Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (37 page)

Qara and Shahrah life are now changing fast. Miranda Morris writes that the Shahri word
ezirit
, ‘a track that is temporarily in heavy use; especially to water and to settlements where beautiful women are to be found’, is now also used for motor roads. And Muhammad told me that one day in Salalah he saw a mountain man in full traditional dress – an indigo loincloth, dagger and .303 rifle – pull a plastic card from behind his dagger sheath and take money out of a cash-point machine.

It was bad enough to be tainted with the blood of Salih’s she-camel; but the Shahrah have also been identified as a remnant of Ad, the people whom the Qur’an says were destroyed by a hurricane for opposing the Prophet Hud. The association may explain why there is a tomb of Hud in Dhofar – even though there is a perfectly good one in Hadramawt, famous since at least the beginning of Islam. IB visited the Dhofari tomb, ‘half a day’s journey from the city, on the sea-coast’. Late one afternoon, Qahtan took me in his minibus to the mausoleum seen by IB, a short drive east of Salalah and in sight of the sea. As with most Dhofari monuments which have not been rebuilt in the international Islamic taste, the little four-domed building had been enthusiastically restored. I went in but Qahtan, whose innate reticence seemed to extend to the dead, lingered at the door. ‘Aren’t you going to greet Hud?’ I called. He entered, mumbled a quick Fatihah with downcast eyes, and was out of the door.

The sun set. Qahtan did his ablutions from a well, then chanted the
adhan
, the call to prayer, in a high quavering voice. Unless it was an invitation to me, there was no one else around to join him. I sat inside the darkening tomb while he prayed outside on his Michelin Man windscreen shade.

As we drove back towards Salalah Qahtan said, ‘I felt a great fear around that tomb.’

I smiled. ‘So it was the jinn you were calling to prayer.’

There was no reply. I was beginning to regret the flippant comment when Qahtan spoke again. ‘There was once a Mahri girl who disappeared. You see, she had married a jinni. One day, years later, a man who knew the jinn turned up and offered to get her back. He said, “I’ll lead one of you down to her. To save her, this man must take hold of her arm. She will change into a wolf, a rat, a snake and other beasts, but he must not let go of her. And he must neither look at her nor mention the name of God.” But no one was brave enough to go.’

I thought of Eurydice, and of all the tales that must have wandered around the world before cultural boundaries began to harden. ‘I bet there are lots of old stories like that,’ I said, hoping to hear more.

Qahtan took his eyes off the road for a moment and looked at me. ‘It’s not an old story. I was one of the ones who was asked to get the girl.’

Later, we drove out of Salalah and on to the
jurbayb
, the plain between the ocean and the Qara Mountains. At night it became a vast drive-in salon, dotted with cars and groups of men who reclined on cushions, drinking coffee and eating dates. ‘We Arabs’, said Qahtan as we left the road, ‘have three concerns:
al-bawsh wa ’l-hawsh wa ’l-qahwah fi ’l-hawsh
– camels, flocks and coffee in the yard.’ But this was no ordinary yard: paved with platinum, vaulted with sapphire, lit by a topaz moon – no sultan, no Solomon had conceived such mystical architecture.

We joined a group around Qahtan’s chief, Shaykh Musallam of the Qazzoz subsection of the al-Bahr section of the Khawar sept of Bayt Kathir. At first we talked about jinn; then the
shaykh
steered the conversation on to Mubarak bin London, the traveller Wilfred Thesiger. In
Arabian Sands
, Thesiger grumbled at the Khawar for banning him from their territory in the late 1940s. Recently, the book had been translated into Arabic. ‘He called us avaricious,’ Shaykh Musallam said. ‘Nothing but praise for our neighbours; but we Khawar are avaricious!’

It was around midnight when Qahtan drove me home. On the way I reflected that, just occasionally, a character in a travel book could turn critic. It was a sobering thought.

The following day I turned to another item on my Battutian checklist,
tambul
. In his description of Dhofar, IB included a page-long ethnobotanical excursus on
Piper betel
. ‘The specific property of
its
leaves’, he wrote, ‘is that they sweeten the breath, remove foul odours of the mouth, aid digestion of food, and stop the injurious effect of drinking water on an empty stomach; the eating of them gives a sense of exhilaration and promotes cohabitation … I have been told, indeed, that the slave-girls of the sultan and of the amirs in India eat nothing else.’

I had originally assumed that the plant was brought to Dhofar by the Rasulids, who were responsible for introducing so many Indian species to Arabia. In fact it had arrived long before, as I discovered in the
Plains of Gold
of the tenth-century geographer and historian al-Mas’udi: ‘In our time,’ he said, ‘betel has overtaken all other breath-fresheners and is quite the fashion among the people of Mecca, the Hijaz and Yemen.’ (The information was an aside in a passage on Indian self-immolation. On his way to the pyre and bliss in the afterlife, al-Mas’udi wrote, the suicide parades through the markets. ‘He first has himself scalped, then places live coals, sulphur and juniper resin upon his head. Thus does he walk, the crown of his head smouldering, surrounded by the odours of his roasting brain, chewing betel and areca nut the while.’)

Habibah told me at lunch that she had invited a friend over for the evening, an expert on betel. First, though, I wanted to do some fieldwork. The obvious place to start was in the coconut groves and gardens across the road. There, I followed a track until I came to a little drystone cottage and byre. Outside it squatted a couple of Pakistanis. When I asked if they grew betel they looked surprised, but nodded. One of them led me to a fenced-off plot about thirty feet square. Inside this, palm trunks supported a trellis, thickly covered by shiny, ribbed leaves with sharp points; they would have made an elegant pot plant. IB’s description was accurate: ‘Trellises of cane are made for it, just as for grape vines, or else the betel is planted close to coconut palms, so that it may climb upon them as the pepper climbs.’ The Pakistani plucked some leaves for me, choosing the smaller, yellowish ones. Again, IB was spot-on when he said that the best leaves are yellow.

Back at the cottage I was surprised to see a large American car, and a prosperous-looking Omani sitting on a bed next to the byre. He called me over and explained that he was the owner of the farm. ‘In fact, I was born in this very house.’ He asked me where I was from. ‘Ah, I thought so …’ he said. Then, to the Pakistanis, ‘Be careful. This is a British spy.’ He twirled his camel-stick. ‘And where did you learn Arabic?’

‘Oxford,’ I said.

‘Hah! The university of spies!’

‘No,’ I replied. ‘That’s Cambridge.’

I had caught him off guard; but he went straight back on to the offensive. ‘You British have two vices.’

There was something alarming in his gaze. ‘What are they?’ I said, swallowing.

‘I’m not going to tell you. But I can judge you by your face.’ He scrutinized me more closely. ‘Hmm. Not bad. Half okay.’

He smiled, and apologized for the ribbing. ‘You see,’ he explained, ‘we are lazy men with nothing to do. I come here every day at four, waste a couple of hours, then go to the mosque.’

‘So you’re what we would call a gentleman farmer.’

‘“Gentleman farmer …” I like that.’

My host took me to see the cow in the byre, a miniature Dhofari with a tiny calf. He sniffed. ‘Ughh. What an awful smell!’ I said I thought it was a perfectly natural smell, but he told the men to light some frankincense. ‘It keeps away germs. And
al-shaytan
, Satan.’

He confessed he hadn’t the slightest idea about betel. ‘What use is it?’ he asked. In reply, I read him IB on the properties of the leaf. ‘Utter nonsense,’ he exclaimed. ‘Take my advice and don’t touch the stuff. Personally, I keep off all harmful substances. I hardly even drink tea. You do, I suppose. Well, have you ever seen your innards?’ I admitted I hadn’t. ‘Just take a piece of fresh beef and put it in some tea. It does this …’ he made a horrible, gurning face and blew a raspberry. ‘Your guts’, he said portentously, ‘are like that meat.’

That evening Habibah’s friend came to instruct us in
tambul
mysteries. After dismissing her chauffeur she entered the room, removed her veil, and smiled – a meteor-burst of flashes passing over a round, dark moon of a face. At first, Thumna was self-deprecating. ‘It’s my aunts who are the real authorities on
tambul
. One of them chews it as soon as she gets up in the morning.’ But, encouraged by Habibah, she produced a little bag of ingredients – she called it her
mudayghah
, her ‘little masticatory’ – and began work: two leaves one on top of the other, glossy sides down, a few chips of
kusayr
(areca nut), a scraping of
kat
(catechu – an astringent extract of acacia), a few dabs of
nurah
(paste of caustic lime), all folded into a neat green package. She worked with dexterity and a touch of drama, like a barman mixing a Singapore Sling.

Thumna took the first wad and popped it into her mouth. She had used the leaves collected on my afternoon expedition, and she pronounced them to be of excellent quality. As she chewed she looked saucily from one of us to the other, as if caught at a midnight feast. I heard the crunch of areca nut. The next wad she gave to me. The leaf was spicy, as one might expect from a member of the pepper family. Almost immediately I felt a slight contraction of the oesophagus; this was followed by a liquefaction in the mouth and a visit to the lavatory to spit out a quantity of tomato-red saliva. Soon, all four of us were chewing. Thumna was celebrant of the
tambul
eucharist, Habibah, who brought a smoking incense-burner, thurifer; Muhammad, master of the music, obeyed a subliminal urge to pun and put on ‘Sergeant Pepper’. By the third wad I, the bemused neophyte, began to feel faintly trippy; but perhaps it was the Beatles rather than the betel.

Talk turned inevitably to the supernatural. I recounted my strange experience on the bus at Edfu, Habibah a stranger one with a statue of Amenhotep III in Luxor. Then Thumna spoke: ‘When I was a
child
,’ she said, ‘I caught polio and my leg withered up. The British doctors said there was no hope. But the late Queen Mother took me on. She had me locked up in a darkened room and made me eat gazelle meat for forty days. She also sent me poultices for my leg, made from the powdered skins of snakes and chameleons.’ She shivered at the memory; I thought of Macbeth’s weird sisters, and Ibn al-Mujawir’s sorceresses (like them, the Queen Mother was Dhofari). ‘I was really scared. But my family would come and whisper to me through the shutters and tell me not to be afraid.’ She paused, and smiled distantly. ‘And then my leg got better. It … grew back.’

It was late when Thumna left. Muhammad was already in bed, and Habibah about to join him. As she bid me good-night, I asked her a question that had been on my mind. ‘
Ya
Habibah … do you think IB was right about
tambul
promoting, er, cohabitation?’

She gave me her hermetic look. ‘I’ll tell you in the morning,’ she said, and winked.

It was useful to have a research assistant.

*

I found the descendants of the Rasulid sultans of Yemen and Dhofar, as one does, by chance. The sign stopped me in my tracks: ‘Al-Ghassani for Domestic Appliances’ was as much of a surprise as ‘Plantagenet Hardware’ would be in England.

The Ghassanids were a noble Arabian tribe who migrated northward from Yemen in the third century
AD
. They ended up in Syria, where they founded a small but exquisite kingdom with its capital near Damascus. According to themselves and their court historians, the Rasulids were descended from this ancient stock: al-Mujahid, IB’s host in Yemen and ancestor of my friend Hasan, billed himself as ‘head of the oldest dynasty in the world’. Admittedly their immediate forbear Muhammad ibn Harun Rasul al-Ghassani had more than a touch of the
tarbush
; but they made no secret of their ancestors’ marrying into the Turkomans. It was the male line that mattered.

More recent commentators have axed the noble Arabian ancestry and given the dynasty an unadulterated Manjik Turkoman pedigree. If they are right, perhaps the Rasulids were only emulating the fictional Abu Zayd al-Saruji. This lovable wide-boy, the direct ancestor not only of numerous fake counts but also of Tristram Shandy, Baron Munchausen and the Reverend Jimmy Swaggart, ‘claimed at times to
be
a Sassanid, at others a Ghassanid’. As I entered the shop, I reflected that even if I had discovered a dodgy Ghassanid, I might still have turned up a blue-blooded Rasulid.

Ahmad al-Ghassani, the owner of the showroom, confirmed my expectations: he was, it seemed, a descendant of IB’s reclusive Sultan al-Mughith. He had a somewhat
badw
look to him; but when he showed me a picture of his cousin, the head of the family Shaykh Abdulqadir al-Ghassani, there was little doubt in my mind: the elderly gentleman distinctly resembled Hasan’s father in distant San’a. The branches of the family had separated seven hundred years ago, and yet those lusty Rasulid genes had conquered time.