Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (9 page)

In the station at Banha, a group of large and very beautiful women sat on the platform like earth mothers. As I looked at them, a small man with a Mr Punch face in a grey safari suit walked up to them and performed an energetic hornpipe. They quivered with laughter. In Damanhur station, the people on the platform had graded themselves according to size and shape, like pebbles on a beach: one bench was for large women, another for slimmer ones, and others were occupied by fat fellahs, thin fellahs and bent old men. Damanhur didn’t look to be ‘possessed of remarkable attractions’, as it was for IB; but few places do from a railway line.

As we approached the coast, the Delta became less bosky. The sky opened out, and increasing humidity gave it a dull pearlescence, like the inside of a mussel shell. A hush of anticipation went around the
children
. I could remember that feeling, from a long time ago, approaching another sea.

Egypt looks big on the map; but, with nearly all its habitable area lying along the Nile, it is in reality a thin country, thinner than Chile. As if to make up, there are many Egypts, and nowhere more so than in Alexandria. One can read Forster, Cavafy and Durrell on the city, but it is most neatly summarized in the names of its tram-stops: Sidi Bishr, Sporting, Bulkley (officially Isis), Stanley, San Stefanu, Miami, Mustafa Pasha, Glymenopoulos.

I had little idea of what remained of the physical Alexandria IB saw. Of the two structures he described one, the Pharos, was reduced to a magnificent pile of rubble after his visit. The other still stood – the great column raised in honour of Diocletian in
AD
300 and known to the Crusaders as Pompey’s Pillar. In a city famous for eclecticism since the first Ptolemy set up a committee to design its religion, this at least was a stable point of reference from which to begin some inverse archaeology.

The Pillar stands as it did in the time of IB in a grove of date palms and other trees. Signs said ‘To the Pillar’ and ‘Pillar this way’ – well-intentioned but pointless: it was as if someone had put up noticeboards around Trafalgar Square to direct visitors to Nelson’s Column. The Pillar rises on a dusty hillock riddled with cisterns, vaults and passages. Reaching the top of this eminence, I came face to face with an exceedingly ugly block of flats. The days were gone when Alexandria’s buildings, as IB said, united imposing size with architectural perfection.

It was hot. The noise of Lote-tree Gate Street came on a fitful breeze like the murmur of a distant football crowd. I examined the centuries of graffiti carved into the base of the Pillar, hoping against hope to find ‘IB,
AH
726’; but the base was of soft stone, now eroded, and all I could make out was ‘CICERO’ followed by ‘1822’. I was joined by a group of Indonesian tourists in the charge of a pretty Egyptian guide. She told them that the Pillar was 26.85 metres tall from the bottom of its base to the top of its capital, and that ‘it has been attributed since the Crusades’ time to Bombay, the well-known Romanian general’. Thus, I suppose, are legends born.

Like many essentially useless objects, the Pillar has generated a number of stories to explain its existence. One account of the time of IB suggests that it was part of the stoa of Aristotle; the same source
gives
an alternative explanation, that it was one of seven columns brought by the giant proto-Arab tribe of Thamud from near Aswan, each column carried by a Thamudi under his armpit – like the old advert which shows a workman, made superhuman by Guinness Extra Stout, carrying a colossal girder. In the
Travels
, Ibn Juzayy in one of his editorial asides tells another story associated with the Pillar. One of his teachers, ‘a much-travelled man’, saw a member of the Alexandrian corps of archers sitting on top of it, apparently as some sort of protest. He had made the ascent by shooting a thread attached to a rope over the capital, pulling the rope over and securing it in the ground on the other side, and climbing up it. He then threw the rope off, ‘so that people had nothing to guide them to his trick and were astonished by his feat’. Ibn Juzayy does not answer the most interesting question: How did the man get down?

An elegant lady in a small neo-classical building among the palms, who had charge of the Pillar, had not heard of the rope trick. She seemed shocked when I suggested going to the Alexandria Sporting Club to find an archer who could re-enact the stunt. But she did tell me that, in the more recent past, twenty-two people had had a picnic lunch on top of the Pillar.

For the medieval geographers, Alexandria swarmed with legends. One told how, when Alexander was building the city, each day’s work would be mysteriously destroyed during the night. A watch was posted, and it was discovered that the culprits were sea monsters. Alexander had a brainwave. He ordered his carpenters to construct a mini-submarine of wood, sealed with tar and provided with glass portholes. Accompanied by the two best court artists, Alexander was lowered into the sea in this contraption, straight into a group of ‘satans in human form, with the heads of beasts, carrying hatchets, saws and billhooks’. The artists quickly sketched the monsters and, safely back on land, turned their drawings into statues which they set up along the sea front. When the monsters emerged for their nightly spree of vandalism, they saw their own images, took fright and were never seen again.

Ibn Khaldun, rarely a willing suspender of disbelief, branded the story absurd. ‘Were one to go down deep into the water, even in a box, one would have too little air for natural breathing. Because of that, one’s spirit would quickly become hot. Such a man would lack the cold air necessary to maintain a well-balanced humour of the
lung
and the vital spirit. He would perish on the spot.’ The force of logic may be on Ibn Khaldun’s side; but the submarine story, apart from being entertaining, is a nice allegory for the process by which Hellenic art and science tamed the dark, irrational animal-headed gods of the Pharaohs.

The sea around the site of the Pharos was grey-green and truculent, and I could see how the imagination might people it with monsters. (In fact, a giant statue of Isis Pharia was dredged up at this spot forty years ago.) Here, legends cluster as thickly as the barnacles on the rocks. The historical Pharos was built by Ptolemy II Philadelphos in the early third century
BC
. One of the classical Wonders of the World, it was 450 feet high and topped by a brazier and a mirror which reflected light far out to sea. Medieval science fiction turned the mirror into a powerful reflecting telescope, through which the departure of ships from any port in the eastern Mediterranean – or, in another version, the world – could be observed. Some accounts add that the mirror was treated with special oils; others converted it into a giant burning-glass which could zap vessels far out at sea. The mirror was smashed by a Byzantine spy; or in the version of Leo the African, who places it on Pompey’s Pillar, rendered useless by a Jewish agent who rubbed garlic into it.

More critical writers transmitted such legends with a good basting of scepticism; but the habit of retelling them created a phantom edifice of myth that outlived the physical Pharos. Travellers who saw the building in its senescence felt they had been sold a dud. The pilgrim-guide writer al-Harawi, 150 years before IB, wrote that ‘nowadays it is no longer a Wonder of the World – it is no more than a watchtower by the sea’. IB, a congenital optimist, called it ‘a square building soaring into the air’, but admitted that a whole face of it was ruined. Passing through Alexandria again, twenty-three years later, he found that ‘it had fallen into so ruinous a condition that it was impossible to enter it’.

Over a century later, the Mamluk Sultan Qayt Bey built a fine fortress from the remains of the Pharos. It still stands there, out on its tongue of land, riding the waves like a Dreadnought. I was sitting beneath its walls, just above the limpet line, mesmerized by the suck and gloop of the water, when a man with pigmentless hands came and sat beside me. I agreed with him that, praise God, it was a fine spot.

‘You are a Muslim?’

I said I wasn’t, and he gave me a brief lecture on Heaven and Hell. ‘… And when your flesh has been consumed by the fire, it is immediately renewed and the process begins again. Don’t you want to escape this punishment?’

I thought for a little. ‘I think our Hell is slightly less nasty than yours.’

He laughed. ‘Well, it’s your decision.’

It was all very good-natured; we might have been discussing whether to pass through the red or the green channel in Customs. The man wished me an enjoyable stay, and went to rejoin his family.

At the tip of the peninsula the sea was angry, thudding against the rocks and spitting spray. A lone man crouched down by the waterline collecting limpets, but with one eye on the waves. Whenever a big one came he scuttled out of its way. Tradition gives the Mediterranean a malevolent character: it is said that God, after He had created the seas, asked the Indian Ocean what it would do with the Faithful who travelled on it. ‘I’ll carry them on my back,’ said the Ocean. When He asked the same question of the Mediterranean, it answered, ‘I’ll drown them!’ God blessed the Indian Ocean with pearls and spices, and cursed the Mediterranean with storms and Christians.

In his chapter on Alexandria, IB quoted a long prayer, the
Litany of the Sea
. Reading it at this spot, it seemed to throb and flow with the rhythm of the waves:

Subject to us this sea as Thou didst subject the sea unto Moses, and as Thou didst subject the fire to Abraham, and as Thou didst subject the mountains and the iron to David, and as Thou didst subject the wind and the demons and the jinn to Solomon. Subject to us every sea that is Thine on earth and in heaven, in the world of sense and in the invisible world, the sea of this life and the sea of the life to come. Subject to us everything, O Thou in Whose Hand is the rule over all.
Kaf-Ha-Ya-Ayn-Sad
…

Fourteen centuries of exegesis have failed to explain those final letters, and others, which appear in the Qur’an. They are reputed to be a powerful talisman. Six months later, I was to see them carved on
the
stern of a long-beached
sambuq
in a tiny haven, two thousand miles away on the Arabian Sea.

I walked back along the landward side of the peninsula, looking across the bay towards the city. From here it appeared to float like a mirage; through half-closed eyes it might have been the city Alexander built, so dazzlingly white that he had green silk hung around its streets to cut the glare. It is all an illusion, a trick of the light that has taken in generations of visitors. Symon Semeon, in the city a couple of years before IB, wrote that ‘Alexandria shines in outward appearance, but in reality its streets are narrow, ugly, tortuous and dark’; al-Abdari thought that ‘its form is greater than its substance … like a beautiful body without a soul’. Few places on earth can have suffered so long and dispiriting an anticlimax.

I walked on, haunted by snatches of the
Litany of the Sea
and ‘Eternal Father, Strong to Save’; and ended up feeling maudlin. Chicken livers in Madeira sauce at the Elite Restaurant did nothing to dispel the sensation. Neither did the ambience of the restaurant. The
patronne
, an elderly Greek woman with turkey wattles who wore beads and a striped kaftan, sat with a prematurely grey young man. She smoked and swayed to a tape of sad bouzouki music, counterpointed by the rhythmic clang of a water-seller out on the street. An old Greek couple came in and greeted her. They were dressed as for a wedding; the man carried a white shoulder bag, decorated in the manner of Chanel with large gilt bosses.

I awoke in my hotel room in the twilight, after an overlong siesta crowded by fantastical, chicken-liver inspired dreams. My maudlin state persisted; darkened by the feeling that I wasn’t getting anywhere near IB or his Alexandria, it threatened to turn into one of ennui. There was only one antidote: a visit to Lionel.

Lionel was living in graceful retirement in the suburb of Bulkley, named after its tram-stop. The driver of the taxi I hailed to take me to Lionel’s explained that Mr Bulkley – he called him ‘Bukleh’ – was a member of the original Victorian tram company’s board of directors, and that the stop was built to serve his villa. Victorian Alexandria now seems hardly less distant than Hellenistic Alexandria, and the road to Bulkley is overlooked by walls of high-rise blocks and clogged with a thrombus of traffic. But it was in the unlikely setting of this traffic jam that I had my first real glimpse into the Alexandria of IB.

The subject of trams led unexpectedly into that of
walis
, ‘friends of God’ or saints. ‘When you British were building the other part of the tramline,’ said the driver, ‘a strange thing happened. The route you’d chosen was blocked by the tomb of a
wali
, Sidi Abu ’l-Durdar, and you decided to knock it down.’

I protested at the ‘you’.

‘All right, they decided to knock it down. And, would you believe it, the first workman who raised his pickaxe to strike the tomb found that his arms were paralysed! And the next one, and all of them. So you left the tomb alone. It’s like an island between the tramlines. This was a great
karamah
of the saint.’

Talk of saints and
karamahs
– saintly as opposed to prophetic miracles – took me straight into the text of the
Travels
. IB was enthralled by saints, and wherever he found himself he went out of his way to knock on the doors of hermitages, collecting anchorites as avidly as later tourists collected ammonites. It was here in Alexandria that his hagiophilia took off, with a saint called Burhan al-Din the Lame. My research had failed to turn up any references to Burhan al-Din other than IB’s, and the driver had not heard of him. I asked him about Yaqut, ‘Ruby’, another holy man IB had visited in Alexandria.

‘Sidi Yaqut? Haven’t you seen his new mosque? It’s as big as al-Mursi’s and right next to it.’

Suddenly, things were dropping into place. IB had called on Yaqut. Al-Mursi – Abu ’l-Abbas of Murcia, in al-Andalus – was Yaqut’s teacher; he died before IB’s visit, but the Moroccan mentioned his fellow Maghribi in passing.