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Chewing it over Im branded a travel writer, and I dont like the term. Partly because it suggests that I live in some Whickers World of lounges, terminals and expense accounts (well, I wouldnt mind the expense accounts); and partly because my favourite journeys are the shortest ones. From my front door in Sana the first city founded after the Flood, capital of the Republic of Yemen and one of the most stunning urban landscapes in the world it takes precisely two-and-a-half minutes to walk to Shares restaurant. Forget about inspiration. A plate of liver, fried with chilli's, onions and garlic, is all you need to get writing.
By 8 am Im back up on my fourth floor with a mug of coffee, a load of lined foolscap, and a sinking feeling. Its not the terror of the blank page, but the opposite: how to cope with a formless, quivering info mass and rearrange it into something readable. My subject is Ibn Battutah, the 14 th-century Moroccan traveller. His subject is, in short, the world.
He spent half a lifetime exploring it, reaching the Volga, Tanzania and China, and out-travelling Marco Polo by a factor of three. My research on his India years has produced a few hundred thousand words of homework mainly notes taken in libraries and 700 pages of diaries written on the road between Delhi and the Malabar coast. And out of all this, Im trying to make a good yarn. The process has generated frustration, countless ripped pages, plenty of snapped biro's and one broken window, the victim of a flung ashtray.
If Im lucky, I can do about 300 words in a morning. After the noon prayer comes my other favourite journey, the five-minute walk to Sabri's qat shop in the Cattlemarket. Qat is a leaf that is mildly stimulant when chewed; it is to me what opium was to Coleridge. I go back and start munching. The effect is like a deep bowl of thoughts, connecting and concentrating. I look at what I wrote in the morning, and wonder what the problem was.
This is when my most precious piece of equipment comes out, a Life-long brand silver propelling pencil (currently on its third life it belonged to my grandfather and father before me). A few deft squiggles, a meaningful semi-colon here; a pregnant ellipsis there a dollop of bathos, and lo! the sheet of paper looks like an orgy in an anthill. Very occasionally Sabri sells me a dud bag of leaves for example, from a tree planted inadvertently on a grave and it all goes wrong. I have been known to get stuck for three hours on one word while the qat generates a useless thesaurus of synonyms.
My daily journey to Sabri the qat-seller may soon be considerably shortened. Im moving next door to him, to a house that belonged to a family called the Eyelashes. It stands on the Hillock of Clover, between the Cattlemarket and the Market of Lame Donkeys, in a tiny street called Dragging Alley. A few months ago, while I was doing some building work there, one of the Eyelash ladies came with a strange request: she had dreamed of her old house and of a coiled snake a sure sign of hidden treasure. Could she borrow the key, and a pickaxe? With some misgivings, I agreed.
I returned from my recent India trip to find a number of large holes in the plasterwork. She didnt let on what she found. But the richest treasure of the house remains: the view a meandering line of minarets, pools of green mosque gardens between ginger houses, the bone-white dome of the Bakiriyyah Mosque, the lion-coloured mountains of Nude and Asir, a rim of dead volcanoes far to the north. With that view and my qat-dealer next door, my travelling days may be numbered. &# 183; Tim Mackintosh-Smith is the author of Travels with a Tangerine (Picador)
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