Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (8 page)

Ibn Juzayy also added a
dibajah
– literally a length of brocade, literarily an introduction in rhymed prose. Beginning with pious phrases, the passage sets out the idea of the book. It is also a chance to acknowledge its patron. Predictably, it is not a mere ‘I should like to thank …’: Abu Inan’s reign ‘is conjoined with majesty whose
crown
is bound upon the temples of Gemini, and with glory that sweeps with its skirts the Galaxy of Heaven …’ and so on, for several pages. It is almost impossible to synthesize in translation the original’s rich and sophisticated flavour. A rare English
dibajah
introduces the great Cambridge orientalist Edward Granville Browne’s
A Year Amongst the Persians
. He recalls ‘how in pursuit of knowledge/I had foregone the calm seclusion of college’, before ‘from Kirmán and the confines of Bam/I had returned again to the city on the Cam’.

I sat by my pillar until my backside went numb, unwilling to leave. The stucco had yellowed, the cedar darkened, and there was a new nozzle on the little fountain in the centre of the courtyard; otherwise, what I saw was what I would have seen in IB’s time.

Suddenly the reverie was shattered by a gabble of voices as a group of Spanish tourists entered the courtyard. They thudded across the
zillij
floor on grape-pressing feet and ran their fingers across the stucco. A teenaged boy leaned against a pillar with one commando-soled boot cocked back against the tiles, staring into the sky with a look of transcendent boredom. I remembered that Andalucia, al-Andalus, the lost paradise of the Maghrib, gets its name from the people from whom the Arabs took it: the Vandals. The invasion lasted no more than five minutes; but the spell of the place was broken.

I stopped a taxi to take me back to the Residence. ‘Avenue Bou Regreg, please. Just off the
jawlah
, the roundabout.’

‘The what?’

I had used a Yemeni word. ‘Sorry. I mean the
dawar
.’

‘The
what
?’

I searched unsuccessfully for another synonym. ‘You know, the place where the roads meet and the cars go round in a circle.’

‘Oh, you mean the
rond-point
.’

‘That’s it. So what do you call it in Moroccan Arabic?’

The driver looked at me curiously. ‘
Al-rond-point
.’

*

On the train back to Tangier, I had a longer Franco-Arabic conversation – the French was all hers – with a girl from the south, of Mauritanian origin. She conformed to no image of Islamic womanhood that I had ever encountered: she wore black denim and high army boots, and she was travelling with a large military-style rucksack
which
she swung with a grunt on to the luggage rack. Her appearance, and her views – some of which raised eyebrows among our fellow-passengers – had me wondering whether she came from the City of Women, that Amazon-like colony located by eastern geographers in the Maghribi desert.

Everything went well until she asked if I was married. ‘Only to my books,’ I said, giving my stock answer. She looked sceptical. ‘The thing about books’, I went on, ‘is that they don’t answer back, they don’t need to be bought clothes. You know what the poet said: “A man’s best friend is his library.”’ The two other men in the compartment grinned; my friend looked hurt. I’d meant it lightheartedly, and now felt a cad.

‘
Some
women are not as you imagine,’ she said in a low voice.

She left the train at the next station; but before she did so she reached into her pocket and, without comment, handed me a newspaper cutting. It bore a photograph showing her in what appeared to be pyjamas, and the headline: ‘Only Woman in Southern Morocco with Karate Black Belt’.

Back in Tangier, the Hôtel Ibn Batouta was full, but the receptionist told me that the place across the road had vacancies. In the lobby of the other hotel I rang a bell and waited, wondering how to take a prominently displayed notice: ‘Absolutely No Guests to be Entertained in Bedrooms’. Was it simply a euphemism? Or did it mean that only conversations of a tedious nature were permitted? In a stay of one night, I would probably not be given the chance to find out.

The boy who answered the bell looked like a youthful Boris Karloff. As we climbed the stairs I told him I was writing a book about IB.

‘Many famous writers have stayed here,’ he said.

‘Really? Who?’ Remembering the photograph of IB across the road, I half expected them to include Ibn Khaldun and Sir John Mandeville.

‘William Burroughs, Allan Ginsberg … Jack Kerouac.’ He opened a firestation red door to a room that looked as if it might hardly have changed since the days of the Beats. The floor was laid with tiles in pomegranate pink, the heavy, dark oak bedsteads had brown velvet counterpanes, and green gingham covered a rickety table. A bidet squatted behind a curtain that flapped in the breeze from an open
window
. The room was loomed over by a very large wardrobe, painted glossy black. Surrounded by these potential metamorphs, I wrote up my notes warily. I did not open the wardrobe. It was certainly a setting to inspire, with a little metaphysic and a lot of drugs,
Naked Lunch
. (Further research revealed that the Mouniria was indeed the place where Burroughs, with the aid of his Eukodolmuse, wrote the novel. His room, however, was on the ground floor. Was my upstairs room the one where the Beats gathered to eat magic mushrooms, supplied by the late Dr Timothy Leary?)

Later, as I lay in bed – with half an eye on that wardrobe – I reviewed my brief visit to IB’s homeland. In one sense, I had failed signally: I had come to visit his tomb, to ask for his blessing on my journey, and had found it to be a fake – a phantasm, Dr Abdelhadi called it. But on the credit side, I had found IB’s spirit very much alive: in Khalid, for instance, the would-be traveller who could quote pre-Islamic poetry; and in Dr Abdelhadi, the far-travelled Maghribi come home to royal patronage. Moreover, IB seemed to have cult status. Apart from the airport, the street and the hotel, one of the ferries to Spain was named after him; there were seminars and conferences on him; there had been a TV series on him, an exhibition of ‘portraits’, and a Year of IB; they were planning an IB Museum in Tangier, and no doubt, one day, there will be a theme park. Further away, a German group had recorded a CD in his name; a Dutch friend has told me of an IB Scout Troop in Rotterdam; and there is even an Arabic on-line dating agency called ‘IB’.

But cults need relics. Although al-Rumi tells us to look for the dead in men’s hearts, his own tomb in Konya is one of the most revered and visited in Turkey. I had heard that they even display the great mystic’s long-johns. I could only hope that somewhere along my route between here and Constantinople – a route eccentric enough to take in the Kuria Muria Islands in the Arabian Sea – I would find something as tangibly, if not so intimately, connected with IB.

I had a long way to go. A vision came to me, that of the Residence servants in Rabat lined up by the door, waving farewell; it gave way to another – an endless sequence of economical hotels. I slept uneasily, my dreams haunted by the flushing of a nearby lavatory.

As the Tangerine dawn turned to day, I set off for the airport. I was glad not to be following IB overland from Morocco – to cross rural
Algeria
in his time was dangerous enough, but today it would have been potentially suicidal. The taxi driver painted a gory picture of events across the border. ‘In many ways,’ he said, not meaning to be discouraging, ‘travel is more difficult now than it was in IB’s day.’

As I paid him, he wished me a safe journey; then added, ‘You must always remember that IB wanted people to know one another. He was …’, he thought for a moment, then slipped into Franglais, ‘…
il était un gentleman
. May God go with you.’

He smiled broadly and patted me on the back. And there, I thought, not from a tomb but from the driver of Grand Taxi n° 158, was the blessing I had come for.

IB travelled across North Africa to Egypt. In Alexandria, he had his first intimations that he was ‘to travel through the earth’. After passing through the Nile Delta he arrived in Cairo, capital of the Mamluks – a military élite of Turkic origin who ruled Egypt and the Levant. From Cairo he followed the Nile into Upper Egypt then crossed the desert to the Red Sea town of Aydhab, intending to sail to Jeddah, the port for Mecca. Political disturbances, however, had halted shipping. IB retraced his route to Cairo
.

The Delta

A Dark and Greenish Country

‘Real dream vision is an awareness on the part of the rational soul in its spiritual essence, of glimpses of the forms of events. While the soul is spiritual, the forms of events have actual existence in it, as is the case with all spiritual essences. The soul becomes spiritual through freeing itself from bodily matters and corporeal perceptions. This happens to the soul in the form of glimpses through the agency of sleep, whereby it gains the knowledge of future events that it desires and regains the perceptions that belong to it. When this process is weak and indistinct, the soul applies to it allegory and imaginary pictures, in order to gain the desired knowledge. Such allegory, then, necessitates interpretation.’

Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406),
The Muqaddimah
, trans. Franz Rosenthal

S
IX HUNDRED
and seventy-one years, five months and three days after IB, I walked along Lote-tree Gate Street, by which travellers from the Maghrib entered Alexandria. ‘She is a unique pearl of glowing opalescence, a secluded maiden arrayed in her bridal adornments, glorious in her surpassing beauty.’ IB, or more likely his editor, was nothing if not flattering. Alexandria was even then of a certain age. Now she is a very old lady indeed, an empress exiled to a tenement who hardly dares to recall the days when Mark Antony came to dinner.

Lote-tree Gate Street is a sort of deconstructed Marks and Spencers, and I had to force my way between shoppers and racks of nighties (or were they housecoats? Many Egyptians exist in a quotidian sartorial penumbra, in which the division between day and night attire is blurred and grown men are to be seen in pyjamas at teatime). There were tumuli of knickers, and pyramids of bras that,
given
a concept, might have passed in Cork Street for feminist sculpture. More pyramids, built of watermelons with the one at the apex cut open, tottered along on horse-drawn carts whose drivers cleared a passage with loud cries. Barrows carried mounds of knobbly guavas and rupturing figs, protected from the flies by smoke from pans of incense. I bought some figs, and as I bit into one I remembered a couplet:

He said: ‘Your lips are split.’

I said: ‘Like only the sweetest of figs …’

IB made the long journey from Tangier to Alexandria by land, via Tlemsen and Algiers, Bougie, Constantine and Bône, Tunis and Tripoli, before crossing in the Libyan Desert that invisible line of longitude that divides Maghrib from Mashriq, West from East. In Bougie he caught a fever; by Tunis he had suffered a relapse and arrived at the city tied to his saddle with his turban cloth. Alone, and surrounded by groups of embracing friends, he burst into tears. But he left Tunis as
qadi
, judge, of the pilgrim caravan, and in Tripoli married the daughter of one of its members. In the desert before Egypt, in between avoiding nomadic bandits, he fell out with his father-in-law and divorced the girl. By the time he reached Alexandria, he had remarried.

My own journey into Egypt was less eventful. Mindful of al-Abdari’s warning that ‘the traveller, from the time he leaves the territory of Morocco until his arrival in Alexandria, never ceases to face death at the hands of malefactors’ and of the fact that the difficulties
of
overlanding through Algeria and Libya were now, if anything, greater, I had flown into Cairo and caught the train. I had missed out the blunt end of a continent. But IB’s account of the journey is sparse. The wastes of Barbary were not a place in which to linger.

The other passengers on the Alexandria train were mostly well-to-do families on their way to the seaside. Slowly, we slipped between the grubby suburban fingers of Cairo into the Delta. It was astonishingly green – of a dark, furry greenness shot with irrigation channels that glistened like slug trails – and I could understand the apparent colour blindness that often, in Arabic, confuses green with black. A medieval poet described the landscape we were travelling through as

A meadow of night-dark green like the down on a cheek,

A stream of chisels worked by the north wind’s hand.

People still waved at trains. Men in earth-coloured
jallabiyyahs
and carrying mattocks would pause to raise a shovel-sized hand as we went past. Beamy women with trays of washing on their heads strode through the fields along slender paths. At intervals, we passed towns that had erupted into the fields in a rash of scabby cement buildings. Many of the flat roofs had sprouted sugarloaf pigeon towers of mud; the effect was a combination of the Gorbals and Timbuktu. In an utterly horizontal landscape, the tall chimneys of brickworks seemed unduly grand. Their angular inscriptions, picked out in bricks of a contrasting colour, made them into distant cousins of the Timurid tomb-towers of Samarkand.