Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (32 page)

A moment of elementary reasoning would have revealed that if any coasting vessels actually did sail from Sur to Dhofar they would be obliged, barring shipwreck or global circumnavigation, to return by the same route. Somehow the syllogism escaped me.

*

Bureaucracy has its advantages. The Omani Ministry of Information put me up at the Muscat Gulf Hotel and Resort, a place designed for a thoroughly different class of traveller from me. Over the next few days, big silent American cars took me on a round of official visits.

Muscat has changed since IB passed through. Then, it was a fairly insignificant fishing port. Little was different even as late as the 1960s. Now, under the ‘Renaissance’ presided over by Sultan Qabus, Muscat has become not so much a city as a consuburbation linked by gleaming freeways, where the residential areas are traffic-calmed into a state of permanent weekend hush. The Omani capital was once notoriously filthy; today you can be fined for driving a dirty car.

A process of architectural homogenization is going on. Villas sprout vestigial crenellations, machicolated air-conditioner surrounds and castellated plastic water tanks. Bus shelters and telephone kiosks are also designed in the Omani-baronial taste. At the same time, old Omani forts have been restored so thoroughly that they resemble the villas. It is all rather like making sandcastles with those cheat buckets that mould a perfect one every time. And the deception goes further. I met a man in Fez who had worked as a fort restorer in Oman. ‘We workers were all Moroccans,’ he said. ‘But if any journalists showed up, they hid us away and brought out Omanis, who pretended to work for the cameras.’

When it comes to road beautification, however, the designers’ imagination breaks free. Vast incense-burners jostle for attention on roundabouts with outsize coffee pots and rosewater-sprinklers; fibreglass oryxes, Bambis and merry-go-round horses prance over verges; pirate chests brim with hoards of fake treasure, and giant oysters gape, disclosing nonsuch plastic pearls. I recently noticed a review of a book called
The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience
. The title took me straight back to Muscat.

Some highway art, however, transcends the kitsch. In the north of Oman, I saw a roundabout near Suhar with an apparently simple decorative concept – a circle of concrete palm trees. What made it remarkable was the context: all around were acres and acres of real palms. I could only assume that the concrete palms, like Meret Oppenheim’s furry teacup, were making some metaphysical statement about form and matter.

The theme park theme overspills the Capital Area. The city’s surroundings, described by an early traveller as ‘vast and horrid
mountains
’, are an ideal setting for leisure pursuits like rock-climbing, and wadi-bashing – which one does in a plush jeep, very carefully, so as not to jolt the ice-box unduly. One can even go on a guided tour to Umm al-Samim, Thesiger’s dreaded quicksands.

To stock up for a wadi-bash, a single visit to the supermarket is sufficient. Here, the only indication that you are in Far Arabia is the separate Pork Room. Living in porkless Yemen, the first time I saw one I found the display of naked flesh and huge mottled salamis as shocking, as fascinating as a sex-shop. I ogled; IB would have fainted on the spot.

My official visits over, I got in touch with a friend of a friend, a man of
shaykh
ly lineage. He suggested meeting that evening at the Ghala Wentworth Golf Club. Although it was my first experience of a golf club, I imagined the ambience of the place – the honours boards and trophies, the personal tankards above the bar, the bonhomie – to be pure Surrey. The members, however, were more exotic. Portly scions of the ruling houses of Muscat and Zanzibar held court and stood rounds; a heroically pissed Irishman was, he said, ‘keeping an eye on things for, hic, shecurity reasons’.

Here in the Royal and Ancient – or rather Sultanic and Modern – of Muscat, we dined splendidly on mussels, beefsteaks and cherry pie. The claret was, according to one member of our party, an experienced courtier in a navy and cream co-respondent
dishdashah
, most acceptable. ‘You see,’ he said, swirling and sniffing a sample from yet another bottle, ‘I am what is called
un bon viveur
– or does one say
vivant
?’ The question provoked heated discussion. Then, as the bottles emptied, we began swapping poetry and jokes. The only one that has survived the night’s oblivion concerned a certain Gulf ruler. During a television interview, he was asked what his favourite leisure activity was. ‘Fucking,’ he replied. ‘Cut! Cut!’ cried the Minister of Information, one of the ruler’s sons. ‘Father, this is a family show. Can’t you say something
nice
? Reading, for instance.’ Take two: ‘And what is Your Highness’s favourite leisure activity?’ ‘Reading …’ the
shaykh
said, ‘about fucking.’

Some time after midnight, my companion and I followed the courtier back to his house. Gilded gates glided open automatically, and we parked inside next to a Bentley. We entered a gorgeous salon, all marble and glass, hung with nineteenth-century orientalist oils and echoing with Sinatra. A silent Indian cupbearer kept us
supplied
with burgundy. Thereafter I remember only fragments: a line of empty bottles; peeing wildly at a lavatory decorated with tiny hand-painted roses; the courtier’s voice saying, ‘Aaah! Savour those plums …’

I awoke late next morning fully clothed, down to my walking shoes, back in the house of the British friend who was putting me up. Beside me was the evidence, the Cinderella’s slipper that proved the night had not been a fantasy – a large box of Romeo y Julieta Churchills. My head was remarkably clear, and occupied with a single, nagging thought: not much inverse archaeology is getting done.

Not much could be, here in Oman proper. After his disastrous walk from Sur to Qalhat, IB had made only a brief excursion into the interior before crossing the Strait of Hormuz to Persia. The bulk of what he wrote on what is now the Sultanate of Oman concerns its southern province, Dhofar, and the adjacent coasts and islands. My Battutian checklist for the region was varied: it included betel, frankincense and dried sardines, houses made of fishes’ bones and, a very long shot, a saint’s cell in the Kuria Muria Islands – one of the most out-of-the-way spots in the history of eremism.

*

Sur, then, was the place for boats. The morning after my hike to Qalhat, I walked down to the creek. Clearly the place to start was over in the skippers’ suburb of al-Ayjah, which I now believed to be IB’s landing place.

‘Yesterday,’ the ferryman told me, ‘Khalfan’s
sambuq
left for Salalah.’

This was promising news. I was quite happy to wait for the next one.

‘It’s a pity you missed it. The last time anyone did the trip was, oh, years ago.’

This was appalling news. I dismissed it at once.

Al-Ayjah was a salty old place. Rocky outcrops rang with the blows of shipwrights’ hammers. Down on the shore the swelling bellies of
sambuq
s grew plank by plank from
munaybari
, Malabar teak. Old sailors sat in doorways carved in the manner of Calicut and Zanzibar, wearing
dishdashahs
with embroidered yokes – the Omani equivalent of the Aran sweater; like Superman they wore their
underwear
, a checked waistcloth, on the outside, to protect the skirt of the robe from fishy stains. Everyone confirmed that Khalfan had sailed for Salalah the day before; no one held out any hope of another Dhofar-bound boat. My plans drifted steadily up the creek.

‘The trouble is’, said the ferryman on the way back, ‘no one does the long distances any more. They just put out at night to fish and come back in the morning.’ I stared, disconsolate, into the reflective waters of the creek, thinking of the days when Sayyid Sa’id had ruled a seaborne empire of cloves and slaves; when, between them, the Omanis and the British had controlled the western Indian Ocean. ‘You could try the new harbour,’ the ferryman suggested, sensing my despair.

The new harbour was still being built. In the works office I called on the Project Manager, a bearded Keralan in his fifties. He gave me his card: MR K. JOHNSON ITTY IPE. (I never discovered whether the last two elements were part of his name, or his professional qualifications.) On the wall of the office hung charts detailing shapes and sizes of accropodes – which sounded like some species of Gulf crustacean, but are in fact large T-ended concrete lumps used for building moles – and a quotation from the Letter to the Hebrews, ‘Follow peace with all men’. Mr Johnson implemented the advice with a stream of workers, cantering nimbly between Malayalam, English and Hindi. When the stream slackened we went to the harbour.

The mole was growing slowly, like an immense three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. ‘It’s my fifth,’ Mr Johnson said as we walked along it. We talked of IB’s visit to Kerala – Mr Johnson remembered studying the account from the
Travels
at school, in Malayalam – of God and His role in Mr Johnson’s escape from al-Khafji when the Iraqis invaded, and of his career. ‘I wanted to be a film director,’ he told me, ‘but my father made me study engineering.’

I looked at the harbour, at the huge and expensive equipment, the disciplined workforce. ‘Don’t you think directing a harbour is rather like directing a film?’

Mr Johnson’s eyes shone. I couldn’t imagine him as a Bollywood type. He seemed more of an individualist, a Werner Herzog, perhaps, of the mole-building business.

We hailed a man on a tug and asked where it was going. ‘To al-Anji,’ the man called back. Further off lay another vessel, a fine
wooden
bum
. I looked at it across the bright water, shielding my eyes from the sun, and saw a gleaming brass-sheathed prow and brass portholes. Again, illogically, my hopes rose: if any vessel were going to Dhofar, this had to be it. Mr Johnson summoned a Maldivian boatman, and we puttered over the water to the
bum
. It was about to sail: for Dubai, on the return leg of a businessmen’s outing. My hopes sank like a heaved lead.

On the way back into town, I reflected that while the old patterns of travel seemed to have disappeared, some things hadn’t changed. A Maldivian boatman, an engineer from the coconut coast of India, teak from Malabar – the network of Indian Ocean ramifications IB had known was still in place. Here in Sur, Gujarat was closer than Salalah, and not only in terms of cartographic distance. Knots of Indian subcontinentals loitered in the late-afternoon sun; others crowded into moneychangers’ shops, busily remitting their earnings home. In the fourteenth century, Arabs like IB had headed for the Sultanate of Delhi, drawn by its immense wealth. In the twentieth, however, the demographic tide turned: the Gulf is now as much Indian as Arab.

A by-product of this vast movement of labour has been the appearance of a new language, Indo-Arabic. Vocabulary is slimmed down to an anorexic minimum, and the vigorous branches of the Arabic verb pruned to a binary
fi
(‘in’ = ‘there is’) /
ma fi
(‘not in’ = ‘there is not’) + infinitive. (A neat example is that of an Indian Muslim who passed a graveyard. His version of the traditional
memento mori
– ‘You [the dead] are those that precede; we are those that follow’ – came out as, ‘You there is go; I there is come.’) Omanis seem to be bilingual; I never quite got the hang of it.

That evening, my plans in tatters, I could face neither my diary nor any of the books I had brought. The only other reading matter in the hotel room was the telephone directory. It began with the Green Pages, which list members of the Sultan’s family and other dignitaries. I considered brightening the evening up by paging a princess, or even ringing the Sultan himself. Then a thought struck me: I had heard that Qabus employed a court organist, whom he summoned from time to time in the small hours to play a chorale prelude from Bach’s
Orgelbüchlein
. I was still on the right side of that career Rubicon, forty, and it wasn’t too late for a change … I had been an Oxford organ scholar (admittedly not at one of the more musically
famous
colleges) and, briefly, organist of a Levantine cathedral; perhaps I could insinuate myself into what sounded like a pleasant sinecure. The Sultan would surely thrill to my organ arrangement of Mozart’s ‘Adagio and Rondo for Glass Harmonica’. And who knew where it might lead? In the 1920s Bertram Thomas, another amateur musician and Arabian traveller from Bristol, had virtually run Oman as vizier to Qabus’s grandfather. The Sultan’s personal number, however, was listed neither in the Green Pages nor under his portrait at the beginning of the directory.

I studied the face in the portrait – the copper skin, white beard and black eyebrows beneath a magenta, purple and orange turban. The image, so formal in pose yet so surprisingly coloured, might have been taken from a Mamluk miniature; indeed, I thought, it may be that in his magnificence, his capriciousness, in the absoluteness of his rule and his manner of achieving it (like IB’s two great patrons, the sultans of Delhi and of the Maghrib, Sultan Qabus overthrew his father) he is, of all contemporary monarchs, the one most like those of the
Travels
. That organist’s job needn’t be a career change: it could be a chance to do some really profound inverse archaeology. Or could have been, had not the winged chariots of mortality been bearing down on me.

Having exhausted the possibilities of the telephone directory, I turned to my map. If I couldn’t sail down the Coast of the Fish-eaters, I would have to motor down it. This, of course, was assuming that I could find transport. Most of the coast road was classed as ‘Graded’; however, where the Wahibah Sands – a dune desert the size of Wales – meet the Indian Ocean, it became an ‘Other Track’. More worryingly, there was a short but significant-looking gap in this Other Track. Then, five hundred miles from Sur, on the shore of Kuria Muria Bay, the road reached a place called Qanawt, and ran out. In the middle of the fifty-mile lacuna before it picked up again, and marooned like an onshore island at the base of the 6,000-foot Jabal Samhan, lay the small settlement of Hasik, visited by IB. From here onwards stretched misty, thuriferous Dhofar, along the coast to Salalah, then to Raysut, Rakhyut, Khirfut, Dalkut and the modern border with Yemen, beyond which the toponymic monorhyme continued.