Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (44 page)

Throughout this monologue the audience hung on Hajji Baba’s utterances. The only movement was of a boy who brought us tea, approaching on his knees. I, however, had only one concern: not to belch. On account both of our close proximity and the very large raw onion I had eaten with my supper, it would not have been a pleasant experience for the
shaykh
of the Mevlevi-Kaderis.

I soon forgot the turmoil in my gut, for the
sema
had begun. A man on our right chanted a litany in Turkish interspersed with Arabic. While this was happening, I was at last able to study the
sema-
goers. There were perhaps seventy of them, mostly in early middle age but with a sprinkling of older and younger men, and a few boys. What was remarkable about them was, like IB’s cobbler host in Antalya, their ordinariness. I tried to imagine how they had spent the day: driving taxis, selling carpets, keeping accounts, extracting teeth. They looked as unlikely a set of mystics as you might meet anywhere.

The litany ended, and a flute began to play. It was a simple melody but mesmeric, like a Satie
Gymnopédie
. ‘Listen to this reed, how it makes complaint, telling a tale of separation … The cry of the reed is fire, it is not wind … It is the fire of love that has set the reed aflame; it is the surge of love that bubbles in the wine!’ Divine love, separation of soul from Creator, ecstatic champagne: with this allegory Mevlana returned from his travels. No one, said IB, could understand him; now, as we listened, it began to make sense.

The
sema
-goers intoned the Islamic creed, then other phrases
which
ended on a long
glissando
syllable,
huuuu
; as it died away they prostrated themselves. Some sobbed. I noticed Hajji Baba give a sign, and two drums began to beat, insistently. The whole room chanted
la ilaha illa ’llah
, There is no god but God. Faster and faster it went; then another almost imperceptible sign from Hajji Baba and the rhythm changed, and the chant, to a simple
Allah
…
Allah
… The men rocked back and forth. At first I remembered the swaying dancers at al-Husayn’s
mawlid
in Cairo; but the dervishes of Konya soon left them standing – the rocking became more vigorous, even violent. A youth opposite snatched breaths between
Allahs
with loud sobs and gulps, and sweat flew from him: he seemed on the verge of hyperventilation, of collapse, and I now thought of IB’s Shrieker, a dervish of Bursa who died of ecstasy. And still the intensity increased.

Just this side of frenzy the two elder dancers appeared. They crossed the room on their knees and kissed Hajji Baba’s hand. He stroked their faces, then they rose and began to turn, pirouetting on the left foot and propelled by the right, which rose and fell in time with the drums. As their speed increased their skirts billowed out and became perfect cones of white. Their arms were outstretched, right palm upwards, left downwards. I knew from my reading on the dervishes that their hands were meant to transmit
barakah
from heaven to earth – rather like spiritual lightning-conductors. Books, however, had not prepared me for what now took place – a gradual emptying of the mind of everything but these two revolving figures, cycle and epicycle, and that deafening throb:
Allah
…
Allah
…, the great iamb, the music of the spheres.

Eventually the dancers retired, kissing once more the hand of their gnostic conductor, and others came on – those prosaic mystics in trousers and sweat-stained shirts. The last to dance was the youth I had seen robing earlier. In seconds he was a conic blur, weightless, on the point of levitation. Thus he remained, time in suspense, until at last Hajji Baba nodded to the drummers and the rhythm slowed, the corolla of skirts folded, the heartbeat became still. In the silence and acrid-sweet stink of sweat, someone began to recite from the Qur’an. I looked from face to face around the room and remembered that IB had described the scene, and such voices, ‘that work upon men’s souls and at which hearts are humbled, skins creep, and eyes fill with tears’. The recitation began: ‘
Ha-Mim Ayn-Sin-Qaf
. Thus Allah, the
Mighty
One, the Wise One, inspires you as He inspired others before you.’ Again, the mystic letters.

When the reading finished, Hajji Baba turned to me and asked how I felt. After the catharsis of the
sema
, I could only honestly say that I felt empty.

‘Then,’ he said very quietly, ‘with what will you fill this emptiness?’

We looked at each other, the crowd suddenly absent – like potential lovers. Shocked, I looked away. The room flooded back.

I heard Hajji Baba speaking, then Kamil translating. ‘He says your
nafs
is too strong, that it is making you fight against Islam. You know the meaning of
nafs
?’

I nodded. ‘For a moment I entertained the idea of spending the rest of my life in the service of this
shaykh
,’ wrote IB of the island-hermit of Abbadan; ‘but I was dissuaded from it by my importunate
nafs
.’ By his worldly, appetitive spirit.

Hajji Baba spoke again. ‘And’, said Kamil, ‘he says that your head is too full of books.’

Mats were spread and laid with peaches, melons, grapes and cucumbers. Hajji Baba picked the ripest and sweetest fruit and passed it to me on a plate – the
simat
of the dervishes, the food served to all wayfarers, unbelievers and idolators included. After we had all eaten, he recited Mevlana’s grace and we dispersed into the midnight streets, shivering after the bath-heat of the room, shirts stiffening with sweat-frost. As Kamil and I were leaving, Hajji Baba patted my shoulder and said, ‘I think you will not sleep tonight.’

He was right. A pair of tomcats growled and scrapped under the bedroom window. My stomach growled and scrapped. And my mind span and pulsed, noisy with the strangeness of it all: of looking for a carpet and finding the
sema
; of glimpsing a world IB had known, officially dead but living on in the back streets of Konya; and of hearing the language of the coast – a language of love, dance, wine, ecstasy – spoken in the dialect of angels.

Some time after three the microcosmic belch broke out, tremendous as an onion. Then someone chucked a bucket of water over the cats. The spinning ceased, the pulse slowed; sleep came.

*

‘The Sultan of Akridur makes a practice of attending afternoon prayers in the congregational mosque every day.’ I entered the
mosque
, the
Travels
open in my hand. ‘He sits with his back to the wall of the
qiblah
.’ I sat, sultanically, against the wall facing Mecca. ‘The Qur’an readers take their seats in front of him on a high wooden platform.’ I looked up: there it was, a double-decker dais. It was an extremely unusual piece of furniture, but I had missed it when I came in – my nose was stuck in the text. Perhaps Hajji Baba was right, and my head was overstuffed with books.

So far, IB would have had no trouble recognizing Akridur, the Turkish E
ğ
ridir, west of Konya, set on a lake surrounded by apple orchards and the peachy mountains of Pisidia. ‘We lodged there in a college opposite the mosque.’ I crossed from the mosque to the college, exactly opposite, entered through its superbly carved portal and found myself in …
a tourist bazaar
. As I walked around the courtyard, peering into the little rooms that opened off it, I wondered where IB had stayed. In jeans, or sunglasses? In leather jackets, or tie-dyed T-shirts? Only the eagles knew – stone ones, perched above the courtyard on reused Byzantine capitals, looking down with ancient, pterodactylic
Weltschmerz
.

E
ğ
ridir was an
urbs in rure
with a good sprinkling of chic women in jeans. But as I travelled south-west towards IB’s next destination, Gölhisar, ‘Lakecastle’, the demography became increasingly bucolic. Jeans gave way to elasticated floral print trousers; the women inside them grew in volume. In Burdur market the sellers of peppers were, to a woman, deeply upholstered and covered in chintz. At the same time, the buses that I rode diminished in size and shared the roads with carts and tripping horses. The wider world impinged little, although I noticed that the usual amulets dangling from one rear-view mirror – ‘Muhammad’ in Arabic script, and an anti-Evil Eye eye of blue glass – had been joined by an Internet Explorer 4 CD: a mixture of faith, superstition and technology.

I tried to pronounce,
sotto voce
, the names of villages we passed. At Höyü
ğ
ü, I realized I would need a lot of practice to develop the necessary embouchure. At least my ignorance of Turkish was shared with IB. He claims to have picked it up later but Gibb, in an uncharacteristically wry footnote, dismisses the claim as ‘fanfaronade’.

We passed from a land of bright lakes and orchards to one of muted colours – swatches of yellow stubble, brown earth, black burnt stubble, grey road and two-tone trees in silver and dark green – then entered a luminous upland plain fringed with cream hills. Mindful of
Hajji
Baba’s comment about books, I had suppressed the tic that made me turn to the
Travels
every few minutes. But as the bus neared Gölhisar, I reread IB’s description of it: ‘a small town surrounded on every side by water in which there is a thick growth of rushes. There is no way to approach it except by a path like a bridge constructed between the rushes and the water, and broad enough only for one horseman. The city is on a hill in the midst of the waters and is formidably protected and impregnable.’ As in E
ğ
ridir, I was impressed by IB’s ability to recall a scene over twenty years later, with neither notebooks nor, for this Anatolian back-of-beyond, independent sources to jog his memory.

The only problem was that Gölhisar bore no resemblance whatsoever to IB’s description. True, there was a hill with some ruins on it; but the hill stood on sloping ground, so any lake would have had to defy gravity. The Arthurian vision of castle and rushy mere evaporated.

In my Turkish equivalent of Indo-Arabic, I asked at the bus station whether I was in the real Gölhisar. The ticket man looked momentarily surprised (I suppose it is rather ill-mannered to turn up in a place and immediately accuse it of being an impostor); then he laughed, and explained that we were, without doubt, in the unique and genuine Lakecastle. I was also able to elicit the following information: there was a castle but no lake at Lakecastle; a lake, Gölhisar Gölü, existed, but it was five miles from the town; at Lakecastle Lake, however, there was no castle – let alone a castle on an island, for there was no island.

I began to wonder if IB had got it wrong. Certainly, there are problems with his Anatolian itinerary. At one point, for example, he strikes off east and travels as far as Erzerum. ‘We stayed there for three nights,’ he says, ‘then left for the city of Birgi, where we arrived in the late afternoon.’ Even allowing for IB’s tendency to elasticate time, as an account of an eight-hundred mile journey it is undeniably terse. But, while this blip could be the result of enthusiastic editing, it was far harder to reconcile IB’s Gölhisar with the place I was in. Even so, there was something – a verisimilitude – about his description of Gölhisar. I caught a bus to the turn-off for the lake, and set out to look for the invisible island.

The lane was paved with cowpats and perfumed with aniseed. A mile or so off the main road I came to Yamadı, a village of tottering
balconies
decked with pepper ropes and chilli necklaces. The village ended with a cuboid tomb-chamber, ogivally roofed, and an old lady. I asked her who was buried in the tomb, hoping for a Battutian lead; she answered at length, patting the building now and then while I grinned and nodded encouragingly. Having understood nothing, I said in Turkish ‘I don’t speak Turkish,’ uttered a sonorous Arabic prayer, and passed on.

After another mile or two, I saw a corner of lake and made for a hill that overlooked it. It would be the perfect vantage point for spotting vanished islands. Near the hill I had another one-sided conversation, with a man working in a sugar-beet field. As he spoke, I noticed a large dyke running through the field. Cattle grazed in water meadows beneath the hill, which was fringed with rushes. Drained land … I had solved the problem of the missing island: it was the hill. ‘Is there a road?’ I asked, pointing towards it. In reply, the farmer led me to a raised track – IB’s ‘path like a bridge’.

As I crossed the causeway – it had been enlarged, clearly at a recent date, to tractor width – I congratulated IB on his powers of recollection, and reproved myself for doubting them. The only thing missing now was his town and its fortifications. I quartered the hill and found plenty of potsherds of a burnished red ware that looked far older than the fourteenth century and, alarmingly, dozens of recently sloughed snakeskins; but not a trace of a medieval building. A defensive tower on the summit, looking out over the undrained part of Lakecastle Lake, turned out to be a square rock outcrop.

There was only one area left to explore, a wide terrace at the base of the hill, north of the causeway. And here, at last, in a field of tomatoes, I spotted something that could only have been Islamic and medieval – a bit of blue-glazed faience tile. It was a minor yet pleasing monument. But if it came from IB’s Gölhisar, what had happened to the rest of the town?

I found a clue at the head of the causeway. Here stood a big new barn, as yet unroofed, built partly of large and finely worked blocks of ashlar. Like the burnished sherds they had a pre-medieval look to them; other bits of masonry that lay about nearby – fluted column drums, part of an acanthus frieze – were unquestionably classical. The enlarged causeway also incorporated some dismembered ancient buildings. Probably, I surmised, IB’s Gölhisar had been no more than a classical or Byzantine site recycled and given Islamic touches; now
it
had itself been recycled, and possibly not for the first time. I thought back to the
madrasah
at E
ğ
ridir where IB had stayed, constructed from bits of Byzantine buildings and a Seljuk caravanserai, and now turned into a mini-complex of boutiques. It was all part of the same process, cycle and recycle. Nothing was ever sacred.