Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (21 page)

She laughed. ‘You can have him if you want!’ The Evil Eye was fully averted: what jinn would want Baha when his own mother was prepared to give him away?

Baha’s mother was followed by about thirty women, girls and younger children. As they entered, I realized with growing panic that the captain had taken me to the ladies’ quarters. By some dreadful accident I had realized the old orientalist dream – penetration of the seraglio – and could see it turning into a nightmare.

The women were advancing. I grinned disarmingly. ‘Well, I’d better be on my way …’

There was an arpeggio of laughter. ‘Where are you going?’ asked Umm Baha. ‘You’re our guest.’

She came and squeezed my hand; all the others followed her example. A toddler waved at me and threw a kiss. The greetings over, the women ranged themselves around the hall, untroubled by the stranger in the harem, and nattered polyphonically. They were all pleasingly plump, chocolate-dark and gorgeously wrapped in bright floral prints.

Umm Baha told me that they were from Luxor. ‘But we’re originally from south of Aswan, from Nubia. Our family had to move when the High Dam was built. You see, we’re all cousins.’

I asked her what had brought them to Humaythira. Again, she laughed. ‘Oh, we just like to come here. In fact, we come whenever we can afford to. We visit the saint and spend a couple of days here as his guests – I mean, you can give a donation if you want, but you don’t have to. And’, she confided, ‘someone else does the cooking.’

I sat listening to the musical Nubian voices. For somewhere that owed its existence to death, Humaythira seemed remarkably lively. It was a place of both devotion and recreation – a sort of Islamic Butlin’s. My own reasons for being here were not a matter of discussion; but one of the cousins asked Umm Baha, in a whisper, if I was a Muslim.

‘How should I know?’ she said, then turned to me. ‘Are you a Muslim?’

I said I was a Masihi, a follower of the Messiah.

‘Oh,’ said the cousin, ‘one of
iyal ammana
.’

One of our cousins.

The men came back from their prayers and we sat down to a meal of rice,
mulukhiyyah
and fat mutton. After lunch, they all left for the long journey back to Luxor. The hall was empty again; but no longer silent – the Nubian cousins seemed to have set off some harmonic of the place, and their laughter lingered behind them.

I went to the tomb, and found I was the only visitor. Everyone else in Humaythira was enjoying a mutton-fed siesta. It was the slack time for tomb-going. Feeling, for the first time in my sepulchral travels, a distinct sense of melancholy, I left the saint and went to look for a ride in the direction of Aydhab.

*

‘And what of the third person of your Trinity, the Holy Spirit?’ The
shaykh
spoke with the precise little twangs and pops peculiar to speakers of the most elevated Arabic. His pharynx seemed to conceal a miniature skiffle group.

To many Muslims, the idea of the Trinity smacks of rampant
shirk
, polytheism. I was hardly the best person to defend it. I could remember my infant self pondering the subject during sermons at Mattins. God was 3 in 1, like that brand of oil my brothers put on their bikes.
God
the Son was easy: He was shown all over the place on His cross and, this being the 1960s, looked like the latest issue of curate. God the Holy Ghost was more difficult, but perhaps to be found in the attic, which was where ghosts lived. The real poser was God the Father. An early burst of logic dismissed the old-gentleman-on-a-cloud version: wouldn’t He fall through the cloud? Perhaps God as a whole was very small – the winds and whales of the Benedicite had to magnify Him, which is what my grandmother did to read the newspaper.

To be frank, my understanding of the triune deity had developed little since childhood. Now, I longed to change the subject to something straightforward like the virgin birth, to admit that I had failed Divinity ‘O’ Level. But the
shaykh
was waiting for an answer. He smiled quizzically from a face as dark as bog-oak that rose out of a horned moon of beard. It was the face of a mage, or a mesmerist. ‘Uhm … I think that in the gospels Jesus said that another comforter would come after him, and the comforter is the Holy Ghost. Or something like that.’

‘This is another case’, the
shaykh
said softly, ‘of deliberate alteration to the Injil, the Evangel. The original text is in the Holy Qur’an, in which Jesus says,’ he touched my hand in emphasis; on one of his fingers glittered a balas ruby the size of a hazelnut, ‘“After me there will come a prophet whose name is Ahmad.” Ahmad is, as you know, an alternative name for Muhammad. Jesus the son of Mary predicted the coming of our Prophet, may God bless and preserve all three of them. What do you say to that?’

There was no point arguing with the literal word of God, so I said, ‘Mmm.’

The other passengers in the pick-up, the
shaykh
’s followers, looked disappointed at my response. They wanted more. From the cab, a
dhikr
cassette broadcast its rhythmic, unitarian mantra: ‘
La ilaha illa ’llah
, There is no god but God.’ I looked out of the whizzing vehicle on to a landscape as blurred and arid as my brain. I could think of nothing except a silly but apposite joke about a Cairene traffic policeman.

The policeman had been posted to the desert, and was desperate to get back to the city. He had to book someone and prove himself, but for months not a vehicle had appeared. Finally, one day, a Christian priest rode up on a motorcycle.

The bike was in perfect condition; the priest was even wearing a crash helmet. The policeman’s heart sank. All he could do was issue a mild word of warning: ‘Father, don’t you know it’s dangerous to travel alone in the desert?’

‘But I’m not alone,’ said the priest. ‘I travel with the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.’

‘Hah! I knew there’d be something,’ the policeman exclaimed, pulling out his notebook. ‘Four on a motorcycle. You’re booked.’

I told the joke. There was the briefest of hiatuses; one of the passengers laughed
sotto voce
. The
shaykh
fingered the knobbly wooden rosary that hung around his neck. ‘Perhaps’, he said, ‘we can say no more about the true nature of God than the statement of His Prophet: “Consider creation, and do not consider the Creator. For minds cannot attain Him, nor sight encompass Him.”’

I nodded enthusiastically, and sighed inwardly with relief. My inquisition was over.

Like me, the
shaykh
and his companions had visited al-Shadhili and were now on their way to the coast. As we turned east at Sidi Salim, my thoughts turned to Aydhab. Compared with the more illustrious pepper ports – Mangalore on the Malabar coast, Aden, Alexandria, Venice – Aydhab was the poor relation. Gibb’s footnote in the
Travels
sounded bad enough: ‘Its ruins have been identified by G.W. Murray,
Geogr. J
., LXVIII (1926), 235–40, “on a flat and waterless mound” on the Red Sea coast, 12 miles north of Halaib, at 22°20′ N., 36°29′32″ E.’ But the note concealed the true awfulness of Aydhab in its heyday. Ibn Jubayr wrote that pilgrims were forced to pay outrageously high taxes. For those who refused, the port authorities ‘devised various inhuman tortures such as suspension by the testicles’. Only one letter, he noted, separates ‘Aydhab’ from
adhab
, ‘punishment’. Things improved when Saladin abolished uncanonical dues; but travellers still had to contend with Aydhab’s fake holy men, randy landladies and, most notoriously, rapacious skippers. Their vessels leaked through their coir stitchings and stank of shark oil and bilge gas. Into these, Ibn Jubayr says, the pilgrims were packed one on top of another ‘like chickens in a cage’. If anyone complained, the response was, ‘You look after your soul, and I’ll look after my hull.’ The sea was dreadful, a warren of reefs with names like ‘the Shoal of the Devil’s Mother’ and home to ravening sharks. The Persian traveller Nasir
Khusraw
, stuck in Aydhab for three months, heard of a camel which died at sea and was flung overboard. A shark swallowed it whole, all but a leg which remained sticking out of its jaws. Then came an even more monstrous fish that swallowed his smaller cousin
farci de chameau
.

Ibn Jubayr made it across the Red Sea, but only just. On several occasions he heard the heart-stopping crunch of hull striking coral – ‘We died and were resurrected many times,’ he recalled. Disembarking queasily at Jeddah, he resolved to return overland via the Levant: Crusaders were a minor worry compared with the skippers of Aydhab, ‘a place which, if at all possible, it were best never to set eyes on’.

One hundred and fifty years later, IB didn’t even make it aboard. As today, there was a dispute about who actually owned the port. A third of it belonged to Sultan al-Nasir and the rest to the Bejas, a local and only partly Islamized tribe, ‘black-skinned people, who wrap themselves in yellow blankets’. Arriving at Aydhab just as the joint rulers had fallen out, IB discovered that the Beja chief had sunk all the ships in harbour. As the holy man of Hu had predicted, he turned his back on the sea and retraced his steps to Cairo. Continuing territorial squabbles put traders off the port, and within a few decades of IB’s visit commerce there had all but fizzled out. Since then, Aydhab has been forgotten – and perhaps deservedly – by all but a few scholars of medieval geography.

The pick-up began to descend a long, narrow valley. I noticed a hint of salt in the air, and peered over the cab roof into the buffeting wind. In the distance, just visible between mustard-coloured rocks, was a dab of royal blue – the Red Sea. I asked the
shaykh
if he had heard of a place called Aydhab.

He looked surprised. ‘Aydhab is in our territory. It belonged to our ancestors …’

‘So you’re Bejas!’ Fragments of reading on these strange people rushed into my mind: camels trained to sniff out prey like gun-dogs, ritual excision of the right testicle, a female subsection of the tribe who lived as Amazons. European writers identified the Bejas with the Blemmyes, that freakish race whose faces were on their chests. I scrutinized the
shaykh
more closely: admittedly, his face was in the customary position; but he did have a rather short neck. He also looked taken aback.

‘The Bejas’, he said testily, ‘are a people who wear
sticks
in their hair. We are Bishariyyah. Our ancestor was that great warrior and scholar, the Prophet’s companion al-Zubayr ibn al-Awwam, may God be pleased with him.’

I was disappointed. I thought I’d met a cousin of the Sciapods, Himantopods and Cynocephales of classical geography. But then I remembered a reference to the
shaykh
’s tribe. ‘I’ve read’, I said gingerly, ‘that the Bishariyyah are of mixed descent, Beja and Arab.’

‘The Prophet said, “Genealogists are liars.”’

‘So … your ancestor was al-Zubayr ibn al-Awwam.’

I was now the inquisitor, waiting for a response.

The
shaykh
smiled beatifically. ‘It would be an honour if you came with us as our guest.’

Protocol demanded an oblique refusal. But I was tempted. ‘Would I be able to visit Aydhab?’

‘Of course. But there is nothing there. Just a few ruins by the sea.
Ka-annaha lam takun
.’

As though it had never been.

I wavered. But another 200 miles to visit a place which it were better never to set eyes on, a place which might never have been? Besides, I had exhausted my knowledge of the Trinity.

In the small seaside settlement of Marsa Alam I thanked the
shaykh
for his offer, and explained that I really ought to go to Syria. He turned south, I north. It was only later that I realized I’d forgotten to ask which country Aydhab was in.

*

Two months later and on the other side of the Red Sea, I was reminded of my night at Sidi Salim by another news item on another radio. There had been a second massacre, this time at Luxor. Militants had killed sixty foreign tourists and eight Egyptians.

The promiscuous babble of trippers and touts ended in bullets, then sirens, then silence. Luxor went into shock. No Stellas were drunk in the Horus Hotel; the dollars dried up in the Dante Bazaar; Sambo’s boat dropped its sails; there was no
son et lumière
after the sound and fury. Luxor, or at least the pseudo-Luxor of the tourists, became a place which might never have been. Unlike Aydhab, it would probably come back to life; but not yet.

The militants had done it, they said, in the name of Islam. I
thought
of the Egyptians, the Muslims, I had met – Umm Baha and her many cousins, Nashwat of Military Intelligence, the Delta imam with the El Greco face, the farmer at al-Husayn’s Mawlid, the possibly Beja
shaykh
– and wondered what they were making of it all.

From Cairo IB crossed the desert to Gaza. He visited Jerusalem and toured the other holy places of Palestine, then visited cities and castles in Syria. In the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus he attended classes on
hadith,
Traditions of the Prophet, and was given diplomas by some of the leading scholars of the age. On 1 September 1326 he left Damascus for Mecca, travelling in the Syrian pilgrim caravan
.

Damascus

The Shilling in the Armpit

‘Obedience spake and said: “I take my seat in Syria”; the Plague replied: “And I go with you.”’

Mustawfi,
Nuzhat al-qulub
(
c
. 1340)

S
OMEWHERE AT THE
bottom of a box, I have a photograph taken by a friend from the battlements of Crac des Chevaliers, looking down on to the moat. Far below on the greenish surface of the water floats a tiny creature, pallid and leggy like something nasty found in a pond. The creature is me, breasting the frogspawn and rusty cans, drunk on Bekaa Valley wine. As I hadn’t kept a diary or taken a camera, the picture is one of the few pieces of material evidence that I had been to Syria before.

Now, driving into Damascus under a November sky crazed with lightning, other recollections flashed across my memory: a line of towers marching up the Tomb Valley of Palmyra; a plate of pomegranates in the Aleppo
suq
, bigger than babies’ heads; the cry of a street hawker in the small hours – ‘Beerah beerah whisky whisky beeraaah’. I recalled a fragment of conversation on the aphrodisiac properties of the pistachio, and a complete dialogue with a bean-seller on the mountain above Damascus: