Read Online Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah by Tim Mackintosh-Smith - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Tim Mackintosh-Smith
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regains the perceptions that belong to it. When this process is weak and indistinct, the soul applies to it allegory and imaginary pictures, in order to gain the desired knowledge. Such allegory, then, necessitates interpretation.’
Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406),
The Muqaddimah
, trans. Franz Rosenthal
S IX HUNDRED and seventy-one years, five months and three days after IB, I walked along Lote-tree Gate Street, by which travellers from the Maghrib entered Alexandria. ‘She is a unique pearl of glowing opalescence, a secluded maiden arrayed in her bridal adornments, glorious in her surpassing beauty.’ IB, or more likely his editor, was nothing if not flattering. Alexandria was even then of a certain age. Now she is a very old lady indeed, an empress exiled to a tenement who hardly dares to recall the days when Mark Antony came to dinner.
Lote-tree Gate Street is a sort of deconstructed Marks and Spencers, and I had to force my way between shoppers and racks of nighties (or were they housecoats? Many Egyptians exist in a quotidian sartorial penumbra, in which the division between day and night attire is blurred and grown men are to be seen in pyjamas at teatime). There were tumuli of knickers, and pyramids of bras that, given a concept, might have passed in Cork Street for feminist sculpture. More pyramids, built of watermelons with the one at the apex cut open, tottered along on horse-drawn carts whose drivers cleared a passage with loud cries. Barrows carried mounds of knobbly guavas and rupturing figs, protected from the flies by smoke from pans of incense. I bought some figs, and as I bit into one I remembered a couplet:
He said: ‘Your lips are split.’
I said: ‘Like only the sweetest of figs …’
IB made the long journey from Tangier to Alexandria by land, via Tlemsen and Algiers, Bougie, Constantine and Bône, Tunis and Tripoli, before crossing in the Libyan Desert that invisible line of longitude that divides Maghrib from Mashriq, West from East. In Bougie he caught a fever; by Tunis he had suffered a relapse and arrived at the city tied to his saddle with his turban cloth. Alone, and surrounded by groups of embracing friends, he burst into tears. But he left Tunis as
qadi
, judge, of the pilgrim caravan, and in Tripoli married the daughter of one of its members. In the desert before Egypt, in between avoiding nomadic bandits, he fell out with his father-in-law and divorced the girl. By the time he reached Alexandria, he had remarried.
My own journey into Egypt was less eventful. Mindful of al-Abdari’s warning that ‘the traveller, from the time he leaves the territory of Morocco until his arrival in Alexandria, never ceases to face death at the hands of malefactors’ and of the fact that the difficulties of overlanding through Algeria and Libya were now, if anything, greater, I had flown into Cairo and caught the train. I had missed out the blunt end of a continent. But IB’s account of the journey is sparse. The wastes of Barbary were not a place in which to linger.
The other passengers on the Alexandria train were mostly well-to-do families on their way to the seaside. Slowly, we slipped between the grubby suburban fingers of Cairo into the Delta. It was astonishingly green – of a dark, furry greenness shot with irrigation channels that glistened like slug trails – and I could understand the apparent colour blindness that often, in Arabic, confuses green with black. A medieval poet described the landscape we were travelling through as
A meadow of night-dark green like the down on a cheek,
A stream of chisels worked by the north wind’s hand.
People still waved at trains. Men in earth-coloured
jallabiyyahs
and carrying mattocks would pause to raise a shovel-sized hand as we went past. Beamy women with trays of washing on their heads strode through the fields along slender paths. At intervals, we passed towns that had erupted into the fields in a rash of scabby cement buildings. Many of the flat
Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406),
The Muqaddimah
, trans. Franz Rosenthal
S IX HUNDRED and seventy-one years, five months and three days after IB, I walked along Lote-tree Gate Street, by which travellers from the Maghrib entered Alexandria. ‘She is a unique pearl of glowing opalescence, a secluded maiden arrayed in her bridal adornments, glorious in her surpassing beauty.’ IB, or more likely his editor, was nothing if not flattering. Alexandria was even then of a certain age. Now she is a very old lady indeed, an empress exiled to a tenement who hardly dares to recall the days when Mark Antony came to dinner.
Lote-tree Gate Street is a sort of deconstructed Marks and Spencers, and I had to force my way between shoppers and racks of nighties (or were they housecoats? Many Egyptians exist in a quotidian sartorial penumbra, in which the division between day and night attire is blurred and grown men are to be seen in pyjamas at teatime). There were tumuli of knickers, and pyramids of bras that, given a concept, might have passed in Cork Street for feminist sculpture. More pyramids, built of watermelons with the one at the apex cut open, tottered along on horse-drawn carts whose drivers cleared a passage with loud cries. Barrows carried mounds of knobbly guavas and rupturing figs, protected from the flies by smoke from pans of incense. I bought some figs, and as I bit into one I remembered a couplet:
He said: ‘Your lips are split.’
I said: ‘Like only the sweetest of figs …’
IB made the long journey from Tangier to Alexandria by land, via Tlemsen and Algiers, Bougie, Constantine and Bône, Tunis and Tripoli, before crossing in the Libyan Desert that invisible line of longitude that divides Maghrib from Mashriq, West from East. In Bougie he caught a fever; by Tunis he had suffered a relapse and arrived at the city tied to his saddle with his turban cloth. Alone, and surrounded by groups of embracing friends, he burst into tears. But he left Tunis as
qadi
, judge, of the pilgrim caravan, and in Tripoli married the daughter of one of its members. In the desert before Egypt, in between avoiding nomadic bandits, he fell out with his father-in-law and divorced the girl. By the time he reached Alexandria, he had remarried.
My own journey into Egypt was less eventful. Mindful of al-Abdari’s warning that ‘the traveller, from the time he leaves the territory of Morocco until his arrival in Alexandria, never ceases to face death at the hands of malefactors’ and of the fact that the difficulties of overlanding through Algeria and Libya were now, if anything, greater, I had flown into Cairo and caught the train. I had missed out the blunt end of a continent. But IB’s account of the journey is sparse. The wastes of Barbary were not a place in which to linger.
The other passengers on the Alexandria train were mostly well-to-do families on their way to the seaside. Slowly, we slipped between the grubby suburban fingers of Cairo into the Delta. It was astonishingly green – of a dark, furry greenness shot with irrigation channels that glistened like slug trails – and I could understand the apparent colour blindness that often, in Arabic, confuses green with black. A medieval poet described the landscape we were travelling through as
A meadow of night-dark green like the down on a cheek,
A stream of chisels worked by the north wind’s hand.
People still waved at trains. Men in earth-coloured
jallabiyyahs
and carrying mattocks would pause to raise a shovel-sized hand as we went past. Beamy women with trays of washing on their heads strode through the fields along slender paths. At intervals, we passed towns that had erupted into the fields in a rash of scabby cement buildings. Many of the flat
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