Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (45 page)

*

My discoveries were hardly earth-shattering. But at night over my diary and
rakı
, that melancholy spirit, I thought again that it would have been good to share them with a
rafiq
, a travelling companion. Instead, I shared them with ghosts – with IB, and with less substantial future ghosts: you.

At the same time I didn’t envy IB, who seems never to have had a minute to himself. His arrival in Denizli even sparked off a fight between rival Akhi groups, each desperate to earn honour by looking after the stranger. ‘The altercation’, he says, ‘grew so hot that some of them drew knives.’ (I too was the object of a minor altercation in Denizli – between the touts of rival
pensions
.)

As well as enjoying the energetic welcome of the Akhis, IB schmoozed with sultans. He gives us an insight into his technique: questioned by a prince about other rulers he had met, IB realized that ‘his idea was that I would praise those of them who had been generous and find fault with the miserly. I did nothing of the kind; on the contrary, I praised them all.’ These courtierly skills usually earned IB a meal, a robe and some cash. On one occasion, however, they provoked an overdose of hospitality. During his fortnight in the generous thrall of Sultan Muhammad ibn Aydın of Birgi, IB admitted, ‘I began to weary and wished to take my leave.’ By the time he did, he had collected some of his most vivid Anatolian memories – of a stone that fell from the sky, a mountain camp under the walnut trees, and endless presents of butter in sheep’s stomachs.

IB’s Birgi was the capital of a principality that included Ephesus and Smyrna; today it has shrunk to a dot on the map, on a hill above the Little Meander. A footnote in Gibb refers the reader to
Murray’s Guide
of 1895 and to the learned Phippson’s slightly later five-volume
Reise und Forschungen in westlichen Kleinasien
. Cavalierly, I had failed to consult either work. Birgi was thus a surprise, a cascade of pantiles down a hillside in which, out of an island of firs, rose an immense, metropolitan mosque. It was built of large ashlar blocks the colour of
shortbread
; the minaret was a tall cylinder of ginger brick diapered with voided blue lozenges. I looked for an inscription and found one over the main door: ‘Built by the Amir … the Holy Warrior, the Fighter at the Frontiers, Sultan Muhammad ibn Aydın, in the year 712’ – IB’s hospitable captor himself, ‘one of the best, most generous, and worthiest of sultans’.

‘You can read Arabic?’ said a voice by my side. I turned and nodded to the speaker. ‘I am studying Arabic at high school,’ he continued. ‘Islamic high school. But it is not one of my best subjects. However, I am always first in English, and nearly first in history. I think you are interested in the history of Birgi?’

It all came out in a flood – IB, his travels, mine – which only ran out at Birgi, the Sultan, the stone that fell from the sky, the camp under the walnut trees, the stomachs of butter. The boy looked at me solemnly. I wondered what he saw: bore, or maniac?

‘We shall look for these things together,’ he said.

Yalçın took me into a mausoleum by the mosque. Several tombs lay under a dome, again of ginger and blue brick. ‘Here is Sultan Muhammad. It is written that he died in 1334, in an accident while hunting,’ he said, translating from a typed card by the tomb. ‘And look, here are his sons – Isa, Ibrahim and Ghazi Umar Bey. It says that Ghazi Umar fought on the island of Chios, and that he was a friend of … “Cantacuzene”.’

This last, surprising piece of information about Ghazi Umar, whom IB met here in Birgi and then in Smyrna, I confirmed later from Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall
. The Turkoman prince’s friendship with the Byzantine Emperor John V Cantacuzene was compared, the historian wrote, ‘in the vain rhetoric of the times, to the perfect union of Orestes and Pylades’; the Emperor, for his part, looked on Ghazi Umar with ‘sentimental passion’. On one occasion, Gibbon went on, the prince rescued the Empress Irene from the Bulgarians. She invited him to visit her but, ‘by a peculiar strain of delicacy, the gentle barbarian refused’. (A fictionalized version of Umar also appears in the
Decameron
, in which, less delicately, he rapes the Sultan of Babylon’s daughter.) As yet unaware of these ramifications, I simply enjoyed meeting the mortal remains of characters from the
Travels
, and doing so in live and enthusiastic company.

The prayer-hall of the mosque was a perfect arrangement of dark and light, an airy cuboid beneath a walnut ceiling. Beside a
mihrab
of
turquoise
and black tiles stood a pulpit, also of walnut, richly carved and patinated dark chocolate. As we admired it, we were joined by the imam. ‘I preach from this every Friday,’ he said, with understandable pride. He pointed out three gilded bosses on the side of the pulpit. ‘The earth, in the middle,’ he explained, ‘and beside it the sun and the moon. These’, he said, indicating a ring of smaller gilded polygons around the bosses, ‘are the planets.’

‘I think Sultan Muhammad was interested in astronomy,’ Yalçın said.

I went to my bag and pulled out Gibb’s translation of the
Travels
.

‘“Have you ever seen a stone that fell from the sky?”’ the Sultan asked IB. ‘“I have never seen one, nor ever heard tell of one,”’ the traveller replied. ‘Then they brought in a great black stone, very hard and with a glitter in it. I reckoned it a hundredweight. The Sultan ordered the stonebreakers to be summoned, and at his command four of them beat on it as one man, four times, with iron hammers, but made no impression on it. I was astonished at this phenomenon, and he ordered it to be taken back to its place.’

As I read, Yalçın translated for the imam. Then I asked if the meteorite was still in existence; it was, after all, not the sort of thing that would get thrown away. But they had never seen the
gökta
ş
ı
, the skystone, nor heard tell of it.

The double doors of the pulpit bore a fine Arabic inscription. It was a
hadith
, a saying of the Prophet: ‘O God, I seek refuge with You from work that does not profit, from hearts that are not humble, from prayers that are not answered, from appetites that are not sated.’ This time it was the imam who translated for Yalçın. And, as he did so, another scene from the
Travels
played itself out: ‘The Sultan asked me to write down for him a number of
hadiths
of the Prophet. Then he commanded the professor to write an exposition of them for him in the Turkish language.’

I looked around the prayer-hall. Sultan Muhammad had clearly been an avid
hadith
-collector: each window was furnished with walnut shutters, each shutter carved like the pulpit with a saying of the Prophet. It was a most legible building and, for one put up by a minor Turkoman warlord in a parenthesis in history, thoroughly civilized.

While the mosque was gloriously intact, the secular monuments of Sultan Muhammad seemed to have disappeared completely. IB
described
an audience-hall ‘with an ornamental pool in the centre and a bronze lion at each of its corners, spouting water from its mouth’. Here, long-haired Byzantine pages served their delicate barbarian masters with sherbert and biscuits in gold bowls. Yalç
ĭ
n and I made do with
ayran
, diluted yoghurt, in a tea-garden north-west of the mosque. It overlooked a dry watercourse that flowed in the spring when the snow melted up on the slopes of Bozda
ğ
.

‘If I could be Sultan of Birgi,’ Yalçın day-dreamed, ‘do you know where I would build my palace? Right here, in this tea-garden.’ He was probably right. We had combed Birgi and found no better site. He had also asked everyone we met whether they knew about the
gökta
ş
ı
, the skystone. Although we had drawn a blank, I could not have wanted a more dogged research assistant. ‘Is it very important for you to find it?’ he asked.

It was the sort of question, like those concerning the song the sirens sang or the Sphinx’s inscrutable smile, that one ought to ask but didn’t. ‘Well … I suppose it’s important to look.’

‘Then I shall dig for it!’ he said, with a sudden heroic gesture that took in Birgi, Bozda
ğ
and half the Little Meander valley. ‘But first,’ he continued, back to his serious self, ‘we must look for the campsite.’

*

When IB arrived in Birgi, ‘the Sultan was passing the summer on a mountain thereabouts on account of the great heat. We climbed up to the mountain by a road that had been hewn in its side, and reached his camp just before noon. There we alighted, by a stream of water shaded by walnut trees.’

‘There is IB’s road,’ Yalçın said, pointing to a track terraced into the flank of the mountain. It was the following morning, and we were looking up at the massif of Bozda
ğ
squatting over the town on its great sunburnt hunkers.

IB was not a happy camper; he soon grew restless in Sultan Muhammad’s summer retreat. Still, he carefully described his accommodation, ‘a tent which is called by them a
kharqah
, made of wooden laths put together in the form of a cupola and covered with pieces of felt; the upper part can be opened to admit light and air’. The design is old enough to have appeared in Aeschylus, whose Scythians ‘dwell in latticed huts high-poised on easy wheels’ – a reference to the mobile version of the yurt that IB saw later in the land of the Golden
Horde
. Formerly this mini geodesic dome was found from Anatolia to Manchuria. Now, although the Turks themselves have abandoned these round tents, they still survive elsewhere in Asia (and have even recently crossed the Bering Strait to Oregon where, as New Age housing, the tepee is
passé
).

We set off up the track. Below us an early sun raked across the roofs, minarets and gardens of Birgi; further below, a haze hung over the Little Meander. We climbed quickly into the cooling air, browsing on wild figs and green walnuts. Eventually the old road merged with a new asphalted one. Yalçın flagged down a tractor and we bounced the rest of the way up, sitting in a scoop at the back. ‘It’s not cheating,’ he pointed out. ‘IB was riding a horse.’

I was surprised to find Bozda
ğ
a substantial settlement of concrete houses and tea-gardens. ‘The rich people in Birgi and Ödemi
ş
come here for the summer,’ Yalç
ĭ
n explained, ‘just like the Sultan. Only they have villas now, not tents.’ IB, the unhappy camper, would have approved.

After lunch we set out along a stream, looking for a campsite shaded by walnut trees. Yalçın led the way, slashing through the undergrowth with his stick. Often we were forced to walk in the stream itself. ‘This is Vietnam!’ he said. ‘Like the American films. Write in your notebook, “And Yalçın led me into water many metres deep, and we swam it bravely!”’ I did, although the stream was no
more
than a trickle. Several hours later, stung by nettles and covered with old man’s beard, we gave up. We hadn’t found the place; or perhaps we had found it many times, for the entire valley was overhung with walnuts, old ones, perhaps even Battutian ones.

We sat under one of them and went through the text again; but there were no more clues. ‘We have looked,’ said Yalçın, ‘and maybe we have found. We shall never know. But I think that if everything was written in the book, there would be no reason to come and look.’

I caught the last bus out of Birgi, the only passenger. The driver asked me if I had found my
gökta
ş
ı
, my skystone. I shook my head, and looked back at Birgi: the last of the light was catching Sultan Muhammad’s minaret; Bozda
ğ
was growing indistinct, a little furry, like moleskin. What I had found, and left behind, was my
rafiq
.

*

I have said that there are no ghosts in Islam; perhaps it would be more correct to say that there are no Muslim ghosts. ‘The story goes’, wrote the traveller Abu Hamid of Granada,

that in the time of the Prophet, Abdullah ibn Umar went on a journey. He set out alone on his she-camel. As he was passing the battle-site of Badr where the pagans of Mecca were killed, the ground suddenly split open. ‘There rose up’, he said, ‘a human being, blackened and smouldering from head to toe. He had a chain about his neck that dragged behind him, and he cried out to me, “Abdullah! Give me water!
Give me water!
” My camel shied at the apparition. Then there rose up another man. He pulled the first one back towards him with the chain, saying, “Do not give him water, for this is Abu Jahl, the enemy of God!” Then he drove Abu Jahl back into his grave with a whip, and the ground closed over him.’ Abdullah ibn Umar was terrified, and abandoned his journey. When he told the Prophet of what he had witnessed, the Prophet made it a rule that thereafter no one should ever travel alone. He said, God’s blessings and peace on him, ‘One’s company for the devil, two for a pair of devils; three’s company for travelling.’

IB took the decree to heart. As well as al-Tuzari, his Tunisian
rafiq
, he had gathered along the way a group of even shadowier, nameless
‘companions’
. In Ephesus he bought ‘a Greek slave-girl, a virgin, for forty gold dinars’; in Smyrna Ghazi Umar, son of the Sultan of Birgi, gave him a slave named Nicholas, ‘five spans tall’; shortly after this in Balikesir he bought another slave, Margarita. All these were in addition to the slave Michael, part of a going-away present from Sultan Muhammad that also included a hundred gold dinars, a thousand silver dirhams, a complete wardrobe and a horse. The companions had to make do with a robe each and some dirhams.