Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (40 page)

I read Awfit IB’s account of his visit to Jabal Lum’an. ‘“Lum’an”?’ he said. ‘I’ve never heard of it.’

‘Well, there’s nowhere else that would fit, except for one of the Kur … the Hallaniyat,’ I said. ‘I mean, the Hallaniyat do seem to have had several other names. Like the Islands of Bani Ghalfan.’

‘“Bani Ghalfan”? What is this “Bani Ghalfan”?’

I looked at him in surprise. ‘Bani Ghalfan were the Mahri tribe who lived on the islands, probably for centuries.’

‘Who told you this?
Who was it?
’

I was taken aback. ‘I thought it was common knowledge. Sayyid Sa’id called them the Islands of Bani Ghalfan when he gave them to Queen Victoria,’ I said. Awfit grimaced. I had put my foot in it. ‘And the name’s in Luqman’s
History of the Islands of Yemen
.’ Squelch went the other foot.

Awfit was looking at me like the aghast chorus in an H.M. Bateman cartoon. I was the Man Who Talked About The Past. ‘
I
represent the state in the Hallaniyat. All information comes through my office alone. Anyone giving false information will be made to bear the responsibility!’ He rose and glided out of the yard. I hadn’t realized inverse archaeology could arouse such passion. I sat there, wide-eyed and shaken: Awfit was my equivalent of that fifteen-foot mako.

‘Wow!’ Steve exclaimed. ‘What was all that about?’

‘History.’

‘He can be a bit sensitive, Awfit, especially about this name business. Evidently there was a Sultanic Decree that made it an imprisonable offence even to say …’ he lowered his voice ‘… “Kuria Muria”. I didn’t know about it. We were originally called the Kuria Muria Expedition. I had a load of writing-paper done. Had to bin the lot and start again.’

Awfit was too young to remember much of the pre-Qabusian era, but I had heard that the old head islander was still alive – the one who had worn a navy surplus tunic to receive Sir William Luce. That evening I found him, a handsome man in his eighties, sitting on the gravel in the gateway of one of the villas and wearing a swish
dishdashah
.

Shaykh Sa’id seemed to be expecting me. I had hardly introduced myself when he began a short but vehement speech. ‘These are the days of blessing! Before, we had only hovels and caves to live in. Now we have progress! God bless His Majesty the Sultan! If you meet him, give him a kiss from me, from Shaykh Sa’id bin Muhammad!’

I tried to nudge him into the past, but he had nothing more to say. As I rose to leave, his son spoke: ‘You must only write good things about us.’

On the way back to the guest-house it crossed my mind that Shaykh Sa’id might have been nobbled by Awfit. Then again, how could I assume that the old man would have wanted to talk about the past? The houses of fishes’ bones and seaweed may have represented an unbroken architectural tradition that went back to IB, and presumably long before; but there was no denying that they must have been hovels. I began to understand why the islands had been renamed. To call the Kuria Murias the Hallaniyat was, in effect, to claim that their inhabitants no longer lived in the same old place; that they had moved on, progressed in a more than metaphorical sense. They had been resettled in a new and improved island – one that incidentally occupied the same co-ordinates as their former home. None of this boded well for inverse archaeology.

The Kuria Murias being the Arabian equivalent of Rhum, Eigg and Muck, one might imagine them to be a tranquil spot. Next morning, however, I found myself simultaneously eating breakfast with some of the divers and being videoed by others, interrogated by the Deputy Governor, and videoed and interviewed by a journalist from the Moral Guidance Department of the Omani Ministry of Defence. The power breakfast had also attracted a crowd of about thirty onlookers who murmured a commentary in rapid Shahri.

‘“Kuria Muria” is a British invention.’

‘Could you pass the jam? No it isn’t, it’s in al-Idrisi.’

‘We’re making this short film, and we’d like some impressions of the islands.’

‘Twenty-five people have been imprisoned for using the name “Kuria Muria”.’

‘I’m a bit short on impressions. I only got here yesterday afternoon. I haven’t seen anything yet. Look Awfit, “Khuryan and Muryan” is in Ibn al-Mujawir as well.’

‘… some impressions, please, Mr Makuntush?’

‘I said I’ve only just got here.’

‘Ten of them were imprisoned on the island, fifteen on the mainland.’

‘… impressions?’

‘Would “jewels of ever-changing hue set in a placid sea” do you?’

‘Have a banana.’

Eventually the film crew went back to the airstrip, the divers went off to dive, and I told Awfit that a rose by any other name would
smell
as sweet. It lost something in translation, but he seemed to appreciate the sentiment.

I moved the conversation on to the safer subject of birds. Awfit told me that the Hallaniyat were a paradise for ornithologists.

‘And not just ornithologists,’ I said. ‘I’ve heard that the cormorant, and the eggs of the
dagh
, the booby, are particularly delicious.’ Awfit frowned; a ripple of silence passed around the chorus of islanders. ‘I mean,’ I went on, floundering, ‘gulls’ eggs are served in some of the best London restaurants, and I wondered …’

‘I am not aware’, said Awfit tartly, ‘that any of the present generation has eaten these things. Perhaps the islanders did, long ago.’

Again, the locked door of the past. I approached my major topic with no great hope of success, and read out IB’s account of his meeting with the holy man – diplomatically omitting the name ‘Lum’an’. There were a few expressions of wonderment. ‘Now,’ I went on, hesitantly, ‘it’s just a thought, but I wondered if the hermit might have been buried at the site of his cell.’ It was dangerous ground: the past, and faith. ‘I don’t suppose there are any tombs of holy men on the islands?’

To my amazement, the question released a flood of information. Awfit told me the names of seven holy
sayyids
, six buried on Hallaniyah and one on Sawdah. ‘We think they all came from the mainland, some of them a long time ago. And I’ve got an idea. Your traveller says he didn’t understand what the hermit was saying. Perhaps he was speaking in Shahri.’ Or, I thought but didn’t say, Mahri.

I smiled at Awfit. At last we were getting somewhere.

*

Broadly speaking, the sea was blue. It was also blue-green, green-blue, jade, navy, purple and gold – little worms of colour that wriggled around the slender hull. Sa’d and his brother Ahmad spoke occasionally to point things out: a cave, an osprey, a trickle of water on the cliff face. As we neared Hallaniyah Head the cliffs rose higher, tier upon tier of galleries like a collapsing Colosseum. The sea became more boisterous. Wriggle, kiss and tickle turned to slap then, around the point, to head-butt. The water went blue-black, like a bruise.

IB recalled climbing up to visit his hermit. I had therefore eliminated five of the seven holy tombs, since they were at or near sea-level. This left two, Sayyids Ali Hajj and Sa’id, as candidates for the traveller’s holy man. With Awfit’s permission, I was going to the far end of the island to visit them.

Island hermits appear from time to time in the records of Islamic mysticism. That prototype traveller and solitary, al-Khadir, would occasionally appear from an island in the Atlantic to guide ships in distress. IB’s contemporary Ibn al-Khatib wrote of a Berber holy man who had journeyed ‘to one of the islands of the western sea, impelled by divine command to devote himself solely to God’. IB himself came across other island hermits, at the head of the Gulf on Abbadan – at the time an island and a sort of Islamic Athos – and off the coast of India. The only fully authenticated hermit of Hallaniyah was later in date. The man, a retired Iraqi brigadier, was ‘living in a stone hut in the village for which he paid rent’, the British Consul in Muscat reported in 1954. ‘He seems a very simple and harmless type and is perhaps a little mad.’

The Consul would probably have described IB’s hermit in similar terms. ‘On top of the Hill of Lum’an,’ the traveller remembered, twenty-five years after his visit,

is a hermitage built of stone, with a roof of fish bones, and with a pool of collected rainwater outside it. When we cast anchor under the hill, we climbed up to this hermitage, and found there an old man lying asleep. We saluted him, and he woke up and returned our greeting by signs; then we spoke to him, but he did not speak to us and kept shaking his head. The ship’s company offered him food, but he refused to accept it. We then begged of him a prayer on our behalf, and he kept moving his lips, though we did not know what he was saying. He was wearing a patched robe and a felt bonnet. The ship’s company declared that they had never before seen him on this hill. We spent the night on the beach, and prayed the afternoon and sunset prayers with him. He continued to pray until the hour of the last night-prayer. He had a beautiful voice in his reciting of the Qur’an. When he ended the last night-prayer, he signed to us to withdraw, so, bidding him farewell, we did so, with astonishment at what we had seen of him. Afterwards, when we had left, I wished to return to him, but on approaching him I felt in awe of him; fear got the better of me, and when my companions returned for me, I went off with them.

Awe – the conflict in IB between fascination and fear – had given a minor encounter on an insignificant island all the remembered intensity of a recurring dream. But while IB recalled the hermit with filmic clarity, the topographical details are far sparser, edited by time: the person was, as usual, more important than the place. I had little to go on, and my idea that the hermit might have been buried at the site of his cell was no more than wild conjecture. And yet I had to look, even though I sensed I was looking for something intangible.

Soon after passing Hallaniyah Head we reached a small bay called Ahawl. The swell was too big to land, so Ahmad dropped the anchor and Sa’d and I jumped into the water. It came up to our chests. We waded ashore and climbed up a bluff above a small wadi. Sayyid Ali Hajj’s grave was a boat-shaped pile of stones within a larger oval enclosure. Inside this was what looked like a wooden post-box. Sa’d said it once contained cups, ‘so that visitors could drink coffee’. He also told me that anyone who removed anything from a
sayyid
’s grave would be punished. ‘Even if you just took a pebble, your boat would be wrecked.’ While he recited the Fatihah, I scanned the surroundings.
Those
three clues – the beach, the climb up, the pool – were all I had to follow; the only distinctive one, in a steep island with many sandy bays, was the pool. There was no trace of one.

We swam back to the boat and continued south, Sa’d and I shivering in our sodden clothes. At the bay of Ahalt we were able to beach the
hawri
, and all three of us climbed upwards through rocky gulleys. Sa’d picked up the skeleton of a bird. ‘It’s a
dagh
,’ he said. A booby. ‘We sometimes catch them on al-Qibli, then skin them and salt the flesh.’

We climbed on, well out of sight of the beach. My hopes fell. The putative hermitage had to be in sight of the shore: how else would IB have known of its existence? Eventually we reached an eminence of decaying granite. From here the low eastern point of the island was visible, and beyond it al-Qibli, the island of boobies. And directly below us to the south-east lay a shoreline fringed with sand. I felt – was it because I wanted to feel it? – a faint cognitive stirring, like the twitch of the rod in a dowser’s hand.

We took off our footwear and approached the grave of Sayyid Sa’id, a low pile of fractured rocks topped by a couple of bleached shells. Slowly, Sa’d and Ahmad walked around it, stroking the stones and kissing their hands. After they had recited the Fatihah, we sat down in silence. Next to us was a shallow depression in the granite where, in time of rain, the water would collect.

‘Who was Sayyid Sa’id?’ I asked them, breaking the silence.

‘God gave us the
sayyids
,’ Ahmad said. ‘There were many jinn here. The
sayyids
protect us from the jinn and from all evil.’

More silence. Then Sa’d spoke: ‘A man from the island was captured by people from the north. They tied his hands and feet and threw him into the sea, off Shinas - that’s the small island we could see from Sayyid Ali Hajj’s grave. But the man called out,
Ya Sayyid Sa’id!
The next thing he knew, he was sitting here where we’re sitting, safe and sound. The pirates’ boat was destroyed – bang! like a torpedo hitting it – and they were all drowned. Except for a slave, who swam all the way to Sawqirah. After that everybody knew that if they harmed us, a curse would fall on them.’

‘The
sayyids
are very powerful,’ Ahmad said. ‘You can only visit them if they want you to.’

As we left the grave, I wanted more than at any previous time on my travels to raise the ghost of IB and ask him,
Was this the place?

Ahmad and Sa’d took me to an old site nearby, called Akhruf. We
poked
about in the remains of a round structure of big granite pebbles, and found some ancient cane-like netting. ‘This is what they used to hold down the seaweed on the roof,’ said Ahmad. Sa’d pointed out a flat stone which he said was used for ladies’ make-up. It all seemed immensely ancient, like Skara Brae. I said I was impressed by the brothers’ knowledge of the past. They smiled, and told me that the house was where their parents had spent the summer months, before Sultan Qabus and popular housing.