pulled out two fat sprats. He pressed his thumbs into them. The impressions stayed, as they would have done in putty. ‘You see, they’re the best quality!’ He pulled a piece off one of the fish and handed it to me. I shut my eyes and popped it into my mouth.

Like durian, the taste was admittedly better than the smell; it could hardly have been worse. I could feel myself breaking into a cold sweat, and made for the door and fresh air. Perhaps, with the quail, the
kanafah
, the two rice puddings and now this, I had overdone things.

The heron eyed me rheumily. Slowly, my nausea passed, but I still felt as though I’d swallowed a pot of Gentleman’s Relish in one go.

‘So, did you like my
fissikh
?’Abu Rajab asked. ‘It’s the best in Egypt!’

I wondered what the worst
fissikh
in Egypt was like. ‘Your
fissikh
is …’ – I searched for the right word – ‘… astonishing. How much do I owe you?’

‘It’s on me,’ said Abu Rajab, beaming.

‘May God reward your goodness,’ I said.

One more course remained. I had already, in Rosetta, eaten
buri
, the grey mullet admired by IB. It was delicate in flavour, as might be expected of this gentlest of fish which, the poet Oppian said, ‘never stains its lips with blood but in holy fashion feeds always on green seaweed or mere mud’. I was now keen to try its roe, considered a great delicacy. Later, I watched the roe being extracted in a village near the coast: a man gently palpitated the bellies of hen
buris
to see if they were pregnant; if they were, he made a neat incision with a small Stanley knife then pulled out the roe in its yellow membrane, reticulated with pink veins. This, he explained, would be salted, pressed, then dried in the sun. Finally it would be dipped in wax. Even in its unprocessed state the roe looked precious; in its final form, as
batarikh
– the French
boutargue
, the Italian, and particularly Sardinian,
bottarga
– it is hugely expensive. The Egyptians say of a successful businessman that
mahfazatuh batrikhat
, ‘his wallet has swollen with roe’.

I was forewarned of a high price by the English sign on a shop near Abu Rajab’s: SUPER CAVIARE. It was a minimalist shop, containing only a small refrigerator and selling nothing but
batarikh
. The shopkeeper produced a cylinder of paper from the refrigerator and unrolled it to reveal several rosewood-coloured blocks. They resembled mummified human fingers and smelt slightly of football socks. At 260 Egyptian pounds a kilo,
buri
caviare was almost as pricey by Egyptian standards as Beluga in London and I bought the smallest block, a couple of ounces in weight. I told the shopkeeper it was like buying dope. He looked alarmed. ‘It’s all right, it’s perfectly legal.’

After a short siesta to sleep off the excesses of lunch I took my
batarikh
to a bar overlooking the river. Alan Davidson, the doyen of ichthyophages, recommends eating it sliced very thin, with a simple dressing of olive oil, lemon juice and pepper. I found pickles and Stella beer a suitable alternative. Like most expensive comestibles it was interesting in texture, and the thin wax casing contained a gooey centre, richly fishy. I nibbled slowly, spinning my two ounces out over several beers, and could not have eaten more.

The coastal region near Damietta, like parts of Essex or Louisiana, is neither entirely of the land nor of the sea. It was long a haunt of hermits and dervishes, the scene of skirmishes and strange goings-on. In Tinnis, a place famous for its textiles, its catamites and for an endemic disease called the Tinnisi Death-rattle, a woman gave birth to a lamb. The town was so often raided by the Crusaders that the whole population was moved to Damietta. Nearer to Damietta itself, where the Bucolic Nile meets the sea, is a place IB calls al-Barzakh, the Isthmus. Here was a 100-cubit chain that blocked the river against the Franks, and some minarets that quivered when touched. It was also a favourite spot for ascetics, and IB spent a night there with them, ‘in prayers, recitation of the Qur’an, and liturgical exercises’.

Damietta originally stood across the mouth of the river from al-Barzakh. Like Tinnis, the city was continually raided throughout its Islamic history, by Byzantines, Sicilians and finally Crusaders; the chain deterred the Franks for a while, but in 1219 they arrived in a force of Gulf War proportions, which Egyptian sources say included a 750-foot iron-clad destroyer. The Franks cut the chain and occupied Old Damietta for two years. The Jimmy Carter of the day was St Francis of Assisi, who seems to have held peace talks with the Sultan. A less pacific saint, the French King Louis, led a later crusade in 1249 which once more captured Old Damietta. It ended a year later – possibly, as mentioned above, because of mass
fissikh
-poisoning – with the Franks routed and Louis in fetters, guarded by a eunuch gaoler. A popular song of the time, in the manner of ‘Boney Was a Warrior’, warned al-Fransis,
le françois
, that if he came back Sabih the Eunuch would be happy to entertain him again. All the same, the Sultan removed temptation by destroying Old Damietta and relocating its population to the present site a few miles upstream.

Old Damietta between the two Frankish occupations was home to
the
leader of one of the stranger movements in Islamic history. Jamal al-Din of Saveh, in Persia, was an ascetic from his youth, but his good looks caused a woman of Saveh to fall passionately in love with him. As IB tells the story, she enticed Jamal al-Din into her house and pressed him to break his vow of chastity. He pretended to agree, but first excused himself to go to the lavatory. He emerged having shaved off his beard, moustache, hair and eyebrows. The seductress, horrified, threw him out.

Jamal al-Din moved to Damascus, then to Damietta, where he lived in the cemetery. His followers, known as the Qalandars, imitated his shaving habits and shocked a society in which beards were the rule. In the manner of the Cynics, they also gave up other social norms, ‘abandoning polite intercourse’, a contemporary account says, ‘and attaching no importance to their appearance or to what was thought of them’. Some of them even gave up praying. This was asceticism taken to the limit, mortification not of the flesh but, as Albert Hourani put it, of self-esteem. The august
Encyclopaedia of Islam
compares the Qalandars to hippies; but perhaps their philosophy was closer to a sort of pantheistic punkism – the Persian
kalandar
, the probable origin of the name, means ‘an ugly or ungainly man’, which is not far from the original definition of ‘punk’. (Their spiritual cousins the Haydaris, another group of Persian origin, were even more punkish, practising body-piercing and in extreme cases wearing rings in their penises.) The Qalandars, predictably, got a bad name, and were accused of being dope-heads and lechers. Sa’di, the great Persian poet, said that there were two sorts of people who will always feel remorse: the merchant whose vessel has been wrecked, and the heir who has become the associate of Qalandars. Substitute for Qalandars punks/hippies/New-Age travellers, and the late twentieth-century bourgeois fear of the antinomian has been, in substance, the same.

After my Qalandar-like day – Sa’di also said that ‘they stuff till they have no room in their stomachs to breathe’ – I decided to spend the following morning looking for traces of Jamal al-Din of Saveh. I first headed for the Isthmus, with high hopes of finding a saint or two. But as I approached the sea my hopes fell: the road was lined with hotels and hoardings; there was an International Circus and a Damiettex Cinema. The architecture was bewilderingly eclectic – here a Chinese roof, there a lotus colonnade in reinforced concrete – and
the
whole place had the jerry-built look of somewhere that has started off temporary and become all too rapidly permanent. The bus driver took it as a compliment when I compared it to Las Vegas.

He dropped me off at the end of his route, and I walked towards the Isthmus past a string of deserted fast-food joints and the Hanging Garden Pool Room and Amusement Park. Empty hamburger boxes skittered past in the breeze. The Isthmus itself was a long, narrow promontory sheathed in concrete. At the end of it was a stubby lighthouse; opposite, on the other side of the river mouth, was another of the same design. The anti-Frank chain was, of course, gone; so were the quivering minarets, the pious brethren and their hermitages. The Isthmus, it seemed, would have gone too were it not for the great piles of caltrop-like blocks of cement designed to break the force of the waves. A man fishing with rod and line told me that there had been an old mosque here – conceivably the place in which IB stayed – but that the sea had washed it away. The blessed land of Egypt and the cursed Mediterranean used to maintain a sort of equilibrium, as the silt that came down the Nile in its annual flood made up for what the sea took. Now, since the building of the High Dam at Aswan, there had been no flood, no silt, and the sea was winning.

The only other passenger in the ferry across the river to Old Damietta, now called al-Azbah, was a pretty girl dressed and coiffed like a starlet of half a century ago. We shared a taxi, a pea-green Dodge of 1951, which went with her appearance. Most of the vehicles were of a similar age, except for the flocks of motor-scooters, which the taxi driver called
batt
, ducks.

We dropped the starlet off and chugged slowly around, asking in cafés if anyone had heard of Jamal al-Din and the Qalandars. The men we spoke to had a slight swagger about them, an air of ex-cons on the Costa. Abduh, the driver, told me that most of the men of the place had been in the Greek merchant navy; he himself had worked for Onassis. Their faces were quite unlike those of the lumpen fellahin of the inland Delta: they had the large eyes and fine features of Roman mummy portraits.

There were reminders of the Hellenistic and, in the Dodges, Plymouths and Chryslers, of 1950s America; but none of Jamal al-Din. No one had heard of him. What seemed to be the oldest mosque was 400 years too late. The old cemetery, perhaps the one haunted by the Qalandar leader, had been turned into a market.
I
collared the local preacher but he only knew of another Jamal al-Din, buried in present-day Damietta. He was pessimistic about my search: ‘Damietta is not a learned place. The people here are too interested in making money.’

Something told me he was right, that Damietta, a city of swollen wallets, with its good food, its gilded
fauteuils
, its snappy haircuts, seaside leisure facilities and international maritime connections, would have forgotten Jamal al-Din and the Qalandars long ago. They were exotic migrants, too exotic for even the dervish-loving Egyptians: in 1360 the Sultan caught sight of the then leader of the Qalandars and was so horrified by his hairlessness and his ‘heretical, frightful Persian attire’ that he ordered any Qalandar who did not grow a beard and dress properly to be flogged and expelled.

That evening I consoled myself for not finding the Qalandars with another session of beer and
batarikh
. The only other customer in the bar by the river was a woman in a wedding dress. She was sitting alone, arrayed like IB’s Alexandria in her bridal adornments. I imagined her as the Miss Havisham of Damietta and, heady with Stella, considered offering her a nibble of my
batarikh
; but prudence prevailed, and greed.

Cairo

The Palace on Crimson Street

‘They came to a spacious, well-appointed and splendid hall …

In the middle stood a large pool full of water, with a fountain in

the centre, and at the far end stood a couch of black juniper

wood, set with gems and pearls.’

The Arabian Nights
, trans. Husain Haddawy

F
EW VISITORS HAVE
liked Cairo on first sight. ‘
Uff!
’ exclaimed an eighth-century caliph, ‘She is the mother of stenches!’ Later, a geographer wondered why anyone should have wanted to build a city ‘between a putrid and mephitic river, the corrupt effluvia of which cause disease and rot food, and a dry and barren mountain range devoid of greenery’. The ground teemed with rats, scorpions, fleas and bugs, the air with miasmas. In Cairo Symon Semeon buried his companion Brother Hugo, who had succumbed to an attack of dysentery and fever ‘caused by a north wind’. My guidebook, compiled a century after IB’s visit, was disturbingly frank about the dangers of living in a polluted high-rise city where light and air rarely penetrated the dark alleyways. Its author, al-Maqrizi, warned that ‘the traveller approaching Cairo sees before him a depressing black wall beneath a dust-laden sky, from which sight his soul shrinks and flees away’.

I too approached Cairo with a sinking heart. My last daylight view of it had been from a friend’s flat on the Muqattam Hills: the city lay below, gasping under an incubus of fumes; in the distance the Pyramids were hazily visible, as if seen by a
pointilliste
with failing eyesight. But now, as the taxi passed the Eastern Cemetery, a perfectly timed sunburst spread thick, buttery light over the Mamluk
tombs
and turned them into towering versions of Mrs Beeton’s centrepiece puddings. My heart began to rise.

Just as there are many Egypts, there are many Cairos. IB realized that the city was a multiple oxymoron: ‘Therein is what you will of learned and simple, grave and gay, prudent and foolish, base and noble, of high estate and low estate, unknown and famous; she surges as the waves of the sea with her throngs of folk, and can scarce contain them.’ All visitors have agreed with the last point. Friar Symon complained that it was ‘so thronged with barbarous and common people that it is only with the greatest difficulty that one succeeds in getting from one end of the town to the other’. Al-Abdari related an accident which befell his mule in a Cairo traffic jam: a friend had borrowed it, and while he was riding along the main street ‘the crowds pressing about him caused him to be knocked from his saddle. The mule was swept away in the throng of people, and my friend was unable to catch up with it. He could only look on helplessly while the animal receded into the distance. And that was the end of my mule.’