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

Wonder of the World – it is no more than a watchtower by the sea’. IB, a congenital optimist, called it ‘a square building soaring into the air’, but admitted that a whole face of it was ruined. Passing through Alexandria again, twenty-three years later, he found that ‘it had fallen into so ruinous a condition that it was impossible to enter it’.
    Over a century later, the Mamluk Sultan Qayt Bey built a fine fortress from the remains of the Pharos. It still stands there, out on its tongue of land, riding the waves like a Dreadnought. I was sitting beneath its walls, just above the limpet line, mesmerized by the suck and gloop of the water, when a man with pigmentless hands came and sat beside me. I agreed with him that, praise God, it was a fine spot.
    ‘You are a Muslim?’
    I said I wasn’t, and he gave me a brief lecture on Heaven and Hell. ‘… And when your flesh has been consumed by the fire, it is immediately renewed and the process begins again. Don’t you want to escape this punishment?’
    I thought for a little. ‘I think our Hell is slightly less nasty than yours.’
    He laughed. ‘Well, it’s your decision.’
    It was all very good-natured; we might have been discussing whether to pass through the red or the green channel in Customs. The man wished me an enjoyable stay, and went to rejoin his family.
    At the tip of the peninsula the sea was angry, thudding against the rocks and spitting spray. A lone man crouched down by the waterline collecting limpets, but with one eye on the waves. Whenever a big one came he scuttled out of its way. Tradition gives the Mediterranean a malevolent character: it is said that God, after He had created the seas, asked the Indian Ocean what it would do with the Faithful who travelled on it. ‘I’ll carry them on my back,’ said the Ocean. When He asked the same question of the Mediterranean, it answered, ‘I’ll drown them!’ God blessed the Indian Ocean with pearls and spices, and cursed the Mediterranean with storms and Christians.
    In his chapter on Alexandria, IB quoted a long prayer, the
Litany of the Sea
. Reading it at this spot, it seemed to throb and flow with the rhythm of the waves:
    Subject to us this sea as Thou didst subject the sea unto Moses, and as Thou didst subject the fire to Abraham, and as Thou didst subject the mountains and the iron to David, and as Thou didst subject the wind and the demons and the jinn to Solomon. Subject to us every sea that is Thine on earth and in heaven, in the world of sense and in the invisible world, the sea of this life and the sea of the life to come. Subject to us everything, O Thou in Whose Hand is the rule over all.
Kaf-Ha-Ya-Ayn-Sad
…
    Fourteen centuries of exegesis have failed to explain those final letters, and others, which appear in the Qur’an. They are reputed to be a powerful talisman. Six months later, I was to see them carved on the stern of a long-beached
sambuq
in a tiny haven, two thousand miles away on the Arabian Sea.
    I walked back along the landward side of the peninsula, looking across the bay towards the city. From here it appeared to float like a mirage; through half-closed eyes it might have been the city Alexander built, so dazzlingly white that he had green silk hung around its streets to cut the glare. It is all an illusion, a trick of the light that has taken in generations of visitors. Symon Semeon, in the city a couple of years before IB, wrote that ‘Alexandria shines in outward appearance, but in reality its streets are narrow, ugly, tortuous and dark’; al-Abdari thought that ‘its form is greater than its substance … like a beautiful body without a soul’. Few places on earth can have suffered so long and dispiriting an anticlimax.
    I walked on, haunted by snatches of the
Litany of the Sea
and ‘Eternal Father, Strong to Save’; and ended up feeling maudlin. Chicken livers in Madeira sauce at the Elite Restaurant did nothing to dispel the sensation. Neither did