The Hall of a Thousand Columns | Tim Mackintosh Smith

And all the while, of course, he’s searching high and low for Ibn Battutah — in shrines and temples, mosques and markets, on boats, in taxis — hunting down his quarry like the keenest hound on the scent, now finding him in the most unexpected places, now losing him to the phantoms of time. There are scholarly asides and footnotes (‘One Attab, a scion of the early Umayyad dynasty of caliphs and thus a distant collateral of the tangal’s [descendant of the Prophet], gave his name to a quarter of Baghdad, which gave its name to a stripey cloth woven there — attabi, the English “tabby”, which gave its name to the cat’), fine descriptions of place, and gossipy, conversational interludes. After all these years following him about the globe, Mackintosh-Smith is slowly, surely, becoming Battutian himself.

Ibn Battutah’s peregrinations across India should be the stuff of legend. He was, during a wildly improbable decade there, successively ‘judge and hermit, courtier and prisoner, ambassador and castaway’. A lesser man would never have recovered from the series of reversals which seemed to follow him like a bad smell. But then a lesser man would not have had the ability to rise to the pinnacle of courtly life in a foreign country, either, not to mention write the ultimate Arab travelogue The Precious Gift for Lookers into the Marvels of Cities and Wonders of Travel.

The Hall of a Thousand Columns is another triumph, travel writing of the very highest order and the perfect riposte to any publisher or agent who has been predicting the demise of the genre. Stand by for the next volume, Ibn Battutah in China, in around, who knows, probably 2009.

Justin Marozzi is researching a travel history of Herodotus for John Murray