Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (39 page)

We were looking for a boat to take me to the Kuria Murias, another seventy miles to the north-east. It seemed more than likely that one of the group of five islands was IB’s ‘Hill of Lum’an, in the midst of the sea’, where the traveller came across an incomprehensible
and
patently very holy hermit. ‘Lum’an’ is otherwise unknown. But the islands’ nomenclature has always been fluid: they were often called after the Bani Ghalfan, the Mahri clan who owned them for much of recorded history; the navigator Ahmad ibn Majid referred to them also as Hayrawan. At any rate, there were no other serious candidates for Lum’an between Dhofar and Sur.

A quick look at the harbour was not promising. Except for the beached
Wolf
, its neighbour the
Tristram
– a tiny blue yacht which clearly hadn’t gone anywhere for years – and a few small fishing craft, Sad’h was boatless. As we turned back towards Mirbat, the memory of Khalfan’s elusive
sambuq
came back to haunt me.

We drove along the base of Jabal Samhan, a brooding escarpment spotlit by liverish sunbeams. The track passed through a strangely puckered landscape of dry nullahs which Qahtan described as
abasir
. ‘It’s a Kathiri word,’ he explained. To my present frame of mind the word sounded like a mixture of
abis
and
bawasir
, ‘frowning’ and ‘haemorrhoids’. As we approached Mirbat, he added to the general gloom by saying that his father – that man of many wiles, owner of the fateful
bisht
– had been wrecked in a sailing
sambuq
off Mirbat Head. ‘He swam ashore’, Qahtan said, ‘with an old man on his back.’

‘Thanks for telling me,’ I said, thinking of IB’s near miss further along the coast: ‘On the Feast of Sacrifice there blew up against us a violent wind after daybreak. It lasted until the sun was up and almost sunk us. A ship belonging to one of the merchants had gone ahead of us, and it sank. Only one man escaped from it – he got out by swimming after suffering severely.’

By the time we reached Mirbat, however, the afternoon had brightened. The water in the harbour was smooth and perfectly transparent; small fish skittered across it like skipping stones. And there, all but motionless, lay two
sambuq
s. Our calls to the first one were answered from the deck by a fat man. ‘We’re going to Hallaniyah,’ he shouted back.

I pretended not to believe it. But the man came ashore and confirmed that he was indeed sailing, on the morrow, God willing, for the only inhabited island of the Kuria Murias. He then added, with a hint of pride, that he had come all the way from Sur.

I held out my hand. ‘Captain Khalfan, I presume?’

After his initial surprise, Khalfan seemed delighted at the idea of taking a passenger to the Kuria Murias. He would leave at dawn, and
suggested
I spend the night on board. I was about to get my bag when a car drew up. ‘Oh,’ said Khalfan, ‘the boss. We ought to check with him first.’

No one who travels can afford to judge people on first appearances. I did; so did the
sambuq
-owner. Our reactions were mutual: he came towards me as a slug might approach a salt-cellar. I hitched up the corners of my mouth into a semblance of a smile, went through the briefest of pleasantries then asked about a return passage to Hallaniyah.

‘Two hundred,’ said the
sambuq
-owner.

‘Baysahs …?’ It sounded very reasonable. About £3.

‘Two hundred riyals.’

Over £300. ‘That’s a bit steep,’ I said, lamely.

‘Okay. One hundred. One way.’ He smiled horribly; then turned, oozed back to his car and drove off.

I went and fumed on a bollard, then decided to try the other
sambuq
. The likelihood of both vessels going to the Kuria Murias seemed tiny; but, as I found out from an Indian on board, this one was also heading for Hallaniyah. Gingerly, I asked if I could come along. The Indian’s eyes narrowed. ‘There is what work? You there is come, there is very problem with government.’ He disappeared into the hold.

I found Qahtan and Khalfan discussing my situation. Khalfan handed me a Salalah telephone number. ‘Try this,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, but it’s all I can do.’

As we drove off towards Salalah, Qahtan said softly, ‘I think your problem is what we call the Eye of Joy. I saw your face when Khalfan said he was going to the island: you were … too happy.’

I nodded silently.

My problem, as I discovered over the next couple of days in Salalah, was not only the Eye. That brief visit to the quay at Mirbat had set off murmurings about shady shark-fin buyers and mystery abalone merchants. There was talk too of fishier business – that I might be engaged in a less innocent version of I-Spy, that I was probably a Yemeni agent bent on taking over the islands (under the old Marxist regime in Aden, they had been a bone of contention with the Omanis). I rather fancied myself in the latter role; however, I established my prosaic
bona fides
. More gratifyingly, I ran into the
sambuq
-owner’s son and conveyed various expressions to his father. (The man’s name, by the way, is Bin Da’mush; ‘Da’mush’ may well be
a
local variant of the classical
du’mus
, an animalcule and, specifically, ‘a black water-insect’.)

Having thus vented my spleen – or, as Habibah put it, wiped my liver – I set off again for Mirbat. In my pocket, next to the
Litany of the Sea
, was a receipt from Al-Shahry Trading & Cont. Est. for fifteen riyals, the cost of a passage by
sambuq
to the Kuria Murias.

*

We weighed anchor at 4.30 a.m. I had spent most of the night playing Cluedo out on the plain with a group of Mirbati insomniacs (the men of the town are still, as Captain Haines noted in the 1830s, ‘extremely indolent, addicted to smoking, and lolling at their ease’); but I forgot the lack of sleep as we left the harbour, under a full moon and a shoal of drifting clouds.

The Al-Shahry
sambuq
carried a cargo of rice, milk powder, sugar and gas cylinders and had a crew of two: Khalil, the Bangladeshi skipper, who steered with his toes, and a Keralan called Maurice. It was a blessing that the chain of command was so short, for they seemed to have no language in common except for a rudimentary lascar pidgin. The wind rose as we passed Sad’h, and the sun. Dolphins shadowed the
sambuq
as it wriggled and burrowed through the waves. After breakfast – banana sandwiches, ‘Les Enfants’ cheese triangles and tea with ‘Teapot and Swords’ brand evaporated milk – I had an exhilarating crap, suspended above the
sambuq
’s wake in a packing case. The head of a large turtle popped up from the water and eyed me with evident disgust. At Ras Nus the cliffs of Jabal Samhan met the water and we struck out for the islands, breasting a big ocean swell. Soon after came the first, hazy glimpse of Hasikiyyah and Sawdah, the two westernmost Kuria Murias.

Poetically if not geographically, the Kuria Murias belong to the same harmonious archipelago as Serendip, the Celebes, Tahiti and Taprobane, Andaman and Nicobar, the Isle of Grain and the Isle of Dogs. I had fallen in love with the name years before, in the atlas. Since then the authorities in Muscat had changed it to the Hallaniyat, after the main island in the group. This further addition to the islands’ nomenclature seemed to be based on a misunderstanding – that ‘Kuria Muria’ was a European invention, connected in some way with the Virgin Mary. It was true that the islands were shown on the fourteenth-century Catalan Map, reduced to two, as ‘Dua Maria’.
But
they had also appeared well before, and in an eminently respectable Arabic source: in his twelfth-century
Book of Roger
, al-Idrisi called them ‘Khurtan and Murtan’. (The
t
is almost certainly a scribal error for
y
; a hundred years later Ibn al-Mujawir gave the more correct form, ‘Khuryan and Muryan’.)

According to al-Idrisi, the Kuria Murians were marooned on their islands every winter, ‘living in the direst distress and poverty’. At other times, however, they were able to reach the mainland to sell ambergris and turtle shells, which the Yemenis used as bread-baskets and washing-up bowls. There was a postscript, uncharacteristically sensational for al-Idrisi. The Kuria Murians, he says, regularly visit a certain Island of Apes. Here, ‘they catch the apes and take them to Yemen, where they are sold for a high price. The people of Yemen, I mean the merchants, keep the apes in their shops as security guards.’ (A story told in the tenth century by that great source of sailors’ yarns, Captain Buzurg of Ramhurmuz, illustrates the apes’ devotion to duty: ‘I was told that a man somewhere in Yemen had an ape, and that one day he bought some meat and took it home. He indicated to the ape that it should keep an eye on the meat. But a kite came and snatched the meat. For a time the ape didn’t know what to do. Then it had an idea. It climbed to the top of a tree and hung upside-down with its backside in the air. The kite saw the ape’s backside, thought that it was more meat and swooped down on it. At that instant, the ape caught the bird, took it into the house and hid it under a weighted cooking pot. When the man came back, he found that the meat was missing and went to give the ape a hiding. But the ape revealed the kite, and the man understood what had happened. He took the kite, plucked it, and crucified it on the tree.’)

From later medieval times onwards, the Kuria Murias got only a few brief mentions in mariners’ guides. Then in 1854 Sayyid Sa’id, the ruler of Muscat and Zanzibar, gave the islands to Queen Victoria. The islanders, unaware that they had been subjects of Muscat and were now living on a British possession, were surprised by the arrival of Nazarenes and squads of navvies. This was the age of guano fever, and the Kuria Murias were a rich source – indeed, a not entirely implausible theory suggests that the first element of ‘Khuryan Muryan’ means ‘shitty’, from the root
khari
’, to defecate. The easternmost island of al-Qibli, home to a large colony of masked boobies, was stripped of its valuable crust. Thereafter odd visitors passed by – Colonel Miles noted in 1883 that the houses were roofed with seaweed and shark bones and were ‘the height of a walking stick’ – but in general the islanders were left to their fishing, the boobies to their slow increment of excrement. At some point the Mahri population left, to be replaced by Shahris. Then in 1959 Sir William Luce, the Governor of Aden, dropped in on this furthest corner of his parish – ‘my first and, I sincerely hope, my last visit’. He thought the islanders ‘the most malodorous and ill-kempt characters that it has been my misfortune to meet’. Now, as we passed under the lee of Sawdah, the Black Isle, I wondered what time and Sultan Qabus had done to the Kuria Murias.

Hallaniyah was almost unnaturally bright as we approached it, like an image seen in a slide viewer. If this really were IB’s Jabal Lum’an, the name was appropriate:
lum’an
should mean something like ‘gleaming’. The
sambuq
slid tentatively past underwater rocks and entered the little harbour exactly twelve hours after leaving Mirbat.

Things had changed since the Governor’s visit. The crowd on the quay were neatly kitted out in jazzy waistcloths and football shirts. The head islander who received Sir William had worn ‘a naval officer’s ancient white tunic and very little else’; the present head islander, Deputy Governor Awfit al-Shahri, wore a
dishdashah
of a
blue-whiteness
rarely seen outside soap powder ads, and a raspberry coulis and mange-tout turban. He drove me in his Landcruiser past the desalination plant, generating station, fish-freezing facility, clinic, school and mosque; then along a street of what he called ‘popular housing’ – a dozen castellated villas finished off with satellite dishes.

Awfit dropped me at the guest-house. ‘I hope you don’t mind being a bit cramped,’ he said, ‘but we’ve got a team of divers visiting.’ I said something about having expected to stay in a hut of fishes’ bones and seaweed. The Deputy Governor gave me an unnerving look, and excused himself.

The divers were off diving, but their gear was scattered all about: cylinders, flippers, masks, lumps of coral, turtle skulls and open novels. A sign on the gate said ‘Check for Goats under Car before Driving off’. I sat at a table in the yard and tried to fix my position. In one sense I was exactly where I had expected to be: at 17½° N, 56° E, on a lump of granite with a limestone topping, seven miles by four and a half, rising at the north-east to 1,645 feet. In another, I was back in Muscat, or at least in a miniature facsimile of its Omani-baronial suburbs. It was most disorientating.

The divers returned at the end of the afternoon. I had wondered if they would see me as an intruder; but they were immediately welcoming, and introduced me to the arcane world of fins and compressors. Steve Dover, their leader, explained that they were studying coral and other marine life on the wreck of the
City of Winchester
, the first naval casualty of the Great War. ‘I’ve never seen anything like the environment around Hallaniyah,’ he said. ‘It’s pristine. And because we know exactly when the ship went down, it’s the perfect place for looking at coral growth.’ He invited me to dive with them the following day. ‘Awfit’s had a go, haven’t you, Awfit?’ The Deputy Governor, who had just come into the yard, smiled sheepishly. I said I’d think about it; then heard one of the team talking about an underwater encounter that afternoon. ‘I turned round’, he said, ‘and there was this fifteen-foot mako shark staring at me. I don’t know who got the bigger shock.’ I decided to stick to inverse archaeology.