"Bruce Sterling - My Rihla" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

surprised the lads of the fityan--except for the
shocking anomaly that many of us were women.
In his travels through Anatolia, Ibn Battuta
stayed with no less than 25 separate fityans. But
then, he was a professional.
In my time off, I tramped the streets seeking
the curiosities of cities and the marvels encountered
in travels. Would the hashish have surprised Ibn
Battuta? I rather doubt it. You can buy hashish in The
Hague in little plastic bags, for about six bucks a
pop, quite openly. A hole-in-the-wall place called The
Jukebox offers a varied menu: Senegalese marijuana,
Swazie, Columbian, Sensemilla . . . and various global
subspecies of hash: Chocolata, Ketama, Kabul, Sputnik,
Zero-Zero . . . It's a teenage thing, bubblegum.
They're not allowed in bars, Dutch teenagers. They
have to smoke this harmless hashish stuff instead.
They seem rather moody and somber about it, for they
don't kick up their heels, scream, giggle, or frighten
the horses. They just get red-eyed and a bit sluggish,
and listen to old Motown records while sipping orange
soda and playing of all things, backgammon. They huff
hash like monsters and nobody thinks a damn thing of
it. Shocking.
In the Maldive Islands, Ibn Battuta was
appointed a judge. The lax and easy life of the
tropical Indian seas offended his sense of propriety.
Once he sentenced a thief to have his right hand
severed, a standard punishment by the sacred law, and
several sissy Maldivans in the council hall fainted
dead away at the sight of it. The women were worse
yet. Most Maldivan women, he related, "wear only a
waist-wrapper which covers them from the waist to the
lowest part, but the remainder of their body remains
uncovered. Thus they walk about in the bazaars and
elsewhere. When I was appointed judge there, I strove
to put an end to this practice and commanded the women
to wear clothes; but I could not get it done. I would
not let a woman enter my court to make a plaint unless
her body were covered; beyond this, how

ever, I was
unable to do anything."
Poor fellow. Later in his career Ibn Battuta had
the good luck to accompany a slave-train of six
hundred African women as they were force-marched
across the blistering Sahara. There was a great deal
of money in the slave-trade; its master-traders were
very well-respected. Ibn Battuta owned several slaves
in his career, but he was an unlucky master; they