Amitav Ghosh - In an Antique Land - History in the Guise of a Traveler's Tale

‘No,’ I said, and in an effort to soften the shock of that revelation I began to explain that there were more than 700 million people in my country, and that if we’d had military service the army would have been larger than all of Egypt. But before I could finish Busaina interrupted me, throwing up her hands with a cry of despair.

‘Everything’s upside down in that country,’ she said. ‘Tell us, ya doktór: in your country do you at least have crops and fields and canals like we do?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘we have crops and fields, but we don’t always have canals. In some parts of my country they aren’t needed because it rains all year around.’

‘Ya salâm,’ she cried, striking her forehead with the heel of her palm. ‘Do you hear that, oh you people? Oh the Protector, oh, the Lord! It rains all the year around in his country.’

She had gone pale with amazement. ‘So tell us then,’ she demanded, ‘do you have night and day like we do?’

‘Shut up woman,’ said Khamees. ‘Of course they don’t. It’s day all the time over there, didn’t you know? They arranged it like that so they wouldn’t have to spend any money on lamps.’

After the laughter had died down, one of Khamees’s brothers pointed to the baby who was now lying in the shade of a tree, swaddled in a sheet of cloth.

‘That’s Khamees’s baby,’ he said, with a grin. ‘He was born last month.’

‘That’s wonderful,’ I said: I had no idea then that he had made me party to a savage joke at Khamees’s expense. ‘That’s wonderful; Khamees must be very happy.’

Ignoring his brother, Khamees gave a cry of delight. ‘The Indian knows,’ he said. ‘He understands that people are happy when they have children: he’s not as upside down as we thought.’

He slapped me on the knee, grinning, and pushed forward his brother ‘Eid, an exact miniaturized version of himself, no taller than his waist.

‘Take this fellow with you when you go back, ya doktór, take him with you: all he does here is sit in the cornfields and play with himself.’

Stretching out a hand he squeezed the back of the boy’s neck until he was squirming in discomfort. ‘What would happen,’ he said to me, ‘if this boy ‘Eid knocked on the door of your house in India and said: Is anyone there?’

‘Someone would open the door,’ I said, ‘and my family would look after him.’

Khamees pulled a face: ‘You mean they wouldn’t set him on fire so that he wouldn’t have to answer for his sins? What’s the point of sending him then?’

Everyone else threw their heads back to laugh, but Busaina leaned across and patted my arm. ‘You had better not go back,’ she said, with an earnest frown. ‘Stay here and become a Muslim and marry a girl from the village.’

Zaghloul was now rocking back and forth on his heels, frowning and shaking his head as though he had given up all hope of following the conversation.

‘But tell me, ya doktór,’ he burst out. ‘Where is this country of yours? Can you go there in a day, like the people who go to Iraq and the Gulf?’

‘You could,’ I said, ‘but my country is much further than Iraq, thousands of miles away.’

‘Tell me something, ya doktór,’ he said. ‘If I got on to my donkey (if you’ll pardon that word) and I rode and rode and rode for days, would I reach your country in the end?’ He cocked his head to peer at me, as though the prospect of the journey had already filled him with alarm.

‘No, ya Zaghloul,’ I said, and then thinking of all the reasons why it would not be possible to travel from Egypt to India on a donkey, something caught fire in my imagination and I began to talk as I had never talked before, in Lataifa or Nashawy, of visas and quarantines, of the ribbon of war that stretched from Iraq to Afghanistan, of the heat of the Dasht-e-Kabir and the height of the Hindu Kush, of the foraging of snow leopards and the hairiness of yaks. No one listened to me more intently than Zaghloul, and for months afterwards, whenever he introduced me to anyone, he would tell them, with a dazzled, wondering lilt in his voice, of how far away my country was, of the deserts and wars and mountains that separated it from Egypt, and of the terrible fate that would befall one if one were to set out for it on a donkey.

To me there was something marvellous about the wonder that came into Zaghloul’s voice when he talked of travel: for most of his neighbours travel held no surprises at all. The area around Nashawy had never been a rooted kind of place; at times it seemed to be possessed of all the busy restlessness of an airport’s transit lounge. Indeed, a long history of travel was recorded in the very names of the area’s ‘families’: they spoke of links with distant parts of the Arab world — cities in the Levant, the Sudan and the Maghreb. That legacy of transience had not ended with their ancestors either: in Zaghloul’s own generation dozens of men had been ‘outside’, working in the shaikhdoms of the Gulf, or Libya, while many others had been to Saudi Arabia on the Hajj, or to the Yemen, as soldiers — some men had passports so thick they opened out like ink-blackened concertinas. But of course, Zaghloul and Khamees were eccentrics in most things, and in nothing so much as this, that for them the world outside was still replete with the wonders of the unknown. That was why our friendship was so quickly sealed.

9

FOR BEN YIJU the journey from Egypt towards Aden and India would have begun with a four-hundred-mile voyage down the Nile.

The trip could have taken as long as eighteen days since it meant sailing against the current; the same journey, in the other direction, could sometimes take as little as eight. The first leg of the eastward journey ended usually at one of several roadheads along the southern reaches of the Nile. In the twelfth century the largest and most frequently used of these was a place called Qus, now a modest district town a little north of Luxor. An Andalusian Arab, Ibn Jubaîr, who travelled this leg of the route some sixty years after Ben Yiju, spent a few weeks there while waiting for a camel caravan, for the next stage of his journey. He noted in his account that the town was admirably cosmopolitan, with many Yemeni, Ethiopian and Indian merchants passing through—‘a station for the traveller, a gathering place for caravans, and a meeting-place for pilgrims.’

On Monday, 6 June 1183, he and his companions took their baggage to a palm-fringed spot on the outskirts of the town where other pilgrims and merchants had gathered to join a caravan. Their baggage was weighed and loaded on to camels, and the caravan set off after the evening prayers. Over the next seventeen days they progressed slowly through the desert, on a south-easterly tack, camping at night and travelling through the day. A well-marked trail of wells helped them on their way, and all along the route they passed caravans travelling in the opposite direction so that the barren and inhospitable wastes were ‘animated and safe’. At one of the wells Ibn Jubair tried to count the caravans that passed by, but there ‘were so many that he lost count. Much of their cargo consisted of goods from India; the loads of pepper, in particular, were so many as to seem to our fancies to equal the dust in quantity’.

It was a long, arduous journey, but there were ways of easing its rigours — for example, special litters called shaqâdîf, the best of which were made in the Yemen, large, roomy constructions, covered with leather inside, and provided with supports for a canopy. These litters were usually mounted in pairs, one balancing the other, so that two people could travel on each camel in relative comfort, shielded from the heat of the sun. Ibn Jubair remarked that ‘whoso deems it lawful’ could play chess with his companion while travelling, but as for himself he was on a pilgrimage, and being disinclined to spend his time on pursuits of questionable lawfulness, he spent the journey ‘learning by heart the Book of Great and Glorious God.’