Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (41 page)

We had a snack lunch of
sisan
, dried spinefoot, then a nap in a cave. As I dozed, I was visited by doubts. The scholarly Gibb had been certain that Lum’an was Hallaniyah; but might it be another of the Kuria Murias? Then, could there be some coastal rock elsewhere, too small to appear on the maps? To go into all the possibilities I would need the resources of a major expedition and to be, like the Iraqi brigadier, perhaps a little mad. In short, I would never know if I had found IB’s island, let alone his hermit.

I thought back to that depression in the granite, and wished IB had left just a few more clues. Should I return to the grave, and scrabble around for something carbon-datable? But then, I could take nothing away. Except something intangible, insusceptible to calibration and rational investigation: awe.

*

I left Hallaniyah the following morning with Maurice, Khalil, the tentative blessings of Awfit and five tons of fish. Again we passed Sawdah, the Black Island – not so much black as rusty – then the smaller, lower Hasikiyyah. In my imagination, every protruding rock on them became a grave or a ruined hermitage.

The sea simmered with activity. Something slick and black shot out of the water and fell back with a slap. A long slender fin rose above the surface, like Excalibur, then disappeared. All around there were other intriguing surfacings and bubblings in the rich bouillabaisse of the coastal waters. ‘The sea’, wrote the traveller Abu Hamid, ‘has a greater share of wonders than any other part of creation.’ As we reached the mainland at Ras Nus I wrote in my notebook: ‘Sea still full of
aja’ib
, even if wonders now = e.g. whale songs.’

Precisely on cue, Khalil nudged me. Only yards away from the
sambuq
a prodigious head was emerging. It lingered, dead still above the water, black, barnacled, beautiful as sea-born Venus. Ponderously,
it
sank. There was a jet of water. Then a tail appeared – a great glistening V that stood for a moment then slid, slowly, vertically downwards. For all its size, it left hardly a ripple.

Next morning I passed Ras Nus again, in another
sambuq
– the
Sea-Lion
of Captain Rashid of Salalah. The whale was there too, with a friend. They were both whacking the water with their tails. Perhaps my timing was bad, but I told Captain Rashid a story from the
Wonders of India
of Captain Buzurg about a ship in the Red Sea getting rammed by a whale. When it later put into Jeddah, they found the whale’s head in the hold, broken off and neatly plugging the hole it had made in the hull. Rashid capped Buzurg’s tale with one about a
sambuq
that had entered Dubai, ‘not long ago’, with a whale impaled on its prow. (I had already heard the story in Muscat, with the whale demoted to a whale-shark. Unlikely though even this sounded, it was told by no less an authority than the Director of the Muscat Natural History Museum.)

The
Sea-Lion
was on its way from Sad’h to Hasik, my final Battutian destination in Oman. Hasik is as much of an island as Hallaniyah for, although on the mainland, it is inaccessible by motor transport and even by radio telephone, marooned under the massif of Jabal Samhan. IB wrote about Hasik’s two products, frankincense and sharks, and remembered that like the island hermitage its huts were built with fish bones. By probably no more than delightful coincidence, the root of the name is connected with spiky things –
hasak
is a thistle, a grappling-iron, or a fish bone.

We bounced along, throwing up a fine and drenching spray over the bows. To port, the sea cliffs of Samhan trailed shreds of cloud like the scarves of an exotic dancer. Rashid pointed out a tiny footpath that wiggled along the cliff, used in the monsoon when Hasik was cut off even from the sea. The walk to the roadhead at Hadbin, he said, took seven hours. Just after Ras Nus there was a long bay, a thin line of sand at the base of a towering escarpment; at its far end were a few small buildings. Rashid explained that they housed visitors to the tomb of Bin Hud, invisible in a nook among the rocks. Whoever Bin Hud is – and some think he is the Prophet Salih, son of the Prophet Hud – he has gained a reputation for irritability rather like that of the old Irish saints. Rashid said he was prone to wrecking ships: as if in proof a large cargo vessel lay aground nearby, looking like a bit of jetsam against the backdrop of the escarpment. (I heard later,
however
, that since the beginning of Qabus’s reign Bin Hud has generally been quite affable.)

Five hours out of Sad’h we reached Hasik, a line of long boxy houses and a stubby minaret. The roads shone with leaping dolphins, and among the five
sambuq
s at anchor there I recognized one: that of Khalfan the Suri.

I now knew that Deputy Governors, like holy men, are not to be trifled with, and approached the chief citizen of Hasik with appropriate awe. Fortuitously, Ali al-Shikayli was a grandson of the owner of the
Wolf
, that old sailing
sambuq
I had seen at Sad’h. When I showed him the transcript of the prayers carved on its stern, he beamed: it was his father, he said, who had done the calligraphy. He spoke nostalgically of the
Wolf
’s voyages, carrying frankincense to Aden, Basrah and India, and
lukham
, dried shark, to East Africa. These were the very products IB had mentioned; but I learned from Ali that in recent years they had declined. Hardly any frankincense was collected these days; and dried shark had been superseded by abalone, that rubbery restorer of the lost youth of Hong Kong businessmen, and by frozen fish. With its new freezing plant Hasik entered the Ice Age, and the trade of centuries, perhaps millennia, disappeared.

Some
lukham
is still produced for home consumption, however, and Ali sent for a piece from an old fisherman. It had the appearance of an old boot sole, and the texture. ‘
Lukham
needs good strong teeth,’ the fisherman told me, ‘and a woman afterwards.’ As I had neither I gave the object no more than an experimental nibble, and decided that fish-freezing plants were a good idea.

Soon after my arrival Ali was called away from Hasik to a family funeral, and left me the run of the deputy-gubernatorial residence. Indians brought me trays of rice and fish of monstrous size. I wrote up my diary. And I watched satellite TV. A random sampling of Arabsat produced: a debate on medical treatment by Qur’anic recitation (Sudan); a twenty-minute ad for an anti-insomnia pillow (Orbit Shopping); a traffic police docu-soap (Dubai); a discussion on fitted kitchens (Qatar); three old men, drumming and chanting, near to tears (Sudan again); an ad for a tummy-trimmer (Orbit again); a Qur’anic pronunciation class, then Colonel Qaddafi – looking ever more like one of the Rolling Stones, or a mixture of all of them (Libya); and finally the call to prayer, with stills of my home, the old city of San’a (Yemen).

Arabsat was meant to bring it all closer. Instead, it magnified the immense isolation of Hasik. I sympathized with the Dong, far away on his shore, gazing, gazing for evermore.

*

IB got it wrong. ‘The frankincense trees’, he wrote, ‘have thin leaves, and when a leaf is slashed there drips from it a sap like milk, which then turns into a gum.’ Shaykh Musallam bin Sa’id al-Naqsh Thaw’ar al-Mahri showed me how it was really done, two hundred feet up the side of Wadi Hadbaram behind Hasik. With both hands, he gripped his chisel-like
manqaf
and with a few downward strokes sliced off a patch of bark to reveal a pistachio-green layer beneath. More strokes left a wound the colour of raw beef. Slowly, beads of white began to appear on the wound, like pus. Musallam called the operation
tawqi
’, a word which can mean ‘to gall a camel’s back’.

‘You mustn’t cut to the bone of the tree’, he explained, ‘or you’ll kill it. But you can come back and make more
tawqi’s
in the same spot. The more you do it, the more the tree produces. It’s like a cow milking better the more calves she has.’ The frankincense would take several weeks to seep out, but Musallam had already given me a bag
from
last year’s harvest. This was the
hawjiri
variety praised by Radiyyah in the Salalah scent market, the aristocrat of gum-resins.

Apart from the obvious benefits of smelling nice and driving off demons, frankincense can be used as a tooth-filler, a crack-sealant and a depilatory. According to the Rasulid Sultan al-Muzaffar’s book of simples, it heals wounds, staunches blood, clears darkness of vision, burns phlegm, strengthens a queasy stomach, cures diarrhoea and vomiting, expels wind, eases palpitations, protects against the plague and warms a cold liver. Employed as a pessary, it halts vaginal discharge; chewed, it reinforces the teeth and gums, eases speech impediments and combats forgetfulness (of this I took special note, as according to some authorities one of the main causes of amnesia is ‘over-attachment to reading the inscriptions on tombstones’). Overdosing, al-Muzaffar warns, can bring on headaches, melancholy, scabies and, in extreme cases, leprosy. I also found in an eighteenth-century Yemeni book on bathing that a mixture of frankincense, olive oil, nigella oil and honey taken in the bath is ‘an excellent stimulant of libido in the hundred-plus age-group’.

After the demonstration, Musallam shouldered his hunting rifle and led me down the side of the gorge. Above us on the cliff tops sat a layer of mist, and I remembered the description of the Frankincense Country in the
Periplus
– ‘a land mountainous and forbidding, wrapped in thick clouds and fog’. And there was that other, more fanciful mention: that of Herodotus, who thought the frankincense groves were guarded by flying snakes.

Musallam was ready to return to Hasik, but I said I would explore further up the gorge.

‘Watch out for leopards,’ he warned. ‘And snakes.’

I smiled. ‘I bet they’re flying snakes.’

‘Yes. They jump out of the
samur
trees.’

I walked up Wadi Hadbaram into a silence broken only by the rustle of reeds and the beat of pigeons’ wings high up on the rock face. I saw some leopard spoor; the
samur
trees I gave the widest possible berth.

*

I wondered if IB had also got it wrong when he wrote about the fish-bone houses of Hasik; perhaps he had been misled by that near homonym,
hasak
. But how could I find out? I had thoroughly
explored
the village, and found not a vestige of anything pre-Qabus. Al-Habshi, a man who worked in the Deputy Governor’s office, explained the reason: Hasik had moved.

Together, we visited the old site of Hasik, a couple of miles to the west. Most of the structures were converted caves in the bank of a dry watercourse, walled in with stone. I had a good poke around but found nothing to indicate a date.

‘Let’s go to Old Hasik,’ al-Habshi said.

‘I thought this was it.’

‘It is. But there’s an older one further west. It’s full of remains.’

A short distance along the coast, we came to a large expanse of ruins overlooking an anchorage. Beside the shell of the mosque were some fine inscribed gravestones, which I began to read with growing excitement. None, however, dated to earlier than the eighteenth century. We rooted around the ruins of houses and found shards of Chinese porcelain. Most of them were blue-and-white: post-IB. There was none of the celadon ware in which the site of Qalhat had been so rich; and there were no fish bones. It seemed that Hasik had come up in the world in the centuries following IB’s visit, and that all traces of the settlement he saw had been swept away or built over.

We went and sat on the rocks by the sea. I asked al-Habshi if we would find any
sufaylih
, abalone. To lunch al fresco on this most rejuvenating of shellfish would, I thought, be partial recompense for not finding any relics of IB’s Hasik.

‘We used to eat it when I was a boy,’ he told me. ‘You could buy a sackful for next to nothing. Then they started exporting it. Do you know how much it fetches? Dried, 270 riyals a kilo.’ About £200 a pound. A snip when you think of the cost of tiger penises. ‘Even the women collect abalone nowadays. At first they’d just wade in and feel around for it in the crevices in the rocks. These days they go diving, like the men. Fully clothed, of course.’ I had a thrilling vision of the lady abalone divers, formerly mere ticklers, of Hasik, dripping like Ophelia and clattering with aphrodisiac univalves.

Instead of eating abalone we feasted on rock oysters and chitons. The latter look like something from the earlier stages of creation – flattened armoured slugs that move very slowly across the rocks. You pick them off, snap them and gouge out with your thumb a pink, tongue-like
médaillon
of crunchy flesh. Al-Habshi said that oysters and chitons,
zikt
and
shanah
as he called them in the Mahri tongue,
were
an old staple of the coast and islands. I grazed off the rocks until I could eat no more; I was making up for missing out on those other old favourites, cormorants and boobies.

Al-Habshi then remembered that there was yet another old site, further west and over a headland. We crossed the rocks and came to a small bay, dead still, dead quiet. Above the beach there were several boat-shaped graves, one with an outer enclosing wall like that of Sayyid Ali Hajj on Hallaniyah. There were also a number of ruins which looked like the remains of dwellings. I hunted in vain for celadon; then, scrabbling among the stones, I found IB’s fish bones: plaster-white, pitted and brittle, piles and piles of broad flat fragments half covered by blown sand.