Free Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

roofs had sprouted sugarloaf pigeon towers of mud; the effect was a combination of the Gorbals and Timbuktu. In an utterly horizontal landscape, the tall chimneys of brickworks seemed unduly grand. Their angular inscriptions, picked out in bricks of a contrasting colour, made them into distant cousins of the Timurid tomb-towers of Samarkand.
    In the station at Banha, a group of large and very beautiful women sat on the platform like earth mothers. As I looked at them, a small man with a Mr Punch face in a grey safari suit walked up to them and performed an energetic hornpipe. They quivered with laughter. In Damanhur station, the people on the platform had graded themselves according to size and shape, like pebbles on a beach: one bench was for large women, another for slimmer ones, and others were occupied by fat fellahs, thin fellahs and bent old men. Damanhur didn’t look to be ‘possessed of remarkable attractions’, as it was for IB; but few places do from a railway line.
    As we approached the coast, the Delta became less bosky. The sky opened out, and increasing humidity gave it a dull pearlescence, like the inside of a mussel shell. A hush of anticipation went around the children . I could remember that feeling, from a long time ago, approaching another sea.
    Egypt looks big on the map; but, with nearly all its habitable area lying along the Nile, it is in reality a thin country, thinner than Chile. As if to make up, there are many Egypts, and nowhere more so than in Alexandria. One can read Forster, Cavafy and Durrell on the city, but it is most neatly summarized in the names of its tram-stops: Sidi Bishr, Sporting, Bulkley (officially Isis), Stanley, San Stefanu, Miami, Mustafa Pasha, Glymenopoulos.
    I had little idea of what remained of the physical Alexandria IB saw. Of the two structures he described one, the Pharos, was reduced to a magnificent pile of rubble after his visit. The other still stood – the great column raised in honour of Diocletian in AD 300 and known to the Crusaders as Pompey’s Pillar. In a city famous for eclecticism since the first Ptolemy set up a committee to design its religion, this at least was a stable point of reference from which to begin some inverse archaeology.
    The Pillar stands as it did in the time of IB in a grove of date palms and other trees. Signs said ‘To the Pillar’ and ‘Pillar this way’ – well-intentioned but pointless: it was as if someone had put up noticeboards around Trafalgar Square to direct visitors to Nelson’s Column. The Pillar rises on a dusty hillock riddled with cisterns, vaults and passages. Reaching the top of this eminence, I came face to face with an exceedingly ugly block of flats. The days were gone when Alexandria’s buildings, as IB said, united imposing size with architectural perfection.
    It was hot. The noise of Lote-tree Gate Street came on a fitful breeze like the murmur of a distant football crowd. I examined the centuries of graffiti carved into the base of the Pillar, hoping against hope to find ‘IB, AH 726’; but the base was of soft stone, now eroded, and all I could make out was ‘CICERO’ followed by ‘1822’. I was joined by a group of Indonesian tourists in the charge of a pretty Egyptian guide. She told them that the Pillar was 26.85 metres tall from the bottom of its base to the top of its capital, and that ‘it has been attributed since the Crusades’ time to Bombay, the well-known Romanian general’. Thus, I suppose, are legends born.
    Like many essentially useless objects, the Pillar has generated a number of stories to explain its existence. One account of the time of IB suggests that it was part of the stoa of Aristotle; the same source gives an alternative explanation, that it was one of seven columns brought by the giant proto-Arab tribe of Thamud from near Aswan, each column carried by a Thamudi under his armpit – like the old advert which shows a workman, made superhuman by Guinness Extra Stout,