Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (20 page)

In addition to the café keeper, Sidi Salim had one other permanent resident. Prayers were still going on in the mosque when a bulky figure emerged from the tomb compound. Ali Id nudged me. ‘That’s Hajjah Layla,’ he whispered. ‘She lives in the tomb.’ The woman waddled towards an oil-drum of water, glaring at us as she went past. She seemed to share a couturier with the oldest old man, and was cloaked in what looked like an exhumed shroud, secured above her head by three large knots. Considering her place of residence, it was appropriate. Beneath the shroud she wore a pair of pantaloons so generously cut that the crotch dragged along the ground behind her. Her feet were bound in rags, and finished off with a pair of antique carpet slippers. But even more extraordinary than her wardrobe was the little retinue that followed her. It consisted of three black sheep: a) a portly old ram, b) a medium-sized ewe and c) a silky, pubescent ram. Every few steps, c) tried unsuccessfully to mount b), while a) threw disdainful glances over his shoulder. On each of Hajjah Layla’s subsequent appearances, I noticed that the order and activities of the little procession never changed. The whole strange tableau was a ghoulish, grown-up version of ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’.

Hajjah Layla watered her sheep in a trough by the oil-drum, then turned to lead them back. She glared again, and addressed us in a gruff voice: ‘Why aren’t you two praying like the others?’ Then, at Sidi Salim’s gate, she stopped and wheeled around with surprising agility. ‘You’re nothing but a couple of
kafirs
,’ she screeched. ‘We don’t want your sort here!’ Oblivious of the attempted coitus at her feet, she fixed us for a full minute with a terrible, gorgon gaze, then disappeared into the tomb.

I heard a splutter beside me. It was Ali Id, choking on his
shishah
smoke. ‘They say … that in her time …’ Ali told me between splutters ‘… she was a great beauty.’

The mosque-goers returned, and we all shared a lunch of buffalo-cheese balls and pancake bread. Hajjah Layla and her sheep made another appearance. The sun began to slide slowly down the sky. We measured out the unspooling day on
shishah
refills. A pick-up turned on to the Humaythira road, but the cab was full and the back contained two camels, roped in a sitting position so that only their heads were visible. It was followed later by a convoy of minibuses but they too were packed, taking families to visit al-Shadhili. Then, at sunset, an empty pick-up came. Ali Id and the teacher negotiated with the driver but came back shaking their heads. ‘We offered £E35, but he wouldn’t budge from £E50,’ Ali said as the pick-up set off to Humaythira, empty. He didn’t seem at all bothered. I thought of running after it and paying the difference; but I was enjoying the inactivity of the café. We would visit al-Shadhili in his own good time. Besides, it would be discourteous to abandon his fellow-saint, Sidi Salim. (Not that anyone approached the tomb: it would have meant running the gauntlet of Hajjah Layla.)

As darkness fell, I brought up the subject of the checkpoint. To have passed through it unchecked seemed surprising, if not miraculous. Ali Id smiled arcanely but offered no opinion. The teacher spoke: ‘There could of course be some rational explanation. But why shouldn’t a
karamah
operate by rational means? After all, miracles aren’t the same as magic.’

I asked if he thought al-Shadhili would perform a
karamah
for a non-Muslim.

‘If your intention in visiting him is good, why not?’ said the teacher. ‘
Karamahs
certainly take place
through
non-Muslims. I heard a story that happened recently in Cairo.’ The café keeper brought a
lamp
and placed it on a table beside us. ‘You know the Mosque of al-Husayn? Well, a poor man was sleeping there when a thief came and stole his money – fifteen pounds. When the man found out, he didn’t know what to do, so he stayed where he was. In the night, he saw Sayyidna al-Husayn in a dream. Al-Husayn said to him: “Catch the number 52 bus to the Quarter of Such-and-Such, and you will meet a priest who will help you.” In the morning, the man did as he was told – he still had a couple of coins in his pocket for the bus – and found the priest in his church. The priest said to him, “
Salli ala ’l-nabi
. Pray for blessings on the Prophet.” So the man said, “May God give the Prophet blessings and peace.” Then the priest said the same thing again: “
Salli ala
’
l-nabi
,” and the man responded again. This went on and on. The man didn’t know what was happening, so he said, “How many times am I meant to pray for blessings on the Prophet?” The priest said, “Well, you’ve done it fifteen times.” Then he took some money out of his robe and gave it to the man. It was fifteen pounds.’

Ali Id’s eyes were large in the lamplight; the old men muttered approvingly in the shadows. As they sucked smoke and reflected on the story, I got the
Travels
out of my bag and turned to the account of al-Shadhili’s death. IB had heard it in Alexandria from Yaqut, who had been told it by his master, al-Shadhili’s disciple al-Mursi. I read aloud. Every year, IB wrote, al-Shadhili went on pilgrimage to Mecca via Upper Egypt and the desert. ‘One year … he said to his attendant, “Take with you a pickaxe, a basket, aromatics for embalming, and all that is necessary for burying the dead.” The servant said to him, “Why so, O my master?” and he replied “In Humaythira you shall see.”’ When they reached Humaythira, IB went on, the saint prayed and then dropped dead on the spot. His servant buried him where he fell.

As soon as I finished reading, the old man in the mummy-linen turban spoke: ‘Who wrote this book of yours? He missed the most important part!’

We all looked at him.

‘It was al-Mursi who was with al-Shadhili when he died. While he was digging the grave, a man turned up and gave him a hand. Al-Mursi didn’t know who this stranger was, because his face was veiled. In fact, it was the Prophet himself, may God give him blessings and peace! Al-Mursi kept thinking, “Who is this man? Who
is
this man?”
In
the end, he couldn’t stop himself and …’ the old man swept his hand in front of his face ‘… he pulled the veil away.’

The old man paused to get his breath back. No one spoke.

‘Now, it is forbidden to see the face of the Prophet. So who did al-Mursi see? What do you think he saw?’

Everyone looked at me. I looked at the old man.

‘He saw al-Shadhili’s face,’ his voice was cracking, ‘
al-Shadhili burying himself!
’

In the long silence that followed, I imagined the raw drama of the telling processed into a footnote (‘Among the popular accretions to the account of al-Shadhili’s death …’). It would be a folkloric curiosity, a datum, transfixed on paper like a moth on a pin. While they went and prayed, I took out my notebook and began the slow business of transfixion.

The café keeper cooked a supper of beans. After we had eaten, he turned on his radio. The news was grim. Earlier in the day, nine German tourists and their driver had been burned to death in a coach outside the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. According to the report, an escaped lunatic and his brother had petrol-bombed them. I made a bed on a cement bench that ran along the wall of Sidi Salim’s tomb. Ali Id spread a mat on the ground beside me. ‘I shall guard you,’ he said.

Soon after I had turned in, I heard a distant howl, then an answering bleat from one of Hajjah Layla’s sheep. My mind went straight to IB’s night at Humaythira – ‘infested with hyenas … continually occupied with driving them off …’ Ali was still awake, investigating sleeping positions on the hard ground. ‘
Ya Ali
,’ I whispered.

‘What?’

‘That bit I read out about IB and the hyenas … What was that noise?’

‘What noise? Anyway, there aren’t any hyenas now.’

I lay on my back, between the saint and Ali Id, looking up at the Milky Way. It looked solid, like a stroke of whitewash. I had never seen it so bright.

Something woke me. I froze: I could hear a frenzied lapping nearby. Then heavy panting, and the footfalls of a prowling beast. Ali had said there weren’t any hyenas; he had also said there weren’t any mosquitoes, and there was one whining right by my ear. Slowly, I turned my head. The moon was up, the desert electroplated with
light
. An animal was padding away from Hajjah Layla’s trough. Even without my glasses I could see that it was, incontrovertibly, a dog.

In the small hours I was awoken again, by growling monsters. Sidi Salim had turned into a truckstop, and the café keeper was serving the drivers beans and tea. When they had eaten, they climbed into their cabs and the lorries set off for the sea, snorting and farting. I was beginning to doubt Ali Id’s abilities as a bodyguard; despite the din, he hadn’t stirred.

It was in the morning that he proved himself. I got out of my sheet sleeping-bag and was about to put my left foot on the ground when Ali, who was already up and drinking tea, shot across the café forecourt and whacked the gravel with his stick, inches from my bare toes. I put on my glasses, and saw a small and very squashed scorpion.

Beyond the periphery of the café, the surface of the desert seemed to have come alive. The movement came from large numbers of partridge, busy in the early sunlight. Before long, Hajjah Layla emerged from the tomb with her ovine cortège. Then, at about eight, a minibus arrived from the Humaythira road. The passengers, mostly women and children, stood giggling and chatting by the roadside while the driver went to the shop. One of the children spotted me, scuttled across the yard with a curious scissor gait and shook my hand. He seemed to be suffering from some form of paralysis. Then he turned and fell flat on his face. I picked him up and he hobbled back to the bus, laughing. We waved to each other as the vehicle drove away. ‘People are always happy when they visit al-Shadhili,’ Ali Id explained.

The day was heating up, and I retreated to the shade of the café. There was no sign of a lift; I began to wonder whether al-Shadhili was having second thoughts about my visit. And then, towards ten, an empty pick-up came. Uncomplaining, we paid £E70 – double our best offer of the day before – and set off. Ali and I had been waiting twenty-two hours, the teacher two days and the old men an unspecified ‘very long time’. I watched the domed tomb of Sidi Salim grow smaller over the tail-gate. As saints go, he might lack the charisma of al-Shadhili; but when he had guests, he held on to them jealously.

Before us, the plain was narrowing and the rocky hills closing in and growing into mountains. Here and there amid clumps of thorn bush stood a shelter, somewhere between a shack and a tent, with a
camel
or two or a few goats foraging beside it. Ali told me that the encampments belonged to the Ababidah tribe, and said they were
a’rab
, ‘Arabs’, or nomads.

The pick-up entered a series of low passes, a tract of rock nibbled clean by the wind, bleached and ossified by the sun. I tried to picture IB, riding with his
a’rab
through this hyena-haunted waste; and al-Shadhili, seventy years before, travelling with his graveclothes. For the saint, it was an appropriate landscape in which to die. A hardened transcendental trekker, he once recalled camping in such a spot, surrounded by prowling beasts, as ‘the most delightful night of my life’. Clearly, al-Shadhili was made of different stuff from IB and me.

On the route we were following, however, pilgrims like IB and al-Shadhili were the least of the traffic. ‘We saw so much pepper going along this road’, Ibn Jubayr wrote, ‘that we imagined it to be no more valuable than sand.’ The pepper and other spices were shipped from the Malabar coast of India, via Aden, to Aydhab; from there they were carried inland, across these passes and through the desert to the Nile, then downriver to Lower Egypt, to the Maghrib, and across the Mediterranean from Alexandria to Venice and the markets of further Europe. The cosmographer al-Qazwini was amazed by the vast extent of trade in his time, the thirteenth century. In an entry on Maghanjah, ‘a city in the land of the Franks on a river called “Rayn”’ (probably Mainz), he wrote: ‘It is astonishing that, although this place is in the Far West, there are spices there which are to be found only in the Far East – pepper, ginger, cloves, spikenard, costus and galingale, all in enormous quantities.’ Looking over the cab of the pick-up, it was hard to believe that through these narrow cols, like sand through the waist of an hourglass, flowed the most valuable trade of the Middle Ages; that this road ensured the success of a
tajine
in Marrakesh or a Rhenish
wurst
.

Humaythira was a surprise: a cluster of government-built houses, a school and some long low buildings which Ali explained were accommodation for al-Shadhili’s visitors, all in a depression ringed by low hills of rock. Ali led me past al-Shadhili’s tomb chamber, a modern polygonal structure like an oversized seaside kiosk, and into the police post. He introduced me to the commander, Captain Ibrahim, then disappeared. It was the last I saw of him.

The captain noted down my name and nationality, then asked if I
would
be joining him for Friday prayers. I shook my head. He led me to one of the guest blocks, then excused himself. After the day at Sidi Salim with Ali Id and the other travellers, it seemed abnormal to be alone. The call to prayer sounded. However far I followed IB, there always remained that one last step.

A boy of about ten appeared in the doorway, saw me and ran across the room. He shook my hand vigorously. ‘Have you come to visit al-Shadhili?’ he asked.

‘Of course.’

‘Me too. My name’s Baha.’

‘My name’s Tim.’

‘
Teem
… That’s the name of a drink. It’s a kind of lemonade. Aren’t you coming to the mosque? We’ve got to hurry.’

He was still holding my hand. ‘Not today,’ I said.

The boy looked puzzled. ‘Well, see you later.’ He ran off and collided in the doorway with a woman.

‘Baha!’

‘Sorry, mother.’

The woman smiled at me. ‘Was he being a nuisance?’

‘Not at all. He’s charming …
ma sha Allah
,’ I said, adding the phrase to avert the Evil Eye.