Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (31 page)

I was testing a theory: that, at this particular point in his journey, the Prince of Travellers was a wimp. In 1329 he arrived by sea at Sur, the most easterly town in the Arab world. ‘From there,’ he wrote, ‘we saw the city of Qalhat on the slope of a hill, and seeming to be close by.’ After a six hundred-mile voyage along the southern coast of
Arabia
, he was missing civilization. Qalhat, a sort of medieval Dubai, shimmered seductively. IB was told that the walk would take a couple of hours. He set out with a fellow passenger from the boat, Khadir the Indian, and a crew member as guide and porter.

The walk was a disaster. IB soon became convinced that the guide wanted to steal his luggage. By chance, the traveller happened to have a spear with him and every so often, he says, ‘I brandished it so the guide went in awe of me.’ After a detour around a tidal creek, they entered the plain, ‘a waterless desert, where we suffered from thirst and were in a desperate plight’. Khadir the Indian fell ill. They struggled through gullies and rocks by the shore, and six hours later flopped down for the night beneath their tree – presumably an ancestor of mine. IB didn’t sleep: ‘I stayed on watch, and every time the guide moved I spoke to him and showed him that I was awake.’ Next morning they finally arrived at Qalhat, ‘in a state of great exhaustion. My feet had become so swollen in my shoes that the blood was almost starting under the nails … For six days I was powerless to rise.’ It all sounded a bit melodramatic for a walk of eighteen miles.

To be fair on IB, my reconstruction of his walk was not entirely authentic, for I had some advantages over him: I had set out at first light, he at midday; it was now February, while IB had been here in ‘the season of heat’; and I had a pair of stout walking shoes of a type not available in the fourteenth century. I thought of giving myself a handicap and bringing my bag with its heavy travelling library, then decided that the age difference – I was ten years older than IB – was also a consideration.

The topography of IB’s route was, not surprisingly, unchanged;
but
its human geography had altered. Sur had grown, Qalhat – Marco Polo’s Calatu, ‘a noble city … frequented by numerous ships with goods from India’ – had all but disappeared. And there was a new toponym, al-Anji. I heard the name in Sur while asking a tug-master for directions, and rifled my memory for a mention of the place. It certainly wasn’t in the
Travels
, and it seemed to have eluded Ibn al-Mujawir, whose thirteenth-century anecdotal geography is the best guide to the bottom half of Arabia. ‘You know,’ the tug-master said. ‘The end of the pipeline.’ It clicked: al-Anji was ‘LNG’ – the Liquified Natural Gas terminal. And there it was, visible from beneath my
umm ghaylan
, a couple of giant gasometers and a lot of oversized Meccano strewn across the plain.

When I had asked how long the walk to Qalhat would take, there was something hauntingly familiar about the tug-master’s response: ‘Oh, not more than a couple of hours.’ Unless I ran all the way, it seemed wildly optimistic. All the same, I had set off at a lick along the beach, escorted by a dawn patrol of dragonflies. An occasional heron – which the Arabs call ‘the sad bird’ – contemplated the shallows. On my left was a strong smell of frankincense from the matutinal fumigations of Suri houses and, on my right, of tideline iodine. Suburban Sur ended in a line of large villas. One had pharaonic columns coloured like Edinburgh rock, another Blenheim-style iron gates, a cornflower-blue dome and no fewer than three satellite dishes.

The first humans I saw were some boys, fishing with a line. As I passed, they caught something, dropped it and scurried up the beach. Then they edged back, chucking rocks. I went to investigate and found a small drab moray eel, writhing and snapping its last. The boys called it a
hawin
. ‘It bites really hard,’ they told me, ‘specially when it sees something red.’ I looked at its nutcracker jaws and made a mental note never to swim in Omani waters wearing red bathing trunks.

Half an hour further along the beach I came across Rashid and Hamad, who were doing things to a boat. They invited me to their village, across the plain at the foot of the hills. In the interests of my reconstruction, I declined; then changed my mind at the mention of coffee – breakfast had been a joyless pre-dawn omelette and lukewarm Nescafé. They promised to return me to this exact spot, and we drove across the plain in an old pick-up.

In an airy seaward room they brought not only coffee but also
dates
, apples, oranges and a Suri sweetmeat – a crunchy jelly that tasted of cardamom, ginger and Barmouth biscuits. Such Omani invitations are unrivalled in delicacy, the fruit so precisely cut, the dates in dainty containers on doilies, the coffee – in tiny cups a quarter full – to be drunk reasonably quickly and with appreciative but not over-audible slurps. Rashid instructed me in coffee protocol. ‘Only the women fill the cup. You’re slurping too loudly. No, never put the cup on the floor! And you wiggle it like this, from the bottom, after the third cup.’

They drove me back to the shore and I resumed my journey, restored. Eventually the track entered the sprawling gas terminal of al-Anji. Behind high fences sat rows of air-conditioned Portakabins, humming, inhabited refrigerators. Off-duty Indians stared at me through the wire mesh; buses filled with more Indians passed by, each time with a simultaneous turn of heads. A couple of brand-new Landcruisers also went past, driven by Westerners. They were the ones who stared hardest. Perhaps I had inadvertently wet myself, or grown a horn. Everything, though, seemed in order. The only possible explanation for the stares was that I was walking.

Beyond al-Anji the hills met the sea, and the track rose. Up ahead was a cuboid building, the first sign of Qalhat. After a mile or so I passed through the city wall and entered a vast area of scrub and ruins – more walls, vaulted cisterns and tombs with collapsed domes like breakfast eggshells. The whole place trembled minutely: Qalhat was covered with locusts. My solitary grasshopper must have got left behind. It was an apocalyptic scene – this noble city in ruins, infested by millions of rustling, nibbling insects – and I recalled a story I had heard in Sur. The last ruler of Qalhat was having an affair with his daughter. His advisers dropped hints, but he shrugged them off. ‘Why’, he asked, ‘should I give to others the ripest fruit of my own garden?’ So the city was destroyed, Sodom-style, in a fit of divine wrath. (The agent of ruin is variously said to have been an earthquake, a tidal wave, or the Portuguese.)

I wandered about the site, treading at almost every step on shards of jade-coloured celadon ware. When IB was here Qalhat’s citizens were ‘traders who live on what comes to them from the sea’; the smashed luxury porcelain underfoot, imported five thousand miles across the Indian Ocean, was the fruit of their commerce. IB also noted Persian tiles covering a mosque built by Bibi Maryam, a saintly
lady
who ruled the city until a few years before his visit. The mosque has disappeared, but Bibi Maryam’s tomb-chamber still stands, the cuboid building I had seen from the road. As recently as the 1830s, Lieutenant Wellsted of the Bombay Marine reported that the mausoleum was also covered with tiles ‘on which are inscribed,
in rilievo
, sentences from the Koran’. Now the tiles are gone, the dome has caved in and plaster is falling off the coral stone walls.

The tomb, however, seemed to be a locust-free zone, and I lay down in the shade of the wall. I was weary from the walk, although hardly in need of six days’ bed-rest. IB clearly was a wimp. But then, I thought as I dozed off, I bet he wasn’t frightened of grasshoppers.

Still half asleep, I became conscious of a whirring sound. It was closing in. A headline flashed across my mind – ‘Killer Locusts: Writer Nibbled to Death’ – and I opened my eyes apprehensively. Bibi Maryam and I were surrounded by a dozen foreigners taking photographs. I escaped into the tomb and darted lizard-like glances at the tourists – Germans – from behind the door jamb. Their Italian
gruppenführerin
joined me.

‘I hope you’ve told them about IB,’ I whispered to her.

‘Er … Please remind me of him.’ I gave her the
Travels
in a nutshell, which she then passed on in German. One of the tourists, I was pleased to see, took notes on the
grosser mittelalterlicher Weltenbummler
.
I
felt I had done well by IB; perhaps even made up for poking fun at his blisters.

I cadged a lift from the Germans – who might themselves have been termed gross middle-aged worldbummers – to IB’s next destination, the village of Tiwi ten miles up the coast. My own feet were in fair shape, but the time for heroics was over.

IB described Tiwi as ‘one of the loveliest of villages and most striking in beauty, with flowing streams and verdant trees and abundant plantations … They grow the banana called
marwari
, which in Persian means “pearly”.’ It was still an accurate description of the wadi behind the village. With its pea-green pools, tumbling streams and terraces of bananas and dates, the scene was a total contrast to the waterless waste between Sur and Qalhat.

Under an old gnarled tamarind I questioned some old gnarled men about the
marwari
banana; they didn’t know it, but made up by listing the other types that they grew –
billi, faridi, abu baraghim, ahmar
and
aghbari
. Then one of them thrust a bunch of whitish stems in my face. I sniffed them. ‘Er, lovely,’ I said, not knowing what reaction was expected.

The man laughed. ‘They’re palm penises. We climb up the trees and stick them in the female parts. You see, the Prophet said, “Be generous to your paternal aunts, the palms.” He used this term to describe them because, it is said, the palm was created from left-over clay when God had made Adam.’

I later came across the same tradition in al-Qazwini’s
Wonders of Creation
, together with the following useful tip:

If a palm fails to bear fruit, you should take an axe and approach it, saying aloud to another person, ‘I want to cut down this tree because it doesn’t bear fruit.’ Your companion should reply, ‘Don’t do that. It will bear fruit this year.’Then you must say, ‘No it won’t. It’s good for nothing,’ and give it a couple of light blows with the axe. Your companion must then seize your hand and say, ‘Leave it alone. It’s a good tree. Give it one more chance. If it doesn’t bear fruit this year, then do what you like with it.’ If you follow this procedure, the palm will produce an excellent crop.

The technique, surely the ultimate in talking to plants, is said to work equally well with other fruit trees.

The afternoon was getting on but I had no difficulty hitching back to Sur, thanks to a Pathan scrap merchant, a group of Keralan caterers and, finally, a PR man from al-Anji. Adil, a native of Sur, offered a solution to a small geographical query. At the beginning of the walk to Qalhat, IB’s way had been blocked by a tidal creek. He saw some men swimming across it, and the guide indicated that they should do the same. But he and Khadir the Indian smelt a rat – ‘we were convinced that he meant to drown us and make away with our garments’ – and insisted on walking inland to look for a ford. The Omani historian al-Salimi identified the creek as Khawr Rasagh, an inlet not far from the north end of suburban Sur. This, however, was such an insignificant channel that I had almost missed it on my walk that morning. ‘I suppose the configuration of the shore could have changed,’ I suggested.

‘It’s possible,’ said Adil. ‘But I think IB was talking about Khawr Sur, the Sur Creek itself. I reckon he didn’t land at Sur proper, but at al-Ayjah on the other side of the
khawr
. People used to swim across if the ferry wasn’t working, with their clothes on their heads. If IB had walked up to the ford he would have added quite a bit to his journey.’ The blisters were beginning to make more sense. I felt increasingly guilty about scoffing at IB.

We reached the outskirts of Sur in the furry light of late afternoon, and to the unexpected thwack of cricket balls. It was the start of the weekend, and Indian matches were taking place on wickets of dust. Adil dropped me off at Khawr Sur by the
Fat’h al-Khayr
, a fine
ghanjah
– a large sailing ship – dating back to the 1950s and now preserved on dry land. I looked up at the prow, carved with an elegant kiss-curl, and wished that such vessels were still sailing. Still, a humble diesel-engined
sambuq
would do to take me to Dhofar, down what the first-century
Periplus
called the Coast of the Fish-eaters. I would be reversing the direction of IB’s voyage; but bureaucracy had insisted I begin my visit to Oman in Muscat, and the word there was that Sur, not Dhofar, was the place for boats.