Read Online Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah by Tim Mackintosh-Smith - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Tim Mackintosh-Smith
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revealed that the Mouniria was indeed the place where Burroughs, with the aid of his Eukodolmuse, wrote the novel. His room, however, was on the ground floor. Was my upstairs room the one where the Beats gathered to eat magic mushrooms, supplied by the late Dr Timothy Leary?)
Later, as I lay in bed – with half an eye on that wardrobe – I reviewed my brief visit to IB’s homeland. In one sense, I had failed signally: I had come to visit his tomb, to ask for his blessing on my journey, and had found it to be a fake – a phantasm, Dr Abdelhadi called it. But on the credit side, I had found IB’s spirit very much alive: in Khalid, for instance, the would-be traveller who could quote pre-Islamic poetry; and in Dr Abdelhadi, the far-travelled Maghribi come home to royal patronage. Moreover, IB seemed to have cult status. Apart from the airport, the street and the hotel, one of the ferries to Spain was named after him; there were seminars and conferences on him; there had been a TV series on him, an exhibition of ‘portraits’, and a Year of IB; they were planning an IB Museum in Tangier, and no doubt, one day, there will be a theme park. Further away, a German group had recorded a CD in his name; a Dutch friend has told me of an IB Scout Troop in Rotterdam; and there is even an Arabic on-line dating agency called ‘IB’.
But cults need relics. Although al-Rumi tells us to look for the dead in men’s hearts, his own tomb in Konya is one of the most revered and visited in Turkey. I had heard that they even display the great mystic’s long-johns. I could only hope that somewhere along my route between here and Constantinople – a route eccentric enough to take in the Kuria Muria Islands in the Arabian Sea – I would find something as tangibly, if not so intimately, connected with IB.
I had a long way to go. A vision came to me, that of the Residence servants in Rabat lined up by the door, waving farewell; it gave way to another – an endless sequence of economical hotels. I slept uneasily, my dreams haunted by the flushing of a nearby lavatory.
As the Tangerine dawn turned to day, I set off for the airport. I was glad not to be following IB overland from Morocco – to cross rural Algeria in his time was dangerous enough, but today it would have been potentially suicidal. The taxi driver painted a gory picture of events across the border. ‘In many ways,’ he said, not meaning to be discouraging, ‘travel is more difficult now than it was in IB’s day.’
As I paid him, he wished me a safe journey; then added, ‘You must always remember that IB wanted people to know one another. He was …’, he thought for a moment, then slipped into Franglais, ‘…
il était un gentleman
. May God go with you.’
He smiled broadly and patted me on the back. And there, I thought, not from a tomb but from the driver of Grand Taxi n° 158, was the blessing I had come for.
IB travelled across North Africa to Egypt. In Alexandria, he had his first intimations that he was ‘to travel through the earth’. After passing through the Nile Delta he arrived in Cairo, capital of the Mamluks – a military élite of Turkic origin who ruled Egypt and the Levant. From Cairo he followed the Nile into Upper Egypt then crossed the desert to the Red Sea town of Aydhab, intending to sail to Jeddah, the port for Mecca. Political disturbances, however, had halted shipping. IB retraced his route to Cairo
.
The Delta
A Dark and Greenish Country
‘Real dream vision is an awareness on the part of the rational soul in its spiritual essence, of glimpses of the forms of events. While the soul is spiritual, the forms of events have actual existence in it, as is the case with all spiritual essences. The soul becomes spiritual through freeing itself from bodily matters and corporeal perceptions. This happens to the soul in the form of glimpses through the agency of sleep, whereby it gains the knowledge of future events that it desires and
Later, as I lay in bed – with half an eye on that wardrobe – I reviewed my brief visit to IB’s homeland. In one sense, I had failed signally: I had come to visit his tomb, to ask for his blessing on my journey, and had found it to be a fake – a phantasm, Dr Abdelhadi called it. But on the credit side, I had found IB’s spirit very much alive: in Khalid, for instance, the would-be traveller who could quote pre-Islamic poetry; and in Dr Abdelhadi, the far-travelled Maghribi come home to royal patronage. Moreover, IB seemed to have cult status. Apart from the airport, the street and the hotel, one of the ferries to Spain was named after him; there were seminars and conferences on him; there had been a TV series on him, an exhibition of ‘portraits’, and a Year of IB; they were planning an IB Museum in Tangier, and no doubt, one day, there will be a theme park. Further away, a German group had recorded a CD in his name; a Dutch friend has told me of an IB Scout Troop in Rotterdam; and there is even an Arabic on-line dating agency called ‘IB’.
But cults need relics. Although al-Rumi tells us to look for the dead in men’s hearts, his own tomb in Konya is one of the most revered and visited in Turkey. I had heard that they even display the great mystic’s long-johns. I could only hope that somewhere along my route between here and Constantinople – a route eccentric enough to take in the Kuria Muria Islands in the Arabian Sea – I would find something as tangibly, if not so intimately, connected with IB.
I had a long way to go. A vision came to me, that of the Residence servants in Rabat lined up by the door, waving farewell; it gave way to another – an endless sequence of economical hotels. I slept uneasily, my dreams haunted by the flushing of a nearby lavatory.
As the Tangerine dawn turned to day, I set off for the airport. I was glad not to be following IB overland from Morocco – to cross rural Algeria in his time was dangerous enough, but today it would have been potentially suicidal. The taxi driver painted a gory picture of events across the border. ‘In many ways,’ he said, not meaning to be discouraging, ‘travel is more difficult now than it was in IB’s day.’
As I paid him, he wished me a safe journey; then added, ‘You must always remember that IB wanted people to know one another. He was …’, he thought for a moment, then slipped into Franglais, ‘…
il était un gentleman
. May God go with you.’
He smiled broadly and patted me on the back. And there, I thought, not from a tomb but from the driver of Grand Taxi n° 158, was the blessing I had come for.
IB travelled across North Africa to Egypt. In Alexandria, he had his first intimations that he was ‘to travel through the earth’. After passing through the Nile Delta he arrived in Cairo, capital of the Mamluks – a military élite of Turkic origin who ruled Egypt and the Levant. From Cairo he followed the Nile into Upper Egypt then crossed the desert to the Red Sea town of Aydhab, intending to sail to Jeddah, the port for Mecca. Political disturbances, however, had halted shipping. IB retraced his route to Cairo
.
The Delta
A Dark and Greenish Country
‘Real dream vision is an awareness on the part of the rational soul in its spiritual essence, of glimpses of the forms of events. While the soul is spiritual, the forms of events have actual existence in it, as is the case with all spiritual essences. The soul becomes spiritual through freeing itself from bodily matters and corporeal perceptions. This happens to the soul in the form of glimpses through the agency of sleep, whereby it gains the knowledge of future events that it desires and
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