Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (28 page)

The picture, one of the most vivid images of the Orient in the
post-crusading
mind, illustrated a pervasive legend: the Old Man lured innocent youths, doped them out of their minds on hashish (hence
hashshashin
and ‘Assassins’), and gave them a taste of paradise with the girls in his secret garden. Every so often he would pick one or more of the young men to go into the outside world and assassinate an enemy. The killers couldn’t lose: if they got away, they would be readmitted to the garden; if they were killed they would take the short cut to heaven. Within the Old Man’s perverted
hortus conclusus
are all the elements of the stereotypical cult – a megalomaniac leader, seduction and brainwashing of the young, membership of the elect, paradise guaranteed. As with a Hollywood script, successive writers gave a tweak to the more filmic features or, if they didn’t exist, made them up. The biggest name in the credits is that of Marco Polo.

The reality, like the beige walls of Masyaf, was less highly coloured. Drugs and orgies were probably no more a feature of Nizari life than were-deer and harpies. Admittedly, the Nizaris were a missionary organization, with various stages of initiation into esoteric knowledge and with total obedience to their leader. They occupied mountain fastnesses which, if not paradises, were well provisioned – in the other main Nizari region south of the Caspian, one of their castles survived a Mongol siege for fourteen years. And, being a temporal as well as a spiritual power, they naturally disposed of opponents. Like the umbrella-wielding Bulgarian secret service in the 1970s, they just did it more neatly and publicly than anyone else.

The assassinations were not always successful. One of the more celebrated failures was the attempt on the future King Edward I of England, at Acre in 1272. With him was his favourite writer of romances, Rustichello of Pisa – who, as fate had it, landed up a quarter of a century later in a Genoese gaol with Marco Polo. It would be a fair guess to assume that Rustichello’s memories of Acre, mixed with Polo’s garbled second-hand knowledge of other north Persian sects who undoubtedly did use hashish, produced the farrago of the full-blown Assassin legend. The story assured the two Italians of a goggling readership.

At the time IB was travelling, the Nizaris had long ceased to be a political power. Sultan al-Nasir, however, used them occasionally as contract killers; one of his targets was Qarasunqur, a Mamluk cold-war defector to the Mongols. ‘Al-Nasir sent suicide killers against him time after time,’ IB wrote. ‘Some of them gained entrance to his
house
, but were killed before reaching him; others hurled themselves at him as he was riding, and were struck down by him.’ One contemporary account says that eighty Assassins lost their lives; another doubles the figure. Had the fabled jackals become a bunch of bungling pink panthers? Probably, to some extent; but the sensible Qarasunqur ‘used never to leave off his coat of mail, and never slept except in a room built of wood and iron’. Then, in 1328, the Mongols and the Mamluks agreed to a mutual extradition of defectors, or at least of their severed heads. Before he could be arrested Qarasunqur, in the best tradition of the spy story, ‘took a ring of his, which was hollowed out and contained a deadly poison, wrenched off its stone, swallowed the poison and died on the spot’. A less melodramatic historian than IB says that Qarasunqur died of diarrhoea.

It took me some time to find my way out of the castle. Abu Firas was sitting on the bonnet of his car, looking out over the plain. We were joined by an old lady, who wore a corsage of wild flowers and nattered at us. When she had gone, Abu Firas said, ‘They’re a funny lot, you know, these Isma’ilis. When a man leaves his house to go to work, he first kisses his wife’s, um … her you-know-what, and he says “Out of you I came, and into you I shall return.”’

I could see the old lady picking flowers as she walked down the path from the castle. She looked, I thought, a bit like Miss Elsie, my piano teacher – and about as likely as Miss Elsie to submit to having her you-know-what ritually osculated.

We left Masyaf and drove higher into the mountains, following minor and diminishing roads in what we hoped was the direction of al-Ullayqah, ‘the Bramble’. The castle had eluded medieval geographers – even Abu ’l-Fida, who lived twenty miles away and determined the co-ordinates of towns in China, hadn’t mentioned it. At every junction, Abu Firas would stop, mutter ‘
Bismillah
’, then make a divinely inspired guess. We saw no other vehicles and only a few sparse, crofter-like villages. People were windblown and ruddy and stared at the car; there were girls with freckles and men with Hitler moustaches. We asked for directions perhaps a dozen times, but the responses were always halting and equivocal. ‘You see,’ said Abu Firas, ‘they are afraid.’

‘Afraid of what?’

‘Of everything.’

We passed into a region of chalk-white limestone, then into one of
cracked
and patinated karst dotted with wind-gnawed boulders. In the bigger cracks huddled tiny terraces of red earth, separated by white walls and planted with tobacco. There were occasional patches of myrtle and oak scrub, dwarfed by the huge effort of growing.

We came on al-Ullayqah unexpectedly. It sat on a little pap of rock surrounded by bare and silvery walnut trees, like a wen in an old man’s beard. I left Abu Firas and climbed up tobacco terraces that had invaded the outer walls, then through the main rampart via a breach defended by a thorn bush. I emerged bleeding but victorious. On the summit, all the flat spaces were cultivated. A hole in a field led into an underground cistern, and other shafts disappeared into mattamores and oubliettes. A few arches still stood, but most of the masonry had collapsed, prised apart by the roots of sumac and terebinth. The fortress was slowly reverting to its landscape, crumbling like a sandcastle in an incoming tide of vegetation.

The Bramble was certainly a secret place. But on the far side of the summit there was a surprise: I had climbed up a pimple and now found it to be a crag beetling over a deep and shaggy valley. In the extreme distance I could see a town with puffing factory chimneys and, beyond it, the sea – which, by some trick of perspective, seemed to go uphill.

Abu Firas joined me, unscathed, having found the easy way up. ‘That’s Baniyas,’ he said, pointing to the town. ‘And that wadi down below us is called Jahannam.’

Gehenna. It seemed apt that one of the Old Man’s paradises should overlook a valley called Hell.

We drove down towards Baniyas, passing signs advertising holy men’s shrines, little cubes topped by ping-pong-ball domes and set among stands of holm oak. Abu Firas explained that they belonged to the Alawis. I was hoping to find out something about this secretive sect, to which President al-Asad and the ruling junta belonged, in the coastal town of Jabalah. For the moment, however, we were on a different diversion.

During his excursion along the coast IB passed by another castle, al-Marqab, ‘a mighty fortress on a lofty mountain, which was captured from the hands of the Christians by Sultan Qalawun; his son al-Nasir was born close by’. Qalawun, wrote a contemporary Egyptian historian, mustered the latest ordnance from his
makhazin
and
dar al-sina’ah
(the two terms have given us ‘magazine’ and ‘arsenal’); it included
Frank
- and Devil-class mangonels, iron projectiles and flamethrowers. Surrounded by this high-tech weaponry, with sappers gnawing at the foundations like rats in the wainscot, the Christians – Abu ’l-Fida’s ‘Ustibar’, the Knights Hospitaller – sensibly sued for peace. From IB’s viewpoint, these events had happened only a generation before; but, like the Cuban Missile Crisis from ours, they belonged to a closed chapter of history.

We dropped down to the coastal plain and drove south. Soon, Abu Firas pointed upwards to al-Marqab. I could see where the name came from – a
marqab
is a look-out post. Turning off the coast road, we wound up to the castle and passed beneath its fat black rump. The view from the top was stupendous: there was Baniyas in a wide arc of bay with a bleary Mediterranean behind and, to the south, mile after mile of plain on which polythene greenhouses glistened against the dark green of olives.

The Hospitallers’ basalt command-centre seemed unreasonably massive and fascistical. Compared with the Old Man’s untidy mop of a castle at Masyaf, and the creeping alopecia at al-Ullayqah, this was a piece of sheer skinhead effrontery. Alone, I explored the interior, beating paths through acres of scrub and brambles, then feeling my way into vaults so dark that only the echo of my footsteps gave any impression of size. In the inner court there was a hole with a can on a rope next to it. I let the can fall, watched the rope uncoil, then heard a slap and a long, ringing reverberation. I hauled the can up and drank, then let it drop again and timed the echo: a full fifteen
seconds
. I was standing on a cathedral of water. A doorway off the court led into the Hospitallers’ chapel. Inside, an endless column of wind poured through the window of the apse and left by the west door, setting off a faint aeolian plainchant. It was a coldly beautiful interior, perfect for soldier-ascetics.

By now it was mid-afternoon, and we still had to find al-Kahf, ‘the Cavern’, the most secluded of the Assassin castles. But on my way out of al-Marqab the gatekeeper asked if I’d seen the paintings. I was surprised: decorations in this temple to militarism? ‘They’re in a small room off the chapel,’ he explained. ‘We only discovered them this year. They’d been whitewashed over.’

I returned to the chapel, and in a small sacristy to the north of the apse found a fresco. Part of it had flaked away, but it clearly showed the twelve apostles in various stages of youth and age, beardedness and baldness. They looked down from the low vaulted ceiling; I felt that I was the one under scrutiny. Then I noticed that the saints were blind: their eyes had been carefully removed – according to an old belief, the powdered pigment cured ophthalmia. I imagined Qalawun’s forces entering the deserted chapel, surprised by this sudden burst of faces; and, perhaps, by their ordinariness. It was only a fancy, but I wondered if these fragile images might be portraits. The Hospitallers began to seem more human.

As we drove back into the interior of the mountains, we passed a sign to a village called al-Khanziriyyah, ‘Piggy’. Abu Firas’s gruff explanation was that there were ‘some funny places around here’. A little further on he pointed out the Bramble, up on its perch above the Valley of Hell. ‘And look down there. We could have taken that road through the valley. It would have cut out miles. They didn’t tell us about it because they were afraid.’ I rather fancied a trip to Hell in a yellow Mercedes; but the shadows were lengthening and it was no time for Dantesque frivolities.

Rashid al-Din Sinan, the most celebrated leader of the Syrian Nizaris, died in 1192. His successor was keen to show outsiders that, like the old Old Man, he was a disciplinarian. According to Crusader historians, the opportunity arose a couple of years later when he was entertaining Henry of Champagne at the Cavern. In the midst of the diplomatic niceties, the Old Man ordered two of his warriors to leap from the battlements. And leap they did – ending up, as one romance put it, ‘
mors et fenis/ Sur les roches agues desrompis corps et pis
’.

It is one of those elastic stories that get stretched to different times and places. Sometimes the witness is not Henry (who died soon afterwards, parodically, in an accidental defenestration at Acre) but Frederick II von Hohenstaufen; sometimes it takes place in northern Persia; Alexander the Great, in the medieval legends, ordered a death leap; Peter the Great is said to have commanded a Cossack to jump from a tower in Copenhagen, to impress the King of Denmark. In the case of the Nizaris it seems to be more than a myth, for the sober and veracious Ibn Jubayr wrote about their leap of faith well before it entered European literature.

Something inspired us to offer a lift to an off-duty soldier who, it turned out, was going in the direction of al-Kahf. He seemed reluctant to accept, and as we drove off he began frantically clicking his prayer beads. Abu Firas smiled at me, his diagnosis of endemic phobia confirmed. But the soldier gradually calmed down and even pointed out a couple of landmarks, the shrines of Adam’s son Seth and of the Prophet Salih. The light faded, the road deteriorated and the scene became increasingly druidical. Finally, on an eminence above a densely tree’d valley, the soldier told Abu Firas to stop. ‘That’s al-Kahf,’ he said, pointing to a line of cliff, tousled with vegetation, at a spot where the valley split.

I looked at my watch, then at the castle, and reckoned I could just make it back to the car before total darkness descended. ‘Right. If you could wait, Abu Firas, I’ll be back as soon as possible.’

Abu Firas didn’t look happy. The soldier clicked his prayer beads in alarm. ‘Don’t go,’ he said. ‘The forest is full of boars, huge ones. They can cut you in two with their tusks!’ He made a horrible diagonal slicing movement across his chest.

Two things came to mind: al-Khanziriyyah, ‘Piggy’; and a passage I had recently come across in the memoirs of a boar-hunting man, the local twelfth-century nobleman Usamah ibn Munqidh – ‘I remember seeing a boarlet, about the size of a kitten, attack the hoof of my page’s horse. The page drew an arrow from his quiver, speared the animal and held it up in the air. I was astonished that so tiny a creature could be so ferocious.’