Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (22 page)

‘How much is that?’

‘Two hundred lira.’

‘You’re joking.’

‘That’s my price. A hundred for the beans, a hundred for the rent of the table.’

‘If I’d known I’d have eaten standing up.’

‘You’re paying for the view.’

‘Bugger the view. Would you care to charge for the air too?’

A car with Saudi plates drew up and a man got out. ‘Are you a Saudi?’ I asked him. The man nodded. ‘Then what do you think of two hundred lira for a plate of horrible beans?’

The Saudi looked blank.

‘See?’ I exclaimed. ‘Even the Saudi thinks it’s a rip-off.’

I threw a hundred lira on the table and stomped off down the hill, dodging a hail of Damascene damnations.

The bean-seller of Jabal Qasiyun sparked off other discomfiting memories: accusations that I was trying to pass forged hundred-dollar bills; a missed plane and threats of imprisonment because of a minor visa irregularity. (Never, never argue with a colonel in Syrian Immigration – things have changed since the 1876 Baedeker stated that ‘the traveller’s passport is sometimes asked for, but an ordinary visiting-card will answer the purpose equally well’.)

As I was reminded in Upper Egypt, borders and passports are in general a modern discontent. But there were exceptions. Although Egypt and Greater Syria were both ruled by the Mamluk Sultan, IB had to show a piece of paper at the frontier. He noted that the sand was smoothed around the border crossing so that any illegal trespasser could be tracked down. ‘And’, he added, ‘they never fail to catch him.’ The danger, the traveller explained, was subversion by Mongol agents. In the recent past, it had been a very real threat: the Mongol Ilkhans wrote regularly, if in vain, to the monarchs of Christendom, inviting them to attack the Mamluks in tandem. The present Suez Canal zone was the trap through which an invasion from the east would have to pass. For Mamluk Tatarophobes, this was their Iron Curtain.

In the text of the
Travels
, IB continued from the border to Jerusalem, then made an extravagant northward loop through Syria before reaching Damascus. Since he also says that he took only three weeks to get from Cairo to the Syrian capital, there is little doubt that he cobbled together more than one visit – something travel writers do with few qualms. I, too, cheated in a small way, and stepped out of an aeroplane where IB’s literary trip ended.

‘What the poets have said in description of the beauties of Damascus’, wrote Ibn Juzayy in one of his asides to the
Travels
, ‘is beyond all computation.’ The next three pages are an anthology climaxing in a gushing eulogy –

This dwelling-place of joys, where doves attune their song to dancing bough,

And flowers that galliardwise strut through her meads, a gay and scented band.

– followed by an editorial ahem: ‘So let us return to the narrative …’

IB reached Damascus in August, as the fruit was ripening. I arrived when the year had turned the corner into winter. Instead of fruit, there was a vigorous crop of very large presidential portraits captioned, ‘Welcome to al-Asad’s Syria’. For a man so often photographed, Hafiz al-Asad was strikingly unphotogenic. Pictures of his neighbour, Saddam, bespeak a certain brigandish braggadocio; al-Asad, however he was portrayed – uplit, downlit, backlit, in bas-relief, in the round, in mosaic, in multiple like Warhol’s Marilyn – always managed to look like a grocer.

Images of al-Asad’s son Basil also proliferated along the airport road. They showed him in a neatly clipped beard and aviator shades, and sometimes on a rearing charger, the pose borrowed from the famous David of Napoleon. Basil was dashing; but he was dead, smashed to bits in a Mercedes on this very road. This qualified him to be, according to the captions, ‘A Symbol for Coming Generations’. Basil’s brother Bashar, the new heir apparent, was less in evidence and at least in looks took after his father.

I told the taxi driver the name of the hotel I’d been recommended. ‘You don’t want to stay there,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you somewhere much better.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘A flat. Your own flat, with a minibar. And there are people to … look after you. Girls I mean.’

‘Thank you, but historical geography’s more my thing.’

We drove on in silence. Fat gobbets of rain began to explode on the windscreen.

‘Your Princess Diana … Was she a good woman?’

‘She had a big heart,’ I said.

‘She was an adulteress. She tricked her husband. Women should be honourable.’ He dilated on the theme for a while, then ran out of inspiration and switched on a cassette. It was a mosque sermon.

I could hardly believe the swiftness of the transition from whoremongering to homily, from minibar to minbar. But after the initial
surprise
, I began to wonder if the driver was not so much a hypocrite as a sort of moral cubist, taking a biangular look at human nature. Perhaps it was a Damascene trait. ‘Man is prostrate with the fishes and serpents,’ wrote a cosmographer of the city at the time of IB’s visit, ‘but his mind is like the moon and his senses the planets …’ Suddenly the rain came on with wanton violence. Clouds caved in above us. Static ripped through the sky and made eerie holograms of flyovers and unfinished, exoskeletal skyscrapers. ‘The voice of Man is as thunder, his laughter lightning. His flesh is as the earth, his bones mountains.’

We arrived. I shouldered my bag and dived into the rain.

*

In Damascus you can while away a whole day grazing on grilled offal, pastries and crystallized fruit. As Ali Bey wrote, it is ‘the best place in the world for animal subsistence’. For my first breakfast there I had a brainburger – a whole lamb’s cerebrum poached, peppered and squashed into a bun – and a banana milkshake. The city was sodden and uninviting; but I set off with a full stomach and a light step to visit the Umayyad Mosque, which IB thought ‘the greatest mosque on earth in point of magnificence, the most perfect in architecture, and the most exquisite in beauty, grace, and consummate achievement’.

My route took me along a highway and over the Barada, the river of Damascus. Ibn Juzayy, in
Golden Treasury
mode again, said in quotation that

Her waters glide softly with rippling chains, yet unfettered,

And healthy yet languid the zephyr that plays o’er her leas.

The Barada was a disagreeable khaki colour, and stank. But then, poets are notorious liars – worse even than travel writers. The Persian traveller Mustawfi was unusually frank. Visiting Damascus at about the same time as IB, he admitted that ‘its waters are choked with mud, its air bestinks’. The reason the Barada was polluted, he explained, was that it ran under trees. (The geographer al-Idrisi was probably nearer the mark when he said that the sewers flowed straight into it.)

Damascus has always been an ambivalent place. For the conquering Arabs of the seventh century it was a paradise, a giant oasis of orchards cultivated since the second millennium
BC
. For others, it
was
Paradise itself. Mandeville, writing on ‘the Kingdome of Surry’, noted that ‘in that place was Adam made as some men saye, for men called sometime that place the felde of Damasse’. But fecundity and fetidness go together. The Arabic name for the Damascus oasis, al-Ghutah, is cognate with the words for dungheap and defecation. Here, hardy Arabians died in urban epidemics and were unmanned by Romano-Persian over-indulgence. Damascus was a paradise sitting in a cloaca.

That morning, the city bestank too with diesel fumes and dank clothes. The voices of sock- and cigarette-sellers rang plangently above the din of the traffic. I turned into the Hamidiyyah, the long covered market that leads into the heart of the old city. Here there was a sudden confusion of colour, of brides’ dresses, napery, drapery, tinsel and tat, displayed in a gigantic cross between the Burlington Arcade and Woolworths. There seemed to be few imported goods – Damascus has always been a place where things are produced (damask cloth, damask roses, damascened steel, damsons). I ran into a low-flying flock of falcons, stuffed ones proffered by importunate hawkers, and escaped into an ice-cream parlour.

At first glance, it looked like a gymnasium. A line of sweating men were wielding heavy clubs, grunting rhythmically as they pounded vats of a white, glutinous substance. This was no ordinary ice-cream, but
kaymak
, made with the powdered twin tubers of an allegedly aphrodisiac orchid known to the ancient Greeks as
satyrium
and to Arab pharmacologists as ‘fox testicles’. Despite the early hour and the potentially arousing combination, I ate a bowlful studded with crushed pistachios. The ice-cream had the consistency of melted mozzarella and a pleasantly feral aftertaste.

When I re-emerged from the gaudy tunnel of the Hamidiyyah, nearly half a mile long, the day seemed drab and underexposed. Facing me was a barrack-like wall built of large stone blocks that were patched and pockmarked. This first glimpse of the most exquisite mosque on earth is an anticlimax.

And then I looked through the door, and remembered those near-death tales, the Garden glimpsed through a gate. All the light in Damascus seemed to be gathered here, bouncing off the white marble paving of the courtyard and rippling along slender arcades. The interior was light in both senses, luminous and buoyant. It was everything the exterior was not, like an angel in a shabby old mac.

I went in. There was only one other person in the courtyard, a monkish figure in a hooded black gown inscribed on the back with a word in Arabic script. I wondered if the person was an adherent of some obscure dervish order, and strained my eyes until I could read the inscription:
mutawassit
, ‘medium’. The figure turned. She was European and the gown, I realized, not a mystic vestment but a cover for unsuitably clad medium-sized Nazarene females.

IB devoted ten pages to the Umayyad Mosque, more than to any other building he saw except for the two sanctuaries of Mecca and al-Madinah. Never a reinventor of the wheel, he based much of the account on that of Ibn Jubayr. The earlier traveller’s description needed little updating; even today the mosque looks substantially the same as it did when it was finished in 715, despite six earthquakes and seven major fires. IB noted that the Umayyad Mosque had been a church. (He might have added that before that it was the temple of Damascene Jupiter, and, earlier still, of his Aramean counterpart Hadad.) Supposedly it lies half way between Mecca and Constantinople, so it was fitting that for a time the Muslim conquerors shared the huge temenos with their Christian subjects. The Umayyad Caliph al-Walid appropriated the church in 708; but even this was not the end of the Christian presence for, IB says, ‘al-Walid applied to the King of the Greeks at Constantinople, bidding him send craftsmen to him, and he sent him twelve thousand of them’.

Within the mould of the old temple walls the Byzantine artisans, together with others from Persia, India and the Maghrib according to earlier accounts, cooked up a perfect architectural soufflé, solid yet weightless, delicious in its combination of flavours. Nowhere is the fusion more successful than in the mosaics that surround the courtyard, ‘cut stones of gold,’ IB wrote, ‘intermingled with various colours of extraordinary beauty’. Because of Islamic strictures against depicting animate creatures, the mosaics are empty of men and beasts. Instead, they show gardens filled with buildings and streams. Trees grow up the spandrels of the arcades, thick and juicy as asparagus, done in intense pistachio- and spinach-greens and outlined in squid-ink purple. They are not so much stylized as super-real, hyper-trophied like Jack’s beanstalk. As in the fairy-tale or archetypal dream-scene, little buildings are lost in the woods – pavilions, follies, proto-Palladian boathouses. Some are fantasies of the order of Petra or Portmeirion; others resemble the gabled and colonnaded
Byzantine
villas that still survive in parts of northern Syria. It is a real world, but one processed by the dreaming mind. With no perspective, there are sudden confusions of scale – is that a very small palace or a very grand kennel? – and with no visible people, there is something minutely disturbing about the whole scene:
Et in Arcadia Nemo
.

On certain holy nights, twelve thousand lamps were lit around the courtyard; incense drifted from two gilded openwork spheres, standing on columns and looking like ormolu orreries. The sight was said to be one of the wonders of the world. I looked up at the mosaics and
imagined
their tesserae, those millions of shimmering pixels, flickering in the lamplight, all but animate.

Since it cost seven years’ taxes for the whole of Syria, the mosque must be among the most expensive buildings ever constructed. Al-Walid is said to have burned the eighteen camel-loads of account books, saying, ‘We have done this for God, and need no accounting!’ The sheer prodigality of the building shocked the next caliph but one, the saintly Umar ibn Abdulaziz; he planned to remove the gold from the mosaics and put it to a more altruistic use. In the nick of time, a Byzantine delegation arrived and was shown into the mosque. ‘Their leader looked about’, the geographer Yaqut recorded, ‘and turned pale. “We Byzantines imagined”, he said, “that you Arabs would not endure long. Now I have seen otherwise.”’ Umar changed his mind about the gold.