His telephone number is Hav 001. I doubt if I shall ever ring it, but still my visit to Nadik Abdulhamid left me with a paradoxical sense of stability or at least of continuity. I have no idea how authentic is his claim to the Caliphate, and by his own account he leads a tricky kind of life, but there was something about his presence that made Hav feel still in the mainstream of Arab affairs, still in touch, however surreptitiously, with the debates, the feuds and the aspirations of Islam.
It is not all romantic illusion, either. Even today, they tell me, a remarkable proportion of Hav’s Arabs have made the pilgrimage to Mecca, unlike the poor Caliph, and there is a regular flow of students to the University of Al Azhar in Cairo. Much the best-selling tapes at the Fantastique Video and Hi-Fi Shop in New Hav, so its manager tells me, are second-hand cassettes from Egypt, supplied by seamen from the salt ships.
The salt ships! I forgot to tell you! Today the strongest link of all between the Arabs of Hav and the Arabs of Arabia is the trade in Hav salt, whose wide sad pans I saw that first evening on the train. It is said to have been the Greeks who first discovered that salt extracted from the Hav marshes had aphrodisiac qualities: shiploads of it, they say, were sent to Attica, and according to Schliemann it was the salt that led Achilles to set up his base on Hav’s western shore. By the Middle Ages the power of Hav’s salt was so well attested that some scholars think it was the first reason for the Arab seizure of the peninsula.
It was largely to work the salt-flats that the Arabs established that huge slave quarter, and when the Venetians struck up their commercial alliance with the Amirs salt became the staple of their triangular trade with the Egyptians. The great merchant convoys, assembling with their escorts off Crete, would sail first to Hav to ship salt, often having to fight terrible battles with the Turks along the way, then to Alexandria to exchange it for spices and ivories, before returning rich and glorious home.
After the expulsion of the Venetians the Arabs of Hav exported the salt themselves. By then it had long been prized, as it still is, all over the Muslim world. Ibn Batuta had tried it in Tunis as early as 1325, and was much impressed:
It is of a texture not remarkable in itself, being in colour and composition much like other salts, but hidden, within its grains is a power of youth and vigour beyond the accomplishment of the most learned apothecaries. I have tasted this salt for myself (though the merchants of the place, who are extremely greedy, demand disgraceful prices for it) and I can vouch before God that its powers are real.
Six centuries later, when I crossed the Omani desert with the Sultan of Muscat and Oman in 1956, one of his slave-cooks confided in me that the Sultan would eat no salt but salt from Hav.
Thus it is that an exotic trade still binds this city to the Arab countries across the sea. The salt merchants of the Medina stand in line of the Seljuk camel-men, with their myrrh, their gold, their silks, cloves and gingers; and true successors to the dhows and feluccas of medieval Hav are the white salt-ships for ever passing in and out beneath the changeless scrutiny of the Dog.
8
Very often now, as the days warm up, I rise with the trumpet, and taking my notebook, and sometimes my sketching pad, I walk down to the waterfront. I like to watch the market people, and exchange a few words with Brack; and later I often take my breakfast at one of the waterfront cafés, sitting outside and drawing pictures as I eat.
You must imagine the harbour of Hav rather like a small fiord, twisted by its central Hook so that from the quaysides of the city you cannot see the open sea, only bare sloping hillocks on each side. On the east bank, beyond New Hav, stands the isolated white villa that is the British Agency, and was once the British Residency, surrounded still by its green compound, with a tangle of radio-masts on its outbuildings and a landing-stage below. On the west bank, beyond the market and the Medina, there is nothing much but a scatter of small houses, the tower of a navigation light and a semaphore, like an old-fashioned railway signal, with black balls on a mast above. Set against the mottled jumble of the Old City and its markets, the grandiose domes of the Serai, and New Hav seedy but symmetrical on its eastern shore, the harbour of Hav looks all green, wide, cool and spacious. It reminds me sometimes of a little Sydney Harbour, and sometimes of Bergen.
The historical tone of it, even now, is set by the Venetians who dominated its commerce for so long. There are two small islands in the harbour, and from my usual vantage point on the quay they look exactly like islands of the Venetian lagoon — those ‘humped islands’ that Shelley celebrated, running away from a far grander waterfront towards a colder sea. This is not surprising, for the buildings on them are mostly Venetian: the nearer island, still called the Lazaretto, was the Venetian quarantine station, now a jolly pleasure-garden. The further and larger one, still called Isola San Pietro, still crowned with a campanile, was leased to the Venetians as a place of confinement for prisoners-of-war and their own miscreants, and the gloomy barracks they built upon it are today Hav’s only penitentiary — ‘a windowless, deformed and dreary pile,/Such a one as age to age might add, for uses vile…’
Then to my left, heavily arched and graced with sundry escutcheons, most of them so worn away as to be unrecognizable, stands the Fondaco di Cina, the biggest Venetian commercial building outside Venice, through which in its heyday an astonishing proportion of all the eastern trade, from Russia, from Central Asia, from the Levant, from Persia and of course from China itself was trans-shipped. In medieval times there were repeated rumours that the Venetians were about to annex Hav, as the last in their chain of islands and peninsular strongholds guarding the eastern trade routes, and looking at this building it is easy to understand why. Though it was built in Arab territory, it is an unmistakably imperial structure — just as commanding as anything the Serenissirna erected in Crete, Cyprus or Corfu. It was partly a warehouse indeed, and partly a hostelry for the Venetian merchants resident in Hav, but it was also a base for the Venetian galleys based here, with slips and sheds alongside for their careening and repair. The sheds are still there, like aircraft hangars: on top of the stone pillar outside there used to stand the Lion of St Mark, bravely demonstrating his gospel upon this waterfront of Islam.
The Fondaco now is everything under the sun, as ancient waterfront buildings ought to be — in the West it would long ago have been prettied up with souvenir hops and net-hung restaurants. There are chandlers and junk shops, and alcoves stacked with crates, sacks and broken baskets, and hole-in-corner currency dealers, and financial concerns in upstairs offices whose small name-plates are hard to make out in the shadows of their passages — Cosmopolitan Forwarding SA is one, and another is Ahmed Khalid, Hav, Dubai and Jeddah. Mr S. Assuyian announces himself as Lloyd’s Agent and Representative of Lloyd Triestino. World-wide Preferential Shipping Tariffs are offered, in several languages, by a firm surprisingly named Butterworth and Sons. The great central courtyard of the Fondaco, where once the silks and spices were stored, is now an apparently insoluble shambles of trucks, wagons, cars and motorbikes, squeezing themselves in and out through the narrow street entrance at the back. And above the grand front gate on the quayside, in the apartment I suppose of the old Venetian factory governor, sits Mr Chimoun, the Captain of the Port, a masterly Lebanese.