Travels of a Donkey Chapter Three

                                              FROM MOORISH SPAIN

TO ANDALUCIAN MOROCCO

I was now approaching Granada in that part of Andalucia visited by Ibn Battuta in the middle of the fourteenth century. 

           Born in Tangier in 1304, Abu Abd Muhammad Ibn Abd Allah Al-Lawati At-Tanji Ibn Battuta began his travels a year after Marco Polo's death; yet he was to journey much farther than the Venetian.  It seemed to me unfair that the Moroccan was virtually unknown in the West while the Italian was a household name.  And I figured that, even if the purpose of travelling was simply ‘to go’, I might still attempt to redress this injustice in my own travels.

           Both Polo's Il Milione and Ibn Battuta's Rihlah were dictated by their authors.  It is quite possible that their scribes may have helped create such different reputations for the two travellers.  In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries an amanuensis did not necessarily restrict himself to taking down the words dictated to him.  Rustichello, Polo's scribe, was a popular writer of chivalrous romances, and Il Milione was no sooner penned than a veritable fever of copying began, its instant popularity due to readers taking it to be just one more of Rustichello's romances.  On the other hand, Ibn Battuta and his scribe  Ibn Juzayy  probably elaborated the truth less creatively than their Italian rivals. 

           I did not know why we had honoured Ibn Battuta's name with such oblivion, though it seemed plain that race had had something to do with it; but I was determined to do what I could to make his name more familiar in the West.

............An Indian hermit had once said to the Moroccan:

...........‘You are the traveller of the Arabs.’  Those of his disciples who were there     said,  ‘And of the non-Arabs too,   master.’      ‘And of the non-Arabs too,’ he repeated,  ‘so show him honour.’

           And how better could I personally honour him than to follow him on some of his travels?  A mere 4,000 out of his 75,000 miles, this would take me through Andalucia, North Africa, the Middle East and Turkey, comparing his descriptions in the Rihlah with what I might see on the way.

...........The principal motive for my travel was still the road ahead.  Like Whitman, I contain multitudes and do not fear contradiction, the very pillar of truth.

           Closer and closer I came to Granada, the Gharnata of Ibn Battuta.  There was a fifteen-mile detour due to roadworks before I approached the metropolis of Andalucia, the bride of its cities through orchards, gardens, flowery meads. . .and vineyards shot with an evening gleam; the peaks of the Sierra Nevada shone ahead.  Yes, the Arab, who had already travelled in Africa, the Middle East, Turkey, India, the Maldive Islands, Indonesia and China befor he came here, said the country round Gharnata had no equal in any country in the world - hyperbole that anyone who has seen the place will excuse.

           Why, I wondered, did Ibn Battuta speak of his journey through Moroccan Andalucia as a jihad?  I glanced round as if expecting him to tell me.  (He witnessed the struggle between Muslim and Christian here yet took no part in it.)  But the only other travellers on my road were motorists.

.............I have already invited the reader to see Morella before dying, motivated by the certainty this will not be possible afterwards.  Now on 10 November I was to see the Alhambra, where I was obliged to change my tune: if you honestly have to choose between the two for one ante mortem visit, let it be the latter.  Wind up your estate and come to sunny Granada; stagger behind your zimmer through the most beautiful gardens in the world: you will not be disappointed.

           Ibn Battuta might be disappointed: his mosque has been replaced by the ugly church of Santa María de la Alhambra; Charles V has built a palace which anywhere else would have been fine enough but which here is hideously anachronistic.  But only a little disappointed.  He walks once more through the Puerta del Vino into the water-splashing Partal Gardens, looks out over white Granada and silver-summeted Nevada, follows me through the fairy palaces and the Patio de la acequia where jets of water cross swords above a long narrow pond and bougainvillaea swirls down over walls.

           He says nothing of the buildings save that they are noble; perhaps he realises words describing the Alhambra are vain and meaningless.

           What most impressed me as I led him round was the water.  Everywhere in the patios and gardens you hear it gurgling from fountains and sliding down the long stone runnels.

           When Ibn Battuta paid his visit, Abu'l-Hajjaj Yusuf was sultan and had already completed constructing his remarkable vision of earthly paradise.

*     *     *

The Moroccan remained my companion for many days.  We left Granada on Sunday in the icy dark, my hands, as usual now, swathed in long blue socks.  Slowly light stole in over the plain, but the sun would not rise from behind its mountain.  A pale crescent hung from the sky.

           I reached Alhama de Granada - Ibn Battuta's Al-Hamma - about noon; it was heaped on a hill above a jagged gorge, a church, large and rectangular, rising red and yellow into scorching sun.  All round, domed hills mimicking the colour of the church were blocked in symmetrically beside olive groves against a backdrop of far mountains.

           The Arab had mentioned hot springs here.  An elderly woman sent me a mile back along my road.  Turning off the highway into a narrow gorge, I left the noise of young Sunday motorbikes and bumped down the lane between grey canyon walls to the balneario.  Ibn Battuta - who had almost certainly bathed in this wilderness spa -, fearing the worst, would not follow me down to the river.  In his time there had been bathhouses for men and women; now fat middle-aged Germans lathered themselves in shameless propinquity in hot water gushing from a cliffy bank into the stream, without walls to conceal their feast of flesh.

           Deep in the gorge among pine trees, a boulder-encumbered stream let out the bath water with full-throated panache, taking the soap suds swirling with it.  A rush of heated water from the rock had been civilised, regularised with concrete so that it folded as neat and rectilinear as a municipal fountain, from the cliff; it tumbled into a small square tank where a huge German was immersed to the neck.

           Hoping English was a common language, I asked him what he thought the temperature was.

           He cocked his head.

           ‘Celsius, Centigrade?  How many degrees?’

           He beamed.  ‘Fünfundvierzig.’

           I put in my hand, withdrawing it quickly. 

           On my way back to Alhama I noticed a graffito on the cliff wall: AL-JAMMA - a hispanic rendering of Al-Hamma.  Had Ibn Battuta, while he waited for me to rejoin him, written this to pass the time?  Any of the young motorcyclists would have lent him a felt pen, wondering at first to see the small dark man in white burnous, then shrugging his shoulders.  But how would the Moroccan have asked for the pen?  Or written AL-JAMMA in Roman characters?

           Back in Alhama, I waited outside the Iglesia del Carmen as the congregation swirled out from mass.  A man took me through the incense-perfumed church to the sacristy, where the priest was smoking a cigarette surrounded by young acolytes still in their surplices.

           ‘Sorry to bother you, sir.  I'm interested in an Arab writer called Ibn Battuta who was here in 1350.  He speaks of 'a most elegant mosque'.  I'm sure it no longer exists - but do you know where it might have been?’

           He let out the smoke.  The little boys looked up at him.  ‘Yes, it was destroyed in the late fifteenth century.  A church was built over it.’

           ‘This one?’ I asked.

           ‘No, not this one.  The Iglesia Mayor.  But there's nothing left of the mosque.’

           This was what those bearded captains of the Reconquest appear to have done every time: Moors were defeated, mosques demolished, then, as if to disinfect the site of the iniquity of Allah, a church was built over the rubble to the glory of a Christian God.

           ‘I see. . . But I should like to look into it, walk on a spot this Moroccan walked on over six hundred years ago.’

           ‘That's easy to arrange.’

           I cycled over to the Iglesia Mayor.  Carved bedrock and distinct lower foundations were, I was convinced, part of Ibn Battuta's mosque. 

           I was led by an acolyte in civvies into the dark presbytery where the priest detailed one of his women to unlock the church for me. 

           There was a monumental tablet to ‘Don García Maldonado, knight of Calatrava, conquistador and first mayor (of Alhama) for their Catholic Majesties.  He passed away in 1504.’  One hundred and fifty years after Ibn Battuta's visit, this Christian vandal, having defeated the Moroccans, destroyed their mosque and replaced it with a fine dull church of his own.

*     *     *

Later that afternoon I faced a distant amphitheatre of mountains.  Browning's Childe Roland was hemmed in thus on his way to the Dark Tower; I was not certain that like him I would set the slug-horn dauntless to my lips if I found myself in such a trap.  Closer I approached the ring of peaks between rank rows of tomatoes beneath the warm November sun, and not a break could I see in the magic defences.  Having crossed two mountain ranges that day, I did not wish to have to labour up a third.  I felt for the slug-horn.

           A hidden fold in the range opened on my left.  There two immense towers of rock guarded the dizzy abyss, and the road lunged sickeningly away past the giants of the Sierra de Tajera, far down to the valley where the landscape, more intimate now, was incredibly green, royal blue and broom-yellow.  Acres of plastic mirrored the declining sun.  Vélez Málaga - the Ballash of the Rihlah - at last stood ahead of me on its hill, holding its Moorish fort aloft like a club, spilling white-gold down the slopes.

           It was the fiesta of Vélez' guardian, the Virgen de los Remedios; squibs in narrow streets farted like frisky horses, church bells pealing without truce while the moped generation burned fuel strenuously.  An old drunk at a bar offered to take me to a place that sold wine on Sundays and conducted me falteringly up an alley towards a large brown door which he himself would not approach.

           ‘Knock there,’ he said.

           I did.  People emerged from other doors to see if this one would open.  There was no reply.  A boy padded up; his small fist made the house shake once, twice, then a third time: it was opened by a sallow man who stood back with his sallow wife among tiers of vats and dusty bottles.

           ‘A litre of cheap red wine?’ I asked.

           ‘Capelino,’ suggested the woman.

           Her husband drew a bottle towards him, brushing it clean with his palm.  ‘That will be 130 pesetas.’

           The drunk was still standing back from the door when I came out into the street.  Did he expect a tip? I wondered.  A drink maybe?

           ‘Thank you so much,’ I said, feeling a heel.

           ‘It's nothing.’  He shuffled unsteadily back towards his bar.

           Next day an ex-student of the Instituto de los Reyes Católicos told me Professor don Francisco Pino would be able to help me with enquiries about Vélez, so I set off for the Instituto.  When he came out of his class into the dazzling sun, don Francisco was most helpful.

           ‘Ibn Battuta's mosque is destroyed,’ he said.  ‘But the sixteenth century church of Santa María Mayor is built on its site.’

           'Mayor'? I thought.  That's two churches in twenty-four hours called 'mayor' or 'greater'.  Greater than what?  Than the mosques they supplanted?

           I wheeled my bike up the cramped white streets to a pleasant rose-brick church at the foot of which was a stone wall about twenty feet high that had clearly been part of Ibn Battuta'smagnificent mosque.

           It was a sizzling day.  At Málaga, one of the largest and most beautiful towns in Andalucia (you will have noticed Ibn Battuta's fondness for hyperbole), behind arches of topiary, rose the great Moroccan fortress against a cloudless sky while, just beyond, the Christian cathedral's classical façade and social-realist finials hid a fine wall in brick tile remaining from the mosque.  Outside, ramshackle carriages waited for tourists and flies buzzed on the aromatic excrement of neck-hanging horses.

           At the hotel in Fuengirola that night (its owner was from Wembley) an old woman caretaker (or mother of a caretaker) kept me awake with late television in the foyer.

           ‘Could you turn it down please?’ I ventured, standing stockinged at the head of the stairs.

           ‘Could I do what?’

           ‘Could you turn down the volume?’

           She seemed to be examining the notion from all sides - all the bad sides - as her eyes rested on the screen.  I was returning defeated up the stairs when she gave the volume knob a half-turn anticlockwise.

           Soon the noise edged up again and a loud dialogue ensued in competition between the deaf lady and a deaf man.

Quite angry this time, I came down into the foyer.  ‘Look, I asked - very nicely - for the señora to turn down the volume.  She did.  Now she's turned it back up again.’

           ‘How come you're the only one who's complained?’ asked the man.

           ‘I suppose the others are either wimps or hard of hearing.’

           ‘This isn't loud,’ he said.

           ‘Not at all,’ chorused the lady.

           ‘It is loud.  Must be eighty decibels.  Turn it down, for God's sake.’

           It was a stand-off.  The pair were plainly enjoying the change in their night's routine.

           ‘Look!  Am I here for your benefit - or are you here for mine?  Who's the guest, I want to know?  Who's paid for a night's sleep?  If you don't turn it down I'll be off to the ayuntamiento in the morning to complain personally to the mayor.’

           After a face-saving pause (I'd returned to my seething bed), the TV was reduced to a bearable murmur.  So I'm oversensitive? I mumbled irritably to myself.

           Eventually, I suppose, I fell asleep.

           Next morning, cycling past Fuengirola fortress, I wondered if Ibn Battuta had set eyes upon it.  It was only when I reached Marbella (a pretty little town in Ibn Battuta's opinion) that I discovered in the public library he had slept in the fortress at Fuengirola - then called Suhayl.

           He had decided at the last minute not to join a party of horsemen leaving Marbella for Málaga.  There were Christian galleys anchored offshore, from which soldiers were making sorties from time to time.  Moroccan travellers were being surrounded and killed by the Spanish bandits.  When Ibn Battuta eventually left Marbella, he was alone.

           On his way east he found the party he'd missed journeying with had been attacked.  In a ditch there was a dead horse and close to it a pannier of fish.  Farther on he found the dead fisherman.  Leaving the track, he approached a watch tower, but there was no one there.  Finally the commandant of the fortress came out to meet him.

           I was now on the Costa del Sol.  There were several watch towers looking blindly out over the sea (any of them might have been the one the Moroccan had found empty), but these were mere antiquarian diversions from what the Costa del Sol is all about - an uninterrupted display of condominiums, time-sharing blocks, hotels, decorated in kitsch Moorish, their keyhole arches repeated ad nauseam.  Everywhere there were blandishments in English weedling, cajoling, pleading with you to help foot the bill for this trillion-peseta building boom (Costa Inglesa might be a better name).  And strangely most of these Moorish semidetached palaces appeared to be as empty as the watch towers themselves.

*     *     *

I left San Pedro and the shining Mediterranean.  The climb towards Ronda was long and hot: I had to take off my shirt in the forested mountains, sympathising with Ibn Battuta, who had had no road but a rudimentary track, which he called difficult and exceedingly tough.

...........I was having my second picnic lunch in the shade of a pine when a bike came into view careening down the hill.  The rider, seeing me, skidded to a halt in the lay-by, threw his bike on its side and advanced towards me, hand outstretched.

           Tim and I stood there a while in sunlight like Stanley and Livingstone, and then he was gone, and I must climb again.

           When finally I raced down towards Ronda, there was a moment of disappointment: I was looking north at the new town with its high-rise termite hills. 

           As soon as I was in the square by the Puerta de la Almocabar and the sturdy outline of the fortress, I forgot the new town.  The masonry of the ruin had been patched with antique brick and glowed like a good rosé.  Ibn Battuta had said it was one of the strongest and most beautifully situated fortresses of the Muslims.

............No Vauban, I can only vouch for the situation as I saw it.

           I approached the heart of Ronda over centuries-old New Bridge and its chasm; deep down, swallows swooped above the Guadalevin River.  The early evening shadows made a pattern of deep blue shadow and dazzling light along cliff walls pleated like a giant's robe and flounced with vegetation as green in now as in May.

           Just off the main square in one of the most popular of all Spanish towns I got a room for the equivalent of £5.40, then accompanied my Moroccan guide around the town.

           In spite of its popularity, Ronda has not been spoiled by the commercialism one expects in Spain.  Even in mid-winter there were plenty of tourists; everywhere Nikons and Minoltas were freezing moments in medieval time; yet they impinged no more than I hoped I did; above all I saw no McDonald's and not a single sign inviting me to partake of ‘a lovely cuppa tea’.  And to wander its clean, ancient streets, to look from the heights of the Puente Nuevo at wheeling swallows, to linger among its flowers and palms was one of the most sensual pleasures I enjoyed (after the Alhambra!) in all of Spain.

           In the cathedral I had a happy surprise.  Accustomed by now to the burying of mosques under Christian churches, I asked the caretaker dispiritedly if the Moor's place of worship had been here.

           ‘Yes,’ he smiled.  ‘Not only that.  There's a fragment of it left.  Come with me.’

           I followed him to a whitewashed Moorish arch, its band of Koranic inscription still visible.  I felt this was the closest I'd come to Ibn Battuta.  He may have walked through the Puerta de la Almocabar I'd just seen, but this doorway he almost certainly passed under on his way to see his cousin the qadi, Abu'l Qisim-Muhammad Ibn Yahya.  I took a picture and felt inexplicably happy.

           ‘What's that?’ asked the Moroccan, shielding his eyes.

           ‘A photo flash.’

...........The presbytery has been built in an angle between the campanile and the body of the church, its pillared three-tiered balcony now a mass of yellow blooms.  There wasn't a trace of cloud - not even the wispy diaphanousness of the cirrus you see on most summer days if you really look hard for it; the air had a luminosity quite magical - magical in the sense of enchantment.  The bizarre irregularity of Ronda's streets, the cardboard mountains above, their hazy grey-blues, each fold a different thickness of light, lay out under a sky now, like Faulkner's, metallic yellow in the west:

‘the fading copper light. . .almost audible like a dying yellow fall of trumpets dying into an interval of silence. . .’

           And the birds knit the lambent copper of the sky.

.............I sat on the balcony of the Casa de Huéspedes Española watching the fading light and swallowing cold ravioli and red wine beside a young couple on their second honeymoon.  He was from Newcastle, she from Hereford.  They heard the trumpets too.

           Returning that night from a final inspection of the town, I was about to enter my inn when I was drawn by music across the street.  A comparsa de carnaval was practising - twelve men, one with a guitar, one with drums and several with the blaring pito (a short one-note pipe).  I sat with a glass of wine, entranced, their singing poetic and male in the non-sexist sense; and I felt I'd never heard such music in my life and indulged in the shameless coitus of grandeur and pathos.  This, Faulkner notwithstanding, was the aural distillation of the evening sky, not the trumpets: now in nighttime-Ronda the light was being radiated, like heat from sand after sunset, in an exhalation of heady music.

           So impressed was I with the two songs they rehearsed that when, to my great regret, the comparsa rose to leave, I asked one of the singers if he would mind dictating the first stanza of the ‘Pasodoble a mi barrio’.  Smiling, he tore both songs out of his book and handed them to me.

           These lines - from the second pasodoble - I now found particularly moving; they said what I felt about Ronda.  If only I could hear the rich throbbing of the music now!

‘Quién ve nuestra ciudad

siente envidia del rondeño

y hasta le parece un sueño

esta hermosa realidad.’

           Anyone who sees our city envies the people of Ronda, and this beautiful reality appears to him almost like a dream.

*     *     *

After early breakfast opposite the elegant bullring, I walked my bike to the Palacio de Mondragón where I'd heard the sultan of Ronda had lived.  It is now a vocational training school. 

           I entered with the students and was given permission to photograph two graceful Moorish courtyards Ibn Battuta must have sauntered through more than six hundred years ago.

           My trip to Gibraltar was as usual through the browns and blues of mountains, a feast of beauty that never led to surfeit or satiety.  There were two ranges to be climbed, the first over the Puerto de las Encinas Borrachas, or Pass of the Drunken Holm Oaks, quite bare of any trees at all unless they'd fallen into some drunken fold in the mountains.  Today the sky was mixed with a light infusion of milky cirrus; this thickened as the morning heated up.

           I made the second range over the Puerto de la Espina through a plague of minute flies; the descent the other side was exciting, and I tried not to let myself be upset by the insects covering my legs and arms and crawling through my hair.

           Ibn Battuta appeared to desert me at Gibraltar.  I found the Rock dull and expensive; having been informed the only passage from there to Morocco was by katamaran, I made my way back along the coast towards Algeciras.

           On 15 November I wheeled my bike onto theBahía de Málaga.  It was an exciting moment.  The future hung overhead in the heat haze like a question mark. 

           In no time at all two French-Canadians and a German were helping me carry the bicycle down flights of stairs - and I was in the enclave of Ceuta.

           But I was not in Morocco yet, Ceuta being a port the Spaniards clung onto after Moroccan independence in 1956; together with Melilla, it is one of two Spanish 'Gibraltars' in Morocco.  Apart from an Arab ethnic element in Western dress, the town is almost as Spanish as Algeciras.

           At the border two or three miles out of town, I had trouble using my Canadian passport as there was no Spanish entry stamp in it, so I had to revert to my British passport.

           Into the little town south of the border I cycled - into Africa.  The experience was astounding.  Films that I'd seen had not prepared me for the shock of its exoticism.  First, half the men wore djellabas with pixie hoods, white, black, blue and brown; women wore elegant embroidered djellabas of synthetic silk; then there were turbans, woollen caps, red peaked Phoenician caps, merchandise balanced on heads young and old, the smells of roasting coffee and sun-warmed spices, agile mopeds, donkeys running on low-octane fuel with disproportionate loads, and, all around, the gutturals and glottals of Arabic.

           It was very hot.  I sat sweating on a steep slope by a bridge in eucalyptus shade, cut a loaf with my Stanley knife and uncorked my wine.

           A tall boy on a small bike joined me.  I found he spoke Spanish.

           ‘My name's Nicky.’  I held out my hand.  ‘What's yours?’

           ‘Muhammad.’

           ‘Have some wine, Muhammad?’  I knew this might be an inflammatory invitation but thought a boy would be unlikely to share the adult Muslim's feelings about alcohol.

           He shook his head.

           I looked at the blade of the Stanley knife, then away at the blinding white of the road.  ‘How old are you?’  I wrote my age in the dust.  ‘I'm fifty-seven.  You?’  I pointed at his chest.

           ‘Sixteen.  I'm sixteen.’  He seemed to have changed his mind about the wine and now nodded that he was ready for some.

           ‘Not a very good Muslim, eh?’

           He smiled.  ‘No.’  He drank a little from the bottle, returned it to me.

           We shared the bottle - two or three alternate swigs -; then he refused any more.  As I prepared to leave, he took the Stanley knife, and I must confess my heart sank. 

           He simply closed the blade and handed the knife to me.  We shook hands and mounted our bicycles, he making back down towards the town, I uphill for the wildness of the Rif Mountains and the city of Tangier, Ibn Battuta's birthplace, on what the Algeciras ticket agent had warned me was the ‘hashish route’.

End of Excerpt.