Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (34 page)

I recalled a bowdlerized Egyptian edition I had come across, published in 1939 for the use of students. ‘We cannot conceal from the reader’, the introduction said, ‘the fact that IB’s pen, in unguarded moments, recorded words and expressions from which pudency should avert its gaze. We have therefore diligently sought out and erased such passages, in order zealously to preserve the modesty of students whose eyes might otherwise have fallen upon, or whose ears
overheard
, that which they would consider shocking.’ Sales of the unexpurgated edition must have soared.

After lunch, Hamud presented me with an Oman International Bank diary drenched in scent. He then sprayed me and the tassel of his
dishdashah
, which the Omanis use as a sort of pomander, with what seemed to be a good half-bottle of
eau-de-toilette
. Reeking like a pair of courtesans, we set off in his Landcruiser for a tour of the island. As I had already suspected, IB hadn’t missed much. Masirah seemed to be composed of expanses of khaki gravel, set at slightly different inclinations and dotted with occasional shack-like settlements. ‘Mainlanders always think we’re a bit of a backwater,’ said Hamud. I nodded sympathetically. ‘But we have a saying: “Masirah’s not short. Masirah is the neck of Oman.”’ He wasn’t entirely sure what the saying meant.

That evening I sat in the hotel room and wrote up my diary. Outside, the wind sighed along the shore. I got to the end of the day’s entry, then had a thought: why not carry on writing? Mandeville had made up large parts of his
Travels
and so, according to recent scholarship, had Marco Polo. The hotel was cheap by Omani standards, and I certainly wasn’t going to be disturbed by the Father of Speech. On second thoughts, I realized that you couldn’t get away with it these days. The time was long past when travellers, according to the old proverb, might lie by authority.

I looked at the map and saw that I was only a third of the way from Sur to Salalah. There was absolutely no doubt in my mind that IB, in my position, would have gone to the airbase and wheedled a lift in the
sikayfan
. Perhaps that was the answer. I would decide tomorrow.

The following morning I sat in a café eating fried eggs and delaying the decision. In the event, it was made for me. I had been complaining to the only other customer about the lack of boats, when he told me he was about to leave for a village on the mainland to pick up some fish. ‘It’s a couple of hundred miles nearer Salalah. Why don’t you come along?’

I studied him for a moment. With his insouciantly tied headscarf, thick beard, gold teeth and nascent paunch, he had the look of a podgy pirate. He also looked highly amused by the mere idea of the trip. ‘Why not?’ I said.

He regarded me quizzically; then, as if he had just got a punchline, burst out laughing.

On the way to the quay, Khamis explained that he had a boat at the distant village, together with half a dozen fishermen and a pick-up with a giant ice-box on the back. When the ice-box was full, he would drive across the desert and sell the catch in the Emirates. For the moment, we would be hitching.

To cross to the mainland we boarded a launch which they called a
stimah
, pronounced ‘steamer’. Seconds after it had got going, Khamis began waving his arms and shouting, in English, ‘My snake! My snake!’ We returned to the quay. Khamis had forgotten his camel-stick. After the false start, we flew across the waves. The twenty-mile crossing, an hour and a half in the ferry, took twenty minutes. I now understood why I had seen launches with names like
MIG Fighter
.

Our first lift dropped us at a small settlement where Khamis had relations by marriage. We went to their compound and found a group of solemnly beautiful men sitting around a mat. Greetings were
badw
-style, a long fluid concatenation of prayers and inquiries after health, punctuated by a delicate meeting of the tips of noses – the southern Arabian kiss – and ending in, ‘Is there news?’ ‘No news.’
‘Is
there information?’ ‘No information.’, after which the news and information, such as they were, were exchanged. We took our seats around the mat and a boy poured coffee. Then a masked lady arrived and extended her hand to each of us. The hand was covered in the gauziest of veils. I grasped and shook it; then noticed that the others were merely brushing the tips of her fingers. With shocking clarity, a comment of Bertram Thomas’s came to me: ‘For a man to squeeze a girl’s hand, or clasp it as in a European handshake, is to make an improper overture, for which the girl’s relations may take blood.’

Later, waiting by the side of the road, I asked Khamis about the blunder. ‘
You shook it?
’ he exclaimed, horrified. He made a sickening throat-slitting gesture, then collapsed in laughter.

A short way into our next lift, in a lorry driven by a Goan, Khamis asked if I wanted a drink. I said I wasn’t thirsty, but he reached into his bag and pulled out something which confirmed, in his case at least, IB’s thoughts about the impious Masiris: a bottle of ‘Major Gunn’s’ Scotch whisky. The bottle was followed by a flat object of curious shape, like a symmetrical ink-blot. It was a small shark, split, boned and dried. We bounced along, swigging scotch and eating shark, Khamis tearing at it with his gleaming pirate’s teeth. The Goan turned down the offer of a drink; he kept glancing at us and drove as fast as possible, as if wanting to be rid of these obviously dangerous passengers.

I asked Khamis about IB’s Island of Birds, which lay off the coast somewhere along our route but which was invisible from the road. Khamis agreed with Gibb’s suggestion that it was an island called al-Humar. ‘It stands straight up in the sea, like a pillar,’ he told me, ‘and it’s covered in birds.’ I had found out from an article by Michael Gallagher, the doyen of Arabian ornithologists, that these are Socotra cormorants. Khamis shuddered when I asked if he had tried his ancestral delicacy, and took a hefty slug of Major Gunn’s to take away the imagined taste. When I told him that I looked forward to sampling cormorant in the Kuria Murias and, with luck, the masked booby – another island dainty – he looked away and muttered, ‘Crazy man’.

Around sunset we had a lift with a large Sikh in the construction business, Mr B.S. Mann. Much of the whisky had been drunk, and I gave in to an inexcusable fit of the giggles.

Khamis elbowed me. ‘Crazy man! What are you laughing about?’

I got a grip on myself. ‘It’s … it’s the pickwickles.’

‘What are “pickwickles”?’

‘I don’t know. Mr Mann, what are these pickwickles you’ve been talking about?’

‘You are English,’ said Mr Mann, surprised, ‘and are not knowing pickwickles? They are JCBs, artics, etcetera etcetera.’

‘“Big vehicles”,’ explained Khamis, who was fluent in English, Hindi, Urdu and their various mutations.

It was late when we arrived at the one-roomed blockhouse where Khamis’s fishermen lived, and we tiptoed unsteadily across the yard. The door was open. A couple of the men were asleep in the dark corners of the room. In the middle, the others were playing cards by the light of a lamp: they were bare-chested, onyx-eyed, aware of nothing but the game. Khamis was about to speak, but I raised my hand to stop him. I wanted to watch the card-players, far away on their tiny continent of light.

In the morning we launched the boat, four of the fishermen and I, and motored south for an hour or so. We rounded a headland where currents clashed and threw up sharp, short-tempered waves, then anchored in the calm of a wide bay. Talk ceased. The only sounds were the hiss and plop of lines, and of the sea as it nudged the hull, gently but insistently, like a hungry cat rubbing against its owner’s legs. The men worked with a rhythmic grace: a flash of hennaed palm, a gleaming parabola across the water, a quick twitch as the fish bit.

We lunched on tinned pineapple and cigars, then the fishing resumed. My diary records the catch:

Sardines, for bait;
shu
r
ī
, which I ate on Masirah (where they call it
) with sky-blue squiggles; a big one called
kan
ā
fah
,
subayt
ī
or
mary
ū
m
(maybe
marj
ū
m
– hard to tell); speckled
naqr
ū
r
; ruddy
, grouper I think – Jum’ah catches one a yard long that looks surprised as it comes over the edge – big lips, old and grey, something like Kingsley Amis; long silvery
sayf rand
ū
h
; black-hatched
bint al-nawkhadhah
(lovely name! [‘the captain’s daughter’]) with orange stripes;
qishb
ī
b
, with gold anodized backs;
takwah
;
afr
ā
h
; also plenty of inedible (they say)
, those sickly looking moray eels, which they treat with great caution. Marzuq hooks something huge. They don’t know
what
it is until it appears above the waves: a turtle, which they call
missah
. It breaks the line and disappears. Much distress that they haven’t been able to pull it in, extract the hook and release it. At one point a large shark’s fin circles us.