Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (16 page)

We went out into the sunlight and wandered around the garden looking at the remains of the earlier structure. I tried to imagine how it had looked in the 1320s, to rebuild mentally IB’s enormous convent, and failed. The relics of his night here were all but gone. Even the Nile, which in his day flowed by the gardens, had receded to the west. Arab poets could conjure up a
genius loci
from the slenderest of materials:

The abandoned dwellings spoke to me, though they were silent: ‘Our silence is, in part, a form of speech …’

Now, if it was, I couldn’t hear it.

On the way back to the café, Uncle Muhammad invited me to stay the night. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘your Battutah stayed here.’ I was touched but worn out after my urban hike and looking forward to a solitary evening in the Husayn Hotel. I climbed back over the
cement
factory wall, returned to the highway and caught the number 201 bus back into town.

*

Travel writing is, after autobiography, the most egocentric form of literature. But in eighteen pages on Cairo, between his arrival there and his night in the convent outside the city, IB himself appears only once. I was beginning to wonder exactly what he had got up to. In late medieval times the possibilities were endless. They included everything from Qur’anic studies through shadow plays and street storytellers to dancing camels and professional farters. Perhaps a well-brought-up provincial Maghribi like IB would have taken one look at Cairo – ‘this threshing-floor for the chaff of humanity, this dustbin of the world, this refuge of vice,’ his fellow countryman al-Abdari had called it – and fled. He does not record how long he stayed on his first visit; but, passing through again a couple of months later, he says baldly, ‘I stayed only one night in Cairo.’ I wanted to fill in the gaps, and turned to al-Maqrizi.

Exhortations and Reflections on Settlements and Monuments
is a whopper of a book, nearly a thousand dense folio pages. I have called it a guidebook; certainly, a Mamluk donkey driver wanting to mug up on the Knowledge would find it all here: quarters, suburbs, streets, alleys, mosques and tombs. There are fifty pages alone on churches and synagogues. But the topography that al-Maqrizi set out to write, nourished by reading and his own observation, grew into a literary mutant, a panoramic, diachronic combination of Pevsner, Pepys and the
A to Z
.

I began where I had started my walk that morning, outside al-Nasir’s tomb. Of all the streets of the city, al-Maqrizi wrote, this was the busiest. It took its name, Between the Two Castles, from a pair of Fatimid palaces which once stood on either side of the road. Formerly, Cairene aristocrats would gather here to read biography, history and poetry, ‘and to feast their souls on all manner of goods such as delight the five senses’. By the fourteenth century, however, while it was still by day the grandest shopping street in town, it became at night a haunt of ‘unspeakable lewdness and debauchery’. The stream of people was so dense that certain despicable men would ‘pleasure themselves against youths and women, to the point of ejaculation’, without their victims knowing what was happening.
(According
to an English friend who lived in Cairo, at least one descendant of the despicable men is alive and well. He is to be found on rush-hour buses and, judging by her account, is not as discreet as his forebears.) More conventional sex maniacs could nip around the corner into the Candle Market and pick up a tart, immediately identifiable by her red leather trousers.

And all this, I reflected, was going on under the noses of the Qur’an readers, as they chanted their requiems in the window seats of the sultanic mausoleum. The juxtaposition of angelic and priapic, of ejaculations pious and profane in this Mamluk Knightsbridge was, somehow, exquisite. ‘Therein is what you will …’

I returned the following morning to Between the Two Castles. Its racier inhabitants have moved across the Nile to the Saudi-haunted nightclubs in Pyramids Road and, looking around at the surviving medieval monuments, one might imagine that the Mamluks did a lot of praying, studying and dying, and not much else. One purely secular monument, however, survives: the palace built by Bashtak, one of those outlandish
amirs
whose names IB recorded.

The palace stands on Between the Two Castles, but its entrance is in a sideroad, Darb al-Qirmiz, or Crimson Street (
qirmiz
provides the first five letters of ‘crimson’). I passed a guard of tethered geese and entered a courtyard. A massive doorway in a humbug-striped wall of red and white led into an entrance hall, from which rose a staircase.

The first floor was pure theatre. The entire space was filled with a multi-storey atrium with a fountain in the middle and surrounded by columns and
iwans
, vaulted side chambers. Stucco windows high above shone with Bashtak’s blazon, a red diamond on a white stripe. Friar Symon had peeped into a similar interior and pronounced it the house of God and the gate of Heaven. Heaven, I thought, must have been freezing in winter. Even now, in September, the place was chilly. I warmed myself in a few blotches of sunlight in a latticed window, and listened to the sounds that rose from the street below – passing feet and hooves, horse bells, hammering, the rasp of files, a ripple of voices, the occasional strongly expressed opinion. Mamluk sounds.

As a living space, the hall must have been desperately uncomfortable. Equipped with a cenotaph instead of a fountain, it would have made a fine tomb chamber. Even the lavatory was sepulchrally proportioned, about eight feet by five, and twenty feet tall. I tested the
acoustic
with a snatch of ‘I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls’. It was superb. The effect on Mamluk farts must have been megaphonic.

Upstairs, from a screened triforium gallery on the second floor, there was a concubine’s-eye view of the hall; more lattices looked down to the street. I found my way on to a terrace and climbed a succession of external staircases. More terraces rose in Babylonian profligacy, clustering around the central atrium. Finally, I was level with the domes of Qalawun’s and al-Nasir’s mosque-tombs. I caught my breath and looked out.

The street below was a dizzying crevasse. Beyond the domes stood crumbling
iwans
interspersed with later building. From this height, the processes that had shaped the city seemed not architectural, but fungal. Successive structures were parasites on the waste of decayed dynasties, like blewits on a cowpat. Before me was a tell that began with Mamluk masonry, then Ottoman, followed by concrete, then wooden shanties, the whole finished off by an airy
bidonville
of junk – packing cases, rolls of wire, sticks, bicycle frames. It was a living Troy, and all the strata were inhabited simultaneously. I watched the inhabitants of the top layer going about their business, washing, cooking, keeping pigeons and growing things in pots. (Aerial horticulture has a long history in Cairo. An eleventh-century Persian visitor wrote, ‘I heard that a certain man made a roof-garden on the seventh floor, and took up a bullock to raise water. He grew oranges, citrons and bananas.’)

From the roof of Bashtak’s palace a Cairo was revealed which hid itself at street level, a city recycling itself upwards. But Bashtak himself remained buried in the
Travels
, a mere name under
Some of the amirs of Cairo
. It was only when I extended my visit with some textual travel that the bare set of his palace sprang to life. Bashtak’s story, I discovered, would have been beyond the most inventive of scriptwriters – unless, that is, they could imagine a scenario in which Piers Gaveston joined the cast of
Dynasty
.

From Ibn Hajar’s
Concealed Pearls
, I learned that Sultan al-Nasir’s crush on the young Mongol Ilkhan of Iraq and Persia – ‘the most beautiful of God’s creatures’, as IB later described him – was so unbearable that he instructed his slave-buyers to find him a
mamluk
who resembled him. They came up with Bashtak, ‘a graceful, lightly bearded youth’ from the steppe. Al-Nasir was immediately besotted. He showered Bashtak with fiefs,
de luxe
slave girls, and a fresh wardrobe
every
day – everything, Ibn Hajar says, from brocade cloaks lined with squirrel fur down to gaiters.

Not surprisingly, Bashtak turned into a dandy. Mamluk fashion-victims would analyse and imitate his manner of tying the turban. And, whether despite or because of the supply of concubines, he also turned into a monstrous lecher who even seduced, it was whispered, peasant women and fishwives. As al-Maqrizi put it, ‘he was quite incontinent with respect to vaginas’.

A few years after IB’s visit to Cairo, Qawsun - another star of the Mamluk brat-pack – bought and refurbished a particularly fine palace on Between the Two Castles. Bashtak was beside himself with jealousy. He immediately bought a mansion directly opposite Qawsun’s, wheedled the Sultan into giving him a large piece of land adjoining it and built the palace which I had visited – demolishing, in the process, ten small mosques. ‘And thus’, says al-Maqrizi, ‘did the street once more live up to its name of “Between the Two Castles”.’ Perhaps as a final nose-thumb at his rival, Bashtak, the quintessential spoilt horror, turned the ground floor of his mansion into a sweet-shop.

Sultan al-Nasir’s Cairo was the nearest the fourteenth century got to Hollywood. Most of the
mamluks
from the steppe ended up as menials and extras; but those with looks and luck like Bashtak, and the others who elbowed, backstabbed and flirted their way to the top, found themselves in a world of fabulous wealth. Qawsun married the Sultan’s daughter and pursued gold and rare gemstones as hungrily as Bashtak chased women. When another palace of Qawsun’s was plundered during a temporary fall from grace, so much gold flooded the Cairo bullion market that the price dropped by nearly half. Bashtak, after his death, was found to have amassed 1.7 million dinars in cash alone – about seventy million dollars’ worth at today’s prices. Those who didn’t get their hands on gold, jewels and the Sultan’s daughter could always spend a vicarious evening in Between the Two Castles, listening to the latest episode of
The Arabian Nights
. And, as in the
Nights
and Hollywood, reversals of fortune could be sudden and catastrophic: Bashtak and Qawsun were both executed after the death of their sugar-daddy, al-Nasir. (Bashtak would have enjoyed his rival’s crucifixion: the crowds who turned up to watch it could buy Qawsun-shaped lollipops.)

Even in his lifetime, Bashtak’s palace was a white elephant. Reading al-Maqrizi, I recalled my own feelings about that great
morgue
of a house: ‘Whenever he went there, Bashtak’s heart would shrivel. His soul knew no joy as long as he stayed in it. In the end, he sold it.’

To wander through the warrens of al-Maqrizi’s
Settlements
was as strange and thrilling as exploring the physical palace and city. Bashtak, a name mentioned in passing in the
Travels
, was now made flesh. And when, on several later occasions, I happened to pass the palace, I would look up and imagine him in his window seat, trying to get warm, letching through the lattice.

Now I had set and actors, I spent a morning in the Museum of Islamic Art looking for the props. Dark wood was inlaid with white ivory, brass and copper with silver and gold, and glass enamelled in royal blue and sealing-wax red. The love of colour and geometry reminded me of the Moroccan
madrasah
I had visited; clearly, the same nimble fingers and Euclidean minds had been at work here, too.

The difference lay in the heraldry. Almost every object bore a device: there were lozenges and fesses, fleurs-de-lis and Maltese crosses, chalices and double-headed eagles. The combination of sombre field, rich pattern and blazon was a first cousin of Gothic; such an ensemble seen against the backdrop of Bashtak’s great hall would have thrilled Pugin and made Lord Leighton sick with envy.

IB, it seemed, had never penetrated the
grande luxe
world of Mamluk interiors. But when I looked closely, I began to spot points of contact, tangential ones, with his own world, fragments from the
Travels
. There, on a mosque lamp dated 1319, was the blazon of the
amir
Almalik – vert two polo sticks erect addorsed argent. IB had bumped into him at the Delta hermitage where he had his dream of far travel. Among the metalwork I found a brass box inlaid with the arms of Tuquz-damur, one of the
amirs
on IB’s Cairo list, whom the traveller later met in Mecca – an eagle displayed in base a chalice. And nearby, on a pierced lantern cover, was a point of contact with my own world – the propeller-like cinquefoil voided of the Rasulid dynasty of Yemen; beside it was the name of Sultan al-Mujahid, IB’s host there and the ancestor of my friend Hasan.

The similarity with European heraldry was obvious. The difference was that Mamluk arms were not badges of honour, but of office. Bashtak’s diamond represented a
buqjah
, a napkin in which clothes were wrapped; the Beau Brummell of medieval Cairo was Jamdar,
Master
of the Robes, in the amirarchy. Later, reading al-Maqrizi on the ranks of the Mamluk state, I was reminded of another system. Twenty years earlier I had almost reached its summit: splendid in a tie sprinkled with my own badge of office, a fleur-de-lis (which, in its true heraldic form, is of Mamluk origin), I controlled school lunch queues and cast my vote in the election for captain of cricket. I had been elevated to the vertiginous rank of praepostor.

Dr Arnold and the other fathers of the Victorian public school could well have been students of Mamluk society. For while Sultan al-Nasir went in for a most unheadmasterly form of favouritism when it came to the prettier prefects, the Mamluk system was in general not unlike a drawn-out version of Rugby. Young males – mostly from the Kipchak steppe but also from Anatolia, Armenia, the Caucasus and Cathay – were deprived of their liberty at great expense (five thousand dinars, the price of a first-rate
mamluk
, would at today’s bullion rates just about cover ten years of private education; the fees, of course, went to the lucky fathers and slave-dealers). The new boys were regimented into boarding houses. Their main subject of study was Arabic, the Latin of Islam. They played compulsory games of a warlike nature, particularly archery and the use of the lance. A matronly presence was there in the shape of eunuchs, who supervised the boys’ domestic lives and looked after their uniforms. Clothing was strictly regulated, although a certain degree of ostentation was permitted to senior
mamluks
– the gold belt was perhaps the equivalent of a waistcoat in Pop. Discipline was fearsome, especially where a suspicion of sex was involved: any boy seen performing the special ablutions required in Islam after sexual activity was submitted to an immediate underpant inspection. If traces of what my dictionary delicately explains as ‘seeing evil dreams’ were found, all well and good; if not, ‘death came to the boy from every quarter’.