Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (27 page)

Abu ’l-Fida’s upbringing was martial as well as academic. Aged 12, he witnessed the expulsion of ‘al-Ustibar’, the Hospitallers, from their great fortress of al-Marqab; four years later at Tripoli he gagged at the stench of rotting Crusaders; not long after, he was in charge of dragging a giant mangonel through the snow from Crac des Chevaliers to the siege of Acre. Later, he skirmished with the Mongols and took part in the ever-popular sport of Armenian-raiding. Then, as peace descended on the fourteenth century, he turned from swordplay to wordplay, composing verses whose nearest literary equivalent in English is the
Spectator
crossword.

He was a close friend of Sultan al-Nasir, who regularly had him brought to Cairo by the
barid
, the Mamluk Federal Express, to hunt near the Pyramids with panthers and gyrfalcons. Al-Nasir invested Abu ’l-Fida with robes of ermine and cloth-of-gold, and eventually with the title of Sultan of Hamah which his ancestors had borne. The occasion was celebrated with a magnificent procession in Between the Two Castles.

Abu ’l-Fida, warrior, hunter, poet and sultan, was also an accomplished astronomer and botanist; the chief physician in Cairo deferred to him on medical matters; he wrote that useful
Short History of Mankind
, continued by Ibn al-Wardi and finished off by the Black Death; his volume of geographical tables was the most up-to-date thing of its kind, and became a major source for European mapmakers from the Renaissance on. Under this remarkable man, Hamah became an Islamic Parnassus.

At the time of IB’s first Syrian trip, Abu ’l-Fida was writing hard, continuing his history and revising his geography. He was working under pressure of time, and he knew it. ‘I do not believe’, he would say to his courtiers, ‘that I shall outlive my sixtieth year, for no member of the Ayyubid house of Hamah has done so.’ At the beginning of that year he composed a verse in the Andalusian manner and in sentiment somewhere between Horace and Piaf:

I do not rant at Time or blame him,

For with diversions have I tamed him.

I’ve lived a blessed life, full of delights

That please the senses – sounds, and tastes, and sights –

With pure cups carousing, in paradise browsing.

True to the family curse, Abu ’l-Fida died in 1331 aged 59 years and 8 months by the Islamic calendar. He was buried in a mosque-tomb complex he had built in the outskirts of Hamah, set in a garden by the River Orontes and, in his own words, ‘one of the most delectable of spots’.

The Islamic Museum in Cairo owns a personal relic of Abu ’l-Fida – a brass pen-box inlaid in gold, silver and copper with a dense herbarium of arabesques in which lurk the Sultan’s blazon. I had looked for but failed to find this apotheosis of the pencil-case. Now I left
Damascus
, in search of Battutiana and to visit the delectable tomb of the polymath prince of Hamah.

*

Hamah, set on the banks of a river and the verge of genteel ennui, a city of teashops, public parks and fizzing weirs, of fine old buildings restored with a bridgework of new ashlar, has something of the feel of Bath. In an age when most cities have spilt out of their ancient settings it is still relatively compact, almost hidden in the Orontes valley, recognizably IB’s comely town ‘surrounded by orchards and gardens, supplied by water-wheels like revolving spheres’.

Dusk was falling when I arrived. I walked down to the river, drawn by the sound of the water-wheels, or norias. They were as tall as three-storey houses yet twirled as easily as spinning-wheels, powered by the slick black belt of the Orontes. The noise was deafening. (‘Noria’ comes via al-Andalus from the Arabic
na’urah
, itself connected with a root signifying the gushing of liquids and the roaring of beasts.) A man was watching one of the wheels. Suddenly he turned and spoke to me. ‘The poets have written much on the subject of norias.’ It sounded more like Ibn Juzayy than a conversational opener. ‘To what would you liken the sound of this one?’

Perhaps he himself was a poet who had run out of similes. I said the first thing that came into my head: ‘A woman giving birth?’

He looked closely at me. ‘How did you know? My wife’s in hospital. She’s just had a baby. A boy. I must go.’

‘Congratulations …’ I called to him, as he slipped away into the dark. I stood there, listening to the music of the wooden spheres at heavy-metal volume and thinking about the strangeness of the encounter.

The following morning, I went to look for Abu ’l-Fida’s tomb. I crossed to the right bank of the Orontes, where there was a garden with giant plastic toadstools and, nearby, the carbuncular Cham Palace Hotel (the French-style transliteration was a wise choice – ‘Sham Palace’ would have been accurate in more senses than one). On the opposite bank was an orchard, dense, tangly and hiding houses and domes. My path gave out and I recrossed the river by an old bridge and followed a lane where guinea fowl pecked in the dust. Another old bridge took me back to the right bank and Abu ’l-Fida’s mosque – Masjid al-Hayaya, the Mosque of the Serpents.

I spotted them immediately. In the centre of a double arched window overlooking the river was a column in the form of intertwining ‘snakes’, so deeply cut that it seemed plaited, not carved. The door was locked, but two bearded carpenters from a nearby workshop found the key. Together we visited Abu ’l-Fida’s tomb, in a chamber beneath a small lemon-squeezer dome. It was plain but elegant; so too was the prayer hall of the mosque, a white space relieved only by a dado of rare marbles and a gilded inscription band. Clearly, the Sultan was a builder of taste. But the best part of the building was the view through the snake window.

One of the carpenters pointed out the sights of Hamah – the bridges, the citadel hill, the giant Muhammadiyyah noria. As he spoke he fondled the snakes, already burnished by generations of caresses. ‘That garden’, he said, indicating a jungly orchard that disappeared around a bend in the river, ‘is called Tin al-Dahshah.’ The Figs of Amazement. Abu ’l-Fida was right: it was a delectable spot.

I thanked the carpenters and continued downstream towards the Figs of Amazement. There, I found myself in a scene described by Ibn Jubayr in sensuous rhyming prose, ‘a place of secret, hidden beauty. Wander, penetrate the shade, for there are gardens whose boughs overhang the banks like soft, dark hair, while the river winds through its lair among the shadows.’ Fig trees intertwined with pomegranate and apricot. A little noria turned arthritically, irrigating the gardens. Frogs rasped in the water-channels. A tortoiseshell cat eyed me from the undergrowth. A dog barked, sending a flock of white doves flickering out of the branches.

I followed a lane that twisted through the orchards between mud walls, then crossed the river by an ancient bridge of many arches. Here there was a confusion of weirs, some to work mid-stream mills, others norias. The biggest wheel of them all was the giant I had seen through the snake window. Once every revolution it came to a stop. Then it seemed to psych itself up; it would shudder, gasp, emit a few loud reports, and spasm into action again.

I sat by the wheel, opened the
Travels
and turned to an appropriate verse:

Many a noria, compassioning my sin,

As from afar she saw my fell intent,

Tenderly wept and voiced her grief – enough

That even the timber weeps ‘the Impenitent’!

The Impenitent is al-Asi, ‘the Rebel’ – the Arabic name for the Orontes. ‘It is said to have been called by this name because it seems to one who looks at it as though its flow were from down to up,’ said IB obscurely. An early theory claimed that the river was contrary because it dared to flow from Islamic Syria into Christian Asia Minor. But the usual explanation is that, unlike other Syrian rivers, the Orontes flows from south to north.

I began trying to memorize the verse, thinking that it might come in useful if I bumped into any more riverbank poets.

‘
Allah!
’ said a voice, right in my ear.

I jumped.

‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.’ I turned and saw a young man. He had been reading the verse over my shoulder. ‘I just liked the poem. I’ve got another one like it,’ he said. He frowned, then recited,

The Rebel, in contrition, bared his breast,

Grief-stricken like the elegists of ancient years;

Heart pounding like a noria in his chest,

He shed upon the stones his penitent tears.

‘
Allah!
’ I exclaimed. The young man recited several more noria verses. I realized I could never compete with the poetical Hamawis.

Ahmad was in his last year at school. His father owned a fig orchard beneath the noria. ‘They’re the best figs in Hamah,’ he told me. ‘Better than the Figs of Amazement.’

‘I can see why,’ I said, as I watched a cow tethered beneath a tree release a sputtering stream of premium organic fertilizer into the mud.

Ahmad showed me an inscription on the aqueduct that led away from the noria. We made out ‘for the Great Mosque … in the year …’ The date was illegible, but there was a very fourteenth-century-looking Mamluk blazon. I wondered if the Muhammadiyyah was one of the norias IB had seen, revolving like spheres. Materially, of course, the wheel wasn’t the same. Its timbers had been renewed over the years, piecemeal, as they rotted. But perhaps its peculiar timbre, and that complex rhythm of creaks and sighs, had endured – like a piece of inherited poetry.

We walked to the Great Mosque. Ahmad told me it had been a pagan temple, then a church. ‘Like the Umayyad Mosque in
Damascus
,’ he added, with unconcealed Hamawi pride. Much of the building, however, seemed newly built. We went through a door – an aluminium one that said ‘Push’ on the handle – into the tomb-chamber of one of Abu ’l-Fida’s ancestors. The interior, too, looked recent; the cenotaph was a makeshift thing like a packing case.

The ancient Great Mosque of Hamah, I realized, was one of the victims of 1982. In that year, the city was taken over by militant orthodox Muslims opposed to the ruling junta’s even more militant autocracy. President al-Asad responded to the rebellion in the Syrian Bath, Abu ’l-Fida’s Islamic Parnassus, by bombing much of it to bits. At least eight thousand Hamawis were killed, and possibly three times as many.

In the prayer hall, Ahmad pointed to a tablet set in the wall. I was surprised to see that it was inscribed in Greek. ‘Can you read it?’ he asked. ‘No one here knows what it says.’

I said I’d try. I squinted, and read:
ANΔPAMOIENNEΠE
…

I stopped. Here on a stone which, unlike most of the building, had survived the bombing, were the opening words of the
Odyssey
.

Ahmad looked at me. ‘So what is it?’

‘It’s a poem,’ I said. ‘A very old one.’

Later, I had lunch in the shop of a butcher called Abu Husam (the Father, by coincidence, of a Sharp Blade). He showed me his newly hatched canary chicks while my kidneys sang and hissed on a spit. Abu Husam’s boy served them, sprinkled with cumin, at a table between hanging split carcasses. And as I ate I puzzled over the verse from the mosque, which I had transcribed. Beyond those first words it was not the
Odyssey
; that was as much as I could tell. I mourned the death of my Greek.

*

The following morning, Abu Firas the taxi driver and I breakfasted from the boot of his 1963 Mercedes on mountain figs and crystallized pumpkin. The Orontes plain lay below; directly above was a castle, raggedly outlined against a very blue sky.

Masyaf is one of a chain of fortresses which, IB wrote, ‘belong to a sect called the Isma’ilis. None may visit them save the members of their sect. They are the arrows of Sultan al-Nasir, by means of whom he strikes down those of his enemies who have taken refuge from him …
They
have poisoned knives, with which they strike the victim of their mission.’ Masyaf was the mother of these castles and headquarters of the Nizari Isma’ilis, popularly called Assassins. Their mountain territory was a semi-fictional world where the medieval imagination ran wild. Picture a plot by Frederick Forsyth, enacted by members of the Branch Davidians on drugs, then translated into troubadour Provençal, and you will have a fair idea of how the Middle Ages viewed the Assassins and their leader, the Old Man of the Mountains.

I left Abu Firas and went to explore the castle. Masyaf was a mazy, introverted pile thrown together like a stork’s nest. At the top of it all was a polygonal turret chamber with thick walls and arrow slits. Despite the Bishop of Acre’s description of the Old Man’s hideouts as
locis secretis et delectabilibus
, Masyaf was hardly secret – it could be seen from miles away – and it would have needed a hefty interior-design budget to make it delectable.

A miniature from the fifteenth-century
Livre des merveilles
shows the fantasy version of Masyaf, a turreted enclosure set among tusk-shaped mountains. Outside, human-headed deer prance or flop on the grass and a simpering harpy flaps through the air. Within the walls gormless-looking youths and damsels dance before an elderly king. The king has just raised his finger to point at the nearest youth; the dancers stare at him, frozen in mid-movement.