Luke Williams - The Echo Chamber

Milus spread his hands out before him. ‘To write. Set down on paper. Woo your love with words on the page. No doubt, it’s a base alternative. When I speak I draw the largest of crowds. A dense throng of listeners squat on the ground, and even the town idiot, to whom my words mean nothing, is captured and rooted to the spot. To write, however, is to substitute living words for empty scrawl. It is to filch and deceive. There is nothing natural in it — a parasitic, masturbatory art! But, my stubborn apprentice, my incompetent griot, it’s all you’ve got. Steal from the writings of others in order to spin your tale. Pinch from a thousand sources, anything that fits. You don’t know how to look but you’re well versed in deceit. My proposal: Write it down!’

Edrisi took this advice. He embarked on his greatest attempt to woo Abila. As his starting point he took the silver globe. He decided to create a text illustrating in words each of the seven climes. He would call it the Kitab Rujjar or Book of Entertainment for One Desirous to Go Round the World and present it as an advancement of geographical knowledge. In addition to notes from his own travels, Edrisi began to collect information from written sources: the Kitab surat al-ard of Al-Khwarizmi, Al-Battani’s Astronomy, works by al-Istakhri, al-Kashgari, and the Periploi . Then he contacted merchants, seamen, diplomats, itinerants of all kinds. He despatched envoys accompanied by draftsmen. The tone, he decided, would be narrated through the mode of curiosity. In addition to the mapping of the seven climes, he would describe the conditions of the lands and countries, their inhabitants, their customs, appearance, clothes and language, their seas, mountains and measurements, their crops and revenues and all sorts of buildings, the works they had produced, their economy and their merchandising. But at its heart, in addition to being a lexical map of the world, would be wonderful tales. The Kitab Rujjar would serve the primary purpose of telling stories.

Amid the description of the first climate, with its bitter fishes and coarse blue cloth, Edrisi wrote about the African princess who required her meals to be floated to her on a leaf. He mentioned that certain rich mandarins owned bathtubs made out of mollusc shells that measured over a yard in length. After cataloguing the races in the land of Mallel, with its strict though benevolent king, he inserted the legend of Gog and Magog. He narrated, by sleight of hand, as it were, including, as an objective summary of the land of Nubia, the story of the Mountains of the Moon, of the monstrous races that lined the banks of the Nile. He discoursed on the intelligence of elephants, on the city of Wangara, the source of all the gold in Africa. He wrote of the gardens in Tripoli whose plants, once sown, germinate to maturity in thirty minutes, of the Indian paper roses that open in water, and of the subterranean passages in the fifth climate from where an elderly woman, sitting at an unusual keyboard instrument, calls forth the sound of Japan at dawn, Christmas in Ethiopia, the Chinese selling tea, prayers in Medina.

As Edrisi worked on the Kitab Rujjar , he found that he no longer understood his feelings for Abila. She had acquired free rein of the palace, and every time he saw her, passing in one of the high-ceilinged corridors, or else viewing her from a distance as she walked in the gardens, he felt an unbearable sadness. He had his title changed from Chief Vizier to Geographer Royal. He no longer sprinted or took virgins into his chamber, although he remained loyal to his bees. And his desire for Abila became more complicated, less sure and insistent, confused with the emptiness in his chest, that void which was snaking its way through his inner organs. Still he laboured with his book, and, as more envoys returned to Palermo — bringing news of the Iberian peninsula, or a description of the city of Lemlem, or a hint or beginning of a story — he continued to add to what he had written, or else, when he had completed the description of a particular climate, a merchant would arrive to contradict the initial report. And so Edrisi came to understand that he would never finish annotating his map, because the world was always moving. It was at this point, having failed with Abila, Edrisi decided to travel back to his childhood city.

Edrisi recognized nothing of Ceuta. Walking through the square, he looked into a pauper’s rheumy eyes, eyes that had once been young to the city, like his own, and he recognized neither eyes nor the sights upon which they had formerly gazed: the water clock, the tiny door on Meedan Street, the cemetery in which his father was entombed. Sickened, Edrisi began to draw maps of Ceuta, first on a scale of three inches to a mile, then six inches to a mile, and with ever-increasing ratios, until eventually he attempted to chart the city on a scale of a mile to a mile. He wished to create a life-sized map of Ceuta, so as to preserve its true form, as it was before time had engendered a second city that bore the same name. Point by point he retraced the pathways of his boyhood home. And because few places were large enough to house his map, and perhaps also to make the leap from life to death less abrupt, Edrisi brought it to the desert, that place where meanings and values are blown away, where nothing grows, and in which one is free to dream. There, in that void of endless sand, Edrisi put down his map and set about living the end of his life on Ceuta.

But what of Abila? This question never occurred to me as a child, since I was so caught up in Edrisi’s fate. And once Edrisi left Palermo, Father, certainly, never gave her a second thought. With age and my waning powers of listening, however, with my struggle to follow the sounds which remain in my memory, silences have taken on new resonance. They are a kind of vacuum once occupied by sound, a story untold. What, then, of Abila? I would like to believe that, following her enchantment with Milus, the storyteller, she in turn enchanted him, enlisting his help to aid her escape from King Roger’s court. As to where she escaped to, not even Milus, who waited for her, as arranged, by the pomegranate tree at the city gates, until the moon faded and the sun rose high in the sky, long past the hour she was due to appear, well, not even he knows that.

Mother’s trunk is made of iron and red-painted oakwood. Carved into the lid, in curlicued letters filled with dust, are her maiden initials — EHR. The wood is split and covered with a film of oily dust. The padlock and key are missing; nevertheless an iron hasp fastens the lid, the underside of which features three hand-painted miniatures. When my grandfather Mr Rafferty was still a watchmaker he collected these vignettes on his business trips to Asia, having planned to use them to decorate his export-bound watches. Instead he gave them to my mother. The first painting, the smallest and most finely detailed, depicts a littoral with the tide in full ebb; sand occupies the bottom third of the picture and the remaining area is filled by the sea; inscribed by the edge of the water is a little crab. The second scene is more typical of the period: a boat, armed with cannons and culverins, sets sail under a glowering sky; the port is thronged with well-wishers, and behind this multitude loom the dream-vistas of an Eastern city. The third shows the vizier’s daughter Scheherazade kneeling beside King Shahrayar, who is wrapped in the bejewelled blankets of his divan. Dinarzad, Scheherazade’s sister, peeps out from beneath the bed. All three are awake; the King’s eyes are wet and amazed; Dinarzad smiles; Scheherazade looks commandingly towards the King, her arms raised, her whole person poised as if to say: ‘Listen!’